Habits of Hostility

Abstract

When the critical legal theorist Gary Peller was growing up during the period of school desegregation in Atlanta, he was chosen among a select group of high school students to participate in a city-wide project of "unlearning racism." The students were brought together in a large room, the lights were turned off, and the students were invited to touch each other's faces in the dark. The lesson hoped for was that, in the dark, the students would learn that race makes no difference. Peller persuasively critiques this exercise as a sham because, when the lights were turned back on, the economic and political disparities between the black and white communities in Atlanta were still in place, and a serious attempt to address racism had to address those disparities. But in one sense, the school administrators understood correctly the importance of racialized visible differences in student interaction. By eliminating visibility, they hoped the usual distrust and hostility would be absent and new forms of interaction might surface. Unfortunately, the lights had to be turned back on, and things were then indeed, as Peller says, just the same. In this essay I want to think through the relationship between the visibility of race and racism. If one believes that the very existence of race entails racism, this question will be a non-starter, but I want to table that issue at least for the moment. That issue, of whether race entails racism, turns on the way in which we understand racial identity, which needs a lengthy argument itself. If we understand racial identity as a historically created, socially important category that essentially names a cultural identity, it is not clear to me that racist hierarchies are entailed. Nonetheless, to identify a cultural group through their visible racialized features (that is, features in which race is thought to inhere) seems arbitrary and, at least, inherently dangerous. If the viability of race as a category of identity depends on its cultural rather than physical manifestations, shouldn't the whole process of seeing race come to an end? This is the topic that I want to focus on in this essay: the visibility of race. Peller is surely right that eliminating the visible practices of racialization is not sufficient for the elimination of racism, but we might still ask: is it perhaps necessary? It is easy to imagine a situation, such as Danzy Senna describes in her autobiographical novel, Caucasia, in which two sisters share the same two parents, grow up in the same house, but are assigned different racial identities.1 If their parents differ in racial background, or if even just one parent comes from a "mixed" background, this scenario is all too common in social contexts, such as North America, where gradations of skin color or alterations in hair texture signify differences of type. In other words, though siblings are genetically closer than any other human relationship, racial identity can be assigned differentially without regard to ancestry, background experiences, or biology. I raise this to underscore the complete idiocy of practices of racial seeing that ground identity on such trivial criteria. But one might then wonder the following: would I prefer that the two sisters share a racial identity, on one side or the other? Am I suggesting that though their "visible" race is thought to differ, their "real" race, based on genetic inheritance, is the same? This is equally absurd. It would seem then that neither biological nor morphological features should have the power of designating race. However, it is an indisputable fact about the social reality of mainstream North America that racial consciousness works through learned practices and habits of visual discrimination and visible marks on the body. In this way, race operates differently from ethnic or cultural identities, which can be transcended, with enough effort. Inherent to the concept of race is the idea that it exists there on the body itself, not simply on its ornaments or in its behaviors. …