Long/Kreutzer: Individual and Society
Reading (No Writing!) and Group Discussion Assignment for November 18
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. (Source: J. Farganis, Readings in Social Theory. Chapter 7)
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk. (Source: J. Farganis, Readings in Social Theory. Chapter 7)
Anthony Appiah, Racial Identities. P.362-370 in Seidman/Alexander, The New Social Theory Reader. London.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation. P. 371-384 in Seidman/Alexander, The New Social Theory Reader. London.
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk.
Discuss and explain Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness”. Why can it be read as a concept of multiculturalism?
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
(see p. 187)
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation
Discuss the following definitions of race, racial politics and projects, and racism:
“Race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.”
“A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to recognize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.”
“A racial project can be defined as racist if and only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race.”
Distinguish several types of racial projects in the spectrum of racial formation:
Center-right politics;
Center-left politics;
Neoconservative racial projects;
Liberal racial projects;
Far right projects;
New right projects;
Radical democratic projects;
Discuss the following notion of a theory of racial formation:
“The theory of racial formation suggests that society is suffused with racial projects, large and small, to which all are subjected. The racial ‘subjection’ is quintessential ideological. Everybody learns some combination, some version, of the rules of social classification, and of her own racial identity, often without obvious teaching or conscious inculcation. Thus are we inserted in a comprehensively racialized social structure. Race becomes ‘common sense’ – a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world. A vast web of racial projects mediates between the discursive or representational means in which race is identified and signified on the one hand, and the institutional and organizational forms in which it is routinized and standardized on the other. These projects are the heart of the racial formation process.
Under such circumstances, it is not possible to represent race discursively without simultaneously locating it, explicitly or implicitly, in a social structural (and historical) context.” (p. 376)
“The racism of today is no longer a virtual monolith, as was the racism of yore. Today, racial hegemony is ‘messy’.” Do you agree?
Why is racial dictatorship the norm against which all U.S. politics must be measured?
How does Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony explain how racial formation is related to politics as a whole?