The aff’s identarian antiracist organizing obfuscates the role of capital in racial oppression and collapses activist efforts back into essentialized ideals of race—turning the aff.

This book contrasts two approaches to race and racism. The first I will call identarian antiracism. Identarian antiracists proceed with the notion that there are specific kinds of races (e.g., white, black, and Asian American) and that each person possesses—whether or not she can articulate it—a racial identity. This approach includes a variety of views about the nature of race. Some identarians believe race is an innate property of persons.4 In this view, I am, for example, Asian American insofar as my ancestry can be traced to Asia, I am phenotypically identifiable as Asian, I share history and habits with other Asians, and so forth. Other identarians believe that the kind of race one “is” depends on the sort of socialization one has undergone; rather than being born a certain race I  am, through processes of socialization, made—“racialized” is the operative term—a race.5 In this case, my life in America (say, the ways others identify, talk about, and relate to me, the way systems categorize me, and how resources are offered or denied to me, etc.) makes me in a relevant sense Asian American.6 To be sure, these views are not mutually exclusive since one’s phenotypical features can lead to being accordingly racialized. Whether I am born Asian American (where racial identity denotes a natural kind) or become so (denoting a social kind), identarian antiracism proceeds with the idea that I am racially Asian American. Notice that I said that identarian antiracism proceeds with a notion of racial kinds and identities. Which is not to say that it starts with it. Identarianism works out from, without working out, a notion of racial kinds and identities. This is because its primary concerns are political, not metaphysical, and it seeks above all equitable relations between those it takes for granted as racial kinds. It cares about what people are inasmuch as perceptions of what they are determine how they are treated. In other words, identarian antiracists are concerned with race because they are concerned with antiracism. Their antiracist political commitments require that they take on board in some form or fashion the notion of race—including its many problems. The politics allows identarians to look past the problems. It also permits identarian antiracism its diversity of metaphysical views about the nature of race (i.e., whether it is a natural kind or a social kind, etc.). Identarian antiracists can afford to look past the problems and remain agnostic on the metaphysical questions because they are most concerned with the problematic political questions. They adopt the notion of race not because they have worked it out, but because their politics requires it.7 These are important but often overlooked features of identarian antiracist thinking. Identarian antiracism portrays racism as the personal and systemic denigration of racial kinds by other racial kinds, focused specifically—for better or worse—on the harm black people suffer at the hands of white people. It seeks to acknowledge and address these denigrations, a task it pursues by investigating the conditions under which they occur. Its constructive vision entails lifting up those who have suffered racism. This commits identarian antiracism to the work of establishing, securing, and asserting racial identity, work which programmatically comes under familiar banners: diversity, inclusion, representation, multiculturalism, and the like. The constructive vision comes with the deconstructive need to subvert, destabilize, and attack racial kinds deemed responsible for harming others (i.e., whites and others party to their racism). As this book shows, the constructive vision along with the deconstructive tasks have the combined effect of further solidifying (even with the metaphysical agnosticism) the reality of race. In other words, identarian antiracism racializes. Religion does not play a necessary role in identarian antiracism. Which is not to say that it cannot play an important role. The deconstructive tasks might interrogate various religions for supplying racists or racist systems with ideological reasons and motivations for their racism. For example, one might point to Gnosticism’s disembodying tendencies or Christian antisemitism as evidence for religious complicity.8 Conversely, the constructive vision can be aided by utilizing certain theological formulations in order to establish, secure, and assert specific racial identities, especially when those identities have been harmed. For example, one might highlight Jewish scripture that sides YHWH with the oppressed (Exodus 3:7) or Islamic teaching that declares “a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action.”9 Religion can play a role, but it need not. Identarianism can go about its business without ever mentioning religion, religious commitments, or religious people. Identarian antiracism can be as agnostic on religion as it is on the metaphysical status of race. Neither is crucial for its primary concerns. Identarian antiracism is an approach to racism that begins and ends with racial identity, prioritizing (white) racial identity as racism’s starting point and championing (non-white) racial identity as antiracism’s end game. In the academy and beyond, identarian antiracism is the dominant approach to race and racism. Its dominance rises to the level of established doctrine. Hence, one can call it the orthodox view. To get a sense of how identarianism as an antiracist mode of analysis works, as well as the alternative approach espoused by this book, consider the matter of gentrification. In both the academic and popular imagination gentrification is often construed in narrowly racial terms. Whites push black people out of black neighborhoods. Gentrification is presented here as an instance of the far-reaching powers of whiteness and antiblackness. This is an identarian story, cast as it is with the requisite racial dramatis personae. When ethnographer Derek S. Hyra recounts the gentrification of the Shaw/ U Street section of Washington, D.C., he explains things in these terms. His Race, Class, and Politics in Cappuccino City proposes “a plausible explanation for the arrival of some Whites in traditionally low-income African American communities.”10 Hyra zeroes in on a “living the wire” mentality whereby consumptive whites, enticed by the allure of stereotypically black-branded culture (“the wire” refers to a popular HBO series about inner-city Baltimore), move in on historically black communities, snatch up property, appropriate culture, and price African Americans out of house and home. The 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco dramatizes a similar account, whereby adventurous cum progressive-minded whites take over Black San Francisco, not despite its black cultural heritage but rather because of it. Yet, like Richard Rothstein’s much celebrated The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Hyra’s book describes racism’s entanglement with housing markets without examining what such arrangements accomplish, without ever questioning what racism is for, leaving the impression that whites participate in racist systems solely for the purpose of harming black people.12 Like The Color of Law, Hyra’s identarian analysis misses what racism is—that is, what it does. Historian Destin Jenkins puts it this way: “If government was the tool by which segregation was created, who—or what—was the hand that wielded it? Curiously, The Color of Law ignores the obvious answer: capitalism. The book’s focus on law and policy shifts attention away from surplus value and patterns of extraction and exploitation, instead of focusing on these dynamics as an integral part of America’s democratic, law-making system. We might well view residential segregation as the domestic expression of the racial capitalism of the 20th century.”13 Cappuccino City’s focus is narrower still. Hyra attends to capitalism and issues of class, but his emphasis on white and black racial identity confuses matters, thereby failing to deliver on what such attention should do for any analysis of race and racism: illuminate the intrinsic relationship between racist domination and political economic exploitation.14 Hyra recognizes that the phenomenon he labels “living the wire” represents an inversion of market forces that previously redlined African Americans out of the U.S. housing market—hitherto their presence diminished property value; now (at least in this case) it elevates it. Yet, instead of interrogating a market logic whose governing principles use racial categories to judge value, he seems content with ridiculing those governed by it.15 Hyra’s insightful observations regarding the commodification of black culture fall short of realizing that racial identity and commodification go hand in hand.16 The notion that gentrification is a function of whiteness and antiblackness is only plausible if one ignores the material determinates of black displacement.17 As D.C. community organizer Alex Baca recounts, “While media attention often focuses on those few places that are witnessing a transformation, there are two more potent and less mentioned storylines. The first is the persistence of chronic poverty. Three-quarters of 1970 highpoverty urban neighborhoods in the U.S. are still poor today. The second is the spread of concentrated poverty: Three times as many urban neighborhoods have poverty rates exceeding 30 percent as was true in 1970, and the number of poor people living in these neighborhoods has doubled. The result of these trends is that the poor in the nation’s metropolitan areas are increasingly segregated into neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. In 1970, 28 percent of the urban poor lived in a neighborhood with a poverty rate of 30 percent or more; by 2010, 39 percent of the urban poor lived in such high-poverty neighborhoods.”18 Cappuccino City’s strangely individualist approach would leave unscathed entire structures and systems that utilize racial identity to facilitate African American eviction and foreclosure: explosive income inequality that concentrates wealth just as it concentrates poverty; a gold-rush approach to development and management scaled absurdly high and siphoned away from neighborhoods by the financial speculation of big money; a lack of sound government policy incentivizing infrastructure investment for existing communities, meaning that those actually committed to sustainability die the death of a thousand permits; gerrymandered political schemes that suppress communal agency long before impossible rent hikes rob people of homes; and so on.19 At the end of the day it is the persistence and spread of poverty and their antidemocratic antecedents and effects, and their structural and systemic consequences for black life, not the influx of an abstract whiteness, that displaces.20 But that story, one senses, is less tantalizing than the one Hyra tells about white hipsters. These determining factors don’t always add up to the “de jure” forms of racism Rothstein’s The Color of Law sensationalizes, but together they conspire against African American communities. Here is a picture of racism featuring no one group of individuals (e.g., red-faced sheriffs armed with firehoses and attack dogs, well-meaning mortgage lenders, or white progressives “living the wire”) but rather a whole network of oppressions carrying the force of history. The problem with the identarian mode of analysis is that it encourages one to look for the presence of certain racial personalities possessed of certain racist attitudes when one should be looking at structures and systems that often remain faceless and are no less deadly for it. The problem isn’t that in focusing on white gentrifiers Hyra “plays the race card” (as some might complain) but rather that he plays it too narrowly and thereby distracts from the fact that the whole deck of racial capitalism is stacked against anyone relegated to the bottom of the race-based political economy. Hyra turns what needs to be a broadly racial capitalist story (as Jenkins mentions) into one narrowly confined to racial identity. In failing to situate consumer preference within the concrete workings of capital—in failing to ask what redlining and displacement practically accomplish, what they profit—we are left with the sense that the problem lies with white people as such, a mythologized account of gentrification that has the practical effect of leaving the concrete reality of racism beyond reach and redress. This tendency of emphasizing racial identity to the exclusion of political economy is what I mean by identarian antiracism, what I call academic and popular antiracism’s reigning orthodoxy. This book challenges the orthodox identarian view by offering a political economic approach to race and racism. Unlike the orthodox view, my approach does not press the case for racial kinds possessed of racial identities. In fact, it considers orthodox antiracism’s intense focus on racial identity a serious impediment to the work of democratic life on the one hand and political liberation on the other. Instead of an approach to racism that emphasizes racial identity front to back, my approach foregrounds the political economy by which racial identity came to matter at all.21 It presents a genealogy whereby the ideas of race and specific racial kinds were originally established and continue to be used to facilitate domination and exploitation of a uniquely political economic variety. The story has two parts. In the first part, Americans at the end of the seventeenth century devise race in order to ideologically justify political economic domination and exploitation. The claims were thin, no more than skin deep, but because they were embedded within processes and commitments that needed them to be true, they stuck. This is the part of the story that concerns racism. A second, equally complicated part of the story concerns contemporary antiracism’s fixation with race. This book captures both parts in a continuous narrative. It relates the story as one where (1) racial capitalism originally created racial identity—a black race derivative of a white race—in order to facilitate political economic domination and exploitation and (2) antiracists now commit themselves to appropriating racial identity—and its founding white/black binary—for antiracist purposes. Given all that academic research has uncovered about the capitalist origins of white supremacy, there should be little question about the historical correlation between American capitalism and American racism (a correlation captured in this book under the designation “racial capitalism”). There should be, however, considerable debate about the strategic benefits of continuing to operate in terms of race identity, about whether race can be carried forward as unproblematically as antiracists seem to suppose. What we need, and what the genealogy demands, is an open and honest debate about whether race language can become more than it was set out to be at the foundations of American life. This book develops arguments for that debate. As said in the Preface, the lesson to be learned from this genealogy (origin story, if you will) is not one that champions postracial color-blindness, the fantasy that results when one fails to differentiate race from racialization.22 Decades of serious thinking about race teach us two things. First, we have every reason to question the view of race as a natural kind, the case for which has shown itself to be fatally flawed.23 Second, we have little reason to question the racializing effects of racial capitalism, the evidence for which is all those structures and systems racially categorizing people in order to facilitate dominative exploitation. Postracial color-blindness confuses the two, thinking that because race is not a natural kind, race concepts should be abandoned, even those that track the damage done by racial capitalism.24 Regarding racial capitalism, postracialism promotes willful ignorance, which ends up serving racial capitalism.25 Identarian antiracism, though, contributes its own confusions. The deconstructive need to track racialization combines with the constructive vision of establishing, securing, and asserting identity to produce concepts that naturalize race all over again (e.g., “whiteness” and “blackness”). Because identarian politics necessitates adopting race concepts without working out everything taken on board, this newly naturalized notion of race is left standing as an overlooked piece of orthodox dogma. Embracing racial identities that come downstream from racialization amounts to an intimate embrace of the political economy that produced them. We should avoid both confusions. Rather than willful ignorance, we need to keep track of racial capitalism’s many effects. Rather than naturalize race, we need to avoid dogmatic concepts that capitulate to racial capitalism’s identarian schemes. While they might seem mutually exclusive, postracialism and identarianism reinforce one another. What we need—what would constitute a genuine alternative to both—is consideration of political economies that do not leave us with postracialism and identarianism as our only options. Deracialization, not postracialism, should be the goal. Until that goal is met, it is unclear what racial identity comes to other than the furnishings of a political economy that continues unabated in its domination and exploitation. Properly undertaken, the debate about identarianism would raise hard questions about whether racial identity can be appropriated in the way antiracists want to believe it can. Can we, for example, talk about “yellow power” as some Asian American antiracists did in the 1960s without capitulating to the political economy that coined “yellow peril” in order to exploit Chinese migrants in the 1860s?26 Identarians have designs here of hijacking a concept meant for harm and redeploying it for good, reverse-engineering its use from dominative exploitation to political liberation. Can we not appropriate for good that which was meant for evil?27 Conducting this debate is not the primary point of this book, which offers proposals beyond identarianism. At minimum, those committed to keeping racial identity on the table will need to theorize its possibilities through its political economic origins. If I am right about identarianism’s dominance within contemporary antiracism, it will be these questions about the legacy of racial identity that become for many readers a particular bone of contention.28 This book takes the position that while antiracists would understandably want to take the path of appropriating racism’s central concepts, racial identity cannot be so easily appropriated. It cannot for the simple reason that the same political economy that deployed racial identity in the first place still determines the conditions of its use.29 Even if that were not the case, and I try to show throughout that it is, it is nevertheless surprising how rarely antiracists acknowledge the commanding role racial capitalism has played throughout American history. The omission suggests that identarian antiracism does not fully appreciate the stakes of the matter, nor the possibilities that remain. Of course, the mere coincidence of racial identity and racial capitalism is not enough to prove that something untoward has occurred. An argument will need to be made. This book offers one such argument for the claim that racial identity remains wedded to racial capitalism, and it submits those racialized as Asian Americans as evidence for the claim. In relationship to Asian Americans, identarianism comes up short in two telling ways. First, American race politics constructs race in a manner that marginalizes Asian Americans. Here I refer to the racial binary (between white and black) that governs the lives of those it identifies as Asian American. The racial binary limits their existence to a racial existence: who they are reduces to who they are racially. At the same time the racial binary determines the substance of that existence: who they are reduces to who they are relative to a white/black binary. Because race is presumed to work for those identified as white and black (i.e., those who are conceptually prioritized by the binary), it is presumed to work for others. Even if it doesn’t. It should be no surprise then that orthodox antiracism ends up marginalizing those already marginalized by racism.30 Over the course of the book, I offer a number of examples, some quite involved, along these lines. Second, as an explanatory concept racial identity explains very little about Asian Americans.31 Conceptually, racial identity is notoriously unwieldy. Yet identarians insist on using it in order to get at highly complex phenomena like racism, nativism, political community, democratic life, moral agency, and the like. The strategy of using unwieldy concepts to explain complex phenomena results in outcomes that are unsurprisingly mired in analytical problems. While indications of these problems are everywhere present, this book takes up the task of carefully laying out the evidence and delineating the question-begging structure of arguments that begin with racial identity (e.g., “Because of whiteness, white people. . . .”). Failure to pay heed to these problems puts antiracism on the wrong path. My argument proceeds as if that path has become so confused and convoluted that any hope of dismantling racism now involves dismantling significant aspects of antiracist thought. If we have reached a point where we need to, as Eddie S. Glaude suggests, “begin again” (more precisely, continuously begin again), then we need to venture rethinking even our most cherished concepts, including those related to racial identity.32 Throughout my argument, Asian Americans play a central role in challenging antiracist orthodoxy. Their experience within the dominant discourse shows that identarianism harms more than it helps (or that it harms at least as much as it helps but the harms do not so easily register). They similarly demonstrate that identarianism’s intense focus on racial identity severely limits its explanatory power (i.e., racial identity tells us little more than that and how persons are racially identified). Racial identity misconstrues identity, and therefore persons, making of identity’s translational, provisional, and pragmatic character something essential, permanent, and ideal.33 Emphasizing race above all other forms of identification—where one’s racial identity determines everything about one’s identity—then has the effect of misconstruing how identity works altogether. Racial identity misleads not only about race but also about identity, not only about racial persons but persons as such. As a whole, the book argues that replacing identarian antiracism with an antiracist approach focused on political economy gets us closer to overcoming racism. By explaining race and racism in terms of the historical and material contexts that produced and perpetuate race thinking and racist arrangements, political economy better explains what racism is, how it works, and what liberation entails and constrains. Relying, as identarianism increasingly does, on vague concepts like “whiteness” (i.e., that which determines history without answering to it) might be rhetorically useful, but it will not in the end get us very far. Rather than limiting ourselves to racial identity and rather than deploying concepts that float free of history, we might consider approaches that help us understand why racial identity came to matter at all. By narrating identarian antiracism in continuity with racism’s fixation with racial identity (that is, by telling both parts of the origin story), my political economic approach tries to understand the reigning orthodoxy better than it understands itself. Correspondingly, because it does not press the case for racial identity, it does not, as the identarian binaries do, prioritize some people to the exclusion of others. In my approach, each racialized person counts the same, as racialized and therefore commodified. There is not in this approach some conceptually privileged racialized group (some uncommodified racial group), either on account of access to power or proximity to suffering. To be racialized just is to be commodified. As a result, this non-identarian view of persons creates space for coalitional solidarity since your belonging to a group is not made to depend on your belonging to a certain race (which will segregate you from some just as it will join you to others). Belonging instead involves shared patterns of common life by which you and others mutually discover who you are. Coalitional solidarity premised on racial identity turns the degree of one’s racial suffering into the basis for one’s belonging, with predictable results—only certain races count. When race (e.g., “whiteness”) serves as the common enemy around which a coalition is built, then racial identity (i.e., one’s suffering owing to one’s race) becomes the criterion for participation. Just as race narrows what counts as suffering, so it narrows pathways for shared forms of life. When identity precedes liberative politics, it too often precludes it. Racial identity becomes a conversation stopper. When identity instead arrives as an achievement of shared struggle in revolutionary forms of love, identities (who and what we are) form around common liberative agendas.34 Inasmuch as racism stems from a baseline commodifying political economy and insofar as that political economy seeks to dominate and exploit everyone and everything, antiracism will need to provide remedies wide enough to overcome it. Identarianism’s individualizing approach will not do. If we hope to succeed, we will need others.