State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804772193 ISBN 13: 9780804772198

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

The deeply entrenched patterns of racial inequality in the United States simply do not square with the liberal notion of a nation-state of equal citizens. Uncovering the false promise of liberalism, State of White Supremacy reveals race to be a fundamental, if flexible, ruling logic that perpetually generates and legitimates racial hierarchy and privilege.

Racial domination and violence in the United States are indelibly marked by its origin and ongoing development as an empire-state. The widespread misrecognition of the United States as a liberal nation-state hinges on the twin conditions of its approximation for the white majority and its impossibility for their racial others. The essays in this book incisively probe and critique the U.S. racial state through a broad range of topics, including citizenship, education, empire, gender, genocide, geography, incarceration, Islamophobia, migration and border enforcement, violence, and welfare.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Moon-Kie Jung teaches sociology and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. João H. Costa Vargas teaches Black diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is Professor of Sociology at Duke University.

Moon-Kie Jung teaches sociology and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. João H. Costa Vargas teaches Black diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is Professor of Sociology at Duke University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

State of White Supremacy

RACISM, GOVERNANCE, AND THE UNITED STATES

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7219-8

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................................................ixConstituting the U.S. Empire-State and White Supremacy: The Early Years Moon-Kie Jung.......................................................................................11 Liberalism and the Racial State Charles Mills.............................................................................................................................272 White Supremacy as Substructure: Toward a Genealogy of a Racial Animus, from "Reconstruction" to "Pacification" Dylan Rodríguez......................................473 On (Not) Belonging: Why Citizenship Does Not Remedy Racial Inequality Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Sarah Mayorga.............................................................774 The Best Education for Some: Race and Schooling in the United States Today Amanda E. Lewis and Michelle J. Manno..........................................................935 Separate and Unequal: Big Government Conservatism and the Racial State George Lipsitz.....................................................................................1106 Neoliberal Paternalism: Race and the New Poverty Governance Sanford F. Schram, Richard C. Fording, and Joe Soss...........................................................1307 The Case of Ben LaGuer and the 2006 Massachusetts Gubernatorial Election Joy James........................................................................................1588 Not a Citizen, Only a Suspect: Racialized Immigration Law Enforcement Practices Mary Romero...............................................................................1899 The Language of Terror: Panic, Peril, Racism Junaid Rana..................................................................................................................21110 Unmasking the State: Racial/Gender Terror and Hate Crimes Andrea Smith...................................................................................................22911 The Black Diaspora as Genocide: Brazil and the United States—A Supranational Geography of Death and Its Alternatives João H. Costa Vargas.....................243Notes........................................................................................................................................................................273References...................................................................................................................................................................287Contributors.................................................................................................................................................................325Index........................................................................................................................................................................329

Chapter One

LIBERALISM AND THE RACIAL STATE Charles Mills

Liberalism is hegemonic. The antifeudal political philosophy of individual rights and freedoms that emerges in the modern period in opposition to absolutism and natural social hierarchy has unquestionably become, whether in right-wing or left-wing versions, the dominant political outlook of the day. Poststructuralism, communitarianism, multiculturalism, and other bodies of political thought may flourish in the radical academy. But in terms of influencing public policy and mobilizing political players in the real world, liberalism is certainly the main (if not the only) game in town. The seeming collapse of socialist ideological-political alternatives has made a liberal framework the central normative reference point for claims about the justice or injustice of the social order, whether by appeal to free-market or social-democratic ideals.

What then does liberalism have to say about racial oppression? Racial oppression is, after all, the distinctive injustice of the modern world. This follows from the simple fact that—at least according to the consensus of scholars—it is only with modernity that race even comes into existence as a category of identity and as a social reality. Class oppression may date from the period when technological advance creates a social surplus that makes slavery possible; gender oppression may go back even further, to the sexual division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies. But the advent of race and social orders structured around race is a very recent development in human evolution. Moreover, by modern standards race is distinctively horrific insofar as it facilitates enslavement and genocide at the very time when human equality is supposed to have been established as a dominant norm. Whether as a self-owning Lockean appropriator or a self-directing Kantian being, the liberal individual is supposed to be protected by the liberal state, and any infringement of his or her rights corrected for. And what more flagrant violation of the liberal ideal of the rights and freedoms of the individual could there be than people's reduction to chattel status or mass killing merely because of their "race"? One would expect, therefore, that liberal moral theory and liberal political theory would historically have made the analysis and condemnation of racial injustice and the correction of racial oppression a priority, since liberalism and racism developed in the same historical period.

But these expectations would be disappointed. Far from being in principled opposition to racism, as a blatant infringement of individual rights and freedoms, liberalism has too often been complicit with it. The origins of both in modernity have tended to be manifested more in symbiosis than contradiction, with the liberal individual being so conceptualized that whiteness is a prerequisite for individuality. And the liberal state, correspondingly, has historically functioned as a racial state, the Lockean sovereign denying self-ownership rights to people of color and the Kantian state treating nonwhites as subpersons incapable of self-rule. In effect, liberalism, far from being colorless, has been a racialized white liberalism, in which both descriptive assumptions and prescriptive norms have been shaped by race. If liberalism is to be reconstructed to become the vehicle of an effective program of racial justice, a prerequisite must be an acknowledgment of this history and a self-conscious rethinking and self-purging in light of it.

RECONCEIVING LIBERALISM

Let me begin with a brief sketch of the standard narrative of the origins of liberalism. In the orthodox account, liberalism develops in opposition to the political absolutism and social hierarchy of the medieval world. By contrast with the central categories of this sociopolitical system, liberalism makes the morally equal individual its theoretical focus rather than the social estates of feudalism and, before that, antiquity. Both descriptively, in terms of how we think of the genesis of the polity, and normatively, in terms of moral ends, the individual is supposed to be the central reference point. So conceived, liberalism obviously represents a sharp break with the political assumptions of the thousands of years that preceded it. As Paul Kelly (2005: 17) writes, "Equality ... is a peculiarly modern value," one that "[p]re-modern world views such as those...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804772193
• ISBN 13: 9780804772198
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 340
• Herausgeber: Jung Moon-Kie, Costa Vargas João H., Bonilla-Silva Eduardo
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland