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  • Double Consciousness in Black and White
  • Robert Reid-Pharr (bio)

At the panel “Callaloo: Literary and Cultural Studies,” Robert Reid-Pharr presented these remarks.

It will come as no surprise when I say that we are in a moment of great change and crisis. To state the matter with some level of bluntness and sobriety, the US presidency has been taken by a right-wing nativist movement given new focus and energy by the cult of personality surrounding a real estate mogul and reality television star who openly and actively promises the harassment of Mexican and Central American immigrants, the increased racial and ethnic profiling of Arabs and Muslims, the continuation of the aggressive and often deadly policing of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino communities, the dismantling of already anemic health care programs and policies, and the blunt reversal of the gains won by the women’s rights and feminist movements, particularly ready access to safe abortion. In this sense the United States has fallen rather depressingly in line with the anti-immigrant nativist political trends that have gripped Austria, Greece, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, among other places. We have, in fact, opted for a grotesquely American twist on the strong man politics and theatrics we saw during the years of Sylvio Berlusconi in Italy, grotesque in the sense that the rhetoric practiced and promised by the president-elect is and will be decidedly white supremacist while nonetheless maintaining a ridiculously ineffective cover of racial liberalism and color-blindness. The upshot is that, all the rhetoric of American fairness and progressivism notwithstanding, it is clear that though the recent US elections were about many things, at their center was a profound racial hostility and division. Indeed people of color overwhelmingly supported the president-elect’s opponent while a majority of whites, including majorities of middle-class, college-educated white men and women signed off on renewed white nativism.

Our responsibility today, however, is to discuss the past and—more importantly—the future of the most influential journal of African American and African Diasporic literature and culture in the United States, Callaloo. We are specifically charged with the task of remarking the nature of the literary and cultural criticism that has appeared and will appear between the journal’s handsome covers. The matter that stalls us, however, the thing that steals and stills our breath is the fact that the character of our rhetorical—if not exactly our discursive—universe has changed. Our mouths are so full with the words “white” and “failure” that we find it nearly impossible to form proper sentences. My sense is that we have no choice then but to return to basics. Of course, the journal’s long history of representing and championing the varied cultures of the African Diaspora must be celebrated and continued. At the same time, I would suggest that the multi-valenced community loosely grouped under the label “Callaloo” should vigorously confront the illiberal and [End Page 153] anti-black ideologies that continue to molest and disable the peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, no matter their race or ethnicity.

Again, however, none of this is either surprising or novel. Where my comments do take a necessary, if not exactly new, turn is in my insistence that in our assessments of the frightening twist that has taken place in the politics and culture of the United States and elsewhere that we must radically expand what we take to be our natural purview. We must reconsider the most precious ideas developed within African American and African Diasporic cultural and literary studies, particularly, I would argue, double consciousness. Or to rush toward what I take to be the most significant of my claims, at least in the US context, we should build upon the insights of W. E. B. DuBois and his many students in order to name, critique, and ultimately dismantle what we might easily label white double consciousness. Within just the last few weeks, few months, few years we have seen the rather inglorious death of what one might think of a blank whiteness. In the polling booths of Wisconsin, Colorado, and Florida; on the angry streets...

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