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Ethnic and Racial Studies

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Post-race/post-politics? Activist-intellectualismand the reification of race

Brett St Louis

To cite this article: Brett St Louis (2002) Post-race/post-politics? Activist-intellectualism and thereification of race, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25:4, 652-675, DOI: 10.1080/01419870220136673

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870220136673

Published online: 07 Dec 2010.

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Post-race/post-politics?

Activist-intellectualism and the

rei®cation of race

Brett St Louis

Abstract

Many recent theoretical approaches to race have questioned its salience asa critical concept due to the limitations of its reiéed descriptive and explana-tory premises. This article argues that key social constructionist conceptu-alizations of race have consistently emerged alongside oppositional modesof political engagement within a context of activist-intellectualism. This con-ceptualization of race as a constituent of an oppositional political projectdiffers from the post-racial perspectives advanced by recent calls for the dis-mantling of race that are produced within a (postmodern) contemporaryenvironment where intellectual production has shifted from legislative tointerpretive functions. The tangible dangers entailed in the reiécation ofrace remain manifold and grave, and their conceptual and practical equival-ence is questionable. The article develops aspects of Alain Locke’s work toframe the political conditions that might serve as an ethical and responsiblebasis for the critical usage of race.

Keywords: Race; reiécation; social constructionism; activist-intellectualism;politics.

Introduction

At the dawn of the twenty-érst century, the ‘colour line’ that under-scored W. E. B. DuBois’s much quoted observation of the centrality ofrace to the formation and experience of our previous century might beseen as being steadily erased. As the intellectual descendants of DuBoiswe inhabit, for the most part, a scholarly age wise to the scientiéc myths,spurious rationality and dubious facticity of ‘race’. We have long beenaware that ‘race’ has no sustainable biological foundation and, convincedof its socially constructed basis, we instead recognize the racialization ofdifferent ‘groups’ that are culturally, socially and historically constituted.

© 2002 Taylor & Francis LtdISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlineDOI:10.1080/01419870220136673

Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 25 No. 4 July 2002 pp. 652–675

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We also largely agree that socially recognizable ‘races’ demonstratesigniécant degrees of internal as well as external differentiation. It is cleartherefore at least for much of the academy, that the inviolable sanctityof race is under ére, it is under erasure.

This signiécant challenge to the axial character and authority of racewithin our own centennial introspection has generated a profound recon-sideration of its very descriptive and explanatory salience. It is nowgenerally accepted that the disclaimer of ‘race’ as a ‘social construction’neither confers complete descriptive and explanatory latitude on thetheorist of race nor provides indemnity from any ensuing political(ir)responsibility. It is noted in certain quarters that the assertion of thenon-biological, social constructionist and culturalist foundations of ‘race’failed to prevent – and perhaps inadvertently even enabled and legiti-mated – the emergence of novel discourses of cultural difference andtheir progeny of ‘cultural racism’ (Balibar 1991). Furthermore, the asser-tion of ‘race’ as a deénitive category, albeit socially constructed, retainsthe polarities of sameness and difference as relational forms of verié-cation. This, in turn, implies the potential instrumentality of retainingrace as indicated within a wealth of work pointing to the (historical)operationalization of the antinomies of racialized sameness and differ-ence along axes of superiority and inferiority (Fanon 1986; Hulme 1990;Todorov 1993; Wright 1995).

As inèuential contemporary approaches challenge its reiéed premisessome commentators suggest that race, as a deénitive marker of socialdescription, is an inescapably divisive category that needs to be assidu-ously interrogated and, for some, dismantled (Miles 1989, 1993; Hall1992; Guillaumin 1995; Gilroy 1998, 1999, 2000). This project to de-reifyor erase race can be further understood as the initial tentative imagin-ings of a post-racial polity that crystallizes around the understanding thatthe idea and reality of race cannot fully escape the (historical) taint ofits absolutist and essentialized premises. As a result race lacks the con-ceptual sophistication to apprehend the èuidity of identities that stressexperiential plurality, multiple social afénities and negotiated politicalaféliations.

This raises a profound conundrum. How, can the fallacious idea ofrace be disentangled from its social materiality, ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, andwhat is at stake in such a move? While there might be semantic mileagein the theoretical and analytical obsolescence of race, it remains aprimary ascriptive marker of individual and group characteristics in thesocial world and also serves, at times, as a validation of discriminationand an incitement to violence (Goldberg 1992). If, as has been pointedout, racism and racist practices develop from the speciéc social position-ing of idealized claims to race and is not inevitable (Appiah 1990;Goldberg 1993; Mills 1998), the logical criterion that rightly determinesthe negligible theoretical efécacy of race as a sociological concept

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cannot necessarily be exercised to analyse its practical social formation.Taken alongside the close historical proximity between radical and pro-gressive theorizations and conceptualizations of race and anti-racistpractices, three broad abstracted and empirical reservations over thevalidity of the post-racial critical imagination emerge. First, as will bedemonstrated throughout this article, the extent to which post-racialperspectives manage to fully escape the centripetal forces of race isfractious and often incomplete. The powerful omnipresence of raceinèuences and shapes counter-narratives and is an inescapable predi-cate for the discussion of anti-racist and post-racial possibilities; in otherwords, the reconéguration, amendment or disavowal of race requires itsformal acknowledgement. Second, the inventory of a post-racial imagin-ation obscures many of the theoretical and conceptual issues that itwould clarify. For example, if discussing race continually ‘reiées’ and‘essentializes’ an imaginary category to invest it with an illusory salienceand explanatory capacity, is it not then counter-intuitive to situate allreiécations of race within an ascribed universality that indicates equalproperties and intentions? Third, the sometimes obfuscatory theoreti-cal and conceptual vocabulary exercised within the production of post-racial perspectives might represent an elevated discourse that objectiéesits subjects, and also sequesters intellectual production from politicalengagement.

Given the theme of the contemporary theorization and analysis of raceand its (possible) future directions as the focal concern of this specialissue, this article focuses on the shifting intellectual theorizations of racein relation to given historical and political circumstances. My concernhere is to explore the articulation of power/knowledge in the productionof ideas about race. This is not to analyse the socio-historical conditionsthat underwrite evolving discourses and counter-discourses of race ascompeting discursive regimes of truth, but rather to consider theinformative impact of its conceptualization on oppositional politicalpractice. This article therefore explores the contexts and processes ofreifying race and ultimately considers how and why it might be reiéedin the pursuit of progressive political strategies. In considering this ‘how’and ‘why’, I argue that we confront an intellectual question locatedwithin an inescapably political register. This article considers the workwe require of race as a critical resource capable of effecting rigorous andresponsible forms of social analysis, description and explanation thatmight, ultimately, inform progressive social prescription and politicalintervention. I suggest that the theoretical issues surrounding the for-mation and proposed dissolution of racial categorization assumemeaning in speciéc social contexts and question whether, as politicallyengaged theoretical issues, they can afford to be insulated from anti-racist struggles with an acute ethical responsibility.

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Race, politics and activist-intellectualism ‘without guarantees’

During the latter stages of the twentieth century the relationshipbetween the life of the mind and radical activism has undergone animmense shift and many commentators have recognized their increasingseparation. This separation has been widely attributed to the profes-sionalization of the intellect within the academy, and the ensuing disen-chantment of an intellectual elite with the void between the socialimportance of their activity and its modest social status (Jacoby 1987;Collins 1992; Turner 1992; Mannheim 1993; Wilford 1995; Bassett 1996).Taken generally, this shift depicts the movement of the intellectualtowards the abstracted and de-politicized private environment ofacademic life and its retirement from the production of public ideasinformed by an engagement with radical struggles for social justice.

In The Last Intellectuals, Russell Jacoby presents a compelling portraitof the modern ‘public intellectual’ as characterized by a resolute inde-pendence from various constraining structures and conventions. Thisindependence provided potent fuel for non-conformist radical thoughtand independent radical activism. However, for Jacoby, the bohemianinclinations and activist sympathies of the public intellectual unfetteredby bureaucratic demands and institutional aféliation has entered aterminal decline since the end of World War II. This was precipitated bythe academic professionalism of the intellect and signalled by thereplacement of an accessible intellectual discourse with a specializedprofessional academic discourse that was incomprehensible outside theacademy. Furthermore, the academy not only professionalized the intel-lect and restricted public political dialogues, but also created a bureau-cratic system that separated the intellect into commodiéed realms ofspecialized, de-radicalized and de-politicized thought that was pro-foundly distanced, if not separated, from activist practice.

Jacoby’s portrait of an emergent and disenchanted academic intelli-gentsia separated from political activism is a demonstrably partial historyof the demise of activist-intellectualism when one considers the loosepantheon of activist-intellectuals theorizing and engaging the practicalquestion of race alongside politically engaged metropolitan intellectualssuch as Jean-Paul Sartre. The production of social constructionistcounter-narratives to the idea of race as a normative biological category,have been consistently and strongly linked to political activism(Robinson 1983; Omi and Winant 1994; Dennis 1997). It is therefore notsurprising that many scholars of race, involved in a variety of anti-colonial, civil rights, and social justice struggles, found the combinationof intellectual production and activist intervention inescapable.1However, even if exemplary activist-intellectuals contradict the pur-ported contemporary rupture of ideas and activism, the more recentmicroscopic detour that many considerations of social identity and

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political engagement have taken, moving away from the macroscopicmodels of class politics, have profoundly affected thinking on race.

In the midst of Western societies simultaneously racist and increas-ingly multi-ethnic, and the end of empire signiéed by both post-colonialism and neo-colonialism, both neo-Marxist approaches and thepostmodern epistemological mutations stressing uncertainty and contin-gency within the social world have informed conspicuous anxieties overthe theoretical and practical salience of race. The conceptual contesta-tion of race within various neo-Marxist debates has indicated the some-times incommensurate demands of competing intellectual arenas andpolitical perspectives.2 Apart from the obvious doctrinaire differencesover the causality of social relations and the categorical and analyticalprimacy of class as opposed to race, many neo-Marxist critiques of theradicalized reiécation of race implicitly question the very existence andvalidity of cogent links between activism and intellectualism. What infact emerges are correct and incorrect modes of theorization and theircorresponding forms of social description and explanation, and politicalengagement. Whether this is reducible to sectarian theoretical, socio-logical and political approaches requires further discussion than ispossible here, however it does contribute to the (in)formal critique ofthe coherence and validity of activist-intellectualism as often steering anindeterminate path between intellectual (in)consistency and (in)effec-tive political contribution.

The post-racial epistemologies intimated within the conceptualizationof hybridity, for example, further complicates attempts to develop anintellectual project that combines the integrity and speciécity of indi-viduated identities with the political task of mapping the social worldand its web of human relations. Stuart Hall’s (1992) suggestion of theemergence of ‘new ethnicities’ notably challenges the conceptualautonomy of race and its assumed relationship to political mobilization.His recognition of the ‘end of the essential black subject’ dismantles theold Manichean logic of white-oppressor/black-oppressed and contextu-alizes the potential and grave dangers of positing the excavation ofpersonal identity as equivalent to the forging of a political position thatprecludes negotiation (Bulmer and Solomos 1998; Solomos 1998). Thisis a signiécant indication of the maturation of racialized struggles forsocial justice and inclusion. It signals the capacity to move beyond theready-to-wear racial identities that may, in previous times, have providedan important sense of security and stability. This entails the recognitionof expanded social opportunities and options, and that there is noinherent link between racial identity and progressive politics. In turn,this implies accepting the responsibility for injudicious political analysesand aféliations; in other words to recognize that black people, forexample, can be politically Conservative (Gilroy 1992).

This point of departure for conceptualizing race suggests that this

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emergent political maturity entails a new responsibility, and issues achallenge to develop social positions within distinctly speciéed ethicalparameters where identities are no longer limited to the illusory con-ditions of race. However, the qualiéed ‘end’ of innocence and essentialsubjectivities also highlights the need for amended conceptions ofpolitics. It heralds a conceptual and political space for the developmentof new approaches to activism that account for the shifting politicalculture that we might broadly characterize as moving from macro con-ceptions of formal ‘Politics’ towards micro analyses of an increasinglyinformal political realm. However, the implicit and exacting challenge ofsuch a project is that it requires the development of qualitatively novelintellectual and political resources. It emphasizes the desirability ofrecognizing both the vagaries of politics reducible to monolithic interestgroups and the dangers of its attendant social ready-to-wear identities,and retaining the capacity to engage social issues at the micro andinformal level as political concerns. The grave, if not imprecise, recog-nition of the demise of activist-intellectualism and the ensuing intellec-tual political dilemmas is worth considering in precisely this sense: howmight we reconcile identifying the micropolitical with the demands ofbuilding an effective politics?

All, however, is not necessarily lost and Jacoby’s obituary of the publicintellectual leaves some clues for this reconciliatory project. Signiécantly,the public intellectual mourned by Jacoby is very much a modern per-sonality, and their èight towards the private seclusion of the academydemonstrates the profound historical shift that Zygmunt Baumandescribes in the shifting role of the intellectual during the twentiethcentury from that of ‘legislator’ to ‘interpreter’. Whereas the modernintellectual-as-legislator was compelled to make authoritative statementsthat were ‘legitimized by superior (objective) knowledge to which intel-lectuals have a better access than the non-intellectual part of society’(Bauman 1987, p. 4), the postmodern intellectual occupies a more inde-terminate role as ‘interpreter’. Therefore, for Bauman, the postmodernintellectual no longer acts unilaterally as a social conscience charged withpursuing a consistent critical line against the threat of social disapproba-tion and ofécial censure (Said 1996), but rather ‘translates’ statements inorder to expedite communication between ‘sovereign individuals’. Thissuggests an increasingly èuid intellectual role and character within thesocial reconéguration of postmodernity which, as Richard Hoggart wouldhave it, has created a depoliticized post-materialist climate in Britainwhere intellectuals surf the ‘wave of relativism – the obsessive avoidanceof judgements of quality, or moral judgement’ (1995, p. 3). Therefore, theabdication of radical intellectualism and politics within postmodernity ispartially attributed to its theoretical debts to indeterminism and rela-tivism that disallows the production of deénitive statements and assertiveknowledge (Callinicos 1989; Norris 1992; Eagleton 1996).

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The possibility of building the balanced sociological imagination thatnavigates between the micro/individual and the macro/social and retainsa commitment to practical political organization is, however, not whollynegated by the supposed demise of the ‘engaged’ public intellectual.Bauman’s matrix of the intellectual transition from modern/legislator topostmodern/interpreter contains a crucial observation:

While the post-modern strategy entails the abandonment of the uni-versalistic ambitions of the intellectuals’ own tradition, it does notabandon the universalistic ambitions of the intellectuals towards theirown tradition; here, they retain their meta-professional authority, leg-islating about the procedural rules which allow them to arbitrate con-troversies of opinion and make statements intended as binding (1987,p. 5).

Put differently, Bauman’s argument suggests that the non-reductive andnon-deterministic orientation of postmodernism – its rejection of foun-dationalist, essentialist and absolutist modes of thinking – is neither asantagonistic nor antithetical to the production of deénitive statementsas it might initially appear. The act of speaking and the production ofintellectual insight, while no longer organized around universalist objec-tives, are still arranged within certain parameters that (intend to) enablecomprehensive communication if not understanding. In other words, thenon-reductive alignment of postmodernist-inèuenced thinking is a non-negative mode of theorizing: anti-foundationalism nevertheless remainsa foundational tenet, and to recognize the end of grand narratives is, initself, a form of grand narrative (Larrain 1996; Spinosa and Dreyfus1996).

This frames the question whether theories of race can articulaterigorous intellectualism and practical activism, given a politicalenvironment deeply influenced and shaped by perceived postmodernpolitical evasions. However, accepting the implication withinBauman’s observation that potent and determinate statements areretained within such an intellectual climate, how might we articulatethe transparent ethical responsibilities of radical oppositional politicsgiven the problematic character of race with its static inferences andphenotypical resonance? This dilemma provides the context for thesevere contestation of the descriptive, analytical and explanatorysalience of race and the broad paradigmatic perspectives I want toframe as post-racial. Broadly speaking, this critique is not particularlynew. Its sentiments are evident within much of the orthodoxy of the‘race relations problematic’ and its critics (Banton 1967, 1991; Miles1982, 1993; Rex 1983)3 as well as other qualified reservations over theefficacy of race (Zack 1993; Appiah 1996). Nonetheless, I want todraw on the recent work of Paul Gilroy (1998, 1999, 2000) as a

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forceful, theoretical, analytical and ethical articulation of a contem-porary post-racial social imaginary.

Difference and post-racial politics

Gilroy’s declaration that ‘race ends here’ points towards the terminationof race and its succession by a more expansive and inclusive humanism.Broadly stated, he lays out the charges against race as follows: how canwe continue to discuss race, with its inescapable phenotypical allusions,when we know that it has no biological basis or existence? And, accept-ing this absurdity of reference to race, its continued application onlyserves to reinforce its dangerous common-sense meanings that cannotescape its historical mobilization for purposes of social exclusion, domi-nation and subjugation. In other words, even though we might manu-facture ‘race’ and its meaning as socially constructed, it unitesdifferentiated people through arbitrarily ascriptive traits that can neitherbe adequately sustained nor explained and, worse still, silently invokesnaturalistic claims as a means to cohere a social group as a racial collec-tivity. Conversely, for Gilroy (1998, 2000), the developing medical tech-nologies for treatment and research purposes, such as spectral imaging,that draw attention to the internal sameness of the body and place theirrelevance of external (phenotypical) difference in stark relief, demon-strate the ‘crisis of raciology’ and the exhaustion of race. Thus con-fronted by our unifying corporeality, he suggests that we are presentedwith compelling internal similarities as opposed to superécial externaldifferences. While this does not literally signify the end of race, the sheerarduousness of the work required to maintain the signiécance of racialcategorization and difference in the face of compelling alternative know-ledge points to a severe crisis in the tangled logic of racial thinking, or,‘raciology’.

This crisis of raciology not only points to the fallaciousness of racethinking but also signals the ethical vagaries and circumscribed progres-sive possibilities of politics formed within its compass. Raciology, forGilroy, encourages the formation and consolidation of racial ‘camps’ thatadhere to preordained and non-negotiated political positions. In thissense, anti-racist and anti-fascist activists can be seen as both inextric-ably linked to ‘the mythic morphology of racial difference’ (1998, p. 842).He then points to a èawed constructionist logic of ‘race’ that traps uswithin ‘the pious ritual in which we always agree that “race” is inventedbut are then required to defer to its embeddedness in the world and toaccept that the demand for justice nevertheless requires us to enter thepolitical arenas that it helps to mark out’ (1998, p. 842). His disavowalof race arguably suggests the beginnings of a possible route out of thisimpasse: once we free ourselves from the reiéed and hegemonic dis-course of race, we face the political project of coming to terms with social

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injustice and oppression without easy recourse to racialized forms ofsocial description, explanation and justiécation. We shall then have todevelop more compelling arguments that do not depend on naturalisticpredicates and, in extension, we may need to move beyond race in orderto deal more effectively with racisms.

On the one hand, Gilroy’s damning indictment of race is compellingin both its transparency and its preparedness to take the imaginativesteps that might lead towards a truly egalitarian and, it must be said,utopian, politics. For Gilroy, the pervasive negativity of raciology infectseven its antithetical ideology of anti-racism. He builds a strong critiqueof the anti-racist political orthodoxy that tends towards the proscriptiveat the expense of creative prescription: ‘however essentially noble theideal of anti-racism might be, it does not communicate anything aférma-tive. What, after all, are the anti-racists in favour of? What are we posi-tively committed to, and how does it connect with the necessary momentof negation that deénes our political hopes and choices?’ (1998, p. 843).Additionally, if ‘[l]ogically, the contrast class to racism should be non-racism, not antiracism’ (Adler 1999, p. 496) anti-racism arguably reiéesrace as a given and normative social formation.

Even if we accept that the potentiality of non-racism does not negatethe validity of anti-racism as an intermediate transformative stage, it isnot necessarily inevitable that we must accept the political negativity ofanti-racism. As a noun of process as well as an adjective, racism containspractical and relational as well as descriptive properties that question thelogic that frames ‘non-racism’ and ‘racism’ as oppositional classes.Accepting that race and racism are necessary for conceptualizing non-racism, the positioning of non-racism as the ‘contrast class’ of racismover-determines the latter as a grammatical noun and marginalizes itssocial effects as an adjectival form and a noun of process. This presentsthe question of whether non-racism might signal the énal eradication ofracism or whether the trace of the latter within the former, even if onlyin nulliéed or negated form, signiées non-racism as perhaps the tem-porary absence of racism. Therefore, if we consider racism as a series ofsocial and political as well as discursive processes, then we are faced withhow to address the sets of social relations that typify such processes aswell as uncovering its discursive apparatuses.

This is precisely where the fundamental tension between the intellec-tual conceptualization of race, racism and anti-racism, and social analysisand political engagement becomes transparent. On the one hand, thereis the correct intention of developing an assiduous critique of the prag-matic aféliations and alliances based on the collectivization of monolithicracial group identities and interests. On the other hand, there is theequally worthy aim of building formal and informal political associationscapable of recognizing, presenting and addressing the injustices experi-enced by sectors of society that understand themselves as racial groups

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whether ‘imagined’ or ‘real’. As Charles W. Mills notes, ‘[t]hat raceshould be irrelevant is certainly an attractive ideal, but when it has notbeen irrelevant, it is absurd to proceed as if it had been’ (1998, p. 41),and the crucial task at hand is to assess the character of speciéc groupclaims in terms of their (potential) impact on the equity of civil society.This requires a qualitative judgement and ethical approach that need notdefer to formal notions of equity in the sense of state support for thedevelopment of sectarian group interests, such as publically-fundeddenominational schooling, that reiterate the divisive ‘separate but equal’ideal. This recognition of differential social properties and intentions ofspeciéc appeals to race leads Gilroy to invoke a crucial caveat: ‘torenounce ‘race’ for analytical purposes is not to judge all appeals to it inthe profane world of political cultures as formally equivalent’ (Gilroy1998, p. 842; Gilroy 2000, p. 52 ). This assertion of the ‘profane world ofpolitical cultures’ importantly suggests that the practicality of informalappeals to race might serve as an injunction against an analytical critiquethat misrepresents the conceptual and material manifestations of race as‘formally equivalent’. However, while the door is left tantalizingly open,suggesting the continued signiécance of the materiality of race as an exis-tential phenomenon, we are not told what shape it might assume.

This implied informal difference of appeals to race is not simply agestural strategy towards a contingent futurity. Rather it signiées alarger, perhaps insoluble, problematic raised by extreme post-racial per-spectives that is indicative of a form of theoretical/practical impasse thatresonates deeply with the cleavage between intellectualism and activism:‘Gilroy does not, indeed cannot, provide answers to the dilemmas heposes in his provocative article [“Race ends here”]. He is, like most con-temporary students of “race”, racism and anti-racism, haunted by theproblem inherent in the recognition of the critical futility of employing“race” as a category and the concomitant realization that, without thesetried and tested concepts, anti-racism increasingly loses meaning’(Lentin 2000, pp. 100–1).

This is part of the central problematic at hand here. How might acritical post-racial imagination that trades on the theoretical and con-ceptual bankruptcy of race and is committed to its erasure retain efécacyin a civil society and political culture largely arranged around itsimmense practical currency? Franklin Adler (1999) advances a conceptof ‘xenologica’ in an attempt to reconcile the dilemmas within the multi-cultural problematic that on the one hand validates individual speciécityand difference and on the other promotes mutual recognition and someform of workable social compact. In asking what ‘can we make of theconcept of difference, especially those of us who regard it positively, butwho nevertheless are committed practically to tolerance and an expan-sive, non-exclusivist sense of solidarity?’ (1999, p. 493), Adler recognizesa ‘false choice’ that assumes the mutual exclusivity of difference and

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social solidarity and argues that while all racism is predicated on theunderstanding of difference, not all understandings of difference lead toracism. Stating that ‘[w]hat is central is the interpretation of differenceand what inferences may be drawn from it’ (1999: p. 493, emphasis inoriginal), he foregrounds the interpretive issues within its recognition,understanding and meaning. As a resolution of this theoretical/practicalimpasse, Adler proposes a dialogical concept of ‘xenologica’ as ahermeneutic approach to understanding the Other that declares the par-tiality, interest and ontological speciécity that differentiates it from xeno-phobia and xenophilia as, respectively, the uncritical rejection and theuncritical acceptance of the Other.

De-naturing and socializing race

This argument remains, however, rather insufécient. If, as Adlersuggests, prejudices in the literal sense are inescapable facts of ontolog-ically speciéc knowledge and represent the initial directedness of ourbeing and a point of departure not arrival, then we need to understandhow such knowledge is socially informed and produced. The interestsand experiential forces that determine such ontologically speciéc know-ledge are of immense signiécance whether they are idealized reèectionsof, for example, a state of innocence or social relations of privilege,power and dominance. It is worth brieèy noting two strategic possibilitieshere. First, if race is not a causal determinant for the practice of racism,then it assumes a degree of conceptual independence. This points to arange of speciéc spatial and temporal interpretations of race that areoperationalized within distinct social and historical situations and givenconditions and allows it to be mobilized in pursuit of a principled prag-matism that is committed to resisting racisms (Goldberg 1993). Thesecond possibility is that racial signs and discourses disingenuouslydivide the unity of humanity and encourage over-determined racistinterpretations. This frames the illogical logic of race-thinking that sur-reptitiously fuses enlightenment and myth under the aegis of objectivistscience or universalist philosophy (Gilroy 2000).

This opposition demonstrates a struggle over the meaning of race associally situated knowledge, and the critical distinction between itsethical properties and social intention frames the direction of theremainder of this article. As stated above, the key problematic is this:given the well-documented arguments outlining the reiéed premises ofrace and its uses ranging between the disingenuous and the genocidal,how might it remain politically useful and why? The post-racial perspec-tive is predicated on a theoretical aversion to essentialism in that race isinescapably reiéed as a divisive and exclusionary concept. However, thedominant connotation of essentialism that ascribes intrinsically negativecharacteristics to the term and its adherents (Spinosa and Dreyfus 1996;

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Moreiras 1999) misrecognizes the polar opposition of essentialism andconstructionism and the different manifestations and purposes of theformer (Fuss 1989; McLennan 1996). The anti-essentialist attention tothe plurality of forms does not eradicate essentialism but constructs het-erogeneity within a semantic collectivity which, in the example offeminism, allows for the linguistic categorization of women described asa social group constituted outside of a determining ‘nature’ (Fuss 1989).

As such, there have been many attempts to de-nature the concept ofrace from various social constructionist standpoints, albeit with differinglevels of success. Around the én de siècle the secure intellectual groundthat hosted discussions of racial superiority and inferiority under thenovel tenets of evolutionary anthropology and nativism was seriouslyundermined by the relativist and social constructionist interventions ofFranz Boas and W. E. B. DuBois. Furthermore, ‘[t]he efforts of Boasand DuBois to change how scientists and the public understood race andculture were not simply efforts to shift a paradigm, they were strugglesto secure the principles of democracy’ (Baker 1998, p. 100). However,the form of social constructionism informing these thinkers’ paradig-matic and democratic struggles retains certain indelible biological andmetaphysical premises reèecting the ‘objective nature’ of human racesfound within ‘racial realism’ (Mills 1998).4 For example, Boas (1940) vig-orously opposes the hierarchical ranking of different human populationsand their cultural customs as well as the recognition of uniéed racialdescent and absolute validity of racial heredity. However, the absenceof absolutely valid racial heredity does indeed give way to its partialvalidity, and the social bases of racial antagonisms between parallelgroups follow the prior existence of biologically distinct, if internallyvariant, racial groups of ‘pureblood’ that, through intermixture, maybecome ‘mixed blood’.

DuBois’s essay ‘The Conservation of Races’ similarly demonstratesthe fundamental tension between ‘scientiéc’ – biological and anthropo-logical – and socio-historical approaches in his conceptualization of race(Appiah 1986). His construction of the social emergence of racialcategories, identities and experience is consistently tempered by thesubtle thrusts of the intangible and impressionistic forces of racialanthropology and hypodescent; indeed, as Appiah asks, ‘[i]f he has fullytranscended the scientiéc notion, what is the role of this talk about“blood”?’ (1986, p. 25). The key issue is the effect of this residual pri-mordialism and naturalism on DuBois’s conceptualization of race, theextent to which it compromises the social aspects of his description ofrace, and its ethical and political purpose and consequences. Drawing onDuBois’s Dusk of Dawn, Appiah selects a passage that alludes to theontological and existential premises of DuBois’s primordialist predilec-tions, noting the imperceptible ‘reality’ of racial group afénity thatemerges from its members’ socialized commonalties of history, disaster,

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experience and memory. However, Appiah concludes that the com-monality of social experience and their poetic ‘impulses’ and ‘strivings’for racial uplift are founded on common markers of blood, phenotypeand descent. For Appiah, these markers suffuse DuBois’s texts despitehis protestation at their marginality and insigniécance and problematizehis worthy attempt to reconégure race within a horizontal egalitarianformation as opposed to its customary vertical exclusivist structure.

My outline of these inconsistent renderings of the social within theconstructionism of Boas and DuBois is not an unfavourable presentistmeasurement of historical égures conceptualizing race against quali-tatively different contemporary standards (Banton 1980). Compellingarguments temper such presentism. Ross Posnock (1997) points to thestrategic character of DuBoisian doubling as reèecting the interstitialspace that he worked from and the provisional aspects of his afénitieswith ‘abstract humanism’ and ‘unalloyed blackness’. Similarly, ThomasHolt (1995) broadly suggests two interpretations of the sociologicallyimprecise poeticism of DuBois’s prose on race. For Holt, it was both amove away from his earlier optimism in the capacity of systematic socio-logical investigation to uncover social truths, and an attempt to conveythe speciéc, and sometimes irrational and illogical, nuances of everyday(racialized) life and the graphic perceptions of the ‘soul’. However, mysketch of these provisional and incomplete constructionist perspectivesserves as a point of departure. I now turn to consider Alain Locke’s moreprosaic and sociological approach – in the strong sense – to conceptual-izing race that avoids many of the residual asocial pitfalls of a deter-mining primordialism.

It is difécult to isolate the speciéc moment when the biologicalpremises of race are érst dismantled in favour of social forms of expla-nation. However, Locke’s lectures at Howard University on ‘RaceContacts and Interracial Relations’ commencing in 1915 are pivotal intheir explicit and extensive understanding of race as a social construc-tion (Locke 1992).5 Reéning the inconsistent pronouncements of Boasand DuBois, Locke provides the érst relatively unambiguous social con-structivist statement on race, noting that ‘any true history of race mustbe a sociological theory of race’ (Locke 1992, p. 11). He argues that inspite of all its spurious explanatory meanings, race should be main-tained as a concept under the strict proviso that it is considered scien-tiécally. However, wary of the scientiéc éndings of racial theorists suchas Linnaeas, Knox and Gobineau, he carefully speciées the social scien-tiéc salience of race. For Locke, the positivist disciplinary strictures ofsocial science would underwrite a rational, social theorization of racecapable of challenging and eradicating the irrational (and racist)meanings attached to naturalistic and ‘pseudo-scientiéc’ understand-ings.6 He consistently engages the social forces that inform perceptionsof the reality of race and develops sociological forms of description and

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understanding that accept its constructed social resonance and remainsalert to the dangers of its illusory natural objectivity.

Arguably, the most important aspect of Locke’s conception of race ishis assertion that it must be situated socially while not reduced to anorganic, given conception of the social; therefore, race is not only sociallyconstructed, it is an active social constituent as opposed to a passive pre-social organism. This is to say that, as a social entity, race cannot beisolated as an inert concept and is meaningless unless dynamicallylocated within a broader social context. For Locke, this social produc-tion of race generates the actuality of ‘race inequalities’, or what wemight now call ‘racisms’, which have no innate deénition or intrinsicmeaning but are ascribed social positions created by historically trace-able and shifting power relations. Therefore, the disparate positions ofraces are neither reducible to nor reèective of static, pre-social indicesof biological and/or typological inferiority or superiority, but are insteadmanufactured by the (re)distribution of social wealth, opportunities andresources as well as the socially determined positions of ethnic andcultural formations within civil society.

Locke then astutely observes the critical linkages between race andethnicity and their mediation through cultivated social orders:

The biological meaning of race has lapsed and the sociologicalmeaning of race is growing in signiécance. While it may be that thesocial perpetuation of race is legitimate and necessary in the interestof the development of civilization, we must further admit that it is ofadvantage to a group when it can consider itself an ethnic unit(.) Butthat the group needs to consider itself an ethnic unit is very differentfrom the view that the group is an ethnic unit. That the stimulus ofrace sense is an additional incentive to civilization is no proof thatcivilization has developed merely according to the inherent racialstimulus and (not been) projected on to the group really by theirexternal objective fortunes (1992, p. 12)

This requires careful unpacking. The social perpetuation of race isinitially presented as legitimate and necessary in the cause of civiliza-tional development. The precision of this latter notion is vital, as Lockerecognizes its key strategic use by particular European thinkers on civi-lizational advancement, like Gobineau, to reiterate and justifyapproaches primarily seeking ‘to draw a line of demarcation betweenwhat he called the ‘superior’ and . . . ‘inferior’ races’ (1992, pp. 2–3).Thus, while a non-exclusionary and non-racist form of civilizationaldevelopment might validate an appeal to race on social grounds, it mustavoid the superiority/inferiority axis. Locke carefully presents thispossible appeal to race with signiécant strategic qualiécations attached.As the biological indicators of race are redundant its social perpetuation

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cannot rely on appeals to naturalized notions of civilization. Without thetraditional recourse to hypodescent as a cohesive agent, the social basisof racial groups must be maintained without the possibility of alterna-tive pre-social explanations. The unitary pre-social authority of race isthen tempered by the introduction of ethnicity as a parallel concept.

Given the anthropological focus on the distinctively pre-social ‘blood’of ethnic groups, Locke speciées the emergence of ethnic group identié-cation out of the possibility of social (and perhaps civilizational)advancement. This refutes the customary anthropological notion of pri-mordial ethnicity. And énally, after noting this important distinctionbetween ethnicity as denoting socially syncretic group identiécationinstead of primordial and hereditary group identity, he secures his con-structivist conception of race: that race can act as a stimulus for civiliza-tional development does not equate race as the prime stimulation forcivilization. Race and civilization, both independently and relationally,evolve through ‘external objective fortunes’, that is to say, given socialconditions and not primordial, biological and pre-social impulses.

This active social conceptualization of race is linked to ethicallyresponsible ends that stress social syncretism instead of pre-socialorganicism; non-racist civilizational development, non-primordial eth-nicity, and the grounding inèuence of objective social conditions overthe non-reèexive natural world. However, this appears to over-socializerace in the materialist sense that does not account for alternativesymbolic and perceptive aspects of race that are socially emergent. Thiséts the classic reiécation argument whereby developing a conceptimagined in the érst instance, Locke’s conceptualization of race remainsreiéed as it endows an abstract category with material characteristics andreal properties. However, as race is a conceptual abstraction withmaterial effects this appears somewhat disingenuous. Indeed, perhapsrecognizing the practical dangers of isolating concepts from contexts andpractices, for example the proverbial problem of discussing race withoutreference to racism, he restricts the conceptual immunity of race as a‘pure idea’ from structural sociological scrutiny. He questions the formalbarriers erected between the symbolic and material orders of race andinstead situates it as a contextual resource historically ordered withinstructured social relations:

The race sense, as you see, is something which is not vicious in itself,but which may become so if invidious social practices are based uponit. Consequently, we must trace the history of the practices of racefrom these rather unseen beginnings in the group sense of variouspeoples, for it is in this that the real distinctions of race, the practicaldistinctions, originate (1992, p. 20).

So, while race might exist semantically as an internally coherent

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abstraction in the érst instance as something innocuous ‘in itself’, thissemantic existence is devoid of signiécatory meaning and formal contentoutside the context of its historical practices and practical distinctions.Such semantic isolation of the idea of race as a pure abstraction is falla-cious in its rendition of a symbolic order that is posited as neithersymbolic nor representative of anything except its own symbol.However, the converse of this, the reducibility of the abstract idea ofrace to the materiality of its historical and practical contexts is notnecessarily valid either. The existence of ‘race sense’ suggests race as anat least partially sensory perception that extends the knowledge ofsentient corporeality to develop ideas referring to the human inhabitantof the social that exist alongside exclusionary and racist social practices.Race is therefore irreducible to either an impermeable symbolic orderor set of autonomous material social relations. Locke thus emphasizesthe informative synergy between the material and symbolic wherebyrace is an ascribed, elective, and éctive idea of group identity that iscohered through structured social relationships that are characterized bydominance and subjugation (1992, pp. 20–35).

Social constructionism and the occasion for race

Locke’s social constructionist approach to race builds a bridge betweenmacropolitical and micropolitical concerns. His explication of thepractico-theoretical conditions for maintaining race as a viable sociallyconstructed category and the political and ethical responsibility attachedto such a project are interconnected in a manner that stresses the pro-ductive relationship between intellectualism and activism instead of theirmutual antagonism. His perception of the evolution of race as anevolving set of social relationships profoundly distanced from theenvironmental mutations of primordial matter and his juxtaposition ofcivilization and race represent a further political contribution. Byemphasizing the ‘external objective fortunes’ of the racial group hesuggests that race is not only socially formed and, as mentioned above,a political act, but also that it is purposive. His illumination of the pur-posive quality of race raises the issue of its political register and fore-grounds the articulation of activism and intellectualism in itsconceptualization. In recognizing that the ‘biological meaning of race haslapsed’, Locke’s lead suggests that race is neither a constructed socialorganism evolving in a pre-determined manner nor reducible to the pre-ordained route navigated by the historical motor of modernist progress.Freed from the teleological tyranny of primordialist biological and socialsciences, membership of a given racial group positioned within socialrelations of dominance does not signify a racial identity irrevocablycharacterized by inferiority and subjugation as a point of existentialclosure. Instead, conceived through an activist-intellectual schema that

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constitutes race as socially purposive symbolic matter, the future of‘racial groups’ is not assigned along with their badge of race, but is opento the various developmental possibilities derived from a social path thatcan be altered through political intervention.

The strong connection between theorizing race and political action isexempliéed in Locke’s (1997) portrait of the ‘New Negro’ and thecultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance that he is perhaps bestknown for. The New Negro traces the development of black Americansas an emergent social and psychological phenomenon moving fromobjectiécation to a novel level of self-understanding and autonomy.Although discussing the maturation of black American social con-sciousness indicated within various forms of cultural expression, Lockecarefully outlines the formative role of social forces and problems – suchas migration to urban centres – which are ‘new, practical, local and notpeculiarly racial’ (p. 963). The racial group collectivity signiéed by theemergence of the New Negro is distinctively social. It is comprised ofseparate groups whose ‘greatest experience has been the énding of oneanother’ (p. 963) and their ‘common interests’ (p. 969) as opposed tomystical ‘sentimental’ bonds based on ‘colour’ as opposed to race.

The amelioration of racial inequality and injustice is also dependenton the productive and progressive contacts between different racialgroups on ethical instead of racial grounds: ‘the only safeguard for massrelations in the future must be provided in the carefully maintainedcontacts of the enlightened minorities of both race groups’ (p. 965). Thepolitical resonance of this ethical imperative where social progress is inthe hands of the enlightened whose insight is not determined by theirracial identity. This human enlightenment secures Locke’s belief in theprogressive salience of race and the utility of its socially constructed for-mation as compatible with broad social democratic aims: ‘[t]he racialismof the Negro is no limitation or reservation with respect to Americanlife; it is only a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the streamof his progress into an efécient dam of social energy and power’ (p. 967).Therefore, noting that ‘the conditions that are molding a New Negro aremolding a new American attitude’ (p. 966), the race consciousness of theNew Negro is attached to an explicit struggle to realize the promise ofAmerican democracy as opposed to the partial interests of a distinctiveracial group.

So, where does this leave us? In conclusion, I want to suggest thatLocke’s formulation remains instructive for contemporary debates onrace. He addresses many of the reservations and concerns over itsresidual category of naturalized essence that enables its construction tobecome socially embedded, and offers the basis for an ethical rejoinderto the supposed political impasse on intellectual approaches to race.Beginning with the doubts over the value of constructionism, Charles W.Mills’s (1998) useful argument for a socially constructed understanding

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of race based on the establishment of categorical boundaries for racethrough social demands and decisions reèects the signiécance of keyLockean concerns. Opposing standard constructivism that is posited asan epistemic idealization oriented towards discovering the truth, Millsargues for a racial constructivism as a pragmatic idealization withpolitical constraints. Therefore, even though strong forms of racialrealism are based on a crudely essentialized racial metaphysics, there arealternative forms of objectivism – as there are differing forms of essen-tialism – that open a conceptual space to understand race ‘as both realand unreal, not “realist” but still objectivist’ (1998, p.47).

The complexity of Locke’s constructionism – his assertion that socialmorphology must not be distilled to an organic teleology and thatframing race within the social is, in itself, insufécient for a sociologicalconcept of race – cautions against the casual social constructionist theo-rization of race. While Mills does not refer to a diachronic social meta-physics, Locke’s position on elective racial identity and the dynamism ofits social group formation and collective interests warns against isolatingthe socio-historical premises of the ‘social objectivity’ and ‘causal signié-cance’ of a contingent deep racial reality. The positing of a social meta-physics reconégures the analytical certainties of racial realism andnaturalism and creates a similar objectivist form of closure that remainsopen to certain abuses and incongruities.7

A productive constructionist approach to race that develops the impli-cations of Locke’s position is exempliéed within Appiah’s (1996) under-standing of nominalist uses of race that remain aware of the reiécatorydangers of race and yet appreciate its informative role within sociallytransformative democratic political struggles. In recognizing that nomi-nalist racial classiécations are sometimes socially convenient and expe-dient without being racist, Appiah accepts their occasional historical andstrategic necessity while rightfully questioning their production of anddependence on particular normative ‘scripts’ that provide (positive andnegative) narratives for shaping individual and group life lines. Thisproper concern leads him towards his understandable reservation aboutthe adherence to strong racial identities:

Racial identity can be the basis of resistance to racism; but even as westruggle against racism – and though we have made great progress, wehave further still to go – let us not let our racial identities subject usto new tyrannies (p.104).

Appiah’s preference for a potential ‘imperialism of identity’ (p.103) as adesired outcome of progressive struggles towards social equity and justicethat erase signiécant variations between the life chances of different racialgroups aspires to the establishment of ‘a more recreational conception ofracial identity’ (p.103). Following my understanding of Locke’s argument,

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I think that this ‘weak’ constructionist sense of racial identity as opposedto the ‘strong’ objectivist sense, provides the basis for an ethicallyresponsible critical usage of race. A weak conceptualization of race hasa greater descriptive and explanatory capacity, and is able to theorize thecomplexities of materially and symbolically signiécant racialized socialstructures, relations and interests. Constructed in the weak sense, race isneither dependent on simplistic characterizations of the social thatregress towards asocial and pre-political naturalized and primordial cer-tainties, nor irreconcilably divided between the demands of individualfreedom and the politics of identity. Its focus on the given spatial andtemporal social and historical premises of racial identity is assertivelysocial and subject to ongoing ethical negotiation.

Such nominalist constructions of race recognize the local particularityof individual identities that draw on material events and circumstances.For example, the recognition of an experiential commonality with othersmight be understood positively as framing the individual as a socialanimal whose humanity is both an individual and shared lived phenom-enon. Like gender, class and sexuality (among other lived modalities),race can be understood as one local existential element in the formationof a complex human sociality that is only uniéed through ethical andsocial predicates. This nominalist understanding of race asks whethersameness is a prerequisite for social equality and justice, or whetherspeciéc existential elements – which, given the complexity of socialnetworks and spatial and temporal differences, cannot be universalexperiences – are the particular social experiences that cohere a generalhuman unity? The latter proposition, that race is a contributory, notdetermining or principal, local existential element within human exist-ence places it as a part of the grounding set of social experiences andbeliefs that conégure the human as a social animal. The perception ofhumanity as ‘social’ is important because the post-racial search forhuman sameness re-articulates the foundational anthropocentrism ofrace thinking and establishes humanity through the abstracted body andthe application of disembodied ethical values. I therefore argue that anominalist and weak social constructionist approach to race is not onlytheoretically and conceptually viable and socially and ethically respons-ible, but is also an analytical necessity. The weak construction of racethrough sets of social experiences helps to ground the sociality ofhumanity that is no less susceptible to anthropocentric distortion. It alsomeans that while race has a degree of existential speciécity it does nothave the full conceptual independence that generates an internal meta-physics that separates it from its broader human situatedness.8

The provisionally weak construction of race that is conceptualized assubject to continual social and ethical (re)negotiation also demonstratesa signiécant activist-intellectual standpoint. A weak constructionistapproach consistently engages the theoretical and practical uses and

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abuses of race and, as such, poses a critical question to the doxa thatsituates its real/imagined existential materiality and its objective/over-abstracted conceptualization and theorization as polar opposites.Accepting theory as, what Martin Jay has termed, ‘a moment of reèex-ive self-distancing . . . that subverts the self-sufécient immanence ofwhatever we happen to be talking about’ (1996, p.179), the theorizationof race is neither the distillation nor transcendence of personal experi-ence. Furthermore, if ‘no possibility of self-sufécient immanence existson the level of practice, experience, hermeneutic interpretation, narra-tive intelligibility, or empirical facticity’ then, ‘theory [is] necessary, if byitself insufécient . . . [because of] the no less blatant incompleteness of itsothers’ (Jay 1996, p.178, emphasis added).Thus, the conéguration of raceas a social phenomenon that is both material and ideal in both lived andreèexive senses demonstrates the erroneous separation of theory frompractice, and intellectualism from politics.

The separation of idealist and materialist metaphysical worlds ofthought and action places theoretical intellectual activity and practicalpolitical activism within a false antagonism. The ensuing oppositionbetween the reiécation of the idea of race and the marginalization of itspracticality often loses sight of another, perhaps more deleterious, reié-catory tyranny; the reiécation of consensus as a prerequisite for politics.While universal agreement represents a highly desirable ideal, it impliesthe end of politics, the moment when the democratic work of specifyinghuman freedom and equality is complete in the abstract and concretelyrealized. Putative post-racial attempts to dismantle the meaningful sym-bolism and materiality of race confront the same political task of nego-tiating the requisite social understanding and consent for a universalhuman democratic politics. It is, therefore, perhaps preferable to under-stand our disagreements on race differently: as focusing on, drawingattention to, and thinking through its social formation, inclusionary andexclusionary social axes, and their progressive or regressive social andpolitical purposes as a preface to democratic social development.

Acknowledgements

A version of this article was initially presented at the ‘Beyond Differ-ence’ workshop at South Bank University in September 2000. I wish tothank the participants for their observations and comments. I would alsolike to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpfulcomments.

Notes

1. It is easy to recall the activist-intellectual luminaries such as Langston Hughes,George Padmore, Aimé Césaire, Claudia Jones and Richard Wright that were all, at times,

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members of various national branches of the Communist Party. There are also the inde-pendent Marxists or Marxian-inèuenced égures such as C.L.R. James and Oliver CromwellCox respectively, and it is worth remembering claims that the majority of black ‘culturalégures’ in late-1930s New York either held membership or close ties with the CommunistParty (Maxwell 1999).2. For example, see the exhaustive objections of Robert Miles (1984) to more recentexamples of activist-intellectualism (Hall et al. 1978; CCCS 1982; Sivanandan 1982) asreifying race as a normative social fact and Alex Callinicos’s (1993) critique of CedricRobinson’s Black Marxism (1983) as a ‘mystical’ history of black radicalism.3. For example, see Banton’s (1991) distinction between phenotypical differences as aérst order abstraction and race as a second order abstraction and Miles’s (1989) argumentthat the use of race as a descriptive and analytical term serves to distort social relationsand processes as social facts.4. While Mills (1998) recognizes the objectivism of ‘racial realism’ as essentialized andeven ‘false’, he outlines alternative objectivist understandings of race that construct it asreal and unreal as opposed to the realist supposition of its given nature.5. Obviously it is difécult to deénitively date the ‘érst’ sentiment of race as a ‘socialconstruction’. For example, John Stone (1998, p. 15) identiées the ‘Thomas theorem’ datingfrom 1928 as one of the original sources that informed the concept of race as sociallyconstructed. However, in his introduction to Alain Locke’s Race Contacts and InterracialRelations, Jeffrey C. Stewart, perhaps unsurprisingly, recognizes the speciéc sentiment ofthe social construction of race as originating from Locke’s 1915 lectures. For Stewart,Locke’s recognition of the informative role of culture in the social production of racepreégured Ruth Benedict’s (1935) arguments in Patterns of Culture and surpassed Boas’scontinued belief that ‘hereditary factors played a role in race’ (Stewart 1992, p. xxv).However, the evolution of the idea of race as a non-biological category might be tracedfrom Herder’s admonition of Kant and Kantian anthropology that raises a startlingobjection to the biological, phenotypical and geographical pathologies of race:

Some, for instance, have thought ét to employ the term races for four or éve divisions,according to regions of origin or complexion. I see no reason for employing this term.Race refers to a difference of origin, which in this case either does not exist or whichcomprises in each of these regions or complexions the most diverse “races”. For everydistinct community is a nation, having its own national culture as it has its ownlanguage. . . . In short, there are neither four or éve races, nor exclusive varieties, onthis earth. Complexions run into each other; forms follow the genetic character; and intoto they are, in the énal analysis, but different shades of the same great picture whichextends through all ages and all parts of the earth (Herder 1969, p. 284).

6. Locke’s positivist faith in the possibility of establishing the social identity of racesthrough tracing the historical development of an ethnic group within speciéc socialrelations and cultural contexts arguably did not remain constant. Leonard Harris (1989)suggests that Locke’s mature work is characterized by a radicalized pragmatism that under-stood the shifting nature of scientiéc methods. Indeed, Locke opens his famous essay ‘TheNew Negro’ by characterizing it as referring to a ‘new psychology’ and a ‘new spirit’ thathas emerged ‘beyond the watch and guard of statistics’ (1997, p. 961). This invokes thesame Hegelian idealism as DuBois and demonstrates the limited capacity of formalcategorization to understand subjective developments. However, while the New Negro hasreached a level of consciousness that negates their social objectiécation as a ‘problem’ andis no longer a ‘chronic patient for the sociological clinic’ (p. 966), Locke consistently assertsits racial grouping as a socially emergent form that is an ethnically diverse and non-primordial social collectivity.7. Indeed, as Michael Mann (1999) has cogently argued, anxieties over national purityand contamination ought to be recognized as part of the broader Western democratic

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tradition. This democratic tradition, coterminous with nation building, is saturated withorganicist signiéers that serve to identify ‘we the people’ as a racially and/or ethnicallyseparate and distinct body politic.8. I am inèuenced here by Tzvetan Todorov’s (2001) incisive argument that a general,that is to say material and abstract, understanding of humanity, human existence, andbeings is only cohered through the complex and diverse unity of sociality.

References

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BRETT ST LOUIS is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University ofBristol.ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UQ, UK. Email: b.stlouis@bristol.ac.uk

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