"Let Me Go Get My Big White Man"
The Clientelist Foundation of Contemporary Antiracist Politics
Reed, Adolph Jr.
Date Written: 2022-05-11
Year Published: 2022
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX24640
No matter what those who propound it may believe about themselves or, more meaningfully, want the rest of us to believe about them, contemporary race-reductionist politics - i.e., what is commonly recognized as antiracist politics - is not in any way left, egalitarian, or democratic. It is not linked to any popular, insurgent, or 'bottom-up' black or other political expressions. It is not oriented practically toward a vision of broadly egalitarian social transformation, nor is it at all aligned with or congenial to any project of generating a political movement toward such ends.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
Black clientelist politics from its beginnings has been predicated on the conviction that a program that amounts to a racial trickle-down serves the best interest of the race. In the early twentieth century, uplift ideology, deeply embedded in hegemonic race theory, was the sleight-of-hand that justified that racial trickle-down. In the early twenty-first century, things are in some respects very different. The deferential and sometimes even obsequious tone of Washington has been swapped out for “demands,” and the demands are now for “allyship” rather than “friendship” and for the allies to give up their fantasies of white saviorship.16 But the structure—and, in effect, the appeal to ruling class and hence mainly white saviors—remains the same, and the sleight-of-hand is not that different: hegemonic underclass ideology presumes that non-elite blacks are damaged and in need of special tutelage conducted via the role-modeling ministrations of upper-status racial brothers and sisters.17 And constant assertion, both directly and indirectly through the incessant drip of disparity discourse, that all black Americans are equally vulnerable to, for example, the horrors of police terror and killing or the banality of microaggressions, feed the sense that race on some level endows black people with a hive-like experience, which implies both the sense that blacks share a racial hive mind and a corollary that a payoff to any one black person is eo ipso a payoff to all.
The class character of antiracist clientelism is even more transparent than its fin-de–siècle progenitor’s. Its proponents can defend the assertion that racism is the fundamental determinant of life chances for black Americans only via a sleight-of-hand that divests slavery and Jim Crow of their historical specificity as discrete systems of economic and social relations and construes them as almost incidental extrusions of a transcendent racism or white supremacy or, even more tendentiously, in a devil theory positing that all human history has been driven by an ontological anti-blackness. Having transmogrified material social relations into attitudes, putative evidence that such attitudes persist supports assertions that “nothing” has changed since 1619 or 1919.18 It is telling that commitment to that argument subordinates providing concrete causal accounts of how current inequalities are thereby produced and reproduced to taxonomizing apparent racial disparities as instances of the workings of trans-historical racism or white supremacy. This perspective minimizes the significance of political-economic changes since 1965, including deindustrialization, the panoply of regressive policy developments associated with neoliberalization, and the significance of the marked increases in occupational, income, and wealth stratification among African Americans.19 The point of this politics is not to identify and pursue strategies to attack inequalities or injustices affecting black Americans but to make certain that they are understood as stemming from an evanescent racism. An implication is that only inequalities that can be attributed to specifically racial sources are a proper matter for concern.
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