Approaching Difference Without Guarantees
In class, we talk about the FICTION and FACT of race - and all forms of human difference. There is no such thing as race. There are only differences, in W.E.B. Dubois’ words, “hair, skin and bone.” These are material differences that are the result of human adaptation to different climates. Despite the ongoing work of race scientists, arguments that link these differences of hair, skin, and bone with differences in intelligence, cultural capacity, and civilization have been refuted.
There is no such thing as race. There are only differences, in W.E.B. Dubois’ words, “hair, skin and bone.” These are material differences that are the result of human adaptation to different climates. Despite the ongoing work of race scientists, arguments that link these differences of hair, skin, and bone with differences in intelligence, cultural capacity, and civilization have been refuted.
However, race is real in the way that it works in our minds and in the material world. Frantz Fanon famously wrote about the “fact of blackness,” that he could not escape how others saw him through the lens of race. Fanon writes,
…But in my case, everything takes on a new guise. I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance. I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro!” (112). “When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.” (112).
We can draw on a few different ideas to elaborate a Media & Conflict approach to human difference.
Omi and Winant write in Racial Formations:
“There is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete, and objective. And there is also an opposite temptation: to imagine race as a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate. It is necessary to challenge these illusions…” “The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and “de-centered” complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. With this in mind, let us propose a definition: race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies”
Further, Lisa Lowe writes in Immigrant Acts:
“it is an understanding of race not as a fixed singular essence, but as the locus in which economic, gender, sex, and race contradictions converge, that organizes current struggles for immigrant rights, prisoner’s rights, affirmative action, racialized women’s labor… Both the “successes” and the “failures” of struggles over the last thirty years demonstrate the degree to which race remains, after citizenship, the material trace of history and thus the site of struggle through which contradictions are heightened and brought into relief” (26).
According to Small et.al. (Race and Power, 2002), racialization refers to a “process of attributing racial differences to groups and racialization as a problematic which seeks to explain those differences, barriers, etc. These authors describe racism as referring “to the ideological content of such alleged differences” and that this term invariably forms “a wider set of myths and logic, bound up with the notions of innate inferiority and difference – what Stuart Hall has called a racist chain of meaning” (1).
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For Stuart Hall, essentialism is the target - not so much because it can be abused or used strategically, but coming from culture and a systems of classification.
Hall, the highly influential public intellectual in the UK who passed away in 2014, often called for an approach to human difference “without guarantees.” We might find this concept familiar from his critique of classical Marxism.
These two simple words, along with his insistence on the idea of “no necessary correspondence” between one’s identity and ideology provide highly nuanced ways to approach race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality - and all forms of human difference.
Hall elaborates in the following interview with my grad school professor Sut Jhally from the film Race, the Floating Signifier:
Hall continues (to 6:45)
Hall returns again to Marxist theory, this time using Antonio Gramsci to investigate the “stony ground” of a conjuncture - a concrete moment that materializes conflict. In the essay, he explores how Gramsci (1) confronts economic determinism, (2) understands a social formation as a complex structure.
Hall implores us to imagine not racisms but concrete “racisms,” that their impact is uneven, to take a non-reductive approach to race (and other forms of difference), and to take seriously the cultural factor.