The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism

Joseph Darda's monograph has a driving thesis, namely that, in the postwar era, “racial liberalism inaugurated an age of antiracism in which all condemned racism while little changed in the fortunes of Black and brown people in the United States” (p. 8). This development was a team effort, Darda writes, bringing together “scientists, officials, novelists, and jurists,” as well as philanthropists and politicians, all of whom “now addressed race as the central concern of liberal thought” (p. 8). The consequences of this new focus on race were not positive, Darda observes, both because the new racial liberalism “derived coherence from Jim Crow” and thereupon used “Jim Crow to foreclose more radical alternatives,” and because “in forecasting the end of racism in an undefined near future, racial liberals renewed it as a material regime” (p. 11). Darda further elaborates: “Racial liberalism did not invent white racial dominance or anti-Blackness, of course, but it did, while insisting that we shall overcome, limit the tools with which a rising generation, the civil rights generation, could combat them” (p. 12). In sum, Darda argues, racial liberalism functioned as “a constraining discourse” (p. 12). Or put even more directly, what transpired during the postwar era was that “white racial liberals” went about constructing “a racial discourse that constrained a rising antiracist tide” (p. 20).In the first four chapters, Darda discusses a range of leading social scientists and popular authors—from C. Vann Woodward and Ruth Benedict to Gunnar Myrdal and Lillian Smith—who perpetuated “a liberal frontlash that confused racial constructionism with racial biologism, race as illusion with race as essence,” and, in the process, observes Darda with more than a touch of sarcasm, went about “shutting materialist antiracisms out of the conversation altogether while guaranteeing that time, the forward march, the near future, would solve all” (p. 187). In one of his many pithy turns of phrase, Darda notes that racial liberals who had first “tried to defeat racism, to right, enlighten, and cure it,” found only that they had managed to renounce “the near-future solution for the immediate delusion” (p. 187).The fifth and final chapter is the strongest. This is because Darda permits nuance and complexity to enter into his extended handling of Grace Halsell, a friend of fellow Texan John Howard Griffin, author of the notorious Black Like Me. Halsell got the notion she wanted to replicate Griffin's “liberal blackface” as a Black woman living in Harlem and also the South (p. 168). Darda dutifully assails Halsell as a “neominstrel” and a fraud (p. 186). But fraudulent or not, Halsell's book, Soul Sister (1969), found “more than a million readers in seven languages” (p. 178). This success led Halsell to repeat her experiments in “racial drag,” transforming herself first into a fake Navajo (with the blessing of Vine Deloria, no less) and later into a fake undocumented Mexican, “twice swimming the Rio Grande” (p. 185). Drawing extensively and expertly on Halsell's unpublished papers, Darda finds himself inadvertently communicating something like a grudging respect for what might be termed Halsell's entrepreneurial chutzpah. Messier in its perspective, Darda's writing on Halsell evolves into something truly engaging.It is a problem that Darda does not define his terms. We are never quite sure what precisely he means by “racial liberalism,” for instance, though it is unambiguous that it is really bad. (Likewise, we are not sure what he means by “material regime.”) Not defining “racial liberal” allows it to become a capacious tent that potentially includes the humanist psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of Children of Crisis, on the one hand, and the egregious Daniel Patrick Moynihan, author of the eponymous Report, on the other. We cannot know for sure because Darda never critically explores either Coles or Moynihan in a book on postwar social scientific stances on race—odd omissions all their own.These are not the only omissions. Many of the texts Darda analyzes were huge commercial successes, but little attempt is made to grasp how these texts were popularly received. Darda's decision to focus exclusively on how “the racial liberal's faith in the clock—in progress, in the moral arc of the universe—thwarted materialist antiracisms” might have been more compelling had he acknowledged the right's ongoing efforts to perpetuate anti-Black attitudes and institutions (p. 3). We learn next to nothing about what Bryan Stevenson has termed the racial terror violence that ran straight through the postwar era. That racial liberalism might be interpreted as a kind of ideological compromise formation is therefore not entertained. Likewise, there is no hint that there was, or could have been, or might still be, or even ever should be, a cross-ideological coalition between liberals and (Black and brown and white) left antiracists to ward off (what Darda concludes by labeling) “the fascist turn in Washington” (p. 206).Readers of this journal will likely find items of interest in The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism. Darda can quote effectively; he brings a core earnestness to his task. Still, that his analysis leans so heavily on a single note tends to dull the senses after a while, a fact especially regrettable given the extraordinary importance of the subject matter

Dominance (genetics · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Racial equality · Racial formation theory · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society