Crossroads, Directions and A New Critical Race Theory

Francisco Valdes, Angela Harris, Jerome Mccristal Culp

Published by Temple University Press

Valdes, F. & Harris, A. & Culp, J. M..

Crossroads, Directions and A New Critical Race Theory: And A New Critical Race Theory.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/2513

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 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Beyond, and Not Beyond,
Black and White:
Deconstruction Has a Politics
Mar; Matsuda
A PRESIDENT'S CONVERSATION on race is
going on right now, accompanied by a new
McCarthyism that excludes a radical cri-
tique of American racism. No one affiliated
with Critical Race Theory sits on the Presi-
dent's Commission, and that is not an acci-
dent. It is impossible to have a conversation
about race in America without critical race
theorists unless the omission is deliberate.
Our work is a looming absence as the
national conversation grows in confusion.
I heard the confusion all of this week. On
Monday, I was discussing the President's Ini-
tiative on Race with an Asian American civil-
rights lawyer. She said that she was worried
that the President's Initiative had gotten
stuck on the Black-white paradigm. On
Tuesday, I ran into a prominent African
American veteran of the Civil Rights Move-
ment, and she said, "If you are going to talk
about race in America you can't avoid the
Black-white paradigm, and I wish you'd
explain this to people, since you are so good
at explaining things." On Wednesday, I went
to a meeting with a group of people who are
trying to advise the President's Initiative. At
the first opportunity to speak, I said, "It's
your job to assert that there is racism in
America, because there are still a lot of peo-
ple out there who believe that racism does-
n't exist. You have to make it plain to them
that it is not a colorblind world." Immedi-
ately after I spoke, a Native American activist
jumped into the conversation to say, "Well,
I hope you understand that racial discrimi-
nation is not the first problem that my peo-
ple face. Our first issue is sovereignty." On
Thursday, I came to Yale for the CRT Con-
ference, and I met with Asian American stu-
dents. They were angry because there is no
Asian American studies program at one of
the so-called finest universities in the so-
called free world. One of the students said to
me, "How do you ever figure out if your work
is any good when none of your professors
are in a position to evaluate your work
because they don't know anything about
what you are trying to do? If they talk about
race here at Yale, all they know is Black and
white." Now it's Friday, and I need to dis-
394 BEYOND, AND NOT BEYOND, BLACK AND WHITE
CUSS this racial-paradigm business as a chal-
lenge for CRT generally, as the challenge and
the politics of deconstruction.
We in CRT made a choice to put race at
the center of our analysis for reasons his-
torical, political, and analytical, and that
meant that initially we were talking prima-
rily about African American history and
experience. Several years ago at Yale, Profes-
sor Harlon Dalton introduced me as "some-
one who knows more about my people than
I could ever hope to know about her peo-
ple." This was a profound compliment. It
also included a little bit of the self-critique
that is just one page out of the Harlon Dal-
ton school-of-charm book. The reason his
compliment resonated so deeply is embed-
ded in the social history ofJapanese Amer-
icans of a certain age.
A streetwise cousin of mine, when he was
a teenager, showed me sketch books he was
developing through participation in the Yel-
low Brotherhood, which, depending on your
perspective, was either a gang or a political
formation. He had sketched Malcolm, Fred-
erick Douglass, Ho Chi Minh, and Che in
profile, marching off into the future, facing
a big rising sun. This was an iconic, early
1970S vision shared not just by intellectuals.
In this particular time, people you might
call the grassroots, the lumpen, shared the
politics of liberation. We were children in
Los Angeles when Black nationalist graffiti
first started appearing on the walls and we
heard phrases like "Black is beautiful." For
Asian Americans, this remarkable inversion
meant yellow was also, possibly, beautiful.
This was a time when young Asian girls were
saving money to get their eyelids slit by plas-
tic surgeons so they could look more white.
On television, Asian men were portrayed as
bucktoothed, idiotic houseboys. The idea
that someone could say, "I'm Black and I'm
proud," was deeply subversive not just in the
African American community, but also in
the Chicano community and in the Asian
American community. Travel around the
world and talk to people my age, in corners
of Africa, the Pacific, Asia. Go to Aotearoa
(New Zealand) and talk to the Maori people,
and they will tell you, "We· heard this mes-
sage, 'I'm Black and I'm proud,' and we
translated it and formed our own struggle
of liberation around it." The idea that one
can develop self-respecting love of Black-
ness, tie it to a broader, popularized culture,
transmute it over to politics so that it
teaches a critique of colonialism, of capi-
talism, and of racism, created the most
exciting personal and political moment of
my lifetime.!
Out of this confluence of culture and pol-
itics came the Asian American Movement,
Asian American Studies, and Asian Ameri-
can membership in the Third World coali-
tion. The Black-white paradigm therefore
feels like the old home to me. I read W.E.B.
Du Bois and Paul Robeson and others in
the Black intellectual tradition and feel val-
idated by their analysis of what happened in
this country, not just in the late twentieth
century, but if you look back to what they
were writing about in the nineteenth and
earlier twentieth century: They included
Asians. They talked about what was then
called "Coolie Labor," and they understood
that the quasi-chattel status of contract
laborers from Asia was the global equiva-
lent of the quasi-chattel status of Black
sharecroppers in the American South. They
critiqued this as part of a critique of global
capitalism, and they tied these forms of
indentured servitude to the history of slav-
ery. These intellectual links are quite pow-
erful for understanding not just the Black
experience but the Asian experience, as well.
We cannot understand American racism
unless we understand African American his-
tory as American history. Asian Americans
need to know how the fear of a Black planet
was real for planters in many areas of the
South where the enslaved far outnumbered

the free, and how the fear of Blackness bur-
rowed into the collective unconscious of
this nation. There have been times in my
own life when I transgressed boundaries
and found that I was feared as a Black per-
son. In the fifth grade, I defied a teacher
because she made a pronouncement that
was unfair. She said to me in a bitter tone
that I was not used to hearing from her, "I
thought you were different." I had become
to her like the Black kids in the class. This
is no inconsequential position for Asians,
because fear of Blackness kills. When the
Los Angeles Police Department gunned
down a Korean American traffic violator;2
when police in Northern California mur-
dered an unarmed Chinese American man
who was drunk on his own front lawn;3
when a Louisiana jury acquitted a Louisiana
homeowner who had shot a Japanese
teenager who came to the door to ask for
directions 4 -these are real instances, not
metaphors, of fear of Blackness killing
somebody. This is not to say that xenopho-
bic, yellow-peril, Asian-specific forms of
racism are absent in these cases. Rather, I
submit that the quick finger on the trigger
traces back in history to a whispered name,
Nat Turner, and a legacy of terror inflicted
by the terrified. It says "shoot first," and
White Supremacy shoots in fear of what its
own evil has wrought on this continent.
When I say "fear of Blackness," I don't
mean that this is all we need to understand.
I don't want to use up what little time I have
left to say it five times, but I must be under-
stood as though I said it five times: That's
not all we need to understand. We need to
see the blood soaking our land from the
genocide that strips sovereignty, home, and
family from Indian people. We need to see
that without U.S. imperial campaigns of
westward expansion that intended to go all
the way to Asia, we would be speaking Span-
ish at half the panels at this conference.
Without that imperialism, the nations of
MARl MATSUDA 395
Hawaii, Guam, Micronesia, Okinawa, and
the Philippines-all these places that don't
have independence from U.S. military dom-
ination today-would have true sovereignty.
We need to know how racism in all its vari-
ant forms has played out in our history, how
inter- and intragroup oppression makes a
people-of-color coalition a fantasy in many
contemporary parts of the United States,
and as we complexify, we have a challenge.
When we say we need to move beyond
Black and white, this is what a whole lot of
people say or feel or think: "Thank good-
ness we can get off that paradigm, because
those Black people made me so uncomfort-
able. I know all abour Blacks, but I really
don't know anything about Asians, and
while we're deconstructing that Black-white
paradigm, we also need to reconsider the
category of race all together, since race, as
you know, is a constructed category, and
thank God I don't have to take those angry
Black people seriously anymore."
I am an intellectual. Theory is important.
I don't want my comments taken as anti-
intellectual, anti-theory, or anti-decon-
struction in particular. My attack is on
deconstruction that comes without a pro-
gressive politics and without a material
component. Professor Lawrence speaks of
Griggss as the doctrinal culmination of the
Civil Rights struggle, a high point before we
sank back to where we are now. I am a mate-
rial girl, and Griggs is my case. For those of
you who are not lawyers, let me just explain
briefly: The Griggs case says that if we see an
end result of racial exclusion, we will pre-
sume that racism is there, and we're not
going to require proof that someone
intended to get to this racist place. If you
have 500 job openings and you haven't hired
any of the 500 qualified Black people who
applied, your statement that this exclusion
just happened by accident is not tenable.
We're going to take the result as evidence of
what you intended.
396 BEYOND, AND NOT BEYOND, BLACK AND WHITE
The Griggs test is how to achieve equality
if you believe that the real world counts. I
want to look at the effects of any given
deconstruction, whether it's of the
Black-white paradigm or of the notion of
race itself. Is the effect of your deconstruc-
tion to give aid and comfort to the enemies
of racial justice? Is your deconstruction of
race further obfuscating deep racial strati-
fication and white supremacy? If so, you're
engaging in reactionary politics, whether
you intend to or not. Similarly, when I speak
loudly and clearly on behalf of racial justice
and I'm attacked, I notice that the same
people who are attacking me are attacking
Catharine MacKinnon when she speaks
loudly and clearly on the subject of the sex-
ual abuse of women. When the same people
are attacking us, when we have the same
enemies, we are allies. Working backward
from that and working very hard to under-
stand Professor MacKinnon's work, I have
come to see why her work is true in theo-
retical terms. I start from a material place.
The people who want to annihilate her also
want to annihilate me when we demand an
end to their position of domination. There-
fore, she is my sister.
I have come to a Griggs test for decon-
struction theory out of my struggle around
the issue of affirmative action. When I'm
defending affirmative action, as I've tried to
do in my writing and in speaking to all
kinds of groups all over the country, I find
that deconstruction walks into the room,
and usually not in ways that are useful to
the project of racial justice. I run into liber-
als questioning whether affirmative action
makes any sense, because only privileged
people of color get to take advantage of it.
By the way, in empirical terms, this is a lie.
I run into people who question inclusion of
Asian Americans in affirmative-action pro-
grams because "Asian" is an artificial cate-
gory comprising diverse and oppositional
groups. I run into the Hopwood court6 that
does an antiessentialist analysis of race,
challenging the university's goal of diver-
sity. By bringing in Black people or bringing
in Latino/Latina people, you don't get diver-
sity, the court says, because those groups
themselves are diverse to the point of being
non-existent. The court concluded by crim-
inalizing any further efforts to integrate the
University of Texas. Admit a Mexican, go to
jail is the result; antiessentialism is the jus-
tification.
This Hopwood form of deconstruction
and antiessentialism is, of course, simplistic
and reactionary, but I think too often it is
aligned with more sophisticated theoretical
forms. I see a similar groundswell happen-
ing with gender. When structuralist
thinkers identify patriarchy and describe
the subordination of women, they immedi-
ately face the charges of "vulgar," "simplis-
tic," or simply "excluding my experience."
To the extent that this critique is used
against a writer such as MacKinnon, I think
it misreads her work. The power of her
model is that it encompasses a multiplicity,
and it still exists. The women in this room,
as diverse as they are, or the women on this
panel, as diverse and individually unique as
they are, are nevertheless understood by the
broader powers of patriarchy as available for
use and abuse by men. They are systemati-
cally devalued as social, economic, intellec-
tual, and political agents because of that
reality. That many of us manage to rise
above in one way or another doesn't erase
the reality.
The reluctance to accept this powerful
description of patriarchy within CRT some-
times, I think, comes from the same affin-
ity that I articulated earlier for myself
around the Black-white paradigm. To do
cross-cutting analysis, as critical race femi-
nists have tried to do, feels like a dilution to
people who have struggled all their lives for
liberation of their people, as constructed by
race, not gender. In other words, when Pro-

fessor MacKinnon says, "It's sex, it's sex, it's
sex," that's heard as saying, "It's not race,
it's not race, it's not race." She never said,
"It's not race," and if you read her work you
can underline and highlight all the places in
which she says, "And if you think that this
is bad try multiplying it by racial oppres-
sion and see what you get." But maybe she
can't physically say that enough times in a
world in which any move to gender is taken
as an excuse to drop race, and vice versa.
Disaggregation, antiessentialism, post-
structuralism-whatever theoretical move
you make, I'll be watching you. A sophisti-
cated, nuanced, thick understanding of
human life may call for breaking out of cat-
egories and examining exceptionality. Read
MacKinnon. She does this. Any theory that
seeks structure, that can call oppression just
that, lacks power if it cannot account for
the outlier. And what if we are all outliers-
if race is nothing but variability and gender
nothing but theater? What if we could
choose, invent, and dance up, down, and all
around categories? If you love human
beings, you see this transcendent potential.
If you love them under present political cir-
cumstances, you see their unbearable vul-
nerability. Count the bodies as they fall,
even as you imagine freedom from the tem-
plate they fall through.
What does this mean for the future of
CRT? I see an emerging consensus among
the progressive wing of this band that race,
gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality are
complex, interlinked and indisputable loca-
tions of oppression, and any attempt to
erase or dilute one analysis in order to do
another is a reactionary move. This makes
our work incredibly hard, but the theoreti-
cal practice of disaggregation for its own
sake, without attention to political effects,
is ultimately going to serve interests that are
not our own. If you think that sexual abuse
of women is a side issue, please read Mac-
Kinnon again. If you think you know every-
MARl MATSUDA 397
thing you need to know about white over
Black as a metaphenomenon, you need to
go back to CRT 101. If you think that you've
done that and that's all you need to do, the
train is leaving the station; please get on
board. If you are tired of pulling others out
of their ignorance about your own libera-
tion struggle, all I can say is, I'm sorry, but
that burden is your gift. You'll have to find
some place to rest when weary, and you will
have to come back to the table and ask,
"Whom can I struggle with who will bring
their ignorance in good faith and hear what
they can learn from me as this train pulls
away?" Can you do two things that are dif-
ferent at the same time? Can you drive while
you talk on your cellular phone? No. Can
you say, "I love you, and I am angry at you?"
Yes. Can you say, "The institution of slavery
is foundational in American racism, and the
struggle against American racism encom-
passes much beyond the Black-white para-
digm"? Can you say, "The sexual abuse of
women and girls of all races is an epidemic
in this country, and the present rate of
incarceration of Black men is genocidal, and
the fact that these two are gendered phe-
nomena indicates that patriarchy is after
Black men as well as all women, and just
because I said 'Black' does not mean you
should forget about Asian, Latino, Latina,
gay, Indian, poor, working class, disabled,
and, this is not a laundry list?" This is some-
body's body, and at the end of the line there
is liberation, and that is what gives meaning
to all we do.
Notes
Editor's note: This chapter is a transcription of
remarks given at the November 1997 CRT Confer-
ence at Yale University while President Bill Clinton's
Initiative on Race was conducting a national
inquiry into the state of race relations in America:
See President's Advisory Board, One America in the
2ISt Century: Forging a New Future (Washington, D.C.:
398 BEYOND, AND NOT BEYOND, BLACK AND WHITE
u.s. President's Advisory Board, 1998). It should be
read with the chapters by Professor Catharine
MacKinnon and Professor Kimberle Crenshaw in
this book as part of an organic whole on the ques-
tion of theory, community, and power.
1. For an account of this period by an African
American who became active in the Puerto Rican
liberation movement, see James Early, "An African-
American Puerto Rican Connection," in Andres Tor-
res and Jose E. Velazques, The Puerto Rican Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 316-28.
2. See Renee Tawa, "Korean Groups Want
Answers on Police Killing," Los Angeles Times, Feb-
ruary 17, 1997, BI.
3. See Rohnert Park, "Man Fatally Shot by Cops,"
San Francisco Chronicle, April 30, 1997, A18.
4. See Adam Nossiter, "Student's Trust in People
Proved Fatal," New York Times, October 23,1992, AI2.
5. Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424
(1971), as discussed in Charles R. Lawrence Ill's
Foreword in this volume.
6. Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F. 3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996).