Race and America's Long War

Abstract

This collection of essays examines the centrality of racial violence in US domestic and foreign policy. With impressive historical breadth, Singh shows that the United States’ political identity relies on declaring war against an imagined racial other. Ample evidence, starting with the Indian wars and enslavement of Africans and continuing into the global war on terror, shatters all images of the United States as a post-racial, international peacekeeper.US politicians have consciously generated such images since World War II, argues Singh in the book's substantial introduction. Laying the groundwork for the five essays that follow, “The Long War” provides numerous examples of US domestic politics informing its foreign wars and vice versa, continually invoking the language of racial inferiority used during the violent subjugation of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. Emphasizing race as the powerful, ideological link between the United States’ national and global exploits—even as its leaders eschew racist terminology and deny the existence of a US empire—is this book's greatest contribution to scholarship on race, ethnicity, and US political history.The five subsequent essays elaborate the ways US politicians have used racial language and ideology to perpetuate their belief in the country's manifest destiny. In “Race, War, Police,” Singh deftly explains that the war at home takes the form of policing black and brown bodies with the paternalistic rationalization that people of color are incapable of governing themselves and warrant protection from one another. This rationalization then extends to foreign others, leading to long wars ostensibly necessary to save less developed nations from themselves. One war reinforces another, while shoring up white American privilege without explicitly naming race.Capitalism depends on these wars, Singh argues in “From War Capitalism to Race War,” where he critiques Marxist thought for ignoring racialized slave labor as essential to the rise of global capitalism while enslaved Black people were still, as Marx was writing, violently forced to toil for US prosperity. Singh calls for expanding Marxist analysis to recognize those excluded, often racially, from traditional wage labor—“the slave, the migrant worker, the household worker, and the unemployed” (p. 92)—as they are the very reason wage labor can exist for those deemed employable by white American capitalism.Singh continues analyzing the ironies of US empire in “The Afterlife of Fascism,” explaining that through emphasizing American democratic liberalism as the opposite of Nazi fascism, the post–World War II United States actually advances its own fascism in the name of democratization. Such is the twisted logic of the global war on terror, which draws on the Orientalist language used to justify previous US wars in Asia, both to legitimate the war and to defend the torture of those imprisoned from Arab-Muslim countries. Singh is clear: imperial expansionism, not neoliberal exceptionalism, defines the United StatesSingh illuminates still another paradox of the neoliberal United States in “Racial Formation and Permanent War”—that is, the more it preaches racial inclusion, the more it practices racial exclusion through its ostensibly color-blind economic and criminal justice policies. Social analysis has not kept pace with this political manipulation of race, Singh maintains, while presenting Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (Routledge, 1986) as the last definitive theoretical work on race. Extrapolating this work to the twenty-first century, Singh posits that race never exists before the political impetus to create socio-economic hierarchies, but, rather, race results from these hierarchies, changing its meaning and membership to accommodate new groups’ violent assertions of power.By the time Singh turns to the question of how President Trump rose to power, in “The Present Crisis,” readers already have the answer: Trump's victory was the culmination of centuries of racial violence made blatant. Singh is as concerned with how President Obama paved the way for Trump as he is with the political machinations of Trump's administration. For Singh, Obama proves that racial violence is so embedded in US neoliberalism that it can be operationalized regardless of the race of those in power. Rather than wondering at Trump's ascent, Singh advises, the Left should dismantle Trump's appeals to a “white working class” (p. 176) as today's working class are, in truth, multi-racial victims of US neoliberalism.Singh's brief epilogue ends with an appeal to terminate US race wars at home and abroad. Unfortunately, this appeal is unlikely to reach those politicians, activists, and policymakers most equipped to comply. Singh's dense, academic prose, coupled with his abstract analysis, renders this book inaccessible to many, including those new to the study of race, ethnicity, and US political history. Nevertheless, both the book's format and Singh's compelling rhetoric allow readers to limit themselves to any one essay and still walk away with a deep and lasting understanding of racial violence as the bedrock of US empire.