{"id":1038,"date":"2020-05-11T13:42:59","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T17:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/?p=1038"},"modified":"2020-05-12T13:41:32","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T17:41:32","slug":"frank-s-hong-racism-and-its-mutations-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/frank-s-hong-racism-and-its-mutations-in-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Frank S. Hong | Racism and Its Mutations in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Frank S. Hong*<\/strong><\/p>\n

The concept of racism is a vector. Its weight is measured in history, and its direction in real time. The edifice of the United States of America at its founding made no mention of race. The founding fathers had a powerful capacity of discounting \u201caberrations\u201d. They saw \u201call [white] men\u201d were created equal in their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Students at Yale, to their horror, realized that their dorm buildings were named after slave owners and demanded removal of those tainted names. But do they really have to delve into the archives to face racism in their neighborhood? The concept of racism finds its maximum efficacy in directing at the racism of one\u2019s own time. This isn\u2019t easy. As Frantz Fanon forewarned: \u201cEach generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.\u201d1 <\/sup>Homi K. Bhabha found this line one of Fanon\u2019s most enigmatic and inspiring pronouncements in his Foreword to The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>.2<\/sup><\/p>\n

What is \u201crelative opacity\u201d? Take White House counselor Kellyanne Conway as an example. \u201cThis is COVID-19, not COVID-1, folks,” Conway said in her live interview on Fox News on April 16, 2020. \u201cYou would think that people charged with the World Health Organization facts and figures would be on top of that.\u201d3 <\/sup>Putting aside her attempt of scapegoating the WHO and her stunning ignorance while the nation was deep into the COVID-19 crisis, she did reveal a rational way of seeing the world. Presumably leveraging her real-life experience in Windows 1.0 all the way to Windows 10, she surmised that COVID-19 must have meant the 19th iteration of the disease. Her ignorance was deplorable, but her cognitive approach, i.e. using a little abstract framework, albeit a mistaken one, to assimilate her new experience, was rational. She unduly gave herself and her nation an opacity, or a blunder, rather, as a result of her hubris and laziness. Not all opacities can be seen through so easily. The domino, the white plastic bottle touted by Collin Powell at the UN (Feb 5th 2003), the SPVs off<\/em> the balance sheets of Enron, the toxicity of tranches of mortgage debt instruments with AAA ratings, the financial destruction unleased by the fancy named Quantitative Easing \u2026 are on the scale of relative <\/em>opacity.<\/p>\n

To understand the challenge in calling out racism in real time, we must go back to the roots beneath the family resemblance of racism, orientalism and colonialism, which initially had nothing to do with races or skin colors. The roots lie in a mode of abstraction that filters out humanity, namely, by way of an example, where Marx saw \u201chuman\u201d, Gary Becker only saw \u201ccapital\u201d, as noted by Professor Etienne Balibar at the seminar on \u201cReading Capital\u201d, part of Critique 13\/13 this year.4<\/sup><\/p>\n

We need to trace this virus in abstraction further back with a little help from Max Weber. Weber stayed away from a simplistic causal model of how capitalism rose in certain parts of Europe. Instead, he repeatedly pointed at \u201celective affinity\u201d between certain streams of the Protestant spirit and the mode of thinking<\/em> or frame of mind<\/em> undergirding modern capitalism.5<\/sup> As noted by Weber, capitalism cannot function without certain degree of calculability and predictability in science, accounting, law and bureaucracy. For the western mind, abstraction is the reason, and reason exerts its power by way of abstraction. Abstraction is, by definition, cold and ruthless. If a body of rules warms to myriad circumstances, it loses the potency of abstraction. As Weber put it, \u201cthe peculiarly professional, legalistic, and abstract approach to law in the modern sense is possible only in the measure that the law is formal in character. In so far as the absolute formalism of classification according to \u2018sense-data characteristics\u2019 prevails, it exhausts itself in casuistry.\u201d6<\/sup><\/p>\n

In the last 500 years or so, Europeans have perfected the \u201cformal rationality\u201d, to use Weber\u2019s concept, in engineering, law, bureaucracy etc., which helps constituting the apparatus of world domination. The power of such domination as we experience daily in racial relationship, international relationship, domestic wealth distribution etc. comes from that privileged epistemological position. Poetic power notwithstanding, the phenomenology in Darkwater:<\/em> Voices from Within the Veil <\/em>or Black Skin, White Masks <\/em>lacks firepower at the level of epistemology. The authors\u2019 fight against racisms and colonialism became scattered and often tragic skirmishes of \u201cmovement\u201d. A war of \u201cposition\u201d as hoped by Anthony Gramsci was not possible until Gilles Deleuze brought in his intellectual firepower. Deleuze\u2019s war was a nomad\u2019s war of movement against the fixed position, so much more profound than Gramsci could have ever imagined.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed,\u201d declared Deleuze.7<\/sup> The target of Deleuze\u2019s attack was \u201cState Philosophy\u201d,8<\/sup> the representational abstraction model that privileges an identical thinking subject in the perpetual pursuit of the identity between subject and object.9<\/sup> Adorno ended up in despair and exhaustion after his heavy lifting in Philosophy \u2013 seeking to overcome the dualism of subject and object by the so-called negative dialectic.10<\/sup> Deleuze joyfully declared that he detested nothing more than Hegelianism and dialectics.11<\/sup> Deleuze\u2019s process <\/em>philosophy brought to bear on \u201cthe Course of Human Events\u201d, the very first, but the least noticed phrase in the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n

The very institution of mass incarceration, the growing homeless population after 40 years of essentially inconsequential efforts of relief and the sickening death rate of African Americans over Covid-19 are the monstrous children Deleuze would have recognized. Fanon already saw this coming, \u201cTwo centuries ago, a former European colony took it into its head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of America has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions.\u201d12 <\/sup>Deleuze\u2019s enormous contribution lies in providing an alternative epistemology that allows us to mount a frontal attack on the State Philosophy and free us from \u201crelative opacity\u201d once and for all. Sartre would have referred to the above enumerated monstrous children as examples of boomerang.13<\/sup> But Deleuze rejected the long arc of dialectics favored by Sartre. Instead, Deleuze plumbed the basement to observe emissions, leaks and lines of flights: the master\u2019s sperms flowing into Sally Heming\u2019s body; the micropolitics that produced President Trump, or fascism inside those who readily claim antifascism on the molar level.14<\/sup> As Deleuze predicted, \u201ca society is defined by its lines of flight\u201d,15<\/sup> like the video footage of Joe Biden\u2019s bowing to a Chinese man in Trump\u2019s reelection campaign ads. The Chinese man turned out to be Gary Locke, formerly Governor of Washington. The error is only recognizable at the molar level. But it is the sublimated resonance of the image that really matters in this fine game practiced in the name of democracy.<\/p>\n

Deleuze worked out the full potential of Weber\u2019s insight behind his metaphor of \u201celective affinity\u201d. The same process of becoming<\/em> that explained the rise of capitalism fueled by Puritans\u2019 \u201cvocational calling\u201d also explains the mutations of \u201cChristian asceticism \u2026 in renouncing the world, however, had assisted religion, through the cloister, to dominate the world.\u201d16<\/sup> In modern time, David Scott FitzGerald & David Cook-Martin\u2019s Culling the Masses, <\/em>based on their detailed study of the evolution of immigration laws in six American nations, presents a compelling case on the \u201celective affinity\u201d between liberalism and racism.17<\/sup> Their theoretical case would be much stronger if they borrow the fire power of Deleuze\u2019s \u201clines of flight\u201d, which is much more grounded metaphysically than the ad hoc<\/em> metaphor of \u201celective affinity\u201d.<\/p>\n

State Philosophy still calls shots from the height of the privileged epistemological position, albeit with a weakened voice. \u201cGod has not been preparing the English speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-administration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns…. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples,\u201d stated Senator Albert Beveridge, a historian and intellectual leader at the time when the United States sought to annex the Philippines.18<\/sup> A few days ago, Senator Thomas Cotton said Chinese students should be allowed \u201cto come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that\u2019s what they need to learn from America \u2026 They don\u2019t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.\u201d Progress has been made in that Cotton acknowledged the Chinese had the ability to study science, but \u201cthe educated ignorance of white schools\u201d (W. E. B. Du Bois) is obviously alive and well. This \u201csocially sanctioned ignorance\u201d goes a long way, as Lorraine Code masterfully put forth in her analysis of George Eliot\u2019s novel Daniel Deronda<\/em> and James Mill\u2019s History of British India<\/em>. \u201cMill celebrates, takes pride in his ignorance of daily life in India, claiming it allows him to produce a supremely objective history.\u201d19<\/sup> To borrow Code\u2019s phrases, \u201csocially embedded ignorance\u201d holds tenaciously against non-conforming facts from other countries in the fight against Covid-19; \u201cit is intransigently entrenched, sedimented, ossified \u2013 requiring more than mere empirical counterexamples to dislodge it. It claims the power to discount \u2018aberration\u2019 from its dogmatic certainty: indeed, ironically, socially sanctioned ignorance carries an air of certainty even more stubborn than knowledge.\u201d20<\/sup> That stubborn ignorance \u201cis a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all places of joy dark as a buried Babylon,\u201d21<\/sup> or America in 2020 where over 60,000 people have died of Covid-19.<\/p>\n

*Columbia Law School, LL.M. 2020<\/p>\n

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Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

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