Ethnic and Racial Studies

ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20

Eliminating race obscures its trace: Theories of

Race and Ethnicity symposium
Alana Lentin
To cite this article: Alana Lentin (2016) Eliminating race obscures its trace: Theories
of Race and Ethnicity symposium, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39:3, 383-391, DOI:
10.1080/01419870.2016.1109685
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1109685

Published online: 05 Jan 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 467

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rers20
Download by: [University of California Santa Barbara]

Date: 19 April 2016, At: 02:23

ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2016

VOL. 39, NO. 3, 383391
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1109685

Eliminating race obscures its trace

Alana Lentin

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, Sydney,

Australia
ABSTRACT

Focusing on the chapters by Brett St Louis, Michael Banton, Matthew Hughey,

and David Goldberg, I explore the contribution of Murji and Solomos volume,
Theories of Race and Ethnicity, to ongoing debates on the meaning of the
post-racial. I draw on Goldbergs interactive relationality as a means for
thinking about the continued signicance of race both for scholarship on its
material effects and for developing practices of anti-racism.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 August 2015; Accepted 6 October 2015
KEYWORDS Race; racism; ethnicity; post-racial; anti-racism; coloniality

What is interesting about much of the literature about race and racism is the
absence of commonly agreed conceptual tools or even a common framework
about the general parameters of race and racism as elds of study, remark
Karim Murji and John Solomos in their introduction to Theories of Race and
Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives (8). They note that this lack
of consensus both powers a dynamic and wide-ranging eld and unsettles
it by throwing up conceptual contradictions (9). It pushes us to seek
answers to a diversity of unanswered questions that continue to animate
the eld, including questions of what epistemological and methodological
approaches best equip us to respond.
What is remarkable to me, as a participant in these discussions, is that while
disagreements such as (but not limited to) those between sociologists of race
relations, racial eliminativist Marxists and the instigators of Black British cultural studies, US-American black sociology, and decolonial scholars can be
noted, they remain for the most part committed to the centring of race as
a primary problem for social and political analysis. In contrast, racial and
ethnic studies, and race critical approaches in particular, are forced again
and again to contend with the mainstream assumption that a focus on race
CONTACT Alana Lentin
2015 Taylor & Francis

a.lentin@uws.edu.au

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

384

A. LENTIN

derails serious sociological analysis. Several scholars have written about the
deniability that structures receptions of racism so that a key part of the
struggle against racism is the ght for having it recognized as such (Hesse
2014; Nelson 2014). Alongside this is the problem that to think in terms of
the centrality of race itself is seen as an overstepping; an (over)reaching for
a raced perspective that shifts the focus from, it is claimed, more real groundings in class, location, and so on, as though these did not intersect with race. I
am fascinated by this deniability, its apparent obviousness, and the rapidity
with which it is reached for with discrediting, and thus symbolically violent,
repercussions.
I am instructed by Barnor Hesses work to understand this not merely in
terms of what a psychoanalytical reading might suggest is a refutation of
our complicity in persistent inequality through a keeping at arms length
of the full effects of race, but from a theoretical-historical point of view as
foundational to the idea of race itself (Hesse 2011, 2014). In other words,
the willingness to read race as excessive to, rather than imbricated in,
modern socio-political processes is necessary to how race itself functions
as a technology of order and governance. Because race ultimately provides
the language for talking about the place of differently located bodies in
relation to (in-, outside, or in between) the order named humanity, it
also relegates the knowledge produced by these diverse beings on the
basis of their experience, to their proper (own, separate) places. Knowledge
should ow in only one direction; knowledges that know race cannot ow
up. An example, provided by Pamela Brown, one of the instigators of
the Rolling Jubilee campaign,1 drove this home. Brown describes how the
Rolling Jubilee, despite raising half a million dollars to buy back defaulted
medical debt from debt collectors on behalf of those who could not pay,
failed because of the inability of many of the activists within it to accept
the racialised nature of debt in the USA. Occupy activists, many of them
white, despite sharing an opposition to debt with black activists such as
Brown, refused to accept the racial manifestations of debt, delinking
class from race in their analysis of the effects of indebtedness.2 As Brown
explains:
For African Americans debt has produced the indignity of equity theft and foreclosure, an economic hate crime that has resulted in the loss of all economic
gains subsequent to civil rights, a crime that happened in slow motion, while
those with greater power used that power to turn a blind eye. (ibid.)

The failure of white anti-debt campaigners not only to see the raced nature of
debt, but to understand the inextricability of social movements from racialised
processes, pulled the Rolling Jubilee apart from within (ibid.). This route, from
thwarted communication to failure of action, feels familiar to those with social
movements experience. Beyond activism though, the story Brown tells has

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES

385

resonances for the scholarly realm. Brown and her fellow activists sought and
were refused solidarity from white activists too invested in what she calls a
simplistic class analysis.
Theorists of race and ethnicity, to whom Murji and Solomos have oriented
their book, often labour alone; academics, including those who claim to be
concerned by racism, fail to accord race a central place in their analyses of
phenomena understood by those with a race critical eye as raced. This is an
issue that the book itself cannot solve. However, there are several contributions to it that assist in thinking further about two interrelated problems
that I think are related to this concern: rst, how can we better understand
deniability as structured into understandings of race and racism, and,
second, what are the effects of post-racialism on anti-racism? Relatedly,
what do I mean when I suggest that both these problems are concerned
with how we conceptualise the role of race? The reason I am drawing a connection between these questions and my wider concerns about the reception
of race-attentive analyses in the broader realm of social scholarship is that I
think that the broad failure of the latter to consider race is an integrally
urgent question for the development of our eld. Driven by the aim of dismantling the material effects of race (racism), I am concerned with the constant resistances to the decolonizing project within and without the
academy, points of conict that demand to be exposed so that the full
extent of the challenge we face is laid bare.
I start with the observation that there is a tautological problem in desiring
the post-racial while claiming not to deny the signicance of race. Most scholars of themes of concern to students of race (the state, capitalism, modernity,
nationalism, gender, etc.) who do not consider race as central to their analyses
would nevertheless be outraged at the suggestion that their failure to read
their subjects intersectionally with race is to deny its broader signicance.
However, to follow Brett St Louis (2015) in his chapter, a cornerstone of
post-racialism is racial eliminativism. As he discusses, racial eliminativism
has its place within race scholarship as the stated aim of those for whom overcoming racism depends on excising the ontological lie that is race. However,
from the perspective of some racial sceptics, it is possible to reject the ontological utility of racial categories while continuing to make use of race as a
socially meaningful concept. Those who fail to consider race by omitting to
discuss its signicance or actively refuting its role in social processes are
engaged in the deniability that I have argued is a key feature of the functioning of racism in a purportedly post-racial era Lentin (2014b) . Post-racialism is
often proposed to be the desired outcome of a struggle to overcome racism,
an idealization and an ambition, as St Louis remarks. However, as he presciently notes speaking of the race in post-racial, even the act of denial maintains its existence (116). Hence, what we are really dealing with when
confronted with the idea of the post-racial is the purposeful project of

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

386

A. LENTIN

subverting the course of race as a technology (rather than a descriptive category); race is still there but its roots, trajectory, and destination are altered.
St Louis tends to support this view in his detailed engagement with postracialism in its eliminativist, societal, prototypical, bioscientic, cosmopolitan,
and theoretical perspectives. He twice recalls Guillaumins (1995) observation,
Race does not exist, but it does kill people (107, cited in Theories of Race and
Ethnicity, 117, 132), which is a shorthand for the social constructivist view of
race than underpins the race critical approaches of scholars such as Goldberg
and Essed (2002). However, he concludes by suggesting that the argument for
retaining race, even as socially produced, cannot avoid its reication and that
we could better understand discriminatory practices performed in the name
of the idea of race without the diversionary and obfuscating effects of epiphenomenal racial categories (134). This conclusion appears to me to be a strangely literal reading of what critics of the post-racial argue, the racial sceptics
who St Louis takes care to distinguish from the eliminativists at the outset
of the paper (Goldberg 2008; Hesse 2011, 2014; Lentin 2014b). There is an
overlap here with the problematic tendency in Michael Bantons contribution
to the volume and his other recent work (cf. Banton 2015b).
Bantons main mistake, as he puts it, was to have accorded signicance to
the folk concept of race while trying to explain the nature of outward difference (Banton 2015a, 150). While I agree with him that there has never been
sufcient agreement among biologists about this kind of classication to
justify the assumption that there was a scientic concept of race (150), I disagree that treating race as a concept is to accept the terms of racial science.
And, herein lies the problem in Banton. It is vital, in my view, to accept that
race was never wholly about attempting to make sense of differential behaviour associated with physical and cultural differences (160). There was indeed
a branch of sociology that Banton, recounting his trajectory, admits to have
been for some time integral to race relations which was concerned with
attempting to account for human variation in experience and outcome as
racially determined, with race understood straightforwardly as having to do
with biological and cultural differences that were assumed to more or less
map onto each other. Here, I agree with Banton that such an endeavour is
mainly futile. However, if his conclusion is that we must take varying
human behaviour as our central explanandum, then our visions of racial
and ethnic studies must differ greatly (160).
The problem is that post-racialism is unclear about what it objects to
beyond, in its positive anti-racist variant, a commitment to de-reifying racial
categories. Right post-racialism, as St Louis shows, is undermined by
the continued reication of race (119) at play in the substitution of cultural
explanations for black degeneracy for purportedly pass racial ones. But if
the judgment of the success of post-racialism is its ability or not to overcome
reication by refusing to mobilize race conceptually, this seems an

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES

387

undesirable task because it is only through the fullest exploration of the rise of
race, not as a concept, but as a technique of governmentality, that brought
the ction of racial categorization into existence, that such reication can
be overcome. This is made clear by Ann Stoler in her explanation of how
race underwrote the systems of colonial governance in relation to mixed
populations without, as she makes clear, using the word race and while professing an objection to racism: these were agents of the state, who were not
any more nasty than you or me, who would say very clearly, Im against
racism, but we must keep these boundaries clear (Stoler and Lambert
2014). In the same interview, Stoler remarks,
biology is a, not minor, but its only a small part of how race has been dened.
Weve assumed that early racisms, the real racism, the hard racism is biological
racism and now weve moved to a new racism, which is a cultural racism. This is a
totally erroneous notion of how race has developed as a category. From the very
get go it has always been about the cultural competencies that were displayed or not displayed.3

One of the key competencies Stoler describes is the ability of the native to
feel at home in a European setting (to feel at home, she says, was a term
used in the legal record). She notes the various means put in place to
judge whether an individual could be said to be feeling at home and how
the inability to do so was used as a means to set apart and discriminate
against individuals. Now, the cornerstone of post-racialism as it is most commonly mobilized as a colour-blind discourse determined to deny the truth of
racialised disadvantage is that the inability of migrants and/or black people
and people or colour to feel at home within the culture of what is still understood as the hegemonic host society is the result of their own cultural incompetency. Therefore, it seems vital that being able to trace the signicance of
the notion of cultural competency to ideas of race right back to the hearth
of colonialism, as Stoler does, is fundamental for understanding the
meaning of race itself and where the idea of the post-racial stands vis--vis
that history. A post-racialism xated on race as biologically foreclosed categorization that shuts its eyes to its strategic employment as a tool of arbitrary
arbitration, that fundamentally toys with its ambivalence to paradoxically
create the illusion of certainty, is one that I think can have no bearing on
anti-racism.
Arguably, only once this has been most deeply explored, teased out, and
made sense of, the apparent utility of racial categorization will fall away.
David Goldbergs contribution to Theories of Race and Ethnicity lays out a
useful direction for doing so. His relational, interactive methodology is one
of the clearest encapsulations of what working through race/working race
through can look like. I particularly appreciate his critique of comparativism,
which relying as it most frequently does on methodological nationalism,

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

388

A. LENTIN

cannot avoid hid[ing] as much as it reveals (Goldberg 2015, 252). I think Goldberg is echoing Stoler, who demonstrates how race was made count across a
range of seemingly disparate processes, when he states that in order to fully
comprehend the relationality of race conceptually and in practice, their relational elements must be centred in the account (253). In other words, it is
wholly insufcient to draw broad conclusions about how race was interpreted
in, say France or Britain by, for example, making wholesale comparisons
between French and British models of colonialism or immigration, and on
that basis conclude that race matters in Britain but not in France (or indeed,
why not, vice versa?). In contrast, Goldberg argues that, although it is necessary to look at how race operates locally, ideas and practices emanating from
elsewhere are made local because what appears homegrown does not
develop in isolation from the ways in which the ideas and practices of race
and racism have developed beyond the boundaries of the local (254). This
is consistent with what Gavan Titley and Lentin (2011) argued is central to
how discourses of multicultural crisis that animate post-racial racisms
under neoliberalism circulate and infect each other across contexts.
I believe we were successful in going beyond the merely analogical level of
comparativism and using relationality to indicate how effects are brought
about as a result of historical political or economic, legal or cultural, links,
the one acting upon the other, connecting rather than merely contrasting
our examples (Goldberg 2015, 256).
How can relational accounts be put to use in teasing out the debates on the
continued utility, or otherwise, of race today, particularly with the aim of combating racism? Elsewhere, I have begun to question the utility of separating
race from racism based on my growing recognition that splitting concepts
and practices has the deleterious effect of implicitly accepting the notion
that race has a conceptual genealogy that is divisible from its effects, and consequently of inventing new forms of racism that sever their historical ties,
paradoxically enabling arguments for a reverse racism. Following the trajectory of racism, rather than race, leads us in two possible directions: seeing
racism either as frozen in ideal typical paradigms from the past, or as universally extendable to any form of conictual human interaction, and often as
both Lentin (forthcoming 2016). Hence, it may be entirely consistent to
argue that, while blacks were indeed the victims of racism up until the ofcial
end of particular regimes or the overturning of specic laws, now it is beleaguered whites who suffer at the hands of an ascendant black power. In other
words, historical racism is accepted, but its explanatory effectiveness is
deemed useless from a post-racial standpoint.
This seems to be the logic motivating Matthew Hugheys (2015) article in
Theories of Race and Ethnicity on the centring of whiteness in both racist
and anti-racist politics. Hughey argues that hegemonic whiteness serves to
create shared ideals of white racial-identity, which he argues both nationalists

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES

389

and white anti-racists see as idyllic, proper and desirable (219). Hughey too
uses a relational understanding to demonstrate how interpretations of
white racial identity go beyond the local and are guided by larger sets of
shared expectations and authoritative meanings (219). Therefore, the understanding of what it means to be white can be shared across paradoxically
oppositional political perspectives. Using data from both sides of the divide,
Hughey can demonstrate how both promote and benet from ideas of
post-racialism. For example, he demonstrates the extent to which dehistoricised motifs of black pathology among white anti-racists which, while
acknowledging the negative effects of slavery, cast the contemporary socioeconomic disadvantages faced by African-American people in the USA as
engrained in black culture now (223). The semantics differ but slightly
from white nationalists who use similar pathological arguments: black
people steal, cheat, lie their culture is dysfunctional and damn near
demonic (223).
When I read this against the questions I am asking about the relationship
between race and racism, and the drive to separate concepts and practices, as
though race/racism could somehow be divorced from its material effects, I am
concerned to ask, again, what purpose a purportedly anti-racist post-racialism,
at least in its strongest eliminativist form, might have? Hughey demonstrates
that both nationalists and white anti-racists eschew theory and ideas. Racism
is rather seen as behaviour, inducing feelings, or common sense, which the
theoretical clouds over. What is named theory should more properly be
referred to as history or genealogy; it has always been a much more difcult
enterprise to trace the interactive connections that bring race to life and give
it meaning across a range of locations, as Goldberg stresses, than to conne it
within a frozen denition that, by relying on static comparison, fails to capture
the extent of races inheritance. So, what would ridding the discourse of race
look like if, in doing so, the elements that connect HIV-positive Haitian refugees, for example, to Asian-Americans, both incarcerated in camps by the
USA in the 1990s and 1940s, respectively, were to become lost (Paik and
Lambert 2014)?
One retort might be that while race has historical utility, if the aim is to
eliminate the effects of racial logics on people and society, it cannot continue
to have indenite purchase. Those making that argument would, I think, see
me as espousing a post-racial pessimism the logical outcome of the collapse of the emancipatory politics which deed modern oppression (Kyriakides 2012). However, what the most useful chapters of Theories of Race
and Ethnicity contribute is a means of retaining race as an analytical necessity,
allowing us to lay bare how jumping to post-racial conclusions can contribute
to the reinscription of racialization and consequent injustice, while opening
the way to its dismantling through the elaboration of epistemological and
methodological directions tailored to the task ahead.

390

A. LENTIN

Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

Notes
1. The Rolling Jubilee emerged out of Occupy Wall Streets Occupy Student Debt Campaign. The Rolling Jubilee collected USD 500,000 to buy back medical debt from
debt collectors who buy defaulted debt at a fraction of the cost and chase
debtors who cannot pay.
2. When Theory Meets Heart: The Rolling Jubilee and Lessons of Occupying Debt.
http://arcade.stanford.edu/occasion/when-theory-meets-heart-rolling-jubilee-andlessons-occupying-debt. Accessed 18 August 2015.
3. Online podcast, transcribed by the author.

References
Banton, Michael. 2015a. Superseding Race in Sociology: The Perspective of Critical
Rationalism. In Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and
Perspectives, edited by Karim Murji and John Solomos, 143161. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Banton, Michael. 2015b. John Rexs Main Mistake. Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (8):
13691381.
Goldberg, David Theo. 2008. The Threat of Race. Reections on Racial Neoliberalism.
London: Wiley.
Goldberg, David Theo. 2015. Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms: Some thoughts
on Method. In Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and
Perspectives, edited by Karim Murji and John Solomos, 251262. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, David Theo, and Philomena Essed. 2002. Introduction: From Racial
Demarcations to Multiple Identications. In Race Critical Theories: Text and
Context, edited by Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, 114. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Guillaumin, Collette. 1995. I Know Its Not Nice, but : The Changing Face of Race. In
Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, edited by David Theo Goldberg, 114. London:
Routledge.
Hesse, Barnor. 2011. Self-fullling Prophecy. The Postracial Horizon. South Atlantic
Quarterly 110 (1): 155178.
Hesse, Barnor. 2014. Racisms Alterity: The After-Life of Black Sociology. In Racism and
Sociology, edited by Wulf D. Hund and Alana Lentin, 141174. Berlin: Lit.
Hughey, Matthew W. 2015. The Sociology of Whiteness: Beyond Good and Evil White
People. In Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives,
edited by Karim Murji and John Solomos, 214232. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kyriakides, Christopher. 2012. Post-Racial Pessimism: Therapolitics and the AntiUtopian Present. Darkmatter, 2 July 2012. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/
2012/07/02/post-racial-pessimism-therapolitics-and-the-anti-utopian-present/.
Lentin, Alana. 2014b. Post-race, Post-politics: The Paradoxical Rise of Culture After
Multiculturalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies 37 (8): 12681285.

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 02:23 19 April 2016

ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES

391

Lentin, Alana. Forthcoming, 2016. Racism in Public or Public Racism: Doing Antiracism
in Postracial Times. Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Lentin, Alana, and Gavan Titley. 2011. The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a
Neoliberal Age. London: Zed Books.
Murji, Karim, and John Solomos, eds. 2015. Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary
Debates and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, Jacqueline K. 2014. Speaking Racism and Antiracism: Perspectives of Local
Anti-racism Actors. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Published Online, 15 May 2014,
342358.
Paik, A. Naomi, and Leopold Lambert. 2014. Manufacturing Rightlessness: The Camp
as a Legal Fiction. Conversation Recorded with A. Naomi Paik in Chicago on July
27, 2014, Archipelago. http://the-archipelago.net/2014/08/04/a-naomi-paikmanufacturing-rightlessness-the-camp-as-a-legal-ction/.
St Louis, Brett. 2015. Can Race Be Eradicated? The Post-racial Problematic. In Theories
of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives, edited by Karim Murji
and John Solomos, 114137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura, and Leopold Lambert. 2014. The Colonial Administration of Bodies
and Space. Conversation recorded with Ann Laura Stoler in New York on August 11,
2014, Archipelago. http://the-archipelago.net/2014/08/21/ann-laura-stoler-thecolonial-administration-of-bodies-and-space/.