Introduction
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we blacks are wise.
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
—Langston Hughes, “Justice”
In 1932, Langston Hughes published a volume titled Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse. This slim, gorgeously furious book was a
work of protest literature. By weighing in on the infamous trial of four Black
young men1 facing capital punishment for the alleged rape of two White
women on a train in Alabama (one of whom recanted, the other of whom
provided inconsistent testimony), Hughes followed an established tradition
within African American arts of providing social and political commentary
through creative expression.
His poetry remains illuminating even as we approach fourscore years
since the Scottsboro trials. The poem “Justice,” part of this five-piece meditation on Scottsboro, imagines the blindfold worn by the Greek goddess not
as a deliberate gesture of fairness but as a bandage hiding wounds inflicted
against her principle. Hughes, with this provocative imagery, foreshadowed a
powerfully troubling relationship among the concepts of blindness, fairness,
and race, several decades before the U.S. Supreme Court would interpret the
principle of color blindness to mean that American law should reject any
attention to race, even in efforts to address racial subordination, in all but an
increasingly narrow class of cases.
In this era in which we proclaim a national ethos of racial egalitarianism2
and yet find race qua inequality rearing its ugly head in place after place,
we see the festering sores of (in)justice in many sectors: housing, poverty,
imprisonment, health, education, and on and on. On one hand, the humane
person feels a certain urgency about addressing these inequalities. But that
emotion exists in the midst of a long legal and policy retreat from remedies
| 1
for current and past racial discrimination. On the other hand, we feel compelled to also ask why a social transformation as profound and deep as the
civil rights movement could not divorce American democracy from the
blood money of racial caste with which it purchased its stability.
In the fall of 2007, the case of the “Jena 6” entered the public eye. Six
young Black men were aggressively prosecuted in small-town Louisiana
after allegedly beating up a White peer. This occurred in the midst of a series
of altercations that began when Black teenagers had the “gumption” to sit
under what was designated a “White tree.” Nooses were hung on the tree—
perhaps the closest thing to a death threat that could be issued by the use of
an inanimate object. When some pundits termed the experience of the Jena
6 a modern-day Scottsboro, I took pause. Sure, the parallels were there, but
it concerned me. This isn’t 1932. And, while we shouldn’t be antihistoricist in
the manner of the Jena, Louisiana, school officials who referred to the noose
as a “silly prank,”3 that is to say, while we should understand the role history
plays in constituting symbol and in shaping present reality, it really isn’t 1932.
And we have to grapple with what that means. This book is written, in part,
as an argument that a mid-twentieth-century framework for understanding
race and racism handicaps our comprehension and action in the twentyfirst century. Our experience of racial injustice has a derivative, but distinct,
zeitgeist.
At the same time, the fact that tens of thousands of protesters arrived at
Jena in September of 2007 indicated a tide turning. There was a brewing
call for movement that ultimately manifested in the grassroots energy that
surrounded the campaign and election of Barack Obama to the presidency
of the United States. And yet confusion followed the cheers of sweet progress. In fact, any honest assessment of race in the early twenty-first century
should make us remark that “these are strange days indeed.” Barack Obama is
a biracial African American president who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.
Beginning on January 20, 2009, the White House was occupied by an African American family. From November 5, 2008, forward, the chatter about a
postracial America was everywhere, and yet six months into Obama’s presidency a critical mass of Americans hysterically proclaimed the president a
noncitizen and decried the very destruction of the United States under his
leadership. We have been told by pundits that we are moving beyond race,
and yet the media have displayed a renewed interest in talking about race.
Who can tell what exactly is going on?
Similar to the way Michel Foucault noted that Victorian mores about
sexuality offered an opportunity to talk about sex, a lot; the “postracial”
2 | Introduction
discourse reflects both anxiety and confusion about what race means and
doesn’t mean now. In order to answer these questions, we must approach
the enterprise with great rigor and sophistication. At each point, we must
consider the ambiguity of terms and the transformation of ideas and identify
that which is fresh and that which is stagnant. And, if we are to be at our best,
we must sustain and expand the hope that excited us about the 2008 election.
Those are tall orders. My ambition in this book is much smaller. This
book seeks to pursue a very specific question, which nevertheless demands a
complex body of information and analysis: how does a nation that proclaims
racial equality create people who act in ways that sustain racial inequality? I
suppose a second question is pursued, too: what can we do about it?
I have chosen to focus our attention on what I have termed “the practices of racial inequality,” by which I mean actions that individuals take that
researchers can identify as being clear decisions to disadvantage others on
the basis of race. Identifying these as decisions based on race is made possible largely by empirical social science research that reveals trends and makes
comparisons between how different groups of people are treated. When we
see the cumulative effect of the choices people make about how to treat others, we recognize that there are undeniable patterns of racial privileging and
disadvantage that are part of contemporary American culture. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I have, in my work, always drawn upon a range of scholarly
fields. However, I would argue that efforts at understanding race and how
race operates hold special demands for those doing interdisciplinary work,
and require an openness to reading across disciplines. Within fields like sociology, psychology, and media studies, there are constantly growing bodies
of important research on race. Also, within disciplines, while each has its
own rules and practices, the most important efforts to contemplate race have
also engaged in critical practices vis-à-vis the disciplines themselves, which,
without exception of note, have been shaped around notions of humanity,
objectivity, and normativity rooted in White (largely male, largely affluent,
largely Western European) experience. And so, to talk about race with rigor
has also meant using new tools, creating new norms, and challenging flawed
or limited methods within each respective discipline.
A key part of the method of this book is the application of cultural studies
analysis to social science research. Such a use of social science research does
not necessarily fall within the orthodoxies of social scientific argument. At
various points, I argue that “the evidence” shows something greater than or
different from what many of my social science colleagues would say, perhaps
with the exceptions of sociologists of culture and anthropologists. But I take
Introduction | 3
risks with fields that are not my own because my hope is that the method
cobbled together here can be a critical intervention, one that challenges the
resistance to and suspicion of empirical data that exist in much humanist
race theory even as it shows how cultural studies can be useful to address
questions about race that get lost in the gaps of quantitative social science
research (as a function of the constructions and imputed meanings of categories).4 At the root of it all, my fundamental belief is that figuring out this
race thing requires us to become “bricoleurs,”5 notwithstanding the pressures
of specialization, professionalization, and the disciplines. Obviously, I am
not alone in this belief, and a noteworthy group of scholars and intellectuals precede me in a “bricolage” approach to studying race, including but not
limited to Patricia Hill Collins, Robin D.G. Kelley, Hortense Spillers, Gloria
Anzaldua, Ronald Takaki, George Lipsitz, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Herman
Gray, Philip Deloria, and Cornel West.
Race and racism are lived by virtue of encounters, real or virtual, with
“raced” bodies. (And we all have “raced” bodies; even those of us who are
seen as “racially ambiguous” are raced by virtue of our culture’s fascination
with our “indeterminacy.”) In the moments of these encounters, individuals
read, evaluate, and judge others. This means that even though we can measure racial effects or racialized phenomena, there are myriad immeasurable
ways in which race is experienced or given meaning in the midst of social life.
While using aggregate data of the sort provided by social science research
in some ways collapses the diversity of racial experience into a few modes
of analysis, that collapse is necessary to a certain extent in order avoid the
danger of the overrepresentation of an individual and/or nonrepresentative
experience or of a questionable interpretation of a representative experience.
In a book like this, which aspires to provide a theory and a remedial framework that can have broad application, the useful individual interpretation or
racial anecdote must coincide with the existence of patterns. Although telling individual stories about race can be extremely illuminating, examining
empirical evidence about race gives necessary and critical information about
what is happening with race today.
In recent years, the analysis of cultural patterns in relationship to race
have more often been of two sorts: either discussions of the culture of particular racial or ethnic groups and how they are related to, and resist, the dominant social order or analyses of the cultures of people of color, which have
far too often been shaped around diagnostics of what is wrong with those
people (through their own fault or because of the conditions of their lives).
Culture talk in the twenty-first century has especially centered on debates
4 | Introduction
about how disfavored or favorable “ethnic traits” and behaviors impact the
outcomes of groups.
Instead of talking about “colored” culture, I want to talk about racial
inequality as a national cultural practice.
In explaining what I mean by saying the practice(s) of inequality is a cultural practice, I find the description of culture provided by the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz particularly useful. He describes culture as having two locations, in human minds and in public forms. He goes on to say:
The three dimensions of culture, to be understood in their interrelations
are thus:
1. ideas and modes of thought as entities and processes of the mind—the
entire array of concepts, propositions, values and the like which people
within some social unit carry together . . .
2. forms of externalization, the different ways in which meaning is made
accessible to the senses, made public . . .
3. social distribution, the ways in which the collective cultural inventory
of meanings and meaningful external forms . . . together is spread over
a population and its social relationships.6
Applying these dimensions to race in the contemporary United States, I
argue that we have common ways of thinking that are reflective of a racial
ideology and that sustain a belief in or an assumption of White superiority. Our active practices of inequality are means of externalizing these beliefs
and assumptions. Importantly, we can identify a belief in White superiority as having concrete material impact in some contexts and other kinds of
impact—civic, emotional, perceptual, philosophical—in others.
My decision to focus on racial inequality as a cultural practice today,
rather than starting with the conditions of inequality that we have inherited,
may be troubling to some readers. There is widespread agreement that a history of racial inequality has shaped current inequality. We live with the baggage of history. As well, there is an all-too-common yet profoundly incorrect
belief that racism is no longer practiced7 and that the inequality we see today
can be largely attributed to the legacy of our racist past. While I acknowledge
the former (history has shaped what we find today), I reject the assumptions
of the latter. The practice of racial inequality is sustained. It is sustained in
ways that are important for the maintenance of inequality. It shapes markets
for employment, law, public policy, and the media and our experiences as
citizens and residents of this and other nations. I believe we should be his
Introduction | 5
torically sophisticated, aware, even humbled by historic knowledge and yet
not shackled by earlier interpretive frameworks. Moreover, we must avoid
the danger of looking back in order to avoid looking at the present.
The applied value of this book, I would argue, is rooted in a position I
take—that efforts to remedy what I would call the static picture of inequality
(the snapshot vision of how inequality is) cannot be effective without attention to the active practice of inequality. The active practice serves the status quo and sometimes even takes us backwards in our move toward racial
equality. Moreover, practices of inequality even infect our best-intentioned
efforts to remedy the static, historically shaped picture of inequality. Therefore, these practices must be unraveled and exposed.
But first they must be identified. In a national context in which very few
people want to be seen as “racist” and in which we profess a commitment
to racial equality, how do we explain the persistence of practices of racial
inequality? We have two choices routinely offered to us. We can call the
nation and its inhabitants hypocrites who say one thing and mean another.
Or we can focus on the fact that a given practice of racial inequality is unintentional (i.e., that it happens through structures of inequality, that human
agency is subservient to the wheels of inequality that operate like a driverless
engine). While both of these options are partially true, they are deeply unsatisfactory and insufficient. I hope to provide a more satisfying answer to this
troubling dynamic.
In order to describe how and why practices of racial inequality persist in
the midst of an egalitarian ethos, we must be rigorous with the languages of
race. What do race and racism mean? Who are we talking about? One could
argue that a society like ours, where people report far less intentional racist
sentiment than in the past,8 is one that is moving closer to an eradication of
race and racism and toward the less fractious categorization of people by ethnicity. The problem with this idea is that the absence of a necessary hostility
to an ascriptive racial group does not mean the absence of a likely hostility to
members of an ascriptive racial group. For this reason, we can find in recent
history a majority of Americans saying they are not racist and a majority of
Americans reporting that they believe the traditional racist stereotype that
African Americans are lazy.9 By the same token, the fact that people have
generally rejected racial determinism by saying that an individual is not necessarily possessed of some negative trait because he belongs to a particular
ascriptive racial category doesn’t mean that people have rejected the idea that
he is likely to be possessed of some negative trait because he belongs to that
group or is perceived to belong to that group. Tanya Hernandez refers to this
6 | Introduction
as the “Latin Americanization” of race in the United States,10 referring to how
racial inequality in the United States is beginning to operate the way it has
historically in much of Latin America, where, while it is not deterministic
and not shaped by a rigid system of classification and articulated ideology,
it is nonetheless widespread and demonstrable through economic stratification, aesthetics, and bigotry.
Racism is not deterministic these days, and it is frequently unintentional
or unacknowledged on the part of the actor. Race is not even a static category. Individuals and even whole groups can be seen differently in different times and places. And the agents of the practices of inequality are not
necessarily White and may even be members of the group against which the
inequality is being enacted. That is the most profound example of why I say
that the practices of inequality are a matter of our collective culture. We all
learn to participate in the practices of inequality, even though members of
racially disfavored groups may be better equipped in certain instances to
withstand this negative socialization.
This work focuses heavily but not exclusively on the practice of inequality
as it impacts African Americans. The socialization with respect to the practice of inequality vis-à-vis African Americans has deep roots in U.S. history,
and it is a national acculturation. Notwithstanding the popular eagerness to
focus our attention on southern acts of racial discrimination against African
Americans and therefore implicitly to absolve the rest of the country, racial
discrimination against African Americans has always been a national matter.
The fascination we have with Blackness in American culture can be traced
to the manner in which the encounters between the Black subject and the
American project have throughout history been the grounds for the public
expression of both the fallacy and the promise of the American ideal, often
in the most public fora available. And so that a Black man is the first person
of color to be president of the United States is at once most improbable and
unsurprising.
Today, among people of color, African Americans are the most visible in
media, formal education, and public history. The minimal visibility of nonBlack people of color is ambiguous. On one hand, it creates significant difficulty in garnering interest or outrage in conditions of profound inequality or
simple suffering faced by those groups. On the other hand, limited visibility
has the benefit of allowing more space for self-identification or self-fashioning
without the influence of the powerful forces of media representation and
ubiquitous popular narratives of the group. It is nonetheless critical to investigate the references in our popular culture to Asians, Latinos, and Native
Introduction | 7
Americans. Because they are relatively few, they can easily become overdetermined and grossly representative and therefore fuel largely unchecked
stereotypes.
In contrast to the national culture of racialization that affects African
Americans’, Native Americans’, Latinos’, and Asian Americans’ encounters
with practices of inequality are more often shaped by specific regional histories, as well by moral panics around geopolitical configurations in particular
historical moments, economics, and/or the presence of a critical mass of a
certain group in a specific space or place. Insofar as I am offering a national
picture of the practice of inequality, I am focusing heavily on African Americans. However, this does not reflect a political stance that assumes that the
practice of inequality has an exclusive or majority Black subject. Rather, it
reflects my observation that, with respect to identifying a specific set of cultural practices based in disadvantaging on the basis of race, all of us in the
society are trained, socialized, and guided much more explicitly regarding
our perspectives on African Americans than we are with relation to other
ethnic groups. At the same time, there are trends in how inequality and bigotry are manifested that are found in the experiences of more than one racial
or ethnic group, and I attempt to identify these, as well.
One might argue that growing awareness of the diversity of the United
States and the greater acknowledgment of multiracialism and in-racialgroup diversity, along with higher rates of interracial marriage and increased
conversation about non-Black people of color in the public arena, means we
are moving toward a fuller understanding of the social construction of race,
disavowing biological notions of race, and accepting that race is not a blackand-white matter. But widespread recognition of certain demographic facts
and growing intimacy across the color lines alone do not necessarily move
us to a better place, racially speaking. Across the globe, racial inequality and
racism have been expressed in a plethora of ways, ranging from color hierarchies to the drawing of racial distinctions between people who are phenotypically indistinguishable. In some places, race and class are inextricably linked; in others, race is more intensely connected to forms of civic and
political membership.
Even in the United States during the Jim Crow era, a period historians
have understood as solidifying the “one-drop rule” of African American
categorization, there were isolated individuals who were able to traverse
the boundaries of the color line, formally or informally, due to access provided by wealth, color, intimacy with figures of power, and the like.11 And,
of course, there is a very long history of interracial intimacy in the United
8 | Introduction
States that, although not juridically recognized in the form of marriage for
most of our history, occasionally found expression in other legal relations.12
Even when American race rules were at their crudest, they were not simplistically fixed. They played out in distinct manners in a wide variety of social
contexts. In an earlier era, sometimes when an African American person
passed for White, the person’s mixed heritage was a well-known secret rather
than one fully shrouded.13 In an earlier era, we could have spaces in which
Asians were categorized with Whites and others in which they were categorized as “colored.”14 In such instances, we could see inklings of a working of
race that has broadened to what we have today. The holes in the sieve that
allow for the incorporation of more people of color into full social, political,
and economic membership are much wider now; after all, one could barely
have imagined an Obama presidency or the presence of Oprah Winfrey on
the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans a generation ago. Still, we should
be cautious about thinking that we are inevitably marching toward equality
or that the sieve is gone.
The Chapters
The first chapter of this book introduces two intellectual frameworks. The
first asks that we think of race in a way that takes us beyond the notion of
intent as being necessary for the existence of racial discrimination. The second describes how racial discrimination can be rooted in concepts of “correlation” between particular characteristics and racial groups, rather than in
the idea that there is a “causal” or necessary relationship between membership in a racial group and particular attributes or qualities.
In chapter 2, I discuss what race is and move into a narrative overview of
research that demonstrates how racial inequality is a cultural practice in the
United States. This cultural practice creates a devastating accumulation of
disadvantaging experiences. Although it is based in individual actions, these
individual actions are all part of a consistent yet diversely expressed cultural
logic. The identification of this practice sets the foundation for the subsequent chapters’ analyses of how and why the practice exists and persists.
In chapter 3, I argue that racial narratives are fundamental to the practice of racial inequality. They intervene into the processes of individual and
group deliberation and decision making about how to treat others and how
to distribute resources. Racial narratives shape practices on affective, rational, and moral bases. Racial narratives are constructed as both positive and
negative evaluations, as well as general and specific ones. Moreover, although
Introduction | 9
the cumulative instantiations of racial narratives about people of color can
be quite destructive, the generative human potential for narrativity means
that we should be attendant to how the practice of deliberately “shifting narratives” was important historically in making progress in the pursuit racial
justice and that we should accept that it has ongoing possibility.
The work of the third chapter is extended in chapter 4, in which I describe
how categories are used as the terms upon which to practice inequality
because facially neutral categories operate as proxies for race. These categories elide commonalities and heighten distinctions between groups, yet
also trigger information about how to treat individuals within those categories. Moreover, the categories, often brought to us through our political
discourse, policy initiatives and research methods, truncate human experience in ways that allow for dangerous presumptions about groups of people.
To demonstrate this, I do a close reading of the term “fatherless” in policy
literature. This chapter also explores the concepts of merit and standards
as framing devices that simultaneously exclude and offer opportunities for
transgression.
In chapter 5, I use the examples of means-tested entitlements and
the police power as the entry point to an investigation of the relationship
between surveillance, privacy, and voyeurism in African American life. Further, I attempt to provide ways of understanding the connection between the
experiences of African Americans and Latinos in racialized surveillance. The
alienation from the right to privacy through surveillance practices leads to a
widely accepted yet deep inequity in the protection and punishment distributed by the police power and destroys the accountability structures essential
for any ethical surveillance practices.
I argue, in chapter 6, that the presence of “exceptions” to dominant racial
rules and narratives about non-White people are essential for the maintenance of a racially egalitarian rhetoric in the midst of widespread inequality.
An examination of such exceptions reveals that they may be individuals or
groups and that they may or may not identify themselves through the formation of symbolic boundaries against other people of color, but, importantly,
they are distinguished to a great extent on the basis of their differentiation
from other people of color. However, they are nevertheless subject to constraints resulting from both individual kinds of racial surveillance and the
rules of exceptionalizing narratives. I then provide a theoretical analysis of
how to move past exceptionalism into broader incorporation.
The relationship between race and value is the subject of chapter 7. In it,
I argue that the history of formally using race in property valuation and the
10 | Introduction
theoretical concept of Whiteness as property are part of a much more comprehensive practice of attributing value to or of devaluing things, places, and
concepts because of their high levels of association with people of color. This
process becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy on an economic level and also
makes cultural artifacts, institutions, and geographies harder to protect for
people of color. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how discomfort
with ascribed racial designations can and should be understood in light of
the mechanics of “value,” rather than simply “esteem.”
The final chapter of the book begins with a recuperation of the concept
of “freedom” as essential to the conceptualization of remedies to inequality. Using Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of the supposed conflict between
freedom and equality that has emerged in American jurisprudence, I present arguments that are imagined as identifying pathways to freedom, equality, and enriched democracy. I identify twin aspirations that emerge from
this vision. One is building capacity in groups that experience the practice
of racial inequality in order to counteract the impact of these practices.
This capacity building is essential to supporting a participatory democratic
vision. At the same time, I argue, we must aspire to build our capacities, as
citizens and as residents of the United States, to diminish our practice of
racial inequality through educational, civic, political, legislative, and social
interventions.
Introduction | 11