Imperial Racism

Excerpt from Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (courtesy of argh!)

The passage from modern sovereignty to imperial sovereignty shows one of its faces in the shifting configurations of racism in our societies. We should note first of all that it has become increasingly difficult to identify the general lines of racism. In fact, politicians, the media, and even historians continually tell us that racism has steadily receded in modern societies—from the end of slavery to de- colonization struggles and civil rights movements. Certain specific traditional practices of racism have undoubtedly declined, and one might be tempted to view the end of the apartheid laws in South Africa as the symbolic close of an entire era of racial segregation. From our perspective, however, it is clear that racism has not receded but actually progressed in the contemporary world, both in extent and in intensity. It appears to have declined only because its form and strategies have changed. If we take Manichaean divisions and rigid exclusionary practices (in South Africa, in the colonial city, in the southeastern United States, or in Palestine) as the paradigm of modern racisms, we must now ask what is the postmodern form of racism and what are its strategies in today’s imperial society.

Many analysts describe this passage as a shift in the dominant theoretical form of racism, from a racist theory based on biology to one based on culture. The dominant modern racist theory and the concomitant practices of segregation are centered on essential biological differences among races. Blood and genes stand behind the differences in skin color as the real substance of racial difference. Subordinated peoples are thus conceived (at least implicitly) as other than human, as a different order of being. These modern racist theories grounded in biology imply or tend toward an ontological difference—a necessary, eternal, and immutable rift in the order of being. In response to this theoretical position, then, modern anti- racism positions itself against the notion of biological essentialism, and insists that differences among the races are constituted instead by social and cultural forces. These modern anti-racist theorists operate on the belief that social constructivism will free us from the straitjacket of biological determinism: if our differences are socially and culturally determined, then all humans are in principle equal, of one ontological order, one nature.

With the passage to Empire, however, biological differences have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers as the key representation of racial hatred and fear. In this way imperial racist theory attacks modern anti-racism from the rear, and actually co- opts and enlists its arguments. Imperial racist theory agrees that races do not constitute isolable biological units and that nature cannot be divided into different human races. It also agrees that the behavior of individuals and their abilities or aptitudes are not the result of their blood or their genes, but are due to their belonging to different historically determined cultures. Differences are thus not fixed and immutable but contingent effects of social history. Imperial racist theory and modern anti-racist theory are really saying very much the same thing, and it is difficult in this regard to tell them apart. In fact, it is precisely because this relativist and culturalist argument is assumed to be necessarily anti-racist that the dominant ideology of our entire society can appear to be against racism, and that imperial racist theory can appear not to be racist at all.

We should look more closely, however, at how imperial racist theory operates. E ́ tienne Balibar calls the new racism a differentialist racism, a racism without race, or more precisely a racism that does not rest on a biological concept of race. Although biology is abandoned as the foundation and support, he says, culture is made to fill the role that biology had played. We are accustomed to thinking that nature and biology are fixed and immutable but that culture is plastic and fluid: cultures can change historically and mix to form infinite hybrids. From the perspective of imperial racist theory, however, there are rigid limits to the flexibility and compati- bility of cultures. Differences between cultures and traditions are, in the final analysis, insurmountable. It is futile and even dangerous, according to imperial theory, to allow cultures to mix or insist that they do so: Serbs and Croats, Hutus and Tutsis, African Americans and Korean Americans must be kept separate.

As a theory of social difference, the cultural position is no less ‘‘essentialist’’ than the biological one, or at least it establishes an equally strong theoretical ground for social separation and segrega- tion. Nonetheless, it is a pluralist theoretical position: all cultural identities are equal in principle. This pluralism accepts all the differ- ences of who we are so long as we agree to act on the basis of these differences of identity, so long as we act our race. Racial differences are thus contingent in principle, but quite necessary in practice as markers of social separation. The theoretical substitution of culture for race or biology is thus transformed paradoxically into a theory of the preservation of race.This shift in racist theory shows us how imperial theory can adopt what is traditionally thought to be an anti-racist position and still maintain a strong principle of social separation.

We should be careful to note at this point that imperial racist theory in itself is a theory of segregation, not a theory of hierarchy. Whereas modern racist theory poses a hierarchy among the races as the fundamental condition that makes segregation necessary, imperial theory has nothing to say about the superiority or inferiority of different races or ethnic groups in principle. It regards that as purely contingent, a practical matter. In other words, racial hierarchy is viewed not as cause but as effect of social circumstances. For example, African American students in a certain region register consistently lower scores on aptitude tests than Asian American students. Imperial theory understands this as attributable not to any racial inferiority but rather to cultural differences: Asian American culture places a higher importance on education, encourages stu- dents to study in groups, and so forth. The hierarchy of the different races is determined only a posteriori, as an effect of their cultures— that is, on the basis of their performance. According to imperial theory, then, racial supremacy and subordination are not a theoreti- cal question, but arise through free competition, a kind of market meritocracy of culture.

Racist practice, of course, does not necessarily correspond to the self-understandings of racist theory, which is all we have considered up to this point. It is clear from what we have seen, however, that imperial racist practice has been deprived of a central support: it no longer has a theory of racial superiority that was seen as grounding the modern practices of racial exclusion. Ac- cording to Gilles Deleuze and Fe ́lix Guattari, though, ‘‘European racism . . . has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other . . . Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccen- tric and backward waves . . . From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside.’’ Deleuze and Guattari challenge us to conceive racist practice not in terms of binary divisions and exclusion but as a strategy of differential inclu- sion. No identity is designated as Other, no one is excluded from the domain, there is no outside. Just as imperial racist theory cannot pose as a point of departure any essential differences among human races, imperial racist practice cannot begin by an exclusion of the racial Other. White supremacy functions rather through first engag- ing alterity and then subordinating differences according to degrees of deviance from whiteness. This has nothing to do with the hatred and fear of the strange, unknown Other. It is a hatred born in proximity and elaborated through the degrees of difference of the neighbor.

This is not to say that our societies are devoid of racial exclu- sions; certainly they are crisscrossed with numerous lines of racial barriers, across each urban landscape and across the globe. The point, rather, is that racial exclusion arises generally as a result of differential inclusion. In other words, it would be a mistake today, and perhaps it is also misleading when we consider the past, to pose the apartheid or Jim Crow laws as the paradigm of racial hierarchy. Difference is not written in law, and the imposition of alterity does not go to the extreme of Otherness. Empire does not think differences in absolute terms; it poses racial differences never as a difference of nature but always as a difference of degree, never as necessary but always as accidental. Subordination is enacted in re- gimes of everyday practices that are more mobile and flexible but that create racial hierarchies that are nonetheless stable and brutal.

The form and strategies of imperial racism help to highlight the contrast between modern and imperial sovereignty more generally. Colonial racism, the racism of modern sovereignty, first pushes difference to the extreme and then recuperates the Other as negative foundation of the Self (see Section 2.3). The modern construction of a people is intimately involved in this operation. A people is defined not simply in terms of a shared past and common desires or potential, but primarily in dialectical relation to its Other, its outside. A people (whether diasporic or not) is always defined in terms of a place (be it virtual or actual). Imperial order, in contrast, has nothing to do with this dialectic. Imperial racism, or differential racism, integrates others with its order and then orchestrates those differences in a system of control. Fixed and biological notions of peoples thus tend to dissolve into a fluid and amorphous multitude, which is of course shot through with lines of conflict and antago- nism, but none that appear as fixed and eternal boundaries. The surface of imperial society continuously shifts in such a way that it destabilizes any notion of place. The central moment of modern racism takes place on its boundary, in the global antithesis between inside and outside. As Du Bois said nearly one hundred years ago, the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. Imperial racism, by contrast, looking forward perhaps to the twenty-first century, rests on the play of differences and the manage- ment of micro-conflictualities within its continually expanding domain.

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