[lbo-talk] Michaels, Against Diversity

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Oct 4 17:28:42 PDT 2009


Barbara Jeanne Fields:

Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among otherwise sensible scholars that race "explains" historical phenomena; specifically, that it explains why people of African descent have been set apart for treatment different from that accorded to others.[12] But _race_ is just the name assigned to the phenomenon, which it no more explains than _judicial review_ "explains" why the United States Supreme Court can declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than _Civil War_ "explains" why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865.[13]

Note 12:

12. Inseparable from this conviction is the reification of race that impels many scholars to adopt and impose on others, as a pious duty, the meaningless task of deciding whether race is more "basic" to historical explanation than other -- and similarly reified -- categories; a waste of time to which I draw attention in "Ideology and Race in American History," p. 158. Someone might as well undertake to decide in the abstract whether the numerator or the denominator is more important to understanding a fraction, instead of settling down to the more sensible task of trying to define and specify each one, recognizing their difference as well as their relationship and their joint indispensability to the result. A recent example is David Roediger, "'Labor in White Skin": Race and Working-class History," in _Reshaping the US Left: Popular Struggles in the 1880s_, ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinkler, Verso, London, 1988, pp. 287-308. Roediger apparently believes that distinguishing analytically between _race_ and _class_ necessarily implies "privileging" one over the other (to use his slang). And, in defending the identification of racism as a "tragic flaw" that helps to explain American history, rather than as a part of the history that needs explaining, he confuses a rhetorical device with a historical explanation.

Note 13:

13. Alden T. Vaughan, "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," _Virginia Magazine of History and Biography_ 97, July 1989, is a good example of the use as explanation of the very facts needing to be explained. The argument ends in explicit tautology: "It may be more useful to see Anglo-American racism as a necessary precondition for a system of slavery based on ancestry and pigmentation." That is, Anglo-American racism is a necessary precondition for Anglo-American racism. The argument ends as well in unseemly agnosticism abut the possibility of rational explanation: "[R]acism was one cause of a particular type of slavery, though it may be better to avoid the term _cause_, for causation itself is a shaky concept in complex situations." The quoted sentences appear on p. 353.



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