The foregoing line of argument raises the question of how one group's understanding of reality, its ideology, appears to prevail over others when it comes to real and effective political power. Depending on who poses the question, it is the problem of social order, of converting power into authority, or of political hegemony. The most obvious answer --force-- is not an answer. There is never ultimately enough force to go around, particularly since submission is hardly ever an end in itself. If the slaveowners had produced white supremacy without producing cotton, their class would have perished in short order. A colonial ruler does not just want the natives to bow down and render their obeisance to their new sovereign. The natives must also grow food, pay taxes, go to work in mines and estates, provide conscripts for the army, and help to hold the line against rival powers. For these activities to proceed, the natives must not just submit, they must cooperate. Even in those few cases in which submission _is_ an end in itself, force is never enough in itself. Slaveholders, colonial rulers, prison guards and the Shah's police have all had occasion to discover that when nothing remains except force, nothing remains--period. The rule of any group, the power of any state, rests on force in the final analysis. Anyone who gives the least thought to the matter reaches that conclusion, and thinkers as different in other respects as Weber, Marx, Machiavelli and Madison would have no trouble agreeing on that. Rule always rests on force in the last analysis. But a ruling group or state that must rely on force in the first analysis as well is one living in a state of siege, rebellion, war or revolution.
It will not do to suppose that a powerful group captures the hearts and minds of the less powerful, inducing them to "internalize" the ruling ideology (to borrow the spurious adjective-verb in which this artless evasion has so often been couched). To suppose that is to imagine ideology handed down like an old garment, passed on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or imposed like a dress code. Any of these would presuppose that an experience of social relations can be transmitted by the same means, which is impossible.
And yet, power does somehow become authority. A red light, or the upraised palm of a traffic policeman, brings people to stop (at least in places where people tend to obey them) not by the exercise of power--neither a light nor a hand can stop a moving automobile--but by the exercise of authority. Why? Not, surely, because everyone shares a belief, an "attitude," about the sanctity of the law, or holds the same conception of a citizen's duty. Many citizens who would unhesitatingly stop for a red light, even at a deserted intersection at 2:00 a.m., would painstakingly calculate the relative cost and benefit of breaking laws against environmental pollution, insider-trading of securities, or failing to report income to the Internal Revenue Service, and then obey or violate the law according to how the calculation worked out.
It is not an abstract belief or attitude that brings people to stop at a red light. Rather, people discover the advantage of being able to take for granted what everyone else will do at a busy intersection. Or, to be more exact, they have grown up in a society that constantly ritualizes that discovery--by making people stop again and again for red lights--without each person having to make the discovery anew by ad hoc calculation at every intersection. Both parts are necessary: the demonstrable advantage of stopping and the constant re-enactment that removes the matter from the realm of calculation to that of routine. The ritual repetition of the appropriate social behaviour makes for the continuity of ideology, not the "handing down" of the appropriate "attitudes." There, too, lies the key to why people may suddenly appear to slough off an ideology to which they had appeared subservient. Ideology is not a set of attitudes that people can "have" as they have a cold, and throw off the same way. Human beings live in human societies by negotiating a certain social terrain, whose map they keep alive in their minds by the collective, ritual repetition of the activities they must carry out in order to negotiate the terrain. If the terrain changes, so must their activities, and therefore so must the map.
_Shaping the Terrain_
Let me pursue a bit further this analogy of terrain. But imagine a physical landscape: trees here, a river there, mountains, valleys, quicksand, desert and so on. And imagine an observer at the altitude of an earth satellite, who for some reason can follow the paths of people over the terrain but cannot see the details of the landscape. The observer sees people tunneling under, climbing over, jogging to left or right, moving with odd swimming motions, even disappearing unceremoniously into the quicksand Given a modicum of training in the orthodox tradition of American history, he might conclude that people in this part of the landscape have "attitudes" calling for one kind of movement, while people in that part have "attitudes" calling for another kind--all of these "attitudes" possessing a "life of their own." Given a modicum of wisdom, he would realize that the key to understanding the people's movements is to analyse the terrain.
Therein, also, lies the key to understanding how one group acquires authority, imposes order, or achieves hegemony. Exercising rule means being able to shape the terrain. Suppose that the ruling group wants everyone in our landscape to move east, and therefore starts fires in the forests to the west. Mission accomplished: everybody moves east. Because they all share a conviction -- an "attitude" -- glorifying the virtues of easterly movement? Not necessarily. All that order, authority, hegemony requires is that the interest of the mass in not getting burned alive should intersect the interest of the rulers in moving everyone to the east. If easterly movement subsequently becomes part of the routine by which masses organize their lives independently of the rulers so that such movement becomes part of a constantly repeated social routine, a vocabulary will soon enough explain to the masses --not analytically, but descriptively -- what easterly movement means. And that vocabulary need not and cannot be a duplicate of the one spoken by the rulers.
Racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose terrain was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and natural rights; and, more important, a republic in which those doctrines seemed to represent accurately the world in which all but a minority lived. Only when the denial of liberty became an anomaly apparent even to the least observant and reflective members of Euro-American society did ideology systematically explain the anomaly. But slavery got along for a hundred years after its establishment without race as its ideological rationale. The reason is simple. Race explained why some people could rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature's God. But there was nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for granted -- as the indentured servants and disfranchised freedmen of colonial America could not. Nor was there anything calling for a radical explanation where everyone in society stood in relation of inherited subordination to someone else: servant to master, serf to nobleman, vassal to overlord, overlord to king, king to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era of the American, French and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty as theirs by natural right. [38] They did not originate the large nineteenth-century literature purporting to prove their biological inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary can be very deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today denote race, but they did not understand those words the same way. Afro- Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as Frederick Douglass put it, "not _color_, but _crime_." Afro-Americans invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation. They were not troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary to express their sense of nationality. Afro-American soldiers who petitioned on behalf of "These poor nation of colour" and "we Poore Nation of a Colered rast [race]" saw nothing incongruous about the language. Racial ideology in its radical American form is the ideology to be expected in a society in which enslavement stands as an exception to a radically defined liberty so commonplace that no great effort of imagination is required to take it for granted. It is the ideology proper to a "free" society in which enslaved descendants of Africans are an anomalous exception. There is no paradox; it makes good, common sense. Indeed, dare I go further. In the wake of the American Revolution, racial ideology assumed its greatest importance in the free, bourgeois society of the Northern states, where both slavery and the presence of Afro-Americans became increasingly minor exceptions. [41] The paroxysm of racial violence that convulsed the South during the years after emancipation, and the ever more detailed legal codification of racial proscription, represent the nationalization of race, an ideology that described the bourgeois North much better than it did the slave South.
[End of Extract from Fields]
The political implications of Fields's argument can be expressed in the slogan: Racism does not cause the oppression of black americans; the oppression of black americans causes racism.
Jenny's arguments are, I believe, quite consistent with this perspective.
Carrol