The Dark Matter

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Notes

1. Race is also constitutive of modernity on a global scale. See Winant 2001. For reasons of space I emphasize US reference points here.

2. To cite but one example, in his extremely well-known article, ‘Economic development with unlimited supplies of labor’ W. Arthur Lewis (1954) did not trouble himself to inquire by what means these unlimited supplies became available.

3. Note my disparaging remarks about sociology above. From the perspective of Emirbayer and Desmond, such comments are insufficiently reflexive. In this I may claim some affinity with Durkheim who, as the authors note, ‘championed the benefits of reflexive thought while remaining less than unambiguously reflexive when it came to matters of racial inequality and cultural difference’ (p. 45). Indeed I am certain that if pressed, Emirbayer and Desmond would admit to some lapses of reflexivity themselves.

4. Dewey and his social thought largely disappear from the piece after the introductory pages, although some race-oriented pragmatists (Tommie Shelby, Iris Young) are cited.

5. See Brubaker 2004; Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov 2004.

6. As far as I can tell the term ‘self-activity’ was introduced into the political lexicon in Facing Reality, a theoretical text by C. L. R. James et al. that appeared in the 1950s. Because ‘self-activity’ cannot be delegated to others, it embodies radical democracy. James et al. (2006, p. 58) writes:

The end toward which mankind is inexorably developing by the constant overcoming of internal antagonisms is not the enjoyment, ownership, or use of goods, but self-realization, creativity based upon the incorporation into the individual personality of the whole previous development of humanity. Freedom is creative universality, not utility.

The radical pragmatist (and arguably Deweyan) framework here is quite palpable. See also George Rawick (1969). Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs), still active today at age ninety-five, remains a leading anti-racist radical activist and author. She received her PhD in 1940 with a dissertation on George Herbert Mead and has written on Dewey as well.

7. Elsewhere this theme takes other forms: racial differentialism (Taguieff 2011[1988]); multiculturalism (Lentin and Titley 2011); and post-racialism (Durrheim, Mtose and Brown 2011), among others.

8. ‘Colour-blindness’ is a horrible term, a neologism twice-over. First and most obviously it is rooted in an opthalmic condition that has no relevance to race, unless we understand race as being ‘about’ skin colour, a deep reductionism in the term's meaning. Second, the term appears in the dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan in the 1896 Plessy case, where the Justice's insistence that ‘Our Constitution is colorblind’ coexists blissfully with a range of support claims for eternal white superiority and supremacy (see Gotanda 1995).