Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher Kyriakides is Assistant Professor and Director of Ethnicity and Communications Research at Cyprus University of Technology and Research Associate at the University of California, Irvine. Rodolfo D. Torres is Professor of Urban Planning and Chicano-Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and former visiting fellow in the Centre for Research on Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism at the University of Glasgow.

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RACE DEFACED

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface..........................................................................................viiAcknowledgments..................................................................................xvCHAPTER 1 HOPEFUL SUBJECTS AND THE "SYSTEM OF NATURAL LIBERTY"..................................1CHAPTER 2 THE WEAKNESS OF WHITENESS.............................................................36CHAPTER 3 FROM SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC RACE RELATIONS TO MULTICULTURAL CAPITALISM.....................80CHAPTER 4 OTHER THAN MEXICANS...................................................................120CHAPTER 5 WHAT MAY I HOPE?......................................................................158CHAPTER 6 A PRELUDE TO CLASS....................................................................187Notes............................................................................................201Index............................................................................................223

Chapter One

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

Antonio Gramsci

Have pity on the pessimist. He spoils his own existence. In fact, life is endurable only on condition that one's an optimist. The pessimist complicates things to no purpose.... What would have happened to us, by Heaven, if we'd been a group of pessimists! ... How could I have been successful without that dose of optimism which has never left me, and without that faith that moves mountains? ... One must have faith in life.

Adolf Hitler

PARADIGMS OF PESSIMISM

The belief that another, better world is possible and that Man, not God or Nature, has the power to make this happen, is a distinguishing hallmark of modern political thought. It is also that which is typically dismissed by End of History thinkers as redundant, even dangerous. The dismissal also has a long history captured within the constellation of meanings that are usually labeled "utopian," but the negative impulse takes a profound form today. The work of English philosopher John Gray is symptomatic. Taking his cue from ardent anti-utopian postwar liberal Isaiah Berlin, Gray goes further, negatively casting all modern political projects as utopian. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Gray argues that the Enlightenment humanist belief in progress was a secularized form of religious apocalyptic thought. The secularization of an essential human need for faith is responsible for the deadly belief that human beings can make a more perfect world. We are unable to free ourselves from a conflict-ridden human nature, because "nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life." To the familiar "utopian" sources of meaning against which Gray sets out his stall—communism, National Socialism, and neoliberalism—neoconservatism and al-Qaeda's Islamic fundamentalism are added. Gray's highly conservative appraisal of the need for meaning speaks to a contemporary state of emergency. The current darling of zero-hour intellectuals, he is hailed by writer Will Self as "the most important living philosopher." It is striking that such importance should be placed on a theory that considers human aspiration to be fundamentally flawed, even dangerous. But that Gray begins from one of the architects of postwar liberalism and ends on such a negative view of the Enlightenment tradition, projecting apocalypse onto the present as a warning against the dire consequences of humanism, is particularly revealing, for as the historian of ideas, Russell Jacoby notes, "The defeat of radicalism bleeds liberalism of its vitality."

Gray's philosophical orientation is not particularly helpful; in fact, his antipolitical stance kicks at an open door to a post—Cold War age in which the absence of utopia is generally heralded as a victory to be maintained against the Left-Right ideologies of the past. True, those who still consider themselves on the Left or the Right continue to look for and "identify" their political adversary; however, an alternative reading of the present centralizes not the continuance but the collapse of the Left-Right ideological framework, and in this reading neither Left nor Right remains intact. Nor does an unrepentant neoliberalism hold sway. In A World Without Meaning, the present, according to Zaki La'idi, is a period in which "liberal theories [are] made suddenly obsolete." While the end of the Cold War should logically have put liberals "on a pedestal" (and it is on this logic that theories of neoliberalization stand), their relative obsolescence is probably because they and their anti-liberal homologues—though with some nuances—drew their resources from a common well, and ordered their weaponry from the same arsenals, under the illuminated sign of linear progress commanded by the nation-states. The Enlightenment also left its mark here.

Laïdi argues persuasively that the end of communism led to political, ideological, and theoretical fragmentation, an inability globally to find meaning:

... if by meaning we imply the triple notion of foundation, unity and final goal: "foundation" meaning the basic principle on which a collective project depends; "unity" meaning that "world images" are collected into a coherent plan of the whole; and "end" or "final goal," meaning projection towards an elsewhere that is deemed to be better.

If "Man," or the belief that Man could radically transform the world, was the critical foundation on which the modern political sensibility was founded (and we will elaborate on this point later), then the absence of foundation alerts us to the presence of a fundamentally new and unprecedented historical context in which the unity (the human race) and final goal (a better world) have not only altered but have dissipated. It is within this context that we seek to situate the idiom of postraciality, now practically synonymous with the election of Barack Obama.

The entry of a "mixed-race" US president into the White House provoked both celebration and skepticism. This was only to be expected, but the casual observer would have been surprised that negative appraisal stemmed not only from the Right but also from the Left. For those who have spent a lifetime canvassing, advocating, and agitating for the rights of minorities, radical "certainty" dictates that one not be too dazzled by star-spangled utopias, carried away in what Tariq Ali has described and dismissed as the "ideological euphoria" that followed the Obama promise to "heal America's wounds at home." Writing amid Obama's first election campaign, Angela Davis had already cautioned against "a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change" lest the proverbial color-blind flag of racial unity continue to drape the national disunity that has plagued liberal race relations fears since Gunnar Myrdal's dilemma. Davis argues:

[Obama] is being consumed as the embodiment of colour blindness. It's the notion that we have moved beyond racism by not taking race into account. That's what makes him conceivable as a presidential candidate. He's become the model of diversity.

But to a certain...