There’s no denying that in January 2009, when this country swore in its first African-American President on the steps of a building itself built by slaves, some significant progress in our nation’s epic journey away from its explicitly and state-sanctioned racist past had been signaled. Regardless of one’s political persuasion, it is very hard not to view Barack Obama as a kind of epochal marker of that journey. The man himself seemed to represent a sign of the not only unlikely, but truly historical, making-possible of what for so long seemed an insurmountable, almost unimaginable, impossibility. 

And/yet/but… all “signs” must be read, as all good deconstructionists know. “Signs” both stymie and oblige our powers of interpretation and, unfortunately, they rarely offer themselves up to us with accompanying secret decoder rings. 

Immediately following Obama’s inauguration, many people (on both the Left and the Right) interpreted his electoral victory as a sign that we were entering a new “post-racial” future, that the very fact of his election was proof that racism was a thing of the past.  (After all, how could a “racist” country possibly elect a racial minority to the Chief Executive office?)  But there lies the rub…

The original motivation behind this essay was my growing discomfort surrounding the frequency with which I heard my students—and, to be truthful, many of my colleagues—refer to racism as not only a thing of the past, but as “unreasonable,” even “irrational.”  Although I am happy to announce at the outset that  have exactly zero investments in demonstrating the “reasonableness” of racism, I do have an investment in refocusing attention to the philosophical and historical literature rejecting any basic premise that figures racism in terms that are more-or-less synonymous with “irrational,”  “pre-reflective,” “specious,” “unscientific,” “precritical,” “unsound,” et cetera. So, first, I would like to briefly rehearse a couple of iterations of the argument for the so-called “logic” or “reason” behind racism, in particular those that figure racism as a mode of modern political rationality, or a kind of logic of the modern (and, strangely, multiracial) State. However, these arguments for “rational racism” are really just intended to set the scene for another question, which I will treat at more length in the second part: that is, what sorts of effects does racist reason autogenerate?  

Using Michel Foucault’s 1976 lectures (collected and published in English under the title Society Must Be Defended) and Jacques Derrida’s post-9/11 interview with Giovanni Borradori, entitled Philosophy in a Time of Terror, we can see strong analytic similarities in Foucault and Derrida’s treatment of the nexus of political reason and political power in which contemporary racism is situated (especially in democracies). Those analyses, considered in tandem, clearly indicate at least two effects autogenerated by racist reason, which I will call (1) the suicide effect and (2) the privatization effect. Interestingly, to the extent that we find ourselves motivated to undermine or resist these effects and their proliferation—that is to say, to the extent that we are still interested in leveraging anti-racist politics in 21st century democracies—we may find our best aid in a highly unlikely philosophical space… one that both Foucault and Derrida expressly disavowed.

PART ONE: RATIONAL RACISM

As indicated earlier, I was initially drawn to some of these questions by my frustration with what is a conventional and eminently familiar narrative to anyone who teaches race theory (or just has an everyday conversation about racism, for that matter).  The position goes something like this: 

• “The fundamental basis of racism is founded in a person’s pre-reflective, non- or irrational ‘intuition’ which figures ‘others’ (because of their otherness) as essentially different and, consequently, subordinate or subhuman. Theoretical or doctrinal racism, then, develops simply as an ex post facto attempt to construct a facade of philosophical respectability for what is, in fact, a non-theoretical and non-justifiable, but natural, fear.”  

The preceding narrative serves as the popular ready-to-hand explanation for racism, primarily conceived of in its most explicit and violent forms, and it facilitates the everyday liberal or enlightenment vision of racism as a moral failure of racists, that is, a vice of ignorant (or unenlightened) people.  Though this is also the everyday “person-on-the-street” account of racism, there is also a long and unfortunate history of philosophers’ allegiance to it.  One can recall, for example, Hannah Arendt’s account in The Origins of Totalitarianism of the “invention” of race, which she describes as a “barely conscious reaction” on the part of South African colonizers to the “dark people” of the “Dark Continent” who appeared so strange, so different, so tragically inhuman that (quoting Arendt) “no European or civilized man could understand [them] and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the [colonizers] that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species.”  

The reason that this narrative is so persuasive and so useful for the classical liberal or enlightenment sensibility is two-fold.  First, it gives us a way of identifying what there is to be done about racism, namely, educate the racists (disabuse them of their ignorance, explain to them that there is no basis for presuming racial essences, and them leave them to be with their newly enhanced rational capacities to slough off the irrationality that impeded their way). If such enlightenment fails to occur, however, no mind, because the liberal narrative has a built-in safeguard: racists who refuse to acknowledge their own ignorance can be cast off from consideration by virtue of their stubborn and freely-chosen ignorance, and relegated to the same corridors of irrational inhumanity to which they presume to consign the “lesser” races.  (It’s a win-win for the Enlightenment liberal!)  In fact, Arendt says of the Boers who colonized South Africa, “they were never able to forget their first horrible fright before a species of men whom human pride and the sense of human dignity could not allow then to accept as fellow-men.” 

First, this logic obviously appeals to what is– and Arendt is especially guilty of this– a highly suspect theory of “first contact,” i.e., the assumption that human beings not only did automatically react with fear and violence to other human beings who appeared different because of an innate inability to comprehend or synthesize that difference, but by nature must have done so. The problem with Arendt’s hypothesis is not only that this theory of first contact is disproven by history– it certainly has not been the case, historically, that every first contact between physically and culturally different human beings resulted in the human/subhuman distinction, nor in violence or subjugation– but also that it requires us to believe that human beings have some natural internal mechanism that distinguishes significant physical differences in other human beings (like skin color, presumably) from insignificant physical differences (like eye or hair color) pre-reflectively, resolvedly, and absolutely.  

To those who appeal to this kind of explanation we have to ask: why, then, do we not react with the same natural, “horrible” fear and violence to all people who are different than us in any way?  Why these (“racial”) differences and not all differences?  To which, of course, there is no satisfactory answer.  If we take away that foundational, naturalized “origin” of racism, the whole house of cards upon which it is built begins to crumble, and it becomes more and more difficult to claim that theoretical or doctrinal racism (which includes a rationalization of racial superiority and inferiority) is simply an extension of something that was pre-rational but justified under so-called “state of nature” condition.

Second, it seems especially suspect to assume that what we call “pre-reflective” racist judgments are not shaped, to a significant degree, by certain reflections (even if they are not our own reflections). It may be the case that, conventionally speaking, we might claim that “racist” beliefs are unreasonable, irrational or pre-reflective, but they are only made possible as such in an environment that has shaped and prepared certain subjects for making those judgments pre-reflectively. If it is the case that I (as a racist) “pre-reflectively” or “instinctually” determine that non-whites are inferior and, consequently, not deserving of the same considerations and rights as those who look like me, that is less a remark on human nature (if there is such a thing) than it is an indication that I already live in a world in which such distinctions have been theoretically (i.e., reflectively) formulated as relevant and important ones. It means that I live in a world that, through the reflections of others (my family, my church, my philosophers, my scientists, my statesmen and -women), my given is taken to be already-inflected with some (proto- or fully developed) notion of not only the “human” but also something like volk or race. 

Such presumptions about the social embeddedness of our knowledge of the world and each other are, I know, pretty much de rigueur in post-Hegelian professional philosophy, but it is worth noting the prevalence of this popular liberal narrative that persists in spite of the overwhelming literature refuting it. In short, the problem with the classical liberal narrative, which wants to claim something like “racism is an irrational belief that has now been demystified” is that it grounds a false, and devastatingly non-useful, hope in our “progress” with regards to racism.  Racism, considered simply as the irrational pre-judgment of racists, is not only reductive, but actually counterproductive. 

David Theo Goldberg, in his landmark text Racist Culture, does the lion’s share of the work of “demystifying” racism when he argues that the belief in racism’s inherent “irrationality” raises two distinct skeptical considerations, namely:

1. First, despite the fact that much ground has been gained in attacking racist expressions, “the many effects of racist practices remain very much in evidence.”  That is to say, simply disabusing racists of the putatively “irrational” beliefs that ground their racism is not enough to combat the widespread racist practices that are both the ground and expression of those beliefs, nor is it an adequate manner of approaching racism’s relationship to institutional power (a point to which I will return shortly).  
2. Second, “it is a fairly common assumption of studies supporting racism’s inherent irrationality that it is a social psychosis and that racists are socially sick.”  

The problem with the “commonsense” figuration of racist reasoning is two-fold: (a) not only can we not hold the mentally ill responsible for acts caused by their disease, but also (b) we do not usually consider moral education the appropriate response. Thus, Goldberg rightly notes, “if racism is irrational in this sense, its emergence, persistence, and sometimes great viciousness must be inexplicable… because it is incomprehensible.”

Goldberg illustrates at great length in his study of racist cultures an observation that has been similarly elucidated in the work of a number of other contemporary philosophers—Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Linda Alcoff, Charles Mills, Angela Davis, Ladelle McWhorter, Lewis Gordon, Lucius Outlaw, and Robert Bernasconi, just to name a few— namely, that there are clearly identifiable “logics” to racism that undermine any attempt to figure racism as something “simply” pathological and, consequently, incomprehensible. Frantz Fanon perhaps stated the point most directly in his essay “Racism and Culture”: 

The racist in a culture of racism is normal.  

I think it is fair to say that the general consensus of philosophers working on race and racism since the mid-20th C. is that racism is not simply “irrational,” that there are a host of identifiable “logics” (scientific, political, religious, economic and otherwise) that structure the beliefs and practices of racism as we now know it.  And this seems to be the general consensus of historians, too.  So, the obvious next question is: what sort of rationality is at work in racism? what are its powers and what sorts of effects does this kind of reason autogenerate?

Part 2. Two Effects of Rational Racism

In his 17 March 1976 lecture (the final lecture in the collection Society Must be Defended), Foucault argued that the logic of racism is, at its base, the logic of what he calls a “normalizing society.”  Foucault’s previously lectures provided a genealogy of the shift (or “adjustment”) of power since the 17th C., from disciplinary power (which he characterized as the “sovereignty over death”) to biopower (which he characterizes as the “regularization of life”).  On the “old” model of sovereignty, because the sovereign was defined by his power “to take life or let live,” all sorts of technologies for exercising that power in the most rationalized and strictly economized way possible were developed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. 

In Foucault’s carefully-documented genealogical taxonomy, what he called disciplinary power was directed at individualized bodies, and it aimed to ensure the separation, alignment, socialization and surveillance of individuals’ bodies in a whole field of visibility.  But sometime in the second half of the 18th C., there emerged a newer, “non-disciplinary” technology of power—one that was not addressed to individual bodies (as we see in the whole nexus of technologies that include surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, reports, etc) but rather addressed to the “living man, to man-as-living-being… ultimately, to man-as-species.”  Foucault writes:

• “…the new technology that is being established [at the end of the 18th C.] is addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on.  So, after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not the man-as-body but at man-as-species…what I would call a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race.”

Once power begins addressing itself to and organizing itself around “man-as-species,” it’s aim becomes the “regularization” of life—that is, the elimination (or at least management) of the aleatory or chance elements in the general population, and the installation of security mechanisms around whatever appear as those “random” elements in a population, to “optimize a state of life.”  So, biopower concerns itself with mortality and birth rates, with life expectancy, with ensuring that man-as-species is regularized. Foucault is pointing out here the shift from sovereign/disciplinary power, which “took life and let live,” to the biopower or the power of regularization, which consists in “making live and letting die.” 

When these two power regimes are combined, there is one element that circulates between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which is applied to the body and the population alike—that is the norm.  And where this has all been leading for Foucault now becomes explicit: Racism is the “way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.”  Foucault’s argument is that racism is the precondition of every “normalizing” society. That is, racism is inscribed as a basic mechanism of power, as power is exercised in modern States. 

But racism is a special kind of mechanism of biopower: not only does it separate and regularize the population into races, but it also “justifies the death-function” of the State “[with]in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality.”  By the end of the 19th C., on Foucault’s account, what we see is a logic of racism that is modeled on the logic of war: “if you want to live, the other must die.” And so, as he rightly points out: “once the mechanism of biopower was called upon to make it possible to execute or isolate criminals, criminality was conceptualized in racist terms.  The same applies to madness, to sickness, to social disease, and the same applies to various abnormalities.”  

In sum, if a disciplinary, regulatory and ultimately normalizing society wants to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist.  (And Foucault means “killing” in the broadest possible sense here, to include forms of indirect murder, expulsion, rejection, social and political death.)  

What we can see emerge, following Foucault’s genealogy, is a special kind of effect autogenerated by the logic of racism, which I want to call the suicide effect. 

• A racist society, and by extension a racist State, is necessarily suicidal insofar as it comes to understand its mechanisms of securing and optimizing life as most effectively and economically directed against itself.  Because the function of racism is to divide and hierarchize a population into those who must live and those who can be let to die, we can see that what the logic of racism has done is autogenerate risks from within the population whose life it is meant to regularize and thus secure—that is, it has justified and legitimated the right to kill itself in the name of securing itself.  Derrida calls this phenomenon autoimmunity, a concept which he borrows from the biological sciences and which, I think, is eminently useful in elaborating this effect that is present in both his and Foucault’s analyses.  Biologically speaking, the immune system is what protects the body against pathogens, antigens or other threats from the outside.  The body’s immune system functions most effectively on the basis of an ability to discern the difference between itself and organisms that are foreign (and presumably hostile) to it.  This system is essential, but extremely delicate.  The body is severely compromised by anomalies in the immune system’s functioning, most commonly when deficiencies in the body’s ability to generate adequate immune responses result in life-threatening illnesses.  (This is why the immune system sometimes requires assistance from what used to be known as “booster” shots—or vaccines/inoculations.)  On the opposite end of the spectrum, autoimmunity is a physiological anomaly that results in the body’s confusion or inability to discern the difference between self and other, consequently resulting in a misdirected kind of hyper-active immune response.  In “autoimmune diseases,” like arthritis or diabetes, the body (somewhat inexplicably) develops auto-antibodies that attack its own cells as if they were foreign—that is to say, the immune system begins to attack the very same body it is designed to protect due to an inability to “distinguish between what it protects and what it protects against.”  So, really and metaphorically, autoimmunity is a suicide effect—when the autoimmune function is activated, a body (or a body politic) no longer distinguishes between murder and suicide.  

Now, Derrida’s elaboration of autoimmunity extends to all communities, not just racist communities, though it could be argued that Derrida’s idea of what constitutes a community almost always involves something analogous to racism.  So, there are subtle differences between the adjustments of power that lead to this peculiarly suicidal logic of modern racism, which Foucault is elaborating, and Derrida’s discussions of racism and colonial expropriation—but I would venture to say that these are subtle, not significant, differences.  The point I want to highlight is that they share the same “end-game” story, which concludes with a conception of social and political power that is effectively suicidal, that is, that generates its enemies from within its own population and then figures the elimination of those risks as coterminous with the securing of its health and its life.  Foucault is explicit about this in his lecture: a racist State is a murderous State is a suicidal State.  Derrida takes a longer route to the same conclusion, but the end-story is consonant with Foucault’s: autoimmunity is a murderous/suicidal effect autogenerated by racist States.

The second effect autogenerated by racist reason, which I will have to address more briefly and which I don’t think can be located explicitly in either Foucault or Derrida’s analysis, but which I think is a natural extension of the logic of those analyses, is what I want to call the privatization effect.  If we take seriously the account of the racist/suicidal state that Derrida and Foucault provide, we have to conclude that the more effectively the logic and power of this kind of suicidal racism or political autoimmunity is deployed, the more essential it becomes that the mechanisms and instruments of that logic and that power be concealed and disseminated.  Or, more precisely, that logic and power as a State logic and State power must be concealed and disseminated.  It becomes necessary, as a part of the actualization of the ends of this logic and power, that it appear as not only depoliticized, but privatized.  To put it straightforwardly, if the logic of racism is to regularize and normalize a society by killing off (either “really” or “symbolically”) a segment of its constituency, then this murder/suicide cannot be seen to be a function of the State.  If it was disclosed as such, if racist logic and racist power were transparent, one can presume it could (and most certainly would) be contested by those who are, under this system, being figured as the “risks” to be eliminated in the name of the survival of the population.  So, to use a figure of speech practically ubiquitous these days, racism needs to be decentralized… or, at the very least, to appear to be decentralized.

And here, I think, we can see the re-entry of the narrative to which I initially objected—the “liberal” or “enlightenment” narrative that reductively conceives of racism as not only “irrational,” but as a peculiar kind of unreason that is the property of unreasonable people.  Individual unreasonable people.  Racist states (as pictured by Foucault and Derrida) need to disavow racism even as they deploy it—or, rather, in order to deploy it most effectively.  Racism needs to be promoted as a matter of the private minds and hearts of private individuals; this way it cannot be “regulated” or “legislated” or “macro-managed.”  This way, it is not the charge or the responsibility of courts or legislatures, and it does not rise to the level of something that may constitute a collective interest or a collective concern.  As a collectivity, racist states can, without contradiction, promote “colorblindness” or “racelessness” as a manner of relocating racism in the domain of the private individual.  David Theo Goldberg makes this point most explicit when he discusses California’s “Racial Privacy Act” in which the decision to exclude racial considerations from public policy is not tantamount to “erasing” either race or racism, but rather is simply the “privatization of discrimination,” making racial discrimination a matter of individual prejudice which can only be combated on the individual level.  So, paradoxically, one of the most effective deployments of racist “biopower” (which, on Foucault’s analysis, considers the population as a de-individualized whole) is actually to re-individualize racism, such that we find ourselves back in the unfortunate position of thinking that all there is to be done is to evangelize our racist neighbors.  A lost cause, really, inasmuch as we have only allowed ourselves to think of them as anomalous individuals acting in accordance with a private, and ultimately irrational, logic.

So, in my mind, these two effects—the suicide effect and the privatization effect—are mutually supportive of each other and, in tandem, monumentally effective in both actualizing and concealing systemic (and very, very rational) racism.  From Foucault, we see that the regularizing and normalizing operations of modern racist reason and power inevitably wages a war of some against all (though it is never clear who constitutes the “some”); and from Derrida, I think we can see that the activation of this suicidal or autoimmune operation effectively closes down a host of deconstructive or reformative possibilities for rearranging and reorienting our lives as a collectivity by paradoxically (but strategically) re-privatizing the very structure that most defines us as (to use Foucault’s biopolitical term) a “population.”  We quite literally cannot see one effect because of the other, and to the extent that they mutually conceal each other, they mutually reinforce each other.  That is, inasmuch as we conceive of ourselves as a putative collectivity (a “species,” to use Foucault’s term) and we conceive of the “risks” to the life of our species as somehow outside of our collective political custody—and this, really, is the logic of racism—while at the same time relegating all-things-race-related to the domain of private prejudice, then we really are masking suicide in the guise of murder, suicide in the guise of security, suicide in the guise of private interest, suicide in the guise of normalcy, suicide in the guise of health.

An unlikely solution

In conclusion, I would like to make what I am sure will be a controversial suggestion to those familiar with Derrida or Foucault, to be certain, but probably also those familiar with the historical trajectory of racism in the so-called “modern” period.  At least one of the main issues brought to the fore by considering what I have called the two autogenerated “effects” of contemporary racist reason (the suicide effect and the privatization effect) and their mutual implication is the unique difficulty in formulating a kind of collective resistance to the proliferation of technologies and mechanisms of executing racist power.  It is, after all, quite difficult to constitute a “bargaining unit” (to employ the underused but eminently appropriate language of labor unions) when the primary strategy of the power with which one is bargaining is to divide the unit against itself.  Or, to paint the picture even more fatalistically, when the power with one is bargaining is oneself.  

Where do we find the leverage for an anti-racist politics here?  Robert Young, in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, argues that “in any system of force there will always be sites of force that are, precisely, forced, and therefore allow for pressure and intervention.”  But in this system of force, racist reason and racist power situates us all as privately suicidal, as simultaneously murderers and victims.  So the question is: where is the site of force that allows for pressure and intervention?   

Pace Derrida and Foucault, I think that site of forced-force here might lie in a resuscitation of humanism.  I can and will acknowledge, of course, all of the ways in which it was the very language of “Enlightenment” humanism that in the first place allowed racism to adopt the veneer of rationality and respectability that so empowered it.  But it is one thing to critically reflect upon the deployment of an ideal poorly executed, reductively deployed and effectively bastardized—as Derrida has also demonstrated at length is true of the corps of Enlightenment ideals (democracy, fraternity, equality, hospitality, friendship, et cetera ad infinitum) and Foucault constantly reminds us likewise true of our reductive conceptions of power—and another thing to claim that the idea of humanism is rotten to the core, so to speak.  Inasmuch as the primary mechanism of racist rationality and racist power is to constitute us as a “population” interested in the security of our collective “life” only to then divide us against ourselves, that is, to subsequently appeal to us as private individuals to commit the murder that is a concealed suicide—then the I think there is a legitimate argument herein for the strong reconstitution of the ideal collectivity that is being so subtly constructed and decimated by racism.  Not the “raceless” human race of the classical liberal or neo-liberal discourse, but perhaps the idea of “humanity” that grounds the discourse of human rights, and which has been deployed to support the implementation of novel political interventions, like truth commissions, which hold fast to the social and political “truth” of race without figuring the collective interests that racial identities ground as incidental and necessarily exclusive.  

I realize, of course, that it is practically verboten to use Derrida and Foucault (particularly) and the history of racism (generally) to argue for a resuscitation of humanism, but I often wonder whether or not the otherwise legitimate and extensively deployed critique of classical humanism sometimes misses the point, in a way.  Even more so, I worry that our allegiance to this tradition of the critique of humanism, venerable as it may be in its own right, also falls victim to a kind of suicidal privatization that is not only characteristic of the racist logic and racist power that such critique is meant to combat, but also subtly becomes yet another instrument in the exercise of racist logic and racist power.  Perhaps this is an argument for another day, but I want to suggest (in conclusion) that our best bet may in fact be to step backwards, historically speaking anyway, to recover in a better and more nuanced form the classical humanist arguments that made resistance to power and coercion as a collectivity the very essence of political agency, political resistance and political possibility