"The Colour of Power"

People,

Yeah, I been slunkin. I too hot-foot ya see. But woy Nassau pulsin ay! Gapseed for days-- Brokeback banning, crime spree (especially the horrifying rape sprees), hotel development stuff, culture conclave, etc. I'll get to it and I will eventually hope to post to the blog my previous e-mail posts on race. But here's an essay to take us back to that conversation-- you know us and our short memory in this country. The essay comes from Michael Stevenson, COB lecturer. The language is unnecessarily dense but it's worth the read overall.

Meditate, Process, Reason, Move!

bless,

Christian


THE COLOR OF POWER


The Nassau Institute’s letter, published in the February 17 edition of The Tribune, to confront some of the central arguments addressed in a letter written by Helen Klonaris on Whiteness and Bahamian Identity, is nothing less than an elaborate display of ‘blue smoke and mirrors.’ First of all, they attempt to tackle what is, in my estimation, one of the least controversial aspects of Ms. Klonaris’ argument: that racism today has its origins in slavery. Specifically, to the argument that “racism is based on ‘four hundred years of European enslavement of Africans,’” their riposte is that, “slavery did not exist because of racial ideology.” The problem with this reply is that claiming slavery did not exist “because” of racist discourse in no way detracts from the claim that the enslaving of Africans brought about racist thinking. The use, by The Nassau Institute, of Thomas Sowell’s argument in support of their position is completely fatuous because the part of Sowell’s argument that the Institute uses concerns the causes of slavery in general. In other words, Sowell’s argument is not designed to deny the established historical fact that the practice of enslaving Africans led to the formation of a racist ideology that then served to buttress that practice. Most historians would not dare contest the view that economic conditions have served as the necessary determinants of most forms of slavery in the past. With regard to the enslavement of Africans by Europeans, Eric Williams’ classic, Capitalism and Slavery, convincingly advances the argument that slavery, as a pre-modern mode of production, was a condition that gave rise to the establishment of a modern capitalist system in the New World. At the same time, none, but the most fanatical believers in the innocence of white people, would deny that, following closely on the heels of the introduction of slavery into the New World, was the introduction of a legitimizing ideology that was created to facilitate that practice, and that at the core of this belief system was the notion of white supremacy. In short, there is no inconsistency or point of contention between, on the one hand, the argument that the enslavement of Africans had economic roots and, on the other hand, the argument that almost in tandem with the development of that malevolent institution was the formation of a way of thinking, speaking, and seeing the relations between Europeans and Africans that was organized around the belief in racial superiority.
Just as bizarre, is the way The Nassau Institute responds to what they argue is the linkage Ms. Klonaris makes in her letter between racism and economic power. Ms. Klonaris’ argument, in this regard, is simple. In explaining why she would hesitate before referring to a black person as a racist, she writes: “… I would hesitate greatly … since I think white people globally and locally still maintain economic power, and since the social structures most of us live within are largely defined by white (European and American) cultural value systems.” It is important to understand that Ms. Klonaris views these “white structures” as racist because she believes these structures have been created and maintained by white people and that these same structures dominate other (nonwhite) ways of seeing and being in a world that has rid itself of colonialism only on the surface. She writes: “We may think that what is racism are the accessories in the house – a history book that tells a one-sided story, lying on a coffee table. So we get rid of everything antiquated, (perhaps), throw out the books, (perhaps), take down pictures of the Queen, perhaps. But the overall structure is still there, and in this age, it is a white structure, (think about educational curricula, think about the legal system, Judeo Christian church hierarchies, the English language itself) and it carries on what it set out to do: perpetuate white values, standards, ways of being and seeing, ways of doing and speaking – to the exclusion (suppression, condemnation, ghettoization) of … other cultures …”
To the specific argument that the white economic order (both locally and globally) is racist because it is controlled by white people, the response by The Nassau Institute is to enter into a critique of Karl Marx’s analysis of the implications of class antagonisms. To say the least, this response by The Nassau Institute is insipid. Nowhere in Ms. Klonaris’ letter did she imply, or explicitly suggest, that she was deploying a Marxist vision of history in her analysis. To put it kindly, what the Nassau Institute has to learn is that to mention the word ‘class,’ or to refer to such an object, does not make you a Marxist - or one’s analysis - Marxian. Instead of confronting the argument about the ‘color of money’ and the racism, which Ms. Klonaris suggests is inherent within our economic system, The Nassau Institute, instead, translates the issue into a problem of class and sanitizes the problem by draining the issue of its ‘color.’ More importantly, The Nassau Institute fails to explain why this translation is needed.
In the translation process to which The Nassau Institute subjects Ms. Klonaris’ analysis, white owners of production become simply part of the racially neutralized ‘bourgeois elite,’ and the black victims of a racist economic order dissipate within the universal concept of ‘workers.’ By this means, the ‘whiteness’ of the means of production is made invisible, and the full significance of being poor and black is obfuscated. What is lost in this reconfiguration of the ‘whiteness’ thesis into the issue of class warfare, and what The Nassau Institute fails to confront and critically examine, is the full implication of Ms. Klonaris’ thesis: that, if the overall structure is white as she argues, then any nonwhite situated in this ‘white landscape,’ who may believe that they are succeeding within the system, still has to be considered a victim of white structures of power. Thus, according to this reading, a black, bourgeois capitalist who profits from the economic order is also a victim of that economic order since he or she or the racial group to whom he or she belongs, did not have a hand in creating the capitalist system and is still operating within a matrix of interlocking white structures.
This exclusionary circle of discrimination drawn around the black capitalist is a problem for those who want to make no exceptions when dismantling dominant classes wherever they are found. But talking about the ‘color of capital’ in such monolithic and essentialist terms as ‘whiteness,’ this shackling of black experience once again, is also a serious problem for the black business world. No doubt, ascendant black capitalists can undoubtedly gain from any cultural or historical arguments that help eclipse the dominance of white economic power. However, there is a huge problem, I think, in telling black owners of the means of production, or those who aspire to be, that the very economic system from which they are profiting, or stand to profit from in the future, perpetuates racism to the detriment of ‘their people’ because the structure of capitalism in postcolonial settings continues to be ‘white.’ Similarly, there is a grave problem, I think, in telling black people in the postcolonial setting that the educational, legal, political, religious, and language systems from which they may believe they are somehow benefiting is ‘white’ and not serving the ‘real interests’ of the black race because it perpetuates white ways of thinking and seeing as part of a colonial continuum. In fact, very few people, I believe, want to be told that they have been duped by the only system they know, and may even love, despite its inadequacies. Such claims simply do not often tally with the diverse and complex ways people experience ordinary life and their quotidian struggles, and are ultimately, I believe, disempowering within the postcolonial setting. And here lies one of the main difficulties concerning Ms. Klonaris’ thesis that The Nassau Institute failed to confront: her argument rests on a purely structural view of the world that must assume the existence of false consciousness, i.e., that there are people located in various forms of social structures and trapped within a matrix of institutional processes who do not know how to act in their real interest even if they believe they are, for if they did, they would not participate in those structures; would find a way out of them and then create new ones.
To be sure, a structural view of the world, even if it is critical, has the potential to become part of a colonizing mentality, for in truth it tells people that there is always someone who knows more about the problems people are experiencing than the people themselves experiencing the problems. As critique, a structural view of social life erases altogether the diverse ways people experience the social worlds they inhabit. Such critiques have no way of adequately accounting - without reducing peoples’ subjectivities to a state of “collective amnesia” or obliterating them from history altogether through some process of reduction - for the heterogeneous, complex ways people constitute one another in the course of their interactions and come to understand in their own terms these interactions, including the interactions that take place between the source of colonizing pressures and the subjects responding to such pressures.

From the beginning, the African in the New Word has been constructed in the image of the repressed subject and subjugated soul, a being stripped of all and reconstituted from the elements of a new way of being imposed by overlords. From the beginning, the African descendants in the New World have been constructed in the image of docile beings, whose world is not their own – a world into which they have been assimilated and from which they have been excluded. Thus, as the story has been told by ‘friend’ and ‘foe’ of the descendants of the transplanted people of the slave trade, those who survived the horror as other than African (as an assimilated people) in the aftermath of slavery and colonial rule, cannot be but alienated and destined to be dissociated from their milieu; cannot be responsible for anything (good or bad) about the world that they inhabit because they inherited a world that they did not create; can only be condemned either to silence or a life lacking authenticity. The various narratives that feed these constructions are powerful. As a discourse, they have entered the popular imagination at various levels and fed our obsession over the question, ‘who are we?’ Those adhering strictly to the narrative respond, almost ritually, that the world presently inhabited by the descendants of the dislocated African people of the Middle Passage is a white reality that continues to be absorbed by mimesis. It is a neo–colonial world, they argue, where the ‘guards’ of the colonial house may have changed from ‘white’ to ‘black,’ but where the house remains unchanged. Thus, Ms. Klonaris can tell a story of a white structure that is fixed and endowed almost with monolithic immutability continuing to make people, who are not white-skinned, feel inferior despite the overthrow of official colonial rule.
Let us be clear: the narratives that contain the constructions of the African Diaspora as a repressed object in the postcolonial era, if reported by the critically conscious, are told by persons who feel the pain of these stories and are themselves in pain when telling them. They are not lightly told, and people understand and relate to a partial truth in the narratives that contain these constructions. I argue that those who hear these stories, and possibly those who tell them, also realize that there is a missing narrative – one that honors the ordinary and gut experiences of people living in locations that have broken free from the official rule of colonial power. The omitted narrative relates to an intuitive understanding of what has been happening in the postcolonial period as the encounter between the persistent colonial presence and postcolonial populations continues to occur. It is the understanding that, as the postcolonial encounter continues, those freed from formal colonial rule feel themselves becoming, as a controlling force, more deeply etched within the colonial presence that they inhabit (dis we tings), while, at the same time, continuing to feel penetrated by the signature of the continuing presence of the colonizing other (dis dey tings). It is the understanding that in the space between these conflicting presences is created, in the moment of encounter, a synthesis, which, in the words of Edouard Glissant, “is not a bastardization … but a productive activity through which each element [in conflict] is enriched.”
This is not a plea to accommodate relations that give rise to the experience of domination. All forms of domination need to be resisted with as much vitality as all of us can muster. The question is really a strategic one for persons critically reflecting on the postcolonial condition within the African Diaspora: will our conceptualizations of power encourage resistance to domination within the postcolonial setting, if these conceptualizations continue to maintain the distinction between those who hold power and those who remain outside of power as its falsely conscious, docile victims, or, will they facilitate resistance because our conceptualizations of power serve to show just how implicated black postcolonial populations have become within the relations of power that constitute the heart of power. And if we decide to deploy concepts and language that suggest that the black postcolonial figure is implicated within the heart of power – the processes that shape the structures of power we all inhabit in the postcolonial setting - then what will be the color of that power, for surely it could not be ‘white’?

Sincerely,

Michael Stevenson
COB Lecturer
Nassau