New Racial Politics in the 21st Century
Professor Howard Winant
The racial abyss that split the world at the origins of the modern age produced the political systems that still shape our lives and world. The discovery and divulgation of the race-concept not only forged the chains of oppression, but also gave underlying form and structure to the concept of freedom.
"Freedom" of course remains a utopian goal, yet all its varieties—the freedom of labor, of the body, of sex and gender, and most centrally for my present purposes, the freedom of political activity, of democracy—have their modern origins in the struggle against racial domination. The limited but real democracy of the present is thus a product of a vast labor: the achievement of labor rights, of the franchise, of popular sovereignty and freedom of expression, of national liberation from imperial rule, of reproductive rights and women's emancipation more generally, and of popular democracy in all its forms, can be traced back to conflict over and about the racial divide, conflict fundamental to the modern world's gestation and development.
The post-WWII racial justice and anticolonial movements may have been incorporated by the national and global hegemonic systems they themselves helped create. The racial reforms they generated may have fallen short of producing the social justice and democracy they sought. But these movements have certainly not failed either. They have created a new "common sense" that clashes with white supremacy, that deeply undermines the imperial logic of "the West against the rest," and that calls into question the division of the world along North-South or West-East lines. So now what? Is democracy still possible? Have race-consciousness and racial injustice been driven off the political stage? Is the world regressing to a situation like that of a century ago, when white supremacy was taken for granted by those in power? Is the US enacting a simulacrum of those times, living in a kind of racial Disneyland where race is a thing of the past, where the happy pirates can at last frolic again, undisturbed, on the Caribbean beach?
Today the bombs rain down once again on impoverished countries of the global South (and global East). A quarter-century after we thought that the age of imperialism was finally over, dreams of empire have been revived. Meanwhile the opposite dream, Dr. King's dream, of an inclusive and peaceful US society (and world society) seems to have gone up in smoke. In the US, state policy is being made by corporate predators, religious fanatics, and militarists. Society's vulnerable groups—the chief inheritors of the legacies of conquest, slavery, and imperialism—are being left to their own devices.
Much of that power, and a great deal of that greed, are framed in racial terms. This is the problem of the 21st century racial rule: not the problem of the color line, but the problem of how the color-line can be both affirmed and denied, simultaneously reinforced and undermined. This is also the problem of 21st century movements for racial democracy: how to affirm racial identity/difference without reifying it; how to oppose racism without restricting racial autonomy.
A prominent commentator on the role of race in society, Prof. Winant's books include The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since WWII, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, and Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons.