“Toward a Global Idea of Race”
One of the best and most difficult books that I finished this year was Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race. I would recommend that everyone read the book, but I also recognize that I cannot expect everyone to be able to read it with great interest given that it assumes a deep engagement with the history of Western philosophy and the theoretical foundations of Western anthropology and sociology. In light of this, I thought it would be a useful exercise for me to gloss the basic argument of Silva’s book for my readers, leaving aside her disputations with the history of Western philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, and focusing on the problem which inspired me to pick up the book in the first place. The problem in question, “How do liberal globalists and white supremacists relate to one another?”
Over the course of the twentieth century, anti-colonial and anti-racist movements have bested the forces of liberal globalism in a war of position that has forced liberal globalists to repudiate white supremacy in theory, though not in practice.
Prior to the second World War, white supremacy was well regarded in the United Settler States and throughout the Euro-Atlantic West as the intended outcome and crowning achievement of liberal globalism. But in the wake of the successes of anti-colonial and anti-racist movements following the second World War, white supremacy has come to be poorly regarded as an unintended byproduct of liberal globalism, and liberal globalists today find themselves at great pains to maintain their distance from white supremacy and white supremacists.
Repudiations and distantiations aside, white supremacy remains an effect of liberal globalist myths and strategies of intervention. Like their eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors, the liberal globalists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries maintain that white supremacy is the unavoidable consequence of “progress” — citing books like Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and abusing the concept of “path dependence” to this end. The primary difference is that twentieth and twenty-first century liberal globalists endeavor to put “harm reduction” measures (e.g., “affirmative action” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” measures) in place to mitigate white supremacy because it is considered an unfortunate side-effect of liberal globalism’s ministrations.
The founding myth of white supremacy and its guiding strategy of intervention was well articulated by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness — “Exterminate all the brutes.” The white supremacist believes that, either by God’s grace or natural selection, the white race has emerged as the most civilized race and all other races of peoples are destined to either (i) serve the white race or (ii) face extermination at the hands of the white race for being found unfit to serve. According to this logic, the destiny of the white race is to colonize the world, to conquer all other races of peoples, to evaluate whether or not colonized peoples are fit to serve the white race, to put those found fit to work in their service, and to exterminate all the brutes that aren’t fit to serve. The world historical exemplar of a white supremacist project was the pre-Civil War project of the United Settler States of Amerikkka writ large, which turned upon the enslavement of black-skins and the extermination of red-skins by white-skins.
The founding myth of liberal globalist racism, and its guiding strategy of intervention, serve as the conditions of possibility for white supremacy. In its most exemplary form, at least since its turn away from explicitly championing white supremacy, the liberal globalist myth and strategy of intervention was best articulated by Amerikkkaner sociologists from the University of Chicago who, during the early 20th century, came up with the theory of the “race relations cycle” — which proceeds from “conflict and competition,” to “accommodation,” to “assimilation,” and, finally, to “amalgamation” or miscegenation — which, “is apparently progressive and irreversible.” Generalizing from the Amerikkkaner experience of waves of migrations of different racialized white peoples of Europe, Amerikkkaner sociologists proposed that when peoples of different races first come into contact, they inevitably enter into conflict with one another over their cultural differences and compete with one another for resources. After a period of conflict and competition that can be more or less prolonged, peoples of different races will eventually learn to accommodate each others’ differences and to share resources. During this period of accommodation, peoples of different races inevitably become increasingly more familiar with each others’ cultures and evaluate their cultural advantages and disadvantages. The races whose cultures are “primitive” will, slowly but surely, assimilate the better parts of the “more civilized” cultures of other races, having recognized the advantages of adopting the more civilized culture and the disadvantages of holding fast to their more primitive culture. The assimilated will become desirable partners for peoples of other races and they will themselves come to desire intimacies and children with peoples belonging to races with more civilized cultures. The miscegenated offspring of such interracial desires will, in their turn, physically blend in and likely tend towards forming intimacies and having children with persons belonging to races with more civilized cultures. Generation by generation, those races whose cultures are more primitive will be obliterated along with their more primitive cultures for failing to reproduce, and their remnants will be engulfed and absorbed into the more civilized race and their more civilized culture.
The “race relations cycle” is successfully completed when those belonging to primitive races and cultures yield to those belonging to more civilized races and cultures as a result of assimilation and then amalgamation/miscegenation. Yet, it is not the successful completion of the race relations cycle but, rather, its failure that drives liberal globalism. As Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in Toward a Global Idea of Race, “Though [the race relations cycle] explained the trajectory of certain immigrant groups, Southern and Eastern Europeans, other subjugated ‘races and cultures,’ Blacks and Asians, were understood to be neither ‘assimilating’ nor ‘amalgamating’ with the all-powerful [Northern and Western European] white race. [...] The racial (physical) difference (via ‘miscegenation’) and cultural (moral/social) difference (via assimilation) of the others of [Northern and Western] Europe were supposed to naturally yield to the superior [Northern and Western European] race and culture, but stubborn persistence of [the] racial (physical) differences of Blacks and Asians prevented this.” This is to say, in other words, that the race relations cycle runs into difficulties when it comes to blacks and Asians because the miscegenated offspring of white’s liaisons with blacks and Asians are too physically (racially) different from the children of the more civilized white [Northern and Western] European race and, thus, fail to blend in with the white race. As a consequence, blacks and Asians are regarded to be physically (racially) undesirable partners for whites seeking to have children. Silva quotes the Amerikkkaner sociologist Robert E. Park’s arguments to this effect.
“The chief obstacle to the assimilation of the Negro and the Oriental,” Park argued, was “not mental but physical traits. It is not because the Negro and the Japanese are so differently constituted that they do not assimilate. If they are given an opportunity, the Japanese are quite as capable as the Italians, the Armenians, or the Slavs of acquiring our culture, and sharing our national ideals. The trouble is not with the Japanese mind but with the Japanese skin”. Unlike Southern and Eastern [European] immigrants, Park argues, Asians and Blacks exhibit “physical traits,” signs of “social (moral) distance,” that do not disappear in the second generation. These marks entail reactions on the part of the “native” group, ideas and practices expressing prejudices, that exacerbate the “race conflict,” preventing [their] “assimilation.” That is, because they “fail” to lose the “visible” signs (racial difference) of cultural (“social/moral”) difference, Blacks and Asians are the “strangers” whose presence transforms an otherwise transparent social configuration into one that is pathological — not ruled by universality and self-determination — one that fails to fulfill the logic of obliteration prescribed in the “theory of racial and cultural contacts.”
Taught to fear this fate for their own children, Northern and Western Europeans will tend to refrain from miscegenation with Blacks and Asians, and Northern and Western European males in particular, granted their patriarchal privileges, will tend to refrain from producing “rightful heirs” via miscegenation with blacks and Asians.
A century following Park’s sociological studies, however, things are changing with the shift of the global balance of power from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific. In accord with South African conventions from the Apartheid era, East Asians today are more and more often being counted as “honorary whites,” rich enough to (almost) qualify as white — although it must be said that many white Europeans and Amerikkkans resent the bestowal of this “honor” on East Asians, a sentiment that has led to increasing anti-Asian racism and violence in the United Settler States. But whereas the overlap between East Asianness and whiteness is now in dispute, blackness and whiteness remain polar opposites. Blacks as a race are barred from becoming “honorary whites” due to the fact that the analytics of raciality are such that blackness has been deemed the opposite of whiteness, with whiteness meaning civilized and blackness meaning primitive/uncivilized. Only the most exceptional Black individuals are granted “honorary white” status, and these exceptional individuals are treated as if they have transcended the Black race, not as examples proving the Black race as a whole may be deserving of “honorary white” status.
Going further and digging deeper, liberal globalism effectively turns on the denigration of the so-called “race consciousness” of Black and other colored peoples who aren’t able to pass for (honorary) whites. The so-called “race consciousness” of Black and colored peoples is their consciousness of being estranged from a white-dominant Northern and Western European culture because of their physical (racial) differences. According to the liberal globalist, “race consciousness” corrupts the Black and colored person’s adoption of white culture in such a manner that effectively creates primitive racialized sub-cultures (e.g., African American culture) that mimic the more civilized cultures of white peoples but are retarded and warped by resentments that revolve around physical (racial) differences.
The problem for the liberal globalist, then, is what to do with Black and colored peoples relegated to primitive racialized subcultures. White supremacy is, in effect, a kind of “final solution.” White supremacy seeks (i) to subordinate and compel into service those peoples of primitive racialized subcultures who are fit to serve the white race and its more civilized culture, and (ii) to exterminate those peoples of primitive racialized subcultures who are unfit to serve. In other words, liberal globalism is the set-up and white supremacy is the punchline: after liberal globalism has denigrated all those who are unfit for miscegenation as brutes, white supremacy proceeds to exterminate all the brutes who are unfit to serve the white race and its more civilized culture. Liberal globalists who repudiate white supremacy today are setting up the punchline but withholding on its delivery. They are repudiating the genocidal project of exterminating all the brutes, yes, but they are not repudiating the ethnocidal project of denigrating Black and colored peoples and relegating them to primitive racialized sub-cultures that “ape” and “corrupt” the more civilized cultures of white peoples.
Going further and digging even deeper, we may learn a great deal more about liberal globalist racism by examining how its project of denigration has operated in Brazil versus how it has operated in the United Settler States. As Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in Towards a Global Idea of Race:
The celebrated “career” of Africans in Brazil was [...] to slowly but surely disappear under the inescapable force of a European desire as miscegenation eliminated racial difference and ensured that, after slavery, the Brazilian social space was ruled by universality. “The most obvious effect of miscegenation,” [the Amerikkkaner sociologist Donald Pierson argued], “is to eliminate the physical differences between the races. In Bahia intermixture has now, for more than four hundred years, been breaking down physical barriers and reducing the visibility of blackness which in the United Settler States has produced a heightened “race consciousness”.
Silva notes, however, that what we see in Brazil is not the total elimination of “race consciousness” but, rather, a “race consciousness” that thinks in terms of continuous gradations between different colors of people and between blackness and whiteness. In the United Settler States, by contrast, “race consciousness” relies upon discrete racial categories: Black, white, brown, red, yellow. The continuous nature of “race consciousness” in Brazil can be explained by the fact that Brazilian whites, rather than maintaining themselves as “pure” whites, maintain themselves as “alloyed” whites. In chemistry, an alloyed metal retains properties of the pure metal that it contains, such as electrical conductivity, ductility, opacity, and luster, but has supplementary properties that the pure metal lacks, such as increased strength or hardness. Similarly, the “alloyed whites” of Brazil maintain that they have tempered their lineages with that of the indigene and the Black in order to strengthen and harden themselves to thrive in the tropics while still retaining the properties that pure whites possess.
The logic of obliteration through assimilation and miscegenation still reigns supreme for Brazilian racists but, unlike the United Settler States racists who believe that the logic of obliteration demands the progressive purification of Black and colored peoples into white people’s over the course of generations, the Brazilian racist believes that the logic of obliteration demands the alloying of whiteness with blackness and coloredness over the course of generations to better enable whiteness to withstand life in the tropics. In other words, Brazilian racists believe that one gains value by physically appearing to possess a modest quantum of non-white ancestry; Amerikkkan racists, by contrast, believe one loses value by physically appearing to possess any quantum of non-white ancestry.
It would be wrong, however, to believe that there is a conflict between the Amerikkkan and Brazilian racists. Rather to the contrary, Amerikkkan racists understand and recognize the logic of Brazilian racists: they understand that it is the more temperate climate of the United Settler States that enables Amerikkkaners to place more value on “pure” whiteness and it is the tropical climate of Brazil that forces Brazilian whites to place more value on “alloyed” whiteness. This is an important point made in Silva’s Towards a Global Idea of Race: the eschatology of obliteration through assimilation and miscegenation is supplemented by a global logic according to which climate and geography determine the degree to which whiteness is to be purified or alloyed.
Pure whiteness is a privilege that is only available to those who live in climates and geographies that are similar to those of Europe (e.g., North America); alloyed whiteness is a consolation for those who live in climates and geographies that differ from those of Europe but aren’t considered inhospitable to white European settlement and dominance (e.g., South America); and primitive racialized sub-cultures that “ape” and “corrupt” the white-dominant global culture will prevail in places that are considered inhospitable to white European settlement and dominance (e.g., Central Africa).
In light of all of this, let me come to the most crucial point. No matter how strident its repudiations of white supremacy are, the liberal globalist project continues to grant pure whites and alloyed whites the power to incarcerate and execute any Black and colored persons who violently rebel against the white-dominant global culture, selectively but effectively reviving the white supremacist project of extermination and assigning it a limited policing function. This is to say that the liberal globalist who repudiates white supremacy is in reality doing no more than telling Black and colored peoples that they will not be subject to extermination in the manner advocated by white supremacists provided that they accept their denigration and resign themselves to a primitive racialized sub-culture that ”apes” and “corrupts” the more civilized cultures of white peoples. Whether or not they are found fit to serve and are put to work, Black and colored peoples who accept their denigration are invited to petition liberal globalists for some rights and protections against the selective but effective revival of the white supremacist project of extermination as a policing project, but Black and colored peoples who resist and refuse denigration do so at their own peril.
Anti-colonial and antiracist movements, having forced liberal globalists to repudiate white supremacy, are now engaged in a new war of position to force liberal globalists to repudiate the myth that non-white peoples, the others of Europe, ought to disavow their primitive cultures and, instead, “ape” the more civilized cultures of white European peoples. This means pointing out that non-white peoples could only ever have been regarded as inferior to white Europeans in one crucial respect: “they lacked the European technology and culture of war, and were appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare.” Though it is tempting for anti-racists and anti-colonialists to make the argument that the all-destructive fury of European warfare is evidence of the inferiority of white European culture, we must resist this temptation. For anti-racists and anti-colonialists to rank cultures according to their relative inferiority and superiority in any regard whatsoever is to concede significant ground to the liberal globalists in their war of position, given that there is no way to prove the superiority of one culture over another without assuming some form of colonization.
Anti-colonial and anti-racist movements against liberal globalism must (re)create myths and guiding strategies of contravention that obviate any need and desire to prove the superiority of one culture over another. They must, instead, facilitate correspondences and confluences amongst peoples of different cultures. They must enable increasingly diverse peoples to reciprocally defer to one another and blur and traverse the lines and boundaries between them despite continuing to differ from one another in profound ways, physically and otherwise. Liberal globalist initiatives cast differences, especially physical (racial) differences, as barriers for non-white individuals to overcome as they seek to be included in the white-dominant global culture. Opposed to the idea that we ought to “overcome our differences,” anti-colonialist and anti-racist projects are all about creating ways for all of us to take pleasure and enjoyment in the creolizing play and variation of our differences.
