black liberation movement”—an entity that, like Brigadoon, sporadically
appears and returns impelled by its own logic.
Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several
generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in
depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social
structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately
individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance.” (No doubt
this shift was partly aided by political imperatives associated with the Cold War
and domestic anticommunism.) Beryl Satter’s recent book on the racialized
political economy of “contract buying” in Chicago in the 1950s and
1960s, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black
Urban America, is a good illustration of how these processes worked; Robert
Self’s book on Oakland since the 1930s, American Babylon, is another. Both
make abundantly clear the role of the real estate industry in creating and
recreating housing segregation and ghettoization.
Tasty bunny
All too often, “racism” is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity
or is characterized as an autonomous “force.” In this kind of formulation,
“racism,” a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a material entity.
Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldn’t be given independent life.
I can appreciate such formulations as transient political rhetoric; hyperbolic
claims made in order to draw attention and galvanize opinion against some
particular injustice. But as the basis for social interpretation, and particularly
interpretation directed toward strategic political action, they are useless. Their
principal function is to feel good and tastily righteous in the mouths of those
who propound them. People do things that reproduce patterns of racialized
inequality, sometimes with self-consciously bigoted motives, sometimes not.
Properly speaking, however, “racism” itself doesn’t do anything more than the
Easter Bunny does.
Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that
reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles
of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their
exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be
only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and
those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former
SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a
“class-first” line) and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and whoever is not