2009
Wiley-Blackwell
The neoliberal crusade has finally for the most part eliminated official racism in the United States, Europe, and through much of the world. This work contends that now that racism is largely passé, at least at the official level, governments around the world are pretending that race is not an issue. Having eradicated racism, neoliberals want race to disappear from the public debate. Anti-racism devolves without thought into anti-race. Pretending that racism no longer exists, the author argues, neoliberals pave the way for racialism, the unofficial and often near-to virulent private racism that is more dangerous because less controlled by the state. Race remains alive and well regardless of what the anti-racists would believe.
To demonstrate his point, David Theo Goldberg tracks the variety of racialist arrangements that currently plague the world. He begins of course with the United States, a most private and deadly racialism that entails the whitening of the U.S. by the exporting of its racism. War is the most deadly expression of this racism.
The Palestinian version is a variant of the United States form. It is compounded by the dual state configuration of Israel, a configuration that forces violence because the two groups – Israelis and Palestinians – refuse to share their common land. The Israelis have the edge, being the white while the Palestinians are the other even though a rising percentage of Israeli immigrants are coming from other than Europe and the Europeanized world. The solution is to unofficially establish a caste system for citizens while subjecting non-citizens to a military-dominated system that walls them off then breaks through the walls at whim and with impunity. It’s violent on both sides, and whitewashing doesn’t make it go away.
The European racialism is a white core with increasing darkness with geographic movement to the perimeter. Europe worships whiteness; it is the home of the pure white. True darkness is a colonial phenomenon. But after the breakup of the empires and during the rebuilding, then during the aging of the white European populations, the Europeans allowed, encouraged, and brought in their former colonial subjects and other non-whites. By pretending that there is no racial minority and no discrimination within their borders, European governments make room for employment discrimination, the soup kitchen offering only pork-based soup, and the like. These small discriminations fester in the racial neighborhoods, populated by second or third generation ethnics born in Europe but defined as foreign by their skin color or accent. Violence ensues, and the governments feign an inability to understand the cause.
The Latin American contribution is the mixed-race caste, the concept of mestizaje. Some Latin American nations eliminated their black populations after emancipation, sometimes brutally. The European and Indigenous peoples interbred, creating the new Latin “race,” with Brazil being the exemplar (and also the last to emancipate and among those that did not attempt to exterminate freed blacks.)
And an essay on racism and post-racism could not be complete without a discussion of South Africa. The author tracks the history of the colonial states that became South Africa, pointing out clearly how recent the apartheid system was, how it became almost a religion but crumbled into a model post-racist society, with all that implies.
The essays in
The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism
deal with each nation’s history, particularly the dark aspects. American attempts at genocide of the Native Americans, the brutality of black slavery wherever it existed, general second class status and extra-legal measures to contain or diminish black or other minority populations, the anti-Semitism that culminated in the Final Solution before giving way, discredited, to the equally ancient anti-Musselman fervor, the ghettoization of Palestinians, and on and on. The essays also bring the stories up to date, highlighting gated communities, segregated and inferior facilities, differential incarceration rates, poverty rates and such.
The most compelling is the essay on Latin America. It lists and defines the many labels, of which mulatto and Mestizo merely touch the surface. The author explains how the terms such as wolf (Indian and black) and coyote (Indian and Mestizo) animalize darkness. He also points out that the “white” Europeans from Iberia are not a “pure” race at all but rather a mixture of African and Arab as well as others. The conquistadores were Mestizo when they landed on the Indians. And he notes that Brazilians are tending to a higher percentage of blackness for two reasons – one, there is a touch of elitism in having a trace of non-white blood, a spice in the mix, as it were. Also, the introduction of affirmative action and racial set asides has increased the percentage of blacks in the censuses. But most of all the classifications are fluid, with definitions shifting over time and with class/wealth/renown. Even so, the effort to model Latin American societies on European ones (which means white with perhaps a touch of Indian for interest) has resulted in the disappearance of the other colors. Not that the societies are all white, not even those that largely exterminated their black populations after emancipation, but that the assumption of a white society means that any non-white is a non-citizen and thus not relevant to politics or social well-being. Blacks are consistently underrepresented in the positive categories (wealth, education, and so on) while overrepresented in the negatives (poverty, crime, incarceration, disease, and such.) Because the problems are non-white, the “white” society sees no need to address them.
Sharing the common Hispanic interpretation that the future of the United States is brown rather than black and white, Goldberg agrees that the Latin American model is the one that the others will eventually attain, particularly the United States, complacently ignoring the race-based problems in its midst while creating race-based problems through the darker parts of the world, and the European states that have already attained the white-only myth and have no intention of removing the blinders that keep them from seeing their race-based social and societal problems.
But the South African present is the prototype for the American future, a preview of what’s to come in the interim. Apartheid was a religious racism, a pre-ordained separation regardless of how equal. After apartheid collapsed with the unfashionability of race, the system became one of class-based separation regardless of how unequal. And according to Steve Biko the new system was ideal in that it erased race as a political category, made it a non-issue, effectively precluding the formation of race-based political organizations, neutralizing the black majority’s natural political strength.
The system had other benefits aside from preserving and enhancing the fortunate white minority. It allowed the continuation of racist practice underground, leaving the elites free of any obligation to the lesser race/class element in their society. Blacks remained largely excluded, but whites found themselves on the wrong side of the class divide as well. Race is a “shroud” that governments can ignore with impunity now that they have defined it as passé. Class differences are just part of the neoliberal global system, and so be it.
This is powerful stuff. The author intends no scholarly dispassion, no footnoted academic treatise. Rather he presents an impassioned argument at length, replete with examples, full of word games to emphasize a point. There is fire in this work.
The introduction indicates that there is a neoliberal failing at the root of the shift to racialism, but the chapters fault more than neoliberalism. Neoconservatism is at fault as well. Pretending that race no longer matters seems to be a universal shortcoming.
After multiple chapters referencing post-race neoliberalism without formally spelling out the terms, the discussion of neoliberalist racism occurs in the final chapter. After describing five of the forms that neoliberal racism takes based on the racist histories of the five regions, Goldberg develops his history of how liberalism became neoliberalism in the 1970s and after in a context of globalism and privatization. This essay in itself makes the book worthwhile, and it might work better as an introduction. It is better than the current introduction in that it is more straightforward in defining the problems arising from neoliberal disregard for racialism. It is long enough at 60 pages or so that it might be divided into both introduction and conclusion with no great sacrifice of substance.
Although there are no footnotes, each chapter contains an extensive bibliography for those who wish additional information.
Overall the book is interesting, written with passion and obvious pleasure in playing with the language. On occasion jargon gets in the way of argument, particularly in the early pages when Goldberg is setting up his approach and establishing his liberal bases by dropping names such as Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault and Noam Chomsky. Once the reader struggles past the heavy theory, the reward is a remarkable improvement in readability and a work that works.
The Threat of Raceis a strong addition to the growing library of anti-globalism, anti-neoliberal critiques in what can best be described as advocacy scholarship.
Reviewed by John Barnhill, Independent Scholar, Houston, Texas
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