First Takes on Appiah's In My Father's House

Kwame Anthony Appiah, perhaps the quietest of the triumvirate of Harvard's Afro-American studies department, is leaving for Princeton, though, apparently, not over the recent Cornel West/Larry Summers flap, though that can't help. Given the close relationship between Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Appiah, not to mention West's old affiliation with Princeton, it seems that the likelihood of Princeton nabbing all three is especially high. Given that Harvard might well have had trouble holding on to Gates as Appiah goes, alienating West -- and making Harvard look boorish toward Blacks-- is going to make keeping Harvard's department healthy especially tough. Gates is the African-American studies department builder, and having him competing at Princeton (not a sure thing, of course) would be a blow to Harvard.

As a philosopher, I'm fairly familiar with Appiah's logic and philosophy of language work (especially his book on assertions), but I have only encountered a few of his articles on oppression theory. I have a copy of his book In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, which I bought for a graduate class on African-American political thought, but we never got to it in that class and it's languished on my shelf.

The Harvard flap (and Black History Month) spurred me to pick it up again. I'll record my first read impressions and thoughts as I work through it; I'm hoping to read a chapter a day.

Chapter 1: The Invention of Africa

It's looking quite good so far. The initial chapter contains a lot of stage setting and forward looking statements (e.g., he's going to talk about this in Chapter 4, that in Chapter 5, etc.), but is meaty enough on its own. I'd have no hesitation about including it in a course pack.

While Appiah's analytic philosophy training shows through, the chapter is also rich in historical narrative and personal detail. His overarching theme is the use of "race as a basis for moral solidarity" especially as revealed in his investigation of the 19th century Pan-Africanist, Alexander Crummell. I rather suspect, from what I've read thus far, that Appiah is going to come down against many of these uses as a fairly systematic, although not the worst sort of, error.

A Bit of Analytical Framework

Being a trained philosopher type, I tend to notice and be drawn to analytical frameworks, so Appiah's stood out for me as something to focus on (even though there are lots of other neat things with cool structure, including the historiographical discussion of race on pages 10-13). He articulates three crucial "distinct doctrines that compete for the term racism" (as part of his effort to "seek out the distinctive content of nineteenth-century racism", so I may be in error in reading it more generally):

racialism

"the view ... that there are are heritable characteristics ... which allow us to divide [human beings] into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race. These traits and tendencies characteristic of a race constitute ... a sort of racial essence[, that is] the essential heritable characteristics of the 'Races of Man' account for more than the visible morphological characteristics ... on the basis of which we make our informal classifications." (p. 13)

extrinsic racism

"extrinsic racists make moral distinctions between members of different races because they believe that racial essence entails certain morally relevant qualities." (p. 13)

intrinsic racism

"intrinsic racists ... are people who differentiate morally between members of different races, because they believe that each race has a different moral status, quite independent of the moral characteristics entailed by its racial essence" (p. 14)

As is not surprising, racism of either sort entails racialism: i.e., you need to endorse a fairly specific concept of race in order to make certain empirical (for extrinsic) or conceptual (for intrinsic) blunders. The extrinsic racist has a relatively normal moral system, but pops in some dubious facts (to use Appiah's examples, that Blacks are intellectually inferior or that Jews are especially avaricious). The intrinsic racist has an odd moral system: regardless of any other facts, racial identity entails certain moral judgments. Classical white supremacy in the U.S. held that persons committing the worst sort of moral or personal failure have something going for them if they are white and the greatest of moral paragons would still fall (well) short of perfect, if Black (indeed, what would otherwise be a virtue is seen as especially vicious when conjoined with the "wrong" race).

So, one might expect, extrinsic racists can be confronted with empirical studies or simple everyday counterexamples, yes? Well, as Appiah points out, only if they're sincere. There's a fair bit of blathering by insincere intrinsic racists about "biological truths", "hard facts", etc. Note that such intrinsic racists might be primarily self deceiving. To wit, they might have a complex set of mechanisms that keep them focused on their (false and not necessary to them) extrinsically racist justifications and slogans and thus keep them from having to state baldly, even to themselves, their intrinsically racist principles. Somewhat sincere extrinsic racists might have similar mechanisms that keep inconvenient facts and arguments from oversetting their patently false beliefs (Marilyn Frye discusses some of these with regard to sexism in several of her essays in The Politics of Reality).

It seems as if racialism, on its own, is morally neutral. Even extrinsic racism is "only" wrong in detail, not in general principles. For example, assuming that the moral theory is correct, if, contrary to fact, half-Iranians (like me) were inclined to sloth, then condemnations of we slothful half-Iranians would be correct, perhaps akin to minor statements of envy toward our good looks, dashing manners, and resistance to sun burn. Hmm. I have to say that this doesn't leave me with a good taste in my mouth.

Surely, if there are group based judgments to be made, the relevant discriminating properties are the very properties that ground the judgment. That is, if you're going to bash slothful folk, what makes them a group is their sloth, not any other qualities that happen to go with that sloth. Condemning "slothful half-Iranians" seems too narrow. Why focus on slothful half-Iranians, if that (fanciful) racial category is merely a marker of the actually morally condemnable quality? Here reeks intrinsic racism.

I find this conceptual scheme worrisome, but, at least at first glance, useful. I need to work with it some more. I will note that Appiah's triple set of concepts are all individualistic and psychological. That is they are all doctrines that specific people believe. To avoid a charge of racialism or racism it suffices to point to your mental states (so to speak). Institutional analyses of racism tend to claim that too much focus on individualist psychological states misses a great deal of the actual presence and mechanism of racism. Any sort of theory which gives some real status to race, albeit while denying biological or essentialist conception, isn't going to map all that well into Appiah's framework. It would be interesting to cast some of these distinctions into an institutional analysis.

The Holocaust and Hate Crimes

I found the following claim thought provoking:

If, as I believe, intrinsic racism is a moral error, and extrinsic racism entails false beliefs, it is by no means obvious that racism is the worst error that our species has made in our time. What was wrong with the Nazi genocide was that it entailed the sadistic murder of innocent millions; that said, it would be perverse to focus too much attention on the fact that the alleged rationale for that murder was "race." Stalin's mass murders, or Pol Pot's, derive little moral advantage from having been largely based on nonracial criteria. (p. 19)

On the one hand, this seems something of a truism. Once you start doing horrible things to millions of people, especially for crude and vicious ends, it's hard to gain any moral juice. But, but, but, I'm not sure that this is because, say, racism is a relatively minor moral error. I mean, murder isn't a minor moral error, yet you derive little moral advantage from only killing a million people, rather than a million and one. I guess I'm just not sure what this example is supposed to show.

The interesting comparison case is hate crimes. But there, the "extra" badness can be somewhat resolved by pointing to more general effects and messages. For example, hate crimes are often committed, explicitly or implicitly, to terrorize the target community, to "teach them their place". So, whatever our finely tuned moral judgment of the crime, the response called for is often different from "equivalent" "non-hate" crimes. And these responses aren't typically necessarily connected to punishment -- public officials might have to reassure the target community, fund sensitivity training, or increase police coordination with community members, and so on.

I don't have a settled judgment about this argument/case yet.

A Nifty Story

There is a familiar tale of a peasant who is stopped by a traveler in a large car and asked the way to the capital. "Well," she replies, after pondering the matter a while, "if I were you, I wouldn't start from here." In many intellectual projects I have often felt sympathy with this sentiment." (p. 26)

I laughed with wry delight at this! However, it does seem that In My Father's House is a pretty good place to start.

Chapter 2: Illusions of Race

Chapter 2's task is still critical, though the figure Appiah examines has shifted from Crummell to Du Bois. The background question remains: Is there a sound basis for Pan-African (including the African diaspora) unity and solidarity? Du Bois, Appiah writes, "laid both the intellectual and the practical foundations of the Pan-African movement." (p. 28) Appiah hopes that examining the evolution of DuBois thought will reveal the difficulties, possibilities, and general intellectual contours of Pan-Africanism.

I think it does. But one thing is clear -- I need to read a lot of Du Bois. Or get someone who knows a lot more about Du Bois than I do to give me some pointers. The intellectual history Appiah discloses feels compelling, but it's definitely in service of his project, which makes me a tad cautious.

A pro-African Intrinsic Racism

Remember that intrinsic racism isn't necessarily "negative", that is, solely assigning negative inherent valuations to certain races. After all, in standard white supremacy, it's not just that Blacks (or Jews, or Hispanics, or...) are so bad, but whites are so great. Few, if any, white supremacists sit around thinking that whites are merely the best of a bad bunch! (To my knowledge, at least. I suppose that many misanthropists have been white supremacists, but I've never seen the interaction strongly play out.) Appiah points to Du Bois' revaluation of Blacks:

On the face of it, then, Du Bois's strategy here is the antithesis of [i.e., a component part, not the opposite of] a classic dialectic in the reaction to prejudice. The thesis in this dialectic...is the denial of difference. Du Bois's antithesis is the acceptance of difference along with a claim that each group has its part to play, that the white and the Negro races are related not as superior to inferior but as complementaries; the Negro message is, with the white one, part of the message of humankind. What he espouses is what Sartre once called -- in negritude -- an "antiracist racism."
I call this pattern a classic dialectic, and indeed, we find it in feminism also. On the one hand, a simple claim to equality, a denial of substantial difference; on the other, a claim to a special message, revaluing the feminine "Other" not as the "helpmeet" of sexism but as the New Woman. (p. 30)

I rather suspect that Appiah really wants to transcend this dialectic, and I'm certainly sympathetic to that desire. I wonder, however, if this, itself, isn't a fairly standard dialectic. In other words, the thesis being that this is a classic dialectic, the antitheses being a variety of specific transcendings. While the "simple equity" vs. "revaluation of difference" play seems compelling, I wonder how often it really arises. That is, I've encountered simple equity folks who point to, oh, Mary Daly and complain (and vice versa, I guess), but there's a lot of complexity in the way the views jockey for position. This may be a standard weakness of the standard dialectic analysis of the history of ideas.

The deeper issue is, I think, exactly what Appiah's working on: How can Blacks have a shared basis for moral solidarity, for resistance without endorsing some sort of racialism and, indeed, racism. Therein lies the special temptation of "anti-racist racism". There's a lot that's good and appealing about that solidarity -- indeed, it can help enormously in dealing with oppression. But it's difficult to distinguish that solidarity from a revaluation of race strategy or, indeed, just a shared racial interest strategy. After all, common interest, commonality itself, is what has typically bound people together, as Plato describes in the Republic:

And yet I hardly know how to find the audacity or the words to speak and undertake to persuade first the rulers themselves and the soldiers and then the rest of the city, that in good sooth all our training and educating of them were things that they imagined and that happened to them as it were in a dream; but that in reality at that time they were down within the earth being molded and fostered themselves while their weapons and the rest of their equipment were being fashioned. And when they were quite finished the earth as being their mother delivered them, and now as if their land were their mother and their nurse they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth.

It's not hard to see how a pragmatic Pan-Africanist (or feminist) might well take Socrates' advice to heart, but I rather think it will not do in a pluralist, cosmopolitan age. Though, interestingly enough, you do find in some science fiction a kind of radical, more or less deliberate and self-conscious, Balkanization into identity groups. Indeed, one might argue that if you could divorce this from the violence and evil that so often accompanies it, it might be neutral.

A Bit of Biology

There is quite an interesting stretch from page 35 to page 39 about the possibility of a genetic account of racialist races (i.e., where race marks more than superficial morphological characteristics in any morally interesting way) including some nice juggling of the probabilities of inter- and intra- racial allele difference. The closest model for racialist biological race is, I take it, species, and brute facts about lack of human speciation (and general global genetic flow) do a pretty damn good job of debunking such modeling. But it is an empirical refutation, and those tend to worry me. Intrinsic racism's basis on empirical facts seems to be, in general, more tenuous (the way moral theories in general are insulated from empirical facts). While it's tempting to hope that merely showing that racialism is false will be enough to refute intrinsic racism with the ease that one hopes to refute sincere extrinsic racism, I tend to think that not only will that not be the case, I worry about the contrary to fact case where racialism is true! Perhaps, wrongly, but it comes back to a worry I have about Aristotelian "natural slave" arguments.

Hmm... Appiah is, in fact, sensitive to this, though not, perhaps, to my particular form:

The disappearance of a widespread belief in the biological category of the Negro would leave nothing for racists to have an attitude toward. But it would off, by itself, no guarantee that Africans would escape from the stigma of centuries. (p. 39)

There's a cool bit in this section where he places race into the history of science:

The appeal of race as a classificatory notion provides us with an instance of a familiar pattern in the history of science. In the early phases of theory, scientists begin, inevitably, with the categories of their folk theories of the world, and often the criteria of membership can be detected with the unaided senses ... Gradually, as the science develops, however, concepts are developed whose application requires more than the unaided senses; instead of the phenomenal properties of things, we look for "deeper," more theoretical properties ... It is hard for us to accept that the colors of objects, which play so important a role in our visual experience ... turn out neither to play an important part in the behavior of matter nor to be correlated with properties that do... (p. 38)

Analogously, Appiah continues, racial science sought a racial essence to underlie the folk categories, but it turned out that the particular groupings of color of skin and gross morphology are relatively uninteresting from a genetic point of view, and point to no general, distinct essence. And just as we have trouble giving up our phenomenally based properties of matter, so too we have trouble giving up on race.

There seems to be more going on here, which Appiah does hint at, but only in passing. It's not just that this was an instance of this general impulse -- very specific prejudices drove a lot of the science. Indeed, it seems more correct to see the concept of race that drove people to look for a genetic essence as being highly theoretical in the first place. Of course, the rise of "race" in its full modern biological mode is tied up tightly with the rise of science, so it's a little hard to see it as just a normal incident of science that got a bit twisted. Indeed, for all the importance placed on the "reality" of color, lots of pre-scientific folks were prepared to junk it. (Ok, this talk of "pre-theoretical" is very tricky, but take religions that hold that this world is entirely illusory as what I'm thinking of.) (I suspect Appiah of harboring a bit of Sellarsianism here...not that I mind that!)

The Badge of Insult

I wish I had more energy to discuss this idea (from page 42), but I'm running out of steam. Briefly, the badge of insult seems to serve to "cement people together who share a characteristic ... on the basis of which some of them have suffered discrimination." (p. 42) The crucial move is away from shared actual suffering to counterfactual suffering. Eh, that's not quite right. "There but for the grace of luck go I" might be better. And, as Appiah points out, this is quite transracial -- even whites can be led "to an identification with the struggle against racism", by the thought, "if I were there and if I were not white, I would be a victim". (The emphasized clause being the crucial difference in white and non-white variants.) I'll end my chapter 2 notes with this thought:

The lesson, I think, of these reflections must be that there is no one answer to the question what identifications our antiracism may lead us into. Du Bois writes as if he has to choose between Africa, on the one hand, and "yellow Asia and ... the South Seas," on the other. But that, it seems to me, is just the choice that racism imposes on use -- and just the choice we must reject. (p. 42)

Chapter 3: Topologies of nativism

At first glance, Chapter 3 seems to be a digression from the more straightforward politics of the prior chapters into "literary theory". There is, for the determined (or even the mild) skeptic about postmodernist moves, the danger of a special sort of ennui with the attendant longings for the harder "soft sciences" (like, uhm, philosophy!). But it's very clear that Appiah's attention to literature is an organic part of his project:

For while the ideas of racialism are familiar and no one needs to be reminded of the connection between racialism and...imperialism...it is perhaps a less familiar thought that many of those works that are central to the recent history of our understanding of what literatue [sic.] is are also thematically preoccupied with racial issues. But the reason for this is not far to seek: it lies in the dual connection made in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Euro-American thought between, on the one hand, race and nationality, and, on the other, nationality and literature. In short, the nation is the key middle term in understanding the relations between the concept of race and the idea of literature. (p. 48)

As with the earlier chapters, Appiah's critical moves are directed to a long standing and pervasive intellectual milieu. The process of nation/people/race-state formation -- both conceptually and materially -- involved the use of literature. I found Appiah's brief discussion of the place of Beowulf in the "English" literary canon most instructive:

It is the conception of the binding core of the English nation as the Anglo-Saxon race that accounts for Tain's decision to identify the origins of English literature not in its antecedents in the Greek and Roman classics that provided the models and themes of much of the best-known works of English "poesy"; not in the Italian models that influenced the drama of Marlowe and Shakespeare; but in Beowulf, a poem in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, a poem that was unknown to Spenser and Shakespeare, the first poets to write in a version of the English language that we can still almost understand.

While I seem to have a few, lurking positive feelings toward Beowulf from my high school days (well, more toward John Gardner's Grendel), I admit to having been puzzled with it as a starting point for our study of English literature. I mean, it's okay, but I prefer the Nibelungenlied and there seems to be little better claim to reading translations of Beowulf than of it. Given that europhonic literature is the dominant form of African intellectual life, even postcolonially, it is quite important to be wary of these "master's tools" -- tools which were not only a crucial means of domination (on p. 55, Appiah discusses the Roman use of schools to control the provinces as "hoops of a different make") but the giving of those tools is as potentially problematic as the giving of diseased blankets to Native Americans. (Okay, that's a little strong. But cultural annihilation is a serious thing and invariable part and parcel of genocide.) This is one of the deep problems with assimilationist moves; assimilation of the subordinated people to the dominating people makes the assimilated people inherently second class.

This should be obvious, yes? "Eliminative assimilation" is clearly destructive. (And, of course, it is what many neo-conservatives and others really want right now.) But even various "merger" strategies can be seriously problematic (e.g., the co-opting of African-American musical forms). It's worth noting the old China studies trope about the Chinese losing the battles, but winning the assimilation.

As is familiar from the earlier chapters, Appiah is very wary of putatively antiracist moves made within a racialist framework.

[W]e call "nativism" ... the claim that true African independence requires a literature of one's own ...
Operating with this topology of inside and outside -- indigene and alien, Western and traditional -- the apostles of nativism are able in contemporary Africa to mobilize the undoubted power of a nationalist rhetoric, one in which the literature of one's own is that of one's own nation. But nativists may appeal to identities that are both wider and narrower than the nation: to "tribes" and towns, below the nation-state; to Africa, above. And, I believe, we shall have the best chance of redirecting nativism's power if we challenge not the rhetoric of the tribe, the nation, or the continent but the topology that it presupposes, the opposition that it asserts. (p. 56)

Again, the Hegelian imperative to transcend the old oppositions, wherein even resistance is conditioned by bad ideology. To fight on the oppressor's terms, worse, in the oppressor's terms, is to give away something important, maybe the game. Perhaps, at least. I find these sorts of criticisms appealing, but then I really want to see the goods for the transcendence. I mean, "Neither right nor left" has come to mean "creepy" in my book. Challenging presuppositions shouldn't mean embracing wankers.

I don't think that Appiah does this, I'm merely registering my prickles.

Appiah claims that nativism (of the standard sort) tends to attempt to legitimize current (imposed) practice by "alternate genealogizing", to wit, finding antecedents in the "native culture" which one can use to "root" (ahistorically) current practice and, perhaps, mutate it a bit in light of the antecedents. Appiah writes:

But the whole exercise puts me in mind of a certain disreputable trading concern I once visited in Harare -- a product of the frankly desultory attempts at sanctions against the Republic of south Africa. Their specialty was stamping "Made in Zimbabwe" onto merchandise imported, more or less legally, from the South. Perhaps a few are really fooled, but the overall effect of the procedure is only to provide a thin skein of legitimacy to stretch over existing practices. (p. 68)

Of course, unlike this example, the nativist skein is typically thicker and more complex, and done with sincerity, with an eye to alleviating the wrongs rather than circumventing attempts at correction. Perhaps Appiah is right and it's doomed to failure, but I wonder. If the skein is worked well enough, the thread spun thick or fine as needed, and it's all woven together with skill, one might end up with a strong cloth. It's hard to see how that could be, with us so close to the domination. But peoples make do with their histories, even if there are large discontinuities where justice was lost.

The last three pages or so are concerned with "giv[ing] up the search for Mr. Right and speak[ing] more modestly, of productive modes of reading". I thought that an interesting tack, one consonant with my own inclinations, but I rather suspect that there is a big debate of which I'm totally ignorant (i.e., theory of reading, epistemology of reading, etc.).

(More to come...)