E3W Literature | University of Texas

Wahneema Lubiano, Ed.
The House That Race Built: Black Americans, US Terrain
Pantheon, 1997
323 pages
$23
The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today
Vintage, 1998
336 pages
$14.95

Reviewed by Jeremy Dean

Race relations in the US often seem to defy progressive views of American history. At times, they appear even anachronistic: ways of thinking and acting from a supposedly distant past erupt into the present. Fifty years after the landmark civil rights case that ended state-sanctioned segregation in public education, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the nation’s schools remain highly segregated. In 2007, as schools continued to struggle against “de facto” forces of racial isolation, the Supreme Court took a major step backwards in denying two districts in Seattle and Louisville the right to diversify their classrooms. Both districts had considered race as a factor in the placement of students in schools in an effort to prevent re-segregation. In what dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens identified as the “cruel irony” of the Court’s decision, conservative defenders invoked the legacy of Brown. If the use of race was unconstitutional in segregation, they argued, so was it unconstitutional in desegregation. As Clarence Thomas wrote simply, “What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today.” For Thomas, both Parents Involved v. Seattle District No. 1 and Brown uphold the ideal of a color-blind constitution and further a politics that believes that a colorless society is the apotheosis of American democracy. Indeed, this Supreme Court decision is perhaps the most significant one in an era, beginning at the close of the last century, that has been increasingly defined by a deracialization of American politics bookending the major successes of the Civil Rights Movement.

To speak of the anachronism of race relations in the US, then, is not to challenge the progress of civil rights in this country—though we should perhaps continue to question how far we have come, even as we celebrate our achievements—but to attest to the ongoing centrality of race in the construction of the nation, citizenship, and everyday American experience. Originally published in 1997, the essays in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, US Terrain, edited by Wahneema Lubiano, constitute a deeply historical testament of this anachronism. The House That Race Built is a selection of papers given at the Race Matters Conference at Princeton in 1994, which followed the publication of Cornel West’s 1992 book of the same title. Writing in a historical moment characterized, as some would have it, by the declining significance of race, the writers affirm that indeed race does still matter. As West himself summarizes in an “Afterword” to the collection, the essays share the claims that “antiblack racism is integral, not marginal, to the existence and sustenance of American society” and “race remains the most explosive issue in the country today.” Revealing the pervasiveness of race as a category of everyday life in the US, the contributors to The House That Race Built write from a wide variety of disciplines including English, history, African American studies, urban studies, sociology, political economy, law, and theology. Nor is culture subordinated to economics in this multi-faceted analysis, as Stuart Hall insists in his contribution: “questions of culture” are “deadly political questions” and critical to the mobilization of political activism. The combined scholarship in this volume—as Lubiano writes in her “Introduction,” “the best new thinking on the subject”—represents many of the major trends in the field of critical race theory at the time the book was published.

In her essay, “Color Blindness, History, and the Law,” Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw offers legal evidence of the anachronism of race relations in the US, arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), not Brown remains the dominant paradigm of American racial thought. She anticipates Parents v. Seattle when she writes that “Brown itself has been deployed to do the work of legitimating racial hierarchy” and, further, she offers a cogent critique of such forces: “treating different things the same can generate as much an inequality as treating the same things differently.” Here and throughout The House That Race Built, one senses a response, at times direct, to the critique of affirmative action and other race-based policies. For Crenshaw, the “continuing presence” of Plessy is evident in the contemporary adherence to “formal equality”—“separate but equal” train cars, schools—without any substantial redistributive justice. According to the logic of Plessy, such redistribution should, perhaps even will, be taken care of by the supposedly even playing field of the marketplace. Crenshaw’s argument is just one example of the against the grain readings of US history contained in The House That Race Built, but this claim is not to suggest that the scholarship is ahistorical, even as it points out the anachronism of American race relations. That these essays emerge out of a distinct social and political moment is evidenced in topical references to Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, South African apartheid, Bush, Clinton, the Balkan conflict, O.J. Simpson, and even Tanya Harding. Moreover, Crenshaw’s essay contributes to one of the overall arguments of The House That Race Built: as Lubiano writes, “we are currently in the midst of a dangerous reconsolidation of white racial nationalism and racial domination taking place under new quasi-respectable ideologies.”

In a historical account of this trend, Stephen Steinberg unearths another anachronism of the contemporary deracialization of American politics, comparing the current “liberal retreat” from racial politics to the end of Reconstruction more than a century before. Just as the Republicans of the late nineteenth century abandoned Southern blacks after fighting beside them in the Civil War, Steinberg observes that white liberals have again forsaken a politics that would serve African Americans after marching with them during the Civil Rights Movement. The recent neglect of race-based public policy is most evident perhaps in the Reagan-era dismantling of the welfare state, outlined by Robin D.G. Kelley’s thick contextualization of the postindustrial US city. True to Lubiano’s introductory note, though, the essays in The House That Race Built are unforgiving of both Right and Left. The allegedly color-blind agenda of the American public sphere continued, as David Roediger demonstrates—furthering his argument in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)—through the “new Democratic” electoral politics of the Clinton Presidency in which the white working class is “defined much more by the adjective than by the noun.” For Steinberg, the turn away from a politics of race begins with the Moynihan-influenced rhetoric of Lyndon B. Johnson, through which “The conceptual groundwork was being laid for a drastic shift in policy: the focus would no longer be on white racism, but rather on the deficiencies of blacks themselves.” After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, Steinberg asserts, institutional responsibility for the “American dilemma” of race and democracy was absolved. In its place, individual pathology, namely the breakdown of the black family, was blamed for further problems. It was time, so the argument went, for blacks to “get their own house in order.” The House That Race Built argues against this neo-liberal logic, renewing instead a systemic critique of racial hierarchy in the US.

But even falsely race-neutral politics, the contributors seem to agree, has made racism less easily identifiable; that race matters must be argued is evidence of this change. West’s use of the term “white supremacy” in his “Afterword” might at first seem anachronistic, but the authors in The House That Race Built repeatedly invoke the notion that though bigotry may not be as overt as in the era of Jim Crow, its newfound subtlety is all the more insidious. As activist academic Angela Davis writes, “race matters in ways that are far more threatening and simultaneously less discernible than those to which we have grown accustomed.” Her essay, “Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry,” models the cultural work of the essays collected in The House That Race Built: in an era of color-blindness, these authors render the hidden structures of race visible. Davis argues that current conceptions of crime operate as a mask for racist thinking. “Prison,” she writes, “is the perfect site for the simultaneous production and concealment of racism.” To unmask the racism of the American justice system, Davis uses the rhetoric of abolition in her anti-prison activism. The recent events in Jena, Louisiana could not have more poetically and tragically signaled a similar anachronism in race matters. The nooses used by white high school students to terrorize their black classmates, as media accounts noted, were reminiscent of post-Reconstruction racial violence, but the inequity of the punishments for the young men involved in the subsequent incidents is indicative of the continued mass incarceration of black youth. This institutional injustice revealed that the events in Jena were not merely the result of misbehaving teenage boys, but are part of a longer history of American race relations. Similarly, the problem of race in The House That Race Built cannot be blamed on a few bad tenants, but is structural to the house itself.

While The House That Race Built offers much in its deconstruction of racial hierarchy, a large part of its contribution to African American studies is in its articulation of racial specificity. Many of the essays attend to what Lubiano refers to in her “Introduction” as “within-the-group-dynamics.” In “What is Black Culture?” David Lionel Smith questions the blind allegiance of black scholars to African American folk traditions, arguing that it is their responsibility to approach black “common sense” with more skepticism. Smith writes that “‘black culture’ is not a fixed, single thing ‘out there’ in the empirical world…it is, rather, a complex and ambiguous set of processes and interactions, facts and fantasies, assertions and inquiries, passionately held and passionately contested.” As a whole, the essays in The House That Race Built work to reveal this complexity in African American personhood and community, evidencing at once black resistance to the racial consolidation of the nineties, but also, at times, its complicity. The contributions of Lubiano and Kelley to the collection exemplify a double method that underlies the volume as a whole: one that locates complicity in what appears as resistance, as in Lubiano’s critique of the patriarchy of black nationalism, and resistance in what appears as complicity, as in Robin D.G. Kelley’s reading of inner-city youth culture. The subtlety of contemporary racism with its liberal guises and incessant appropriations requires such a subtle critique, which itself deploys the same strategies. In his “Playing for Keeps: Pleasure and Profit on the Postindustrial Playground,” as he did in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (1996), Kelley offers a finely nuanced analysis of class struggle, arguing that, through their own ingenuity, urban youth have put the joblessness created by Regean-era cutbacks to work for themselves, especially in the cultural productions of hip-hop, graffiti and break-dancing. Lubiano, however, argues in her “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense,” in which she analyzes African American family values as expressed in examples from both popular culture and political activism, that “Any narrative that insists that responsible reproductive black masculinity is the central signifier and affirmer of black maleness is a policing of black male sexual desire.” While Kelley’s argument retains a degree of agency for black youth within capitalist co-optation through their own reappropriations, for Lubiano, “There is no way of being outside the state.”

Lubiano’s essay demonstrates one of the most substantial contributions to the field of critical race studies offered by The House That Race Built, what I will call the “constellation theory” that underlies much of the scholarship in this collection. For Lubiano, definitions of blackness are intimately interconnected with definitions of gender and sexuality and cannot be considered separately. The essays by Kendall Thomas and Rhonda M. Williams follow Lubiano directly in questioning mainstream black culture’s heteronormativity. The authors of The House That Race Built view race within a larger field of other cultural indices including not only gender and sexuality, but class and ethnicity as well. As sociologist Howard Winant, perhaps the foremost expert on racial formation in the US, writes in his essay, “Racial Dualism at Century’s End,” “No individual belongs to ‘just’ one socially constructed category: each has his or her multiple racial, gender, class-based, national identities, and that’s just a start of the list…Nor are these categories uniform or stable; we are Whitmanesque, we contain multitudes.” Or, as Patricia Williams puts it quite simply in the essay “The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness,” echoing her work in The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1992): “representations of race and gender inequality in the United States are endlessly complicated.” Like Williams, who considers the history of various ethnicities in the US as integral to understanding black experience, Neil Gotanda offers a multiethnic approach in his discussion of the constellation of race relations in contemporary Los Angeles through analyses of the interactivity among blacks, Asians, and whites in two major trials from the nineties. Particularly important given contemporary arguments for the rising significance of class instead of race—as in Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995) and his more recent The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006)—are Roediger and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s insistence that race cannot be separated from class in our understandings of cultural identity.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument in 1903 that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” is reiterated in the essays in The House That Race Built. But a decade after its publication, seven years into the twenty-first century, race is no less central to everyday American experience. The Jena nooses flash through time from the Jim Crow era. In their light, race itself appears as an anachronism, unwilling to be consigned to the past, to a single, previous century. Race relations can and must be historicized, but race exists outside time. It is not a chapter in US history, ending with Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement or the election of a black president, but is permanently interwoven into our national experience. As Toni Morrison writes, the goal must be to “to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home.” The essays in The House That Race Built work to imagine this space, or as Morrison continues, to “conceive of a third, if you pardon the expression, world.”