The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity

6. Creolizing Subjects: Antiracism and the Future of Philosophy

My account so far has focused upon the way in which the politics of purity serves as an organizing theme and driving force behind racial reality. The politics of purity is to be understood as informing both the ontology of race itself and the practice of racial oppression (racism), emphasizing the way in which these two moments are constitutively interrelated and interdependent. If, as I claimed in the Introduction, this project is motivated by a desire to confront and address the problem of racial oppression, then it is necessary at this point to offer an account of antiracist praxis—of liberation and racial justice. Indeed, this will serve as the ultimate arbiter of the value of this project. The politics of purity, I have argued, constrains our thinking about antiracism and liberation in several ways. First, it demands that we understand race ontologically as either a real biological essence (of an Aristotelian sort), or as presenting what is at best only a provisional and impoverished sort of reality that we are, in the end, better off without. I have linked this to what is ultimately an understanding of the human subject that is guided by notions of purity. Either a given characteristic or property is internal to the agent, and thus inevitably shapes our agency, or it is external to the agent and only shapes our agency as a coercive force or as a voluntarily affirmed identification. Liberation, on this account, is a matter of purifying the self 6 Creolizing Subjects: Antiracism and the Future of Philosophy of external influences that are neither explicitly affirmed nor chosen, such as, in this dominant view, race. Second, because of its presumptions regarding the distinction between the internal and external and between what is essentially real and what is not, the politics of purity demands that racial categories be exclusive and distinct, and that individuals belong to one and only one such category. When categories become challenged in their purity, or when individuals present themselves who do not fit clearly in one and only one such category, then this is understood as a threat that must be overcome. A new category must be generated, an old one redefined, or the individual redescribed (most often a combination of the three), so that the norm of categorical purity is at least approached, if not wholly achieved. This taxonomic purity of racial categories is necessary for maintaining the sense of ontological purity of the subject, insofar as this all-or-nothing, discretely bounded account of the racial landscape is the only way to describe that landscape that is consistent with the rigid internal/external understanding of the subject. Third, the positivistic foundation underlying the politics of purity construes racism as the ongoing practice of the purification of reason and thus humanity. This practice disguises itself as a kind of static property or status, but this deception can only be maintained through the ongoing repetition of the mythology of purity. This repetition takes the form of the domination or control of that which threatens the purity of the norms of reason and humanity that serve as the organizing center of gravity for racial reality. Such threats may be internal or external to the agent or group (though of course purely neither). Internal threats to individual purity might be emotions or subjective biases—the sorts of things that were called into question during Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. The concern over whether she will represent pure and objective judicial reasoning on the bench, or allow the specificity of her experiences, especially her racialized and gendered experiences , to corrupt her judgment is focused on exactly this internal threat to the purity of reason. Internal threats to collective purity, like the purity of a nation or race, take the form of subpopulations who must be controlled or dominated by those who “best represent” the ideals of the nation or race.1 Thus, a nation or race may demonstrate its rationality and purity by asserting domination over its own poor, women, disabled, homosexuals, elderly, and so on.2 At the same time, purity can be asserted, both on the individual and the collective level, by exerting control or domination over external manifes184 Creolizing Subjects: Antiracism and the Future of Philosophy tations of corruption. For the individual, this means dominating those whose purity is suspect, for the collective, this means dominating those...