2006

Race and The Miner's Canary

Étienne Balibar

The recent reading to which I want to refer comes from the Prologue of Lani Guinier's book (written with Gerald Torres): The Miner's Canary. (1) Lani Guinier recalls that, while she was writing on her computer a paper with a reference to "a black woman from Texas", her eight-year old son who was reading over her shoulder asked her to "take out the word 'black'. It doesn't matter, Mom". She would argue with her son, defending the political idea that in some occasions, the racial name had to be vindicated, and drawing from her own experiences. "Niko persisted. So I asked my son: 'Well, what should I say? Would you feel better if I had written: "An attractive person from Texas asked to take a picture with me"?' He said, 'No, she is a woman.' 'Why,' I asked, 'does it matter that she is a woman but not a black woman?' Niko did not hesitate to draw a distinction. 'You cannot just write "a person", because there is still sexual abuse.' He had learned about sexual abuse in school, and he offered to demonstrate what he meant...." As a consequence, Guinier embarks on explaining in a parallel way what "racial abuse" could be, e.g. if her son were shouted at in the street as "nigger", which distresses her son. "Then, he almost whispered, 'Mom, will someone ever call me that?' I was torn. I did not want to mislead my son, yet I was sad to scare him so early in his life. Reluctantly, I said, 'I'm afraid that is possible.' Niko whimpered, 'Mom, you just made me wish I was white!' 'Why?' I asked. 'Because if I was white, no one would call me nigger.' My son was able to see 'woman' as a real category in part because his Germantown Quaker education schooled him to take seriously sexual but not racial differences (...) He was being educated to internalize the colorblind norm: race somehow was different. Gender roles, gender differences had borders that must be policed. As with any border, there were clear rules about permissible crossings. But unlike gender, racial identity or racial difference was not supposed to exist and thus needed no fence ...." She goes on discussing different aspects of the officialization of a "colorblind" vision of differences in the U.S. society combined with the reality of color as stigma (the whole discussion is indeed worth reading). Then comes the dilemma: "Yet, in some way, my response was just a mirror image of the colorblind Quakers. I was schooling my son to see race as stigmatizing. I was making my son visible in ways that made him want to be invisible. I was teaching my son that the only way to see racial differences was in the negative (...) On some level I too was trapped in the categories. I was teaching Niko to counter the Quaker idea that race is an illusion with yet another illusion - that because race can be manipulated to stigmatize and oppress, race is therefore concrete. I had neglected to emphasize that race - and racial identity - is always relational, not inherent (...)". Finally, after another (equally worth reading) discussion concerning the social status of categories, she recalls other experiences of her son, now moved to another school in Massachusetts, where a contemporary issues class tackled race and racism directly. "The teachers encouraged students of color to join affinity groups, where they could talk about their feelings, unobserved by others. In the middle of the seventh grade, Niko announced to me that he was going to tell his classmates he no longer wanted to be called African-American (...) 'Just call us black', he told one classmate, who had just commented, 'All African-Americans seem to have dark hair.' 'You took too long to say "African-Americans,"' Niko explained. 'You hesitated before you could even say the words.' 'Yeah,', a black girl echoed after Niko spoke. 'Just call us black.' When Niko recounted this story to me, I experienced a mixture of awe and uncertainty. I was proud that he was willing to speak up in a predominantly white environment (...) about what he thought was right (...) But I was also admittedly confused. 'Remember,' I asked Niko, 'when you were in the third grade and you didn't want me to put the word "black" in a sentence describing a woman who wanted to have her picture taken with me?' 'No, Mom. I don't remember that.' (...) But then, he got very quiet and said, with a note of sadness in his voice, 'I am ashamed of myself.' 'Why?' I asked (...) 'Well, I don't remember when you pretended to call me a "nigger", but I do remember that when I was in the third grade I wished I was white just like the rest of the kids in my class. I remember that I wanted (...) the benefits of being white (...) I just didn't want to draw attention to myself, to emphasize the ways I was different.' So which way feels more comfortable? 'Just call me black', Niko replied, a confident smile filling his face. 'I know who I am now, Mom. I don't want to be anyone else.'"

This little Bildungsroman, told in pride by the "Mom" herself, who also find in it a compensation for her injuries (being dropped by President Clinton who initially wanted a black woman "symbolically" appointed Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and then changed his mind in face of criticism), is certainly true. It is also perhaps too beautiful. In any case it captures some of the most striking aspects which make "naming the race" in the first, the second, or the third person a double bind performative situation.

It is this kind of issues that Judith Butler has addressed in her book Excitable speech, referring occasionally to race issues, but focusing on the questions of "hate speech" against homosexuals, "sexist" attitudes and discourses, and their possible legal consequences (some theorists and activists, following Catherine McKinnon, ask that homophobic insults and sexist advertisements (instrumentalizing the image of women as objects of lust, "pornographic utterance", etc.) become punishable crimes, on the ground that they are actual forms of violence ("threats") which cause moral and physical injuries. While actively promoting the rights of women, homosexuals, colored subjects (and their exigency to become free of threats and insults) and supporting their struggle against discrimination, Butler opposes this conclusion, which she says ignores the structure of language and the conflictual nature of its performative effects (therefore is unsuitable for effective politics). Allow me to briefly recall some passages from this well known argument. (2)

"The arguments in favor of a counter-appropriation or restaging of offensive speech are clearly undercut by the position that the offensive effect of the speech act is necessarily linked to the speech act, its originating or enduring context or, indeed, its animating intentions or original deployments", writes Butler, referring to an argument put forward by Marxists and Feminists who explain in which sense "words wound". "The revaluation of terms such as "queer" suggests, she goes on, that speech can be "returned" to its speaker in a different form, that it can be cited against its originary purposes, and perform a reversal of effects. More generally, then, this suggests that the changeable power of such terms marks a kind of discursive performativity that is not a discrete series of speech acts, but a ritual chain of resignifications whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable..."

Further in the text, she asks whether there can exist an enunciation that "discontinues" a structure of domination (of which discourse is an integral component), instead of simply "reproducing" or "enforcing" it. And she examines the possibility that structures "suffer destructuration through their being reiterated, repeated, and rearticulated." "I wish to question for the moment the presumption that hate speech always works, not to minimize the pain that is suffered (...) but to leave open the possibility that its failure is the condition of a critical response (...) Might the speech act of hate speech be understood as less efficacious, more prone to innovation and subversion, if we were to take into account the temporal life of the "structure" it is said to enunciate? If such a structure is dependent upon its enunciation for its continuation, then it is at the site of enunciation that the question of its continuity is to be posed." Finally, after Butler had recalled the theory of "interpellation of the individuals as subjects" that Althusser encapsulated in the allegoric scene where a policeman hails a passerby who, "recognizing himself", turns around to answer the call, thereby internalizing a certain form of "guilt" associated with social subjugation, she discusses the possibility inherent in this scenario that the subject "resist" his/her own victimation by returning the name to appropriate an other identity than the one associated with guilt (or stigma). "To bridge the Austinian and Althusserian views, one would need to offer an account of how the subject constituted through the address of the Other becomes then a subject capable of addressing others (...) Hate speech exposes a prior vulnerability to language, one that we have by virtue of being interpellated kinds of beings, dependent on the address of the Other in order to be (...) There is no way to protect against that primary vulnerability and susceptibility to the call of recognition that solicits existence (...) Thus we sometimes cling to the terms that pain us because, at a minimum, they offer us some form of social and discursive existence. The address that inaugurates the possibility of agency, in a single stroke, forecloses the possibility of radical autonomy (...) It is therefore impossible to regulate fully the potentially injurious effect of language without destroying something fundamental about (...) the subject's constitution in language. On the other hand, a critical perspective on the kinds of language that govern the regulation and constitution of subjects becomes all the more imperative once we realize how inevitable is our dependency on the ways we are addressed in order to exercise any agency at all." Butler describes an "ambivalent structure at the heart of performativity", and closely associates the historical possibilities of political agency of victims of racial and sexual injury independent of the protection of a paternalistic State structure with an expansion of the domain of "linguistic survival" where it becomes possible to "say the unspeakable" associated with a collective trauma in the public realm. These are fundamental hypotheses which I want to try and apply to the problem posed by the uses of the R-name.

Notes

1. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres: The Miner's Canary. Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 1-6.

2. Judith Butler, Excitable speech. A politics of the Performative, Routledge 1997, pages 14 to 41.