Race Ain’t Never Stayed The Same!
Ideas around race are always changing. From the fact that “race” was not the basis of indentured servitude in the early colonial years before chattel slavery was implemented, to the fact that some European ethnicities who we consider White today were not considered White at some point, the meanings around race and why it matters are not static, but always in a state of flux. We need people to realize that these changes are always brought about because of socio-historical context. And we must see that, today, economic conflict and racial ideology are not separate issues, but intimately connected.
Racialization: The Historical Development of Race
“In the United States, the racial category of "black" evolved with the consolidation of racial slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani, etc., were rendered "black" by an ideology of exploitation based on racial logic—the establishment and maintenance of a "color line." This of course did not occur overnight. A period of indentured servitude which was not rooted in racial logic preceded the consolidation of racial slavery. With slavery, however, a racially based understanding of society was set in motion which resulted in the shaping of a specific racial identity not only for the slaves but for the European settlers as well. Winthrop Jordan has observed: "From the initially common term Christian, at mid-century there was a marked shift toward the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of self-identification appeared—white."19
We must understand that the ideas we currently hold around race are not stable or static, but are always changing. Race has always taken on new meanings and been shaped by socio-historical context.
....Particularly during the nineteenth century, the category of "white" was subject to challenges brought about by the influx of diverse groups who were not of the same Anglo-Saxon stock as the founding immigrants. In the nineteenth century, political and ideological struggles emerged over the classification of Southern Europeans, the Irish and Jews, among other "nonwhite" categories.21 Nativism was only effectively curbed by the institutionalization of a racial order that drew the color line around, rather than within, Europe. By stopping short of racializing immigrants from Europe after the Civil War, and by subsequently allowing their assimilation, the American racial order was reconsolidated in the wake of the tremendous challenge placed before it by the abolition of racial slavery.22 With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, an effective program for limiting the emergent class struggles of the later nineteenth century was forged: the definition of the working class in racial terms—as "white." This was not accomplished by any legislative decree or capitalist maneuvering to divide the working class, but rather by white workers themselves. Many of them were recent immigrants, who organized on racial lines as much as on traditionally defined class lines.23 The Irish on the West Coast, for example, engaged in vicious anti-Chinese race-baiting and committed many pogrom-type assaults on Chinese in the course of consolidating the trade union movement in California. Thus the very political organization of the working class was in important ways a racial project. The legacy of racial conflicts and arrangements shaped the definition of interests and in turn led to the consolidation of institutional patterns (e.g., segregated unions, dual labor markets, exclusionary legislation) which perpetuated the color line within the working class. Selig Perlman, whose study of the development of the labor movement is fairly sympathetic to this process, notes that: The political issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not merely the ballot, but also "direct action"-violence. The anti-Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian [sic] labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.24 More recent economic transformations in the US have also altered interpretations of racial identities and meanings. The automation of southern agriculture and the augmented labor demand of the postwar boom transformed blacks from a largely rural, impoverished labor force to a largely urban, working-class group by 1970.25 When boom became bust and liberal welfare statism moved rightwards, the majority of blacks came to be seen, increasingly, as part of the "underclass," as state "dependents." Thus the particularly deleterious effects on blacks of global and national economic shifts (generally rising unemployment rates, changes in the employment structure away from reliance on labor intensive work, etc.) were explained once again in the late 1970s and 1980s (as they had been in the 1940s and mid-1960s) as the result of defective black cultural norms, of familial disorganization, etc.26 In this way new racial attributions, new racial myths, are affixed to “blacks.”27 Similar changes in racial identity are presently affecting Asians and Latinos, as such economic forces as increasing Third World impoverishment and indebtedness fuel immigration and high interest rates, Japanese competition spurs resentments, and US jobs seem to fly away to Korea and Singapore.28 . . . “
Next time someone pinpoints economic issues in communities of color as a cultural deficiency (blaming it on hip-hop music, for example) show them this.
Curious? Skeptical? Want to read more? Follow the link below:
http://homepage.smc.edu/delpiccolo_guido/Soc34/Soc34readings/omiandwinant.pdf
