“Our One Heaven of Refuge is Ourselves."

Although Anthony Appiah considered Dubois’ argument “incomplete,” it goes without saying that many African Americans today still thrive on Dubois’ ideas for advancing the African American population. Dubois believed that the duty of African Americans is to “conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, and spiritual ideas. We must strive by race organizations, by race solidarity, and by race unity”(114). African-American history is powered by, creating African-American institutions and putting trust and faith in themselves in order to progress and strengthen their race. W. E. B. Dubois makes a point that the word Negro "has combined the Mullatoes, Zamboes, Egyptians, Bantus, etc."(111). The same thing can be said for the term African-American. Because of society’s tendency to simplify and pars, it doesn't matter what term we place on skin color whether it be African-American, black, negro. According to Appiah, “what exists out there… is the province not of biology but of hermeneutic (interpretive) understanding”(135). Thus explains the mystery of "race".

Race is an artificial term used to unnaturally divide and conquer man. Appiah, while dissecting the works of Dubois, proves that regardless of Dubois’ claims of common blood, common history, or sharing a common wrong, it all boils down to Dubois inability to see race as being “anything other than a synonym for color”(131). Regardless, even though science doesn’t add up, the infrastructure of society is very hesitant to allow cross-cultural mixing of characteristics specific to visually different groups and because of that we continue to see the strength and power of what many people understand to be race. For Dubois, race is real and even now is very well conserved. 

On the other hand, Appiah wrote that race is not real. In saying this he does not mean to ignore the concept. He writes, “Race as we all assume, is like all other concepts, constructed by metaphor and metonymy; it stands in metonymically, for the other; it bears the weight, metaphorically, of other kinds of difference”(134). In other words, we define race by saying “race is like such and such”. Although by doing this Appiah explains that what “we miss through our obsession with the structure of relations of concepts (race is like such and such) is, simply reality”(134). To be more exact he clarifies that “there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us” (134). This means that race does not tie us together through biology, blood or even history. It is simply an artificial division of physical similarities, primarily skin color.

So if race is not real, should we bother to hold on to the experiences that were defined by race? Laugh it off saying it’s all like a game? I don't think we can and that’s where we are today.  People have died in this game and frankly there is no way to forget playing the game without also forgetting the dead.

The question I present is, are “Negro colleges, Negro newspapers, Negro business organizations, Negro schools of literature and art, etc.”(114) still a necessity in advancing the African-American population? Can an African-American individual be just as successful at a PWI (Predominantly White Institution)?  

Another Note on Language

I want to agree with Appiah in saying that race is not real in any rigid ontological sense. Race is not a biological category. Race is not known a priori. We cannot know race without recourse to experience, and even then, it is a concept used to structure our experience and explain divergences after the fact. It has a certain social and political utility, sometimes used to monstrous ends, and, in this country (as in most) it has become an indelible part of any individual's ideology. Race has become a lens through which we see the world; cultural-historical, not biological. 

It is not a fixed concept. Any "truth" it has is contingent on the individual and the context in which the term forms a conceptual framework. There are many conceptions of "race," not a single, true one. This is another way of saying that race means and signifies different things for different people. But words, it seems to me, never quite shed their etymologies. When we refer to someone who is mixed race, we think that the person is descended form parents of two different races (this is evident from the phrase itself). And descent is here the important word. In our common use of race, we are unable to rid ourselves of the notion of blood. In common usage, we become raced by dint of our being born to certain parents. In this sense, Du Bois' use of the word seems faithful to its history.


What Montagu and Appiah (and von Herder, I would claim, considering I'm sympathetic to his insistence that we refer to "peoples" and not races)* retrospectively prove is that one can adequately and persuasively explain how the ways in which we organize our experience are based off of false premises, and still, people will go on talking and acting exactly as they have before. Intellectual, theoretical work is seldom embraced en masse. Especially in America, where intellectual is a byword for elitist.

We have the great luxury of attending an institution where we are challenged to rethink the world around us. We have access to Appiah, and Du Bois, and others through their texts. We have professors to help explain those concepts which we don't readily grasp. Through our liberal arts education, we have the vocabulary to make sense of our social situation. Most folks don't. Without education, one can go through life relying on the same small set of seldom-challenged beliefs. The complex forces that govern economics and social stratification are, without equally complex modes of thought, incomprehensible. Frustration and anger find expression in scapegoating and othering. We know the rest...

Without education, this does not change. Without changing the everyday use of language, this does not change. And we're just as much bound to "race," I think, despite our education. One still plays host to the thousand representations of Others that one has seen or heard throughout one's life, and those are not so easily removed, either. We are stuck playing the race game. The lens is fixed in the eye.

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* von Herder, as distinct from Hegel. Hegel says the race of Africans are children; von Herder says all peoples are nations in their own right and there are no races. I'm still wondering what history might have looked like if we had embraced Herder's distinction instead of the one Hegel inherits from Bernier and Kant.

Flurbs?

Michael Scott, being "collar-blind"

I thought it was interesting that Appiah based his argument on DuBois and then did not himself enter into the implications of the big mic-drop moment.  DuBois came to believe that race did not exist biologically but his sociohistorical concept depended on the ideas of biological connection that he attempted to reject.  Race does not exist biologically, and what we put on race culturally depends on assumptions of biology and race does not exist biologically, and forever and ever amen.    

The biggest issue that I had reading Appiah was trying to figure out what he wanted us to do with the information he provided.  I often have the same struggle when reading feminist theory, when theorists point out these massive, life-changing problems and then just stop their argument. What the hell am I supposed to do with the fact that you can prove to me that race doesn’t exist and we’ve constructed a world in which this flurb we call race shapes our culture and many day-to-day interactions? 

At the end of class we discussed the limitations of Appiah’s understanding of realness.  Just because race does not exist biologically, it does not mean that the experience of race is not real.  We’re playing a game based on flurbs, but we’re still playing the game.  We’re all in it.  The privilege that is attached to whiteness is real, even though we now understand that whiteness is a biological falsity and that in order to claim that we are white and black in the first place we have to entangle ourselves in a discussion that is based on completely arbitrary distinctions between a series of insignificant and unrelated morphological and genetic differences. 

I guess my question is: how do we present Appiah’s argument and also acknowledge the impact that race has had and continues to have in our lives?  As someone pointed out in class, saying things like “I don’t see race” makes a person sound like they’re racist, largely because what it implies is that a person does not acknowledge the very real differences between the way that white people and black people are treated.  It makes me think of Michael Scott, and it seems that while Appiah’s intention is obviously not to deny the impact of race, or flurbs, even as a false concept, it does become problematic if it doesn’t come with some kind of asterisk.  Then again, how do we provide the asterisk without reinforcing the relevance of the false concept?

What’re y’all’s thoughts?  

A Different Look at Du Bois

In class today we spent the period breaking down Anthony Appiah’s essay The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race, and discussing Appiah’s main focus. We came to the conclusion that Appiah believed that Du Bois was stuck between the biological reference of race and the sociohistorical reference of race. He came to this conclusion because Du Bois contradicted himself in later essays. Yet, I think it is important to note that Appiah did not completely disagree with Du Bois, but rather he felt that Du Bois simply did not or could not finish the dismantling of the illusion of the biological reference to race at that point in his life.

As we came to this conclusion in class, it left me with a puzzling question. If Appiah’s essay was in fact creditable at the time, then why does the majority still refer to race in the same outdated manner today? So I did what anybody else would do and I took the initiative to Google it. Through my extensive search I came across an analytical novel of Du Bois published in 1998 called, W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City; The Philadelphia Negro and its Legacy, and edited by Micheal B. Katz and Thomas J. Surgrue. The novel is broken up in sections that analyze several of Du Bois’s essays.  The particular one that pertains to our class discussion was titled, DuBois’s Archaeology of Race: Re-Reading “The Conversation of Races” by Thomas C. Holt. As I skimmed through the piece I came across a quote that I believe answers my previous question.  

Race is not the only socially constructed category that remains nonetheless essential to both academic and lay analyses of social processes. For example, “nation” and “gender” are similarly “imagined” entities. What is important is to recognize that all such entities are not only socially constructed but also politically and historically constructed; that is, their very forms and utilities involve relationships of power and the deployment of power that have evolved over time. (63)

In other words, to say that race is a product of imagination rather than biology is not sufficient enough to completely banish the term from our speech. So while we can reluctantly say that race is not a biological entity, we cannot exclude the fact that it is an essential part of society. So do you believe that W.E.B. Du Bois left out the “dismantling of the illusion of race” by accident or that he recognized the weight the term would carry in society over time?