The abuse of authenticity: On a certain tendency of anti-racist discourse

There is a common anti-racist myth that is itself racist. It has the character of affirming that the oppressed races really exist in an absolute, rooted, nationalism, and only the privileged, oppressor races wrongly seem to exist, because their identities are constructed on the basis of an historical reality of oppression of others (and what amounts to identity theft of them). This is more common than you might think. A black liberal writer no less gifted than Ti-nehisi Coates appears to hold it. He repeatedly writes of "black bodies" and "the people who think they are white."

From my own admittedly Jewish point of view, this essentialism of the identity of the oppressed seems particularly pernicious both because such naturalisms must be false (indeed, we know that race as a 'natural' category, which is after all what every concept of race essential is, and is an attempt to construct, is false; races like nations are historical constructs; contra Elizabeth Warren, there is no national identity or conscience latent in one's genetic code; that is an absurdity). But also because it seems such a false and dishonest response to the reality that no one possessed of much good sense will deny, which is the historical reality of oppression by virtuous of various social and demographic categories and indeed relationships. (No one can deny that patriarchy or male domination -- and these, by the way, are not the same thing-- is not only a conceptual construction but also one involving real relationships -- though of course sex and gender do have a natural component, as race and ethnicity really do not). In our history, it was Nazism and the specifically racial (biological) nationalist racism that made it possible, with the rise of nationalism in the 19th century after the French Revolution and reaction to it, and Darwin and the ideas of naturalistic sociology that referenced it, for Jews to be considered a race. That in turn enabled them to be eliminated. No one could convert any longer to the mainstream society and its values, because the essence of their character was familial if not actually biological.

Fixed ideas of what people are that tie to that what they can or should be are always to be doubted.

In his landmark 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust, Polish and Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes: "[Anti-semite] Charles Maurras would insist that 'what one is determines one's attitude from the beginning..."....Man is before he acts; nothing he does may change what he is. This is, roughly, the philosophical essence of racism."

Black power thinkers have created a racist anti-racism whose primary victims are their own people. It is based on the idea simply that victims of oppression in terms of historically enforced artificial categories (of which the idea of nation itself is one: it exits, but as a concept has no other reality than the social institutions that make it one as a set of 'facts on the ground') can and should understand that their liberation lies in assumption of an identity that is entirely fixed and rigidly bounded. Not only is power as domination key to liberation through empowerment to power as potentiality (the two meanings in Latin languages of different words translated both as 'power' in English), but the key to freedom (or is it safety?) from domination is the self-mastery and self-conquest collectively that is realized by declaring, affirming, and enforcing a totalizing and naturalistic identity, so that in effect: oppressors are artificial and this is false and a kind of theft, while the oppressed have a reality that the artificial and enforced practices of exploitation and domination (which by the way are not the same thing) rely upon, such that oppression as a relationship is ended by asserting this identity (it is the real essence that an artificial theft appropriated -- so give us back our identity!) as something absolutely rooted and naturalistic. History is reduced to nature. Be what you are, you can only be that. When the oppressed are authentic and realized in this way, there is no oppression, only pure being. Being is pure because beings are, and that is because the properties proper to and determining of who we are necessarily are exclusive, and so if you are not one of us, you may not have them. The ultimate target of such thinking is ‘miscegenation’; this is the logic of minoritarian separatism. The basis of this is a logic of representation and totality, based on the idea that Being, what is, is all of the beings, particular entities, things and persons, which have determinate properties; and ultimately the logic of this is also one of property. In that case, domination reduces to difference, and is overcome by refusing it, perhaps with exploitation misunderstood moralistically as theft. Then only oppression and domination bring with them difference, freedom of movement, exile in lieu of existential homelessness, indeed creativity as something that must cross boundaries rather than some kind of power (rendered absolute theoretically) as what must stay absolutely within them. Then the oppressed have only to enforce segregation, and always with much resentment. Nor can there be peace, only a war imagined as leading to it, through an absolutizing of discrete and bounded identities and separation. And this obviously is a false and fascitizing political tendency that leads nowhere, and gets there through authoritarian moralisms.

To what may this be likened? To nothing more perhaps than the nationalism of nascent national liberation movements during the decolonization of the British, French, and other remaining empires after World War II. Nationalism is almost always progressive at first in such contexts. But it can morph, and usually does, of necessity, when the movement succeeds and there is a new nation-state. And the function of this liberation was also partly, though it was fiercely resisted by Western powers, mainly the United States, which fought a long and continuing series of local wars and covert interventions throughout what was then called the ‘third world’, to prevent many of these nascent republics from following a trend that the United States itself had started, of national independent on behalf of the political empowerment of a local bourgeoisie, — the broad function now appears to have been to effect the transition from colonialism proper to the economic globalist world order that still is one of uneven development, though scholars now disagree about whether this tide will eventually lift all boats and create global equality, or the inequality either continuing, and worsening, either between nations or between globalized bourgeoisies that are urban but highly mobile, and global ‘Souths’ that increasingly are found along with the other class in the same cities from New York to the cities of India and sub-Saharan Africa (whose poor are, to be sure, a lot poorer than those in the Bronx or the Paris banlieuses). Local independence liberates identity through pride, obtained through a logic of ownership and autonomy. But as a political factor this autonomy and the self-determination that ideologically expresses it both in individual and collective, national terms, this movement, which can logically be properly called one of self-assertion, does not negate exploitation but reorients it into property relations that are more thoroughly capitalist. Something analogous happens in movements on the left in the United States perhaps above all, where identity discourses are pretty much hegemonic and universally accepted on the left no less than among liberal ‘progressives’ whose horizon is formed by the corporate world and its elites while seeking maximum or even (ideologically) absolute openness to all identities and backgrounds, all types of persons defined by demographical governmental categories (national censuses rarely count ideology, though of course elections do). This is why I say that it is historically relevant to observe that not only has it been the case that even in the most privileged and dominant metropolitan sites, even at the height of colonialist imperialism, like in England and London before WWII, most people, something like 99%, even if ‘white’ and privileged absolutely by nationality, ethnicity, race, or whatever kind of type by ‘nature’ rather than mere position in the economy, which of course in capitalism theoretically is freed from determination by heredity (I did say ‘theoretically’; the reality is somewhat mixed; there is upward mobility, but also a great deal of class continuity because of ways in which class structure and belonging are reproduced), — these people were overwhelming dirt poor, policed, and oppressed in every sense; the English working class was of course a natural ally of the global proletariat and agricultural sub-proletariat. Marxism is right about that. And its only alternative is some ideologically mistaken and fascist-leaning ethnic or other nationalism or pseudo-nationalism (do you want to move to the Feminist Nation, with you children, born of test tubes, where only women are citizens? Or the gay nation? Or whatever other absurdity?). The historical reality is that colonialism and racism were very useful in the logic of capitalism, and ‘white’, ‘black’, and other differentiated peoples were differently disposed in an economy based partly on geographical differences in development and economy. That is a far cry from the purported reality of white people maliciously using capitalism for their own advantage. As if some purer kind would be better. In fact, precisely because of our constitutive multiplicity of nationalities and other ‘given’ identities, the United States might be the best candidate in the long run for the construction of a society that is fully bourgeois and capitalist, and totally blind to racial and other differences not, after all, essential to it. That capitalism has always parasitically made use of geographical and social differences to construct hierarchies that facilitate technological development and capital accumulation, which really is the system’s impersonal and sole deity, and that therefore this future society would have to be a democratic and socialist one — who wants something that is not that? None of us on the left do. But this marks the limit of all pseudo-nationalisms; they can only make sense in some very contingent and temporary way, and of course within their logic this too is ultimately admitted. Finally, I say this: unlike the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, the current movement that generally goes by the name ‘Black Lives Matter’ necessarily is about Black people in America only in a decentered way. It is about and for them but cannot be about and for them alone. They are the non-exclusive focal center of all possible opposition to the current prison and criminal justice neoliberal capitalist police state system. It can only liberate them by liberating all of us, which is the same truth Marx predicated of the proletariat (one obscured when Stalinism and Maoism fought a war against the bourgeoisie that actually treated it as familial or racial). And that is why we need each other.

It is also the logic behind what people like Zizek mean in saying that being ‘Jewish’, at least as it was historically constructed in the diaspora, names what is in a sense the universal condition increasingly in the world today. It would have provided a more intelligible basis of opposition to the murderous exclusions and degradations wreaked by the Third Reich, since then Jews had the role that I am ascribing to American Blacks in the post-Jim Crow American society: the occupying the nonexclusive focal center. uniting at least theoretically all of the groups that Nazism targeted for elimination, including Gypsies/Roma, gays, the handicapped, and the ‘mentally ill’ as well as of course political opponents, mostly Communist, and marginally at least the supposedly inferior Slavic people who during the war were slated more for a neo-colonialist subjugation. The Nazis in a certain way knew what they were doing: for Jewishness is the very opposite of Nazism, which was the most extreme form in modern societies of an attempt to cancel modernity by enforcing the purity of identities and social categories. The Jewish condition (to which the Jewish religion is one possible response; at least until the development of certain forms of artistic and philosophical modernism in the 20th century, it was the most well-developed and consistent form) was and is of belonging securely to no social category (at least other than that formed through the religion, whose God occupies no place except in language), but permits belonging, if insecurely (strictly speaking, ‘rooted’ people are those imagining that being a person is like being a plant), subject to ‘alienation’ wherever they go, and permanent existential exile (this began with Abraham), with the cosmopolitan ability to refuse all boundaries and static definitions: today this freedom exists in two places: a virtual one that furnishes much of current ideologies, in information society and utopian notions of ‘virtuality’ and the conceptual freedom this entails, and in reality, for capital and those relatively few persons who possess and can dispose of or invest in some cases a great deal of it. Marxism in fact was based on the idea that the socialist and democratic future, realizing the Jewish and Christian utopian and ‘messianic’ ideals of a world of ‘full’ liberty and equality, perhaps even beyond material scarcity, a future Marxism dared to and found a way to concretely envision and begin to map, that that future passes through alienation and does not allow a retreat into defenses of property, traditionalism, and given social identities and forms. And that is why we can, all of us, have hope.

I say: bring back the 99%, talk less of identities, whether of ethnic tribe or sex and gender, and think more about capitalism and its alternatives, which, in a truly global world with no possible spatial ‘outside’, can and do lie uniquely in the future, to be determined, to be seized, to be created. When Barack Obama in the speech that made him famous, said that ‘there is not a black America and a white America, only the United States of America’, he was, like Lincoln, both our greatest president by broad acclaim and the only one to maintain an active correspondence with the original thinker of Communism, Karl Marx, both calling for the progressivist realization of a more perfectly bourgeois society that realizes its promises of liberty and equality (and the United States ideologically is still the most advanced society in that respect, though not in its economic and social welfare institutions), and he was also not of course describing the present but advancing a piece of moral legislation for the future. Avanti! The task is, in part, to create a truly post-racial society. I don’t believe that can be done from within an exclusive foxhole; why should victims of segregation insist on it? But a party, uniting not all of the oppressed identity groups as in Jesse Jackson’s ‘rainbow coalition’, but everyone, the 99%, or even the class of persons who in economic terms are labor power (we count because we do things that are used to create value and therefore also profit), can very well place your people at the center at least with regard to the struggle, which certainly must be at the center, against the prevalent forms of policing, criminal justice, and imprisonment. I want less of these things facing you, me, and everyone else. This also reveals to my thinking one point on which it is theoretically possible for people on the left to make arguments that may appeal to some conservatives: In America, conservatives talk, and sometimes care, largely about liberty. Where the left differs from the libertarian right is that we don’t think state oppression and capital can be separated. We also don’t think government has to be merely oppressive; it can, at least, be more or less so, and there is no reason why we cannot have more and better social services without the agencies that provide it being linked as heavily as they are to social control and policing. But that is a problem that both the left and the right have tended to get wrong. That is why the Cold War was sustainable for so long: it seemed to many people that you could only have social welfare services without liberty, or liberty without social welfare services. There are rich white people who are fully convinced, and partly on the grounds of what they themselves could fear experiencing, that our society is too much of an authoritarian police state. That more people who think that are black, that I will not deny. But we may not need a social movement that thinks of itself as based on membership accorded to people on the grounds of how oppressed they are. A political party on the left will likely think that if it wants popular support. But there is some sense in which both what you have experienced, or know you might, and what social group you belong to, should be expected to somewhat fade into the background in relationship to what positive things we want to get. I have yet to see most political demonstrations be policed by activists who need participants to have a membership card qualifying them to march and shout.