Our community of faith, which is overwhelmingly European American, is exploring white blindness to racism. It is intense. Among our readings this week was David Dean’s “Roots Deeper than Whiteness” (embedded).
There is so much that is good about the essay that I might leave good enough alone. Except that Mr Dean’s answer to my racism is that I locate and follow the historical trajectory of my own community from its own freedom in what I take to be western Europe’s late Middle Ages into its own class bondage and racism in the Early Modern period. What Mr Dean wants me to discover is, first, that my ancestors were not racist, were deeply committed to the commons, to community, but, second, that they were coopted by capitalism and were offered the wages of whiteness in exchange for a living wage and racial harmony.
I have several problems with this story. First, I do not believe that my mixed Irish-English-French-Ashkenazi ancestors’ way of life was any more authentic than my life today. Both, I would argue, are equally inauthentic, constructed, shaped, and structured. I am as much related to John Doty, the indentured servant who arrived on the Mayflower to whom my mother’s family traces their arrival, as I am to the Jewish community from which she took her surname. Since my practices are qualitatively different from theirs, it is silly for me to attempt to “recover” my “authentic” pre-racist ancestral identity.
Second, the story Mr Dean tells about capitalism reinforces the authenticity of pre-capitalist social being. It reduces capitalism to bad people doing bad things to good people. As a social formation, however, this story bears no resemblance to how capitalism actually emerged, in Ghent, in 1324, in the parish of St John at the Abby of St Pierre. It emerged when the abbot of St Pierre directed the fullers to install a clock in the workhouse recently built there. It marks the first time anywhere productive human activity was measured in equal units of abstract time. From there, the new technique for measuring value spread throughout Western Europe, generating the compulsion unique among Europeans to generate more with less. To this compulsion we owe not only the insatiable appetite for El Dorado, but also the insatiable appetite to lower costs of production and increase the marginal product, appetites directly related to “liberating” serfs from their traditional lands and re-enslaving them, along with Africans, in the expanding empires of Europe.
I do not change this history by recovering my pre-capitalist ancestors in it. Doing so makes me no less racist. It makes the capitalist social formation that has thoroughly shaped me no less constitutive both of race and of racism.
Third, in this way the story Mr Dean tells reinforces racist metaphors by counting ancestry as something ontologically fundamental and given, while treating what has happened since the 15th or 16th century as constructed and superficial. Capitalism gives rise to a real, comprehensive, and therefore all the more terrifying totality, in part, because it drives me to search for my authentic (racial? cultural? linguistic?) roots.
This I have to assume is not Mr Dean’s aim. I think I have some idea of where Mr Dean wants his argument to go. As a historian, I am fundamentally committed to grasping how history has shaped us, shaped me. And it is absolutely critical that I understand, that we understand, that race and racism are constructed, and that they are constructed within capitalism. Which is one of the reasons why it is absolutely important not to ontologize something fundamental, irreducible, within us. We are constructed and grasping how we are constructed is key to acting and working and thinking and caring our way from capitalism and racism into post-capitalism and difference.