Inaugurating Multiculturalist White Supremacy
By Dylan Rodríguez
What happens to the politics of antiracism when the phenotype of white
supremacy “changes?” At the risk of being scolded for offending the
optimistic spirit of this historical moment, I offer these thoughts
with a different kind of hope: that the spectacle and animus of the
Obama campaign, election, and presidency fail, and fail decisively, to
domesticate, discipline, and contain a politics of radical opposition
to a U.S. nation-building project that now insists on the diversity of
the American “we,” while leaving so many for dead.
To be clear: the political work of liberation from racist state
violence—and everything it sanctions and endorses, from premature
death to poverty—becomes more complex, contradictory, and difficult
now. The dreadful genius of the multiculturalist Obama moment is that
it installs a "new" representative figure of the United States that,
in turn, opens "new" possibilities for history's slaves, savages, and
colonized to more fully identify with the same nation-building project
that requires the neutralization, domestication, and strategic
elimination of declared aliens, enemies, and criminals. In this
sense, I am less anxious about the future of the "Obama
administration" (whose policy blueprint is and will be relatively
unsurprising) than I am about the speed and effectiveness with which
it has rallied the sentimentality and political investment (often in
terms of actual dollar contributions and voluntary labor) of the
purported U.S. "Left."
Celebratory liberal multiculturalist patriotism, in whatever complex
and historically laden form it assumes, is a deadly compromise. I
recognize, with all due respect, that millions are moved to tears as
they recognize in Obama the promise of a fulfilled democratic
(Black/multicultural) citizenship—the national fraud that millions
have bled, died, and cried over, before and beyond the Civil Rights
Movement—while weeping joyfully at the possibility of (their children
and grandchildren) finally becoming human in a place that seems
obsessed with destroying, dehumanizing, and humiliating.
Living in a history of racism, genocide, and everyday suffering is a
heavy thing, and moments of optimism are preciously rare. This is why
the historical burden is multiplied for those who care to address the
euphoria with a different kind of urgency: to move against the
visceral sentimentality of the moment and insist, over and over again,
that optimism endorses terror when its premises are removed from—and
therefore unaccountable to—liberation struggle in all its wonderful
forms. It is worth restating that the historical point of departure
for liberation politics is uncompromising opposition to a
racist/colonialist/imperialist state (regardless of who leads it), and
a willingness to pursue wild but principled ambitions for the sake of
achieving the political fantasy of radical freedom. Herein, the
pending inauguration of an authentically multiculturalist white
supremacy entails, at best, a change of leadership for a mind-numbing
apparatus of normalized repression and mass-based social violence, the
one that capably imprisons well over 2.5 million people (most of them
poor, Black, and Brown) in cages all over the world and will kill well
over 2 million Iraqi, Afghanis and Palestinian civilians (through a
combination of blockades, bombs, and "diplomacy") in the span of less
than a generation. This apparatus is the one thing that will not
change, even as some entrust the Obama administration with the
arrogant hopes of a reduced global body count.
Putting aside, for the moment, the liberal valorization of Obama as
the less-bad or (misnamed) "progressive" alternative to the horrible
specter of a Bush-McCain national inheritance, we must come to terms
with the inevitability of the Obama administration as a refurbishing,
not an interruption or abolition, of the normalized violence of the
American national project. To the extent that the subjection of
indigenous, Black, and Brown people to regimes of displacement and
suffering remains the condition of possibility for the reproduction
(or even the reinvigoration) of an otherwise eroding American global
dominance, the figure of Obama represents a new inhabitation of white
supremacy's structuring logics of violence.
This is to say, Obama's ascendancy hallmarks the obsolescence of
"classical" white supremacy as a model of dominance based on white
bodily monopoly, and celebrates the emergence of a sophisticated,
flexible, "diverse" (or neoliberal) white supremacy as the heartbeat
of the American national form. The signature of the "post-civil
rights" period is precisely marked by such changes—compulsory and
voluntary—in the comportment, culture, and workforce of white
supremacist institutions: selective elements of police and military
forces, global corporations, and major research universities are
diversely colored, while their marching orders continue to mobilize
the familiar labors of death-making (arrest and justifiable homicide,
fatal peacekeeping, overfunded weapons research, etc.). While the
phenotype of white supremacy changes—and change it must, if it is to
remain viable under changed historical conditions—its internal
coherence as a socialized logic of violence and dominance is sustained
and redeemed.
Candidate Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech, arguably the
definitive moment of his campaign for the U.S. presidency, provides a
useful elaboration of this change in the political structure of white
supremacy. Given that this was one of the few moments in the campaign
in which Obama actually addressed "race" as a political issue rather
than a descriptive matter-of-fact, a close attention to the oration
reveals something about the premises of the new multiculturalist,
nationalist optimism. Lifting its title from the opening sentence of
the U.S. Constitution, Obama's denunciation of Chicago pastor and
Black liberation theologian Jeremiah Wright begins with a backhanded
caricature of racial chattel slavery that replicates the classical
liberal denial of the nation's constitutive—in fact
Constitutional—patriarchal white supremacist conditions of
possibility:
"The document [the nation's founders] produced was eventually signed
but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original
sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the
convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave
trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any
final resolution to future generations."
Obama's condemnation of "original sin" begets the white Christian
nation's perpetual forgiveness and redemption, but also anticipates
the pessimism of those who would rightfully allege that white
supremacy's visceral structures of dominance are endemic to American
national reproduction. This attempts to erase the indelible: the
social and economic system that rests on the subjection of Africans as
racial chattel is not a compartmentalized or reconcilable event in the
American white racial destiny, but is the foundation of what legal
scholar Cheryl Harris has called the ongoing legal consolidation of
whiteness as property, a consolidation that can only occur at the
expense of those who are dispossessed and/or actually owned by the
white nation.
Thus, while Obama's otherwise stale re-narration of white supremacist
nation-building falls back on an allegory of the sinning-forgiven
white body politic, his comportment of "electability" proposes an
authoritative black/multiracial/multicultural patriotism that
rejuvenates the rhetorical matrix of contemporary white supremacy. He
is "presidential" precisely because he galvanizes admiration and
reverence through a paean to the historical imagination of the white
slaveholding nation. Obama fetishizes racist/slave "democracy" as a
piece of the American national mythology, a moral tale of vindication
that alleviates the white nation's guilty burdens of the racial
present. More importantly, it permanently defers the political
obligation of confronting an enduring and present white supremacist
social form.
"Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded
within our Constitution—a Constitution that had at its very core the
ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised
its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should
be perfected over time."
A vast and deep body of scholarly critique and radical social thought
has thoroughly refuted the common sense of the U.S. Constitution as a
magical and morally transcendent document that has timelessly valued
the "ideal of equal citizenship" within its philosophical
architecture. In fact, the most incisive critical race theorists
argue that the opposite is closer to the historical truth: it is the
ongoing racial-national project of determining which aliens and
nominal "citizens" are to be marginalized and excluded from the
entitlements of citizenship that sits at the heart of the
Constitution. Why, then, does the political integrity of Obama's
"race speech" rest on the foundations of such a flimsy, hackneyed
sense of history?
The genius of Obama's oration is not traceable to its racially marked
(and rather overstated) "eloquence" or any substantively original
content: rather, its profound resonance with a liberal
white/multiculturalist sensibility derives from the fact that it is an
authoritative 21st century doctrine of the "color line," a deforming
of the early 20th century DuBoisian wisdom that "the problem of the
Twentieth century is the problem of the color line," and "the social
problem of the twentieth century is to be the relation of the
civilized world to the dark races of mankind."
"On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my
candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's
based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial
reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former
pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express
views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but
views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our
nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."
While for DuBois, the color line would be understood as a primary site
of political antagonism in the emergent "American Century," Obama
posits the contemporary color line—his "racial divide"—as the terrain
of the American nation's neoliberal, post-civil rights perfection, the
culmination of its progressive national telos, and the place of
fulfillment for an authentic national culture of "unity." In this
context, his disavowal of Rev. Wright not only marked Obama's
electoral phobia of Black liberationist political affinities, it
clearly pronounced his solidarity with a liberal racist consensus:
"[Wright's comments] expressed a profoundly distorted view of this
country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates
what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with
America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted
primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of
emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
"As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive,
divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when
we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems—two
wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care
crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are
neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that
confront us all."
At the risk of some oversimplification, the political logic is clear:
some lives and destinies matter dearly, while others must be
neutralized, disciplined, or decisively ended; radical antiracism and
liberationist struggle are the bane of national unity, and can only
disturb the seamless progress of the diverse nation toward resolution
of its "monumental problems."
"This is the political condition of possibility for the opening lines
of the victory speech that arrived in storybook fashion just days ago:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place
where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our
founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our
democracy, tonight is your answer."
The euphoria of the moment allowed far too many to happily surrender
any political and moral revulsion at this invocation of the Founding
Fathers, and pushed far too few to seriously consider what, exactly,
animated the founders' nation-building dream and what it might mean
for someone like Obama to valorize it. In the end, however, my
concern is not with Barack Obama the politician, but rather with the
emerging liberal multiculturalist common sense that assembles its
points of optimistic compromise and political enthusiasm in alliance
with the reforming and re-visioning of classical white supremacy that
the Obama campaign and administration represent.
While the historical trajectory and political structure of U.S. white
supremacist nation-building will not be substantively altered, its
explanatory rhetoric, institutional appearance, and resurfaced racial
personage has generated a sweeping political sentimentality and
popular cultural narrative of progress, hope, change, and racially
marked nationalist optimism. And what do these things mean, really,
in the age of Katrina, the prison industrial complex, and the War on
Terror?
At best, when the U.S. nation building project is not actually engaged
in genocidal, semi-genocidal, and proto-genocidal institutional and
military practices against the weakest, poorest, and darkest—at home
and abroad—it massages and soothes the worst of its violence with
banal gestures of genocide management. As these words are being
written, Obama and his advisors are engaged in intensive high-level
meetings with the Bush administration's national security experts.
The life chances of millions are literally being classified and
encoded in portfolios and flash drives, traded across conference
tables as the election night hangover subsides. For those whose
political identifications demand an end to this historical conspiracy
of violence, and whose social dreams are tied to the abolition of the
U.S. nation building project's changing and shifting (but durable and
indelible) attachments to the logic of genocide, this historical
moment calls for an amplified, urgent, and radical critical
sensibility, not a multiplication of white supremacy's "hope."
