[lbo-talk] "Race, " Racism, & Politics vs Moralizing was Re: ... F-9/11 and racism Part 1

[Carrol Cox]

Jenny has been trying to put this discussion in a political context.
Almost everyone else seems to be striving mightily to keep the focus on
the feelings or attitudes or whatever of individual whites & individual
blacks. Nothing useful can come of such a discussion.

There is, of course, no such thing as race (hence the scare quotes in
the subject line), and the core of racism is the assumption that race is
real. Racism is an ideology which rationalizes -- makes sense of -- the
oppression of black people in a social order grounded on the assumption
of human equality. But the unreality of race does _not_ imply the
unreality of a black community _politically_ formed and reformed.

******

>From "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," by
Barbara Jeanne Fields. New Left Review, May/June 1990.

This is perhaps a good moment to say a few words abut what ideology is
and what it is not; because without an understanding of what ideology is
and does, how it arises and how it is sustained, there can be no
genuinely historical understanding of race. Ideology is best understood
as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which
people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create
from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the
particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the
interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they
constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the
varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe,
nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so
on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the
social relations for which they stand.

Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifically
accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that
would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social
relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have
explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and
possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose
daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of
rational "evidence" disprove it. Witchcraft in such a society is as
self-evident a natural fact as race is to Richard Cohen of the
_Washington Post_. To someone looking in from outside, however,
explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death
by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery by
invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce
race day in and day out as Americans do. Ideologies do not need to be
plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when
they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see--ritually,
repetitively--on a daily basis.

So much ideology is. Here is what it is not. It is not a material
entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment,
pass on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or impose like a code of
dress or etiquette. Nor is it a collection of dissociated
beliefs--"attitudes" is the favoured jargon among American social
scientists and historians they have mesmerized--that you can extract
from their context and measure by current or retrospective survey
research. (Someday the reification of conduct and demeanour in
"attitudes" will seem as quaint and archaic as their reification in
bodily "humours"--phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, sanguine--does
now.) Nor is it a Frankenstein's monster that takes on a life of its
own.

Ideology is not the same as _propaganda_. Someone who said,
"Anti-slavery _ideology_ infiltrated the slave quarters through illicit
abolitionist newspapers," would be talking rather about propaganda than
about ideology. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology could not be smuggled
to them in alien newsprint. People deduce and verify their ideology in
daily life. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology had to arise from their
lives in slavery and from their daily relations with slaveholders and
other members of slave society.[35] Frederick Douglass was not
propounding a paradox but speaking the simple truth when he said that
the first anti-slavery lecture he ever heard was delivered by his master
in the course of explaining to his mistress why slaves must not be
taught to read. By the same token, slaves who decided at the first shot
of the Civil War--or even earlier, with Lincoln's election--that
emancipation was finally on the nation's agenda were not responding to
prevailing Northern propaganda (which, indeed, promised nothing of the
kind at that time). It was their experience with slaveowners, not least
the slaveowners' hysterical equation of the Republican Party with
abolition, that made slaves see Lincoln as the emancipator before he saw
himself that way. And, I might add, it was the slaves' acting on that
foreknowledge that forced Lincoln to become the emancipator.

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{35. The slaves' religion arose in the same way. In an astute and
eloquent passage, Donald G. Mathews diagnoses the error of supposing
that the slaves should or could have had a "correct" version of
Christianity by an outside agency. To argue that way, Mathews correctly
insists, presupposes that the slave could "slough off his enslavement,
ancestry, traditional ways of viewing the world, and sense of selfhood
in order to think the oppressor's thoughts after him. . . .The
description of action in which the slave is expected to remain passive
while receiving a discrete body of ideas and attitudes which exist apart
from social and cultural conditions reveals one of the most mischievous
and flawed assumptions which scholars make." _Religion in the Old
South_, Chicago, 1967, p. 187.}

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_Ideology, Propaganda and Dogma_

To insist that ideology and propaganda are not the same is not to
suppose that they are unrelated. The most successful propagandist is one
who thoroughly understands the ideology of those to be propagandized.
When propagandists for secession before the American Civil War
emphasized the danger that the Northerners might encroach upon
Southerners' right of self-determination, they emphasized a theme that
resonated as well with the world of non-slaveholders as with that of
planters, even though the two worlds differed as night from day. "We
will never be slaves" was good secessionist propaganda. "We must never
let them take our slaves"  would have been poor propaganda and the
secessionists knew it; just as today "Strategic Defense Initiative"
makes a good advertisement for a weapons programme, whereas "Strategic
Offensive Initiative" or "First- Strike Initiative" would not.

Neither is ideology the same as _doctrine_ or _dogma_. Pro-slavery
_doctrine_ might well hold, for example, that any white person's word
must take precedence over any black person's. But the push-and-shove
reality of any planter's business would tell him or her that some
situations call for accepting a slave's word over an overseer's. [36]
After all, overseers came and went, but slaves remained; and the object
was to produce cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white
supremacy. The perfect subordination of the slaves to the overseer, if
coupled with poor production, would spell disaster for the planter.
Thus, the ideology of a planter--that is, the vocabulary of day-to-day
action and experience--must make room for contest and struggle (perhaps
couched in paternalistic or racist language), even if doctrine specified
an eternal hierarchy. Doctrine or dogma may be imposed, and they often
are: dissenters can be excommunicated from a church or expelled from a
party. But ideology is a distillate of experience. Where the experience
is lacking, so is the ideology that only the missing experience could
call into being. Planters in the Old South could have imposed their
understanding of the world upon the non-slaveholders or the slaves only
if they could have transformed the lives of the non-slaveholders and
slaves into a replica of their own.

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{36. Genovese, _Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made_, New York
1974, p. 16.}

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An ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if
it is not, it dies, even though it may seem to be safely embodied in a
form that can be handed down. [37] Many Christians still think of
kneeling with folded hands as the appropriate posture for prayer, but
few now know why; and the few who do know cannot, even if they choose,
mean the same thing by it as was meant by those to whom the posture was
part of an ideology still real in everyday social life. The social
relations that once gave explicit reality to that ritual gesture of the
vassal's subordination to his lord are now as dead as a mackerel, and
so, therefore, is the ideological vocabulary--including the posture of
prayer--in which those social relations once lived.

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{37. Some people imagine that ideology can indeed be handed down in the
form of law. If that were so, then the law could do without courts,
lawyers, judges and juries.}

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[to be continues]