Overdeterminations

problem of the twentieth century, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, the problem of the color-line. Since The Souls of Black Folk was published, the century has witnessed an epoch-making, intra-imperialist war, two world-historical revolutions, the rise and partial defeat of fascism, the attempted genocide of several peoples (Armenians, Jews, Gypsies) along ethnic but not strictly racial lines, and the development of nuclear weaponry that renders global holocaust a concrete possibility. Yet Du Bois's prophecy, however hyperbolic its form, remains difficult to dismiss, especially in the context of which he was primarily thinking. What Langston Hughes described in American Heartbreak as great mistake/ That Jamestown made/ Long ago continues to resonate at every level of society: it is often difficult to see (for whites) precisely because it is so glaringly obvious. To an extent that goes largely unappreciated even in radical discourse, the major institutions of power-corporations, state apparatuses, educational systems, trade unions, churches-are racially structured. This is true not only in the recruiting and deployment of their personnel, where segregation and tokenism are still more the rule than the exception, but, even more importantly, in their basic social orientations. For example, the maintenance of a permanently unemployed black underclass in the urban centers is no aberration or archaism, but appears to be a structural necessity of monopoly capitalism. On the other side, when, in the late 1960s, the organized labor movement began to retreat from its earlier support for black liberation struggles, it effected a betrayal for which workers, black and white, will continue to suffer for many years to come. From the development of a proto-capitalist agriculture in the antebellum South to the 1983 mayoral campaign in Chicago, from the history of music to the enforcement of sexual mores, race has inscribed itself as crucial to nearly every activity of civilization

Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Political Economy and Marxism · Political theory and Gramsci

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