File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0404, message 27


Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 18:18:03 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [postanarchism] Aragorn! "The Prison House of Color"




The Prison-House of Color

by Aragorn!

"The history of thought is the history of its models"
- Fredric Jameson

The image that the term "a person of color" brings to
mind speaks to the bias of the interpreter. White
racists see the person of color as the target of their
bias, the center of their mythology, and the point
that they must counter. The liberal left sees the
person of color as the racialized product of decades
of government works, as the producer of quality
popular culture, as statistics, and as the noble
worker of the land. The radical left see the person of
color as the revolutionary subject that must be made
aware of their historic task. But what does the
‘person of color’ see themselves as? Are we the angry
objects of a thousand protest pictures or do we embody
the cruelty of immigration and domestic policy? Are we
an amalgam of all of these perspectives or are we an
identity yet-to-be-determined? Finally, and above all
else, are we defined by the color of our skin?

Let us address the last point first. Is the racist
reality of our society a -visual- reality or is it a
social, economic, and political reality? Is race a
real biological, inherent, and melanin related
phenomena or is it a cultural fact? The term 'Person
of Color' answers both of these questions along
biological lines. A person of color then is an object
of politics but a subject of science. This results in
a cottage industry of scientific research about
diabetes, obesity, and other economic realities in the
service of creating public policy about housing,
school breakfast programs and Medicare. The term,
then, prioritizes an external and perceived (color,
biology, public policy) definition over a cultural or
political one.

As a counter-point, white people have an entirely
political understanding of their own identity. They
easily accept that Italians and Irish people were not
white and became white as they accepted certain
conventions, mores, and economic realities. ‘White’
has been an increasingly economicized identity as more
and more 'people of color' (or who were of color) have
been accepted into positions of power. Racism by the
capitalist white has become as much a struggle against
the perception of there being any other economic
reality possible as against people of color as
outsiders to our economic reality. The fight against
Affirmative Action has been as much about resisting
the role of the State to positively affect people’s
lives (e.g. a fight against Socialism) as it has been
about depriving people of color of opportunity. That
is why there has been comparatively little outcry at
the replacement of Affirmative Action by scholarships,
favoritism, and student narratives. The real struggle
was as political as it was racial.

In Charles W. Mills important essay '"But What Are You
Really?" The Metaphysics of Race' this question is
addressed from an angle. Instead of challenging
terminology, Charles concerns himself with building a
position of racial constructivism where both the
reality and unreality of race can be understood. This
unfolds into a description of a series of 'Racial
Trangressives' with a specific set of characteristics
to be evaluated; Bodily Appearance, Ancestry,
Self-Awareness of Ancestry,Public Awareness of
Ancestry, Culture, Experience, and Subjective
Identification. Detailing Mills's 'Transgressives' is
beyond the scope
of this essay, but by conceiving of a new way to
quantify the experience of race, Mills goes a long way
toward highlighting what is incomplete about our
understanding.

Sociology may provide us final insights as to why the
term ‘people of color’ continues to have purchase. To
quote Randall Collins "Social order is seen as being
founded on organized coercion. There is an ideological
realm of belief (religion, law), and an underlying
world of struggles over power; ideas and morals are
not prior to interaction but are socially created, and
serve the interests of parties to the conflict." While
the term 'people of color' may itself be an inadequate
self-description of real living people (and their
experiences) it is a socially created term that has
come into vogue in a political atmosphere. It has
largely replaced the term 'minority' to convey a more
‘politically correct’ image of a portion of the
population that, to the extent that it has had one
political agenda, has become politically ineffective.
While spectacular racism continues to grab headlines,
the transformation of the 'welfare' state towards a
'pay to play' state falls further and further in the
page count of our local papers. Which begs the
question, what population has been best served by the
linguistic transformation of minorities into people of
color? Has that transformation been a cause or a
symptom of the failure of the political changes of the
seventies to have staying power?

As a racial transgressive whose experience is not
reflected in the amount of melanin in my skin these
issues have continued to trouble and fascinate me. I
have been particularly engaged with the way that the
left deals with the issue of identity for its own gain
and in our name. I strongly distrust calls for the
universality of our experience and then our response.
Every call for ‘people of color’s’ action against
this or that public policy or state-crafted indignity
sounds like another phrasing of the same old failed
politics of the state. I do not hear this language
used to actually demonstrate a diversity of approaches
to common problems, but how common problems should be
addressed by a diversity of people. The problems of
‘my people’ never make it through this powerful
message.

Which brings me to the assertion that the term people
of color, or person of color, is inadequate in its
purpose to unify me with other people. It is
inadequate because of its determinism. It continues to
be a political assertion of unity-of-purpose without
regard to the political consequences of what
identity-as-color entail. It fails because it
generalizes the wrong aspect of the ‘minority’
experience. If
I am going to join under any flag it will have to
embrace the multitude of ways that people have been
transformed into aberrations and outsiders, and not
just the biological ones.

Bibliography

Fredric Jameson "The Prison-House of Language"
Charles W. Mills "Blackness Visible" Essays on
Philosophy and Race
Randal Collins "Conflict Sociology"
Ethnic Terms Pondered by Linguists, Others San Jose
Mercury News, 27
July 1999






===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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