Narrating the Mute: Racializing and Racism in a Neoliberal Moment¹

Editor's Note: This article was originally presented at Columbia University, at a Center for Contemporary Black History and Institute for Research in African–American Studies program.

²

I want to thank Vanessa Agard-Jones, Vin Lyon-Callo, Mamadi Matlhako, Jill Humphries, James Jennings, Michelle Hay, Manning Marable, and the Sister-Scholars group for their valuable insights and critiques. I also want to thank three extraordinary research assistants: Rebecca Pelletier, Rachel Tekula, and Laura Zapata and the anonymous reviewers.

Abstract

This article explores the shifting nature of racism in the context of neoliberalism. The concept of muted racism and racializing is the lens through which welfare reform policy is viewed to illustrate the practices and processes of new forms of racism, the impact of welfare reform policy and examples from welfare reform research are viewed through the lens of muted racism and racializing.

Keywords:

• muted racializing
• muted racism
• neoliberalism
• post-Black
• post-race
• welfare reform

Notes

Source: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/reports.htm

Editor's Note: This article was originally presented at Columbia University, at a Center for Contemporary Black History and Institute for Research in African–American Studies program.

I want to thank Vanessa Agard-Jones, Vin Lyon-Callo, Mamadi Matlhako, Jill Humphries, James Jennings, Michelle Hay, Manning Marable, and the Sister-Scholars group for their valuable insights and critiques. I also want to thank three extraordinary research assistants: Rebecca Pelletier, Rachel Tekula, and Laura Zapata and the anonymous reviewers.

This summation is available at http://www.collegeboard.com/student/apply/the-application/53.html.

Research conducted from 1998–2000 was done in a small city in upstate New York with battered Black women. See Dana Davis, 2006 Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform: Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Research conducted between 1999 and 2002 was part of the Kellogg Foundation's New York State Scholar/Practitioner Program. (See Dana Davis, Ana Aparicio, Audrey Jacobs, et al. 2003.)

For a concise explanation of the rise of conservative social policy through think tanks, see Stefancic and Delgado (1996).

Founded in 1992, Edison Schools is the nation's leading public school partner with schools and districts. The focus of Edison Schools is to raise student achievement utilizing its research-based school design, which incorporates assessment systems, interactive professional development, and integrated use of technology. http://www.edisonschools.com/edison-schools/faqs

The Wildcat Program offers supported work programs for chronically unemployed individuals with limited work histories and little or no job skills. Participants garner “work habits training” and become familiar with the demands of the work place. Work sites were developed at public and nonprofit agencies. According to their Web page, they use the principles of sensitive management, graduated stress, and peer support, so that participants are prepared for their eventual placement in subsidized mainstream employment. http://www.wildcatatwork.org/

Post-race/post-Black cannot be disentangled from its vernacular genealogy; post-modernism; that 18th to 20th century rejection of standards of understanding and consumption of the arts, music, literature, drama, and architecture. In its ethnographic articulation, as in its aesthetic presentation, it seems to me that both post-race/post-Black and post-modernism narrate multiplicity blurring the boundaries of subjectivity.

This liberation is profoundly evident in the visual arts. Stodghill (2001) discusses Thelma Golden, the current Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem in relation to her vision of racial liberation. He notes that she is the country's major cheerleader for what she calls “Post-Black” art, or work by a generation who have raised questions about the meaning of race informed by America's growing multicultural fabric.

According to the Population Resource Center, the U.S. has experienced shifts in its racial composition. The Census 2000 was the first that allowed people to report more than one race with nearly 7 million people identifying themselves with two or more races (Population Resource Center 2004).

Of course it is well known that extreme forms of racism have not been eradicated; they have only been redesigned. The profiling and murders of Black people persist as vestiges of Jim Crow racism. A recent example is the death of Sean Bell in Jamaica, Queens, New York in December 2006. He was shot fifty times by New York City police officers.

Incongruously the post-race/post-Black position, which dilutes race, in fact does require some sort of race consciousness. For one would have to acknowledge and then deny the existence of racism in the United States, a phenomenon which confines African Americans to subordinate status evident in any “relevant sociological indicator—life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, access to healthcare, income level—and in any worldwide correlation where one will find well being correlated with White skin and European descent, and of poverty correlated with dark skin and “otherness” (Winant 2001:305). To not see race, racializing or racism under these circumstances requires an inordinate amount of work. This is a positioning which a post-race/post-Black perspective works to achieve.

For example a recent study of local variation in TANF sanctioning conducted by Fording, Schram, and Soss (2006), found that race is relational to sanctioning practices against welfare recipients in Florida.

Here reference can be made to the Supreme Court's recent ruling that limits race-based polices to achieve school integration (Bravin and Golden, 2007).

Reinforcement of this perspective also came from Black political and intellectual elites including Condeleeza Rice, who according to CBS News, downplayed charges of racism. Available at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/03/katrina/main814623.shtml. Also see McWhorter (2006), who challenged accusations that racism was a factor in the slow response to the Katrina catastrophe.

A second example of indexing is the term “down-low” which is associated with Black men who are presumably straight, but have sexual relations with other men. There is no equivalent term for white straight men who have sexual relations with other men. A startling contrast of how terms racialize is found when comparing the New York Times Magazine article on the down-low (Denizet-Lewis 2003) and a New York Times article by Kilgannon (2005), which examines the activities of white men have sex in a Queens, New York park. Their activities are framed in terms of desire, not as a pathological diagnosis, as the “down-low” implies.

Pseudonyms have been used to protect confidentiality and anonymity, including the name of the city where the research was conducted.

There are limitations of analyzing people's speech and using it to exemplify actual meaning. My assessment of the comments under consideration reflect an analysis of the patterns of the comments and placing them within a particular socio-cultural political moment; that is, neoliberalism.

For example in the HHS Administration and Children Services Fiscal Year 2001 Characteristics and Financial Circumstances of TANF Recipients, it is noted that the racial composition of welfare families has changed substantially over the past ten years. Website accessed October 26, 06, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/character/FY2001/characteristics.htm.

I am elaborating on Pollock's argument that labeling with race words is how Americans make each other racial. My analysis is that the coding in muted racialization not only makes people raced, but also generates racism.

Roberts (1997) recounts that Bob Grant, a New York radio talk show host used a “Black accent” when discussing welfare by “mimicking” a Black woman.

There is of course a literature on the construction of whiteness with some attention being paid to white trash (see Wray and Newitz 1997; Wilson 2002).

This is an elaboration of Mica Pollock's point in analyzing race talk in a Columbus, Ohio school. She notes that adults described the racial demographics of the curriculum by saying “we need more black literature.” They never addressed the racial demographics of student academic performance by proposing that “we need more black students in honors English” (2005:4).

According to Sherman, Fremstad, and Parrot (2004), when we look at employment losses by race, the steepest employment losses from 2000 to 2003 were for Black mothers. Among Black single mothers, the employment rate fell by 4.0 percentage points. For Black single mothers who were never married, the decline was 5.3 percentage points. Among white single mothers, the employment rate declined 2.8 percentage points.