It’s the Economy--
‘A Dreadful Deceit,’ by Jacqueline Jones
Americans
have struggled mightily since the nation’s birth to overcome racial
prejudice. Recently, as symbolized by President Obama’s ascendancy and
his message of racial reconciliation, we have basically succeeded and
are now healing from our racial wounds. Or so the story goes. In “A
Dreadful Deceit,” the distinguished historian Jacqueline Jones
vehemently rejects this redemptive and self-congratulatory narrative.
She believes that the country’s racial problems have little to do with
racism and everything to do with economic exploitation. And, she claims,
we have not even begun to come to terms with this.
Jones
is the author of numerous books, including “Labor of Love, Labor of
Sorrow,” which won the Bancroft Prize in 1986. This new book, a sweeping
account of the role of race in American history, is structured around
the stories of six extraordinary but largely unknown individuals, each
of African descent.
• There’s Antonio, murdered in colonial Maryland for
refusing to submit to enslavement;
• Boston King, a former slave from
South Carolina turned loyalist during the American Revolution;
• the
Afro-Indian Elleanor Eldridge, who started several successful businesses
in Providence, R.I., in the early 19th century;
• the Reconstruction-era
Georgia politician Richard W. White;
• the early-20th-century educator
William H. Holtzclaw, who founded a Tuskegee-like school in Mississippi;
• and finally the radical labor activist Simon P. Owens in mid-20th-century Detroit.
• the early-20th-century educator
William H. Holtzclaw, who founded a Tuskegee-like school in Mississippi;• and finally the radical labor activist Simon P. Owens in mid-20th-century Detroit.
The
six stories, told in vivid detail, are fascinating and a pleasure to
read, particularly the one about Owens, whom Jones sometimes uses as a
mouthpiece. Yet the life Jones is most interested in is the life of the
concept of “race,” which, following the radical abolitionist David
Walker, she terms a “dreadful deceit.” Her book is a call to renounce
the very idea of race as a dangerous misconception. This argument will
be familiar to scholars, but Jones seeks to bring it to a broader
audience.
To
explain how racial conflict has masked power struggles for control over
others’ labor, Jones surveys compelled work in its many varieties, from
slave labor under the lash on tobacco plantations in Maryland to
mandatory overtime in unsafe and sweltering auto plants in Detroit.
Racial ideologies, she argues, are like mob violence, disenfranchisement
and discriminatory laws — merely tactics used to secure material
advantages in social contexts perceived as zero-sum.
So
the refusal of white colonists to recognize black claims to equal
liberty was not premised on racial considerations, Jones argues, but on
naked self-interest. She acknowledges that intellectuals like Thomas
Jefferson were moved to reconcile Enlightenment values with slavery. But
most propertied white men didn’t see a need to justify their dominance
apart from citing their economic interests, the same interests that led
them to exploit Indians, poor whites and women. A racial justification
for slavery emerged only in the 19th century, in response to the
Northern abolitionist movement.
Similarly,
Jones describes early-19th-century white working-class hostility to
blacks as springing from economic competition. “By keeping blacks in
menial jobs permanently,” she writes, “whites might reserve new and
better opportunities for themselves and ensure that someone else did the
ill-paying, disagreeable work.” Throughout the period from colonial
settlement to the Civil War, she says, racial ideologies played only a
minor role in sustaining white dominance.
Jones
acknowledges that “whiteness” functioned as a powerful idea during
Reconstruction, uniting whites of opposing political views and
conflicting class interests. But racial ideologies were “remade” at the
turn of the 20th century, when blacks were imprisoned or killed as
sexual and criminal deviants in order to prevent them from joining
forces with poor whites against white elites. Moving into the present,
she attributes contemporary ghetto poverty and its associated ills to a
lack of jobs for low-skilled workers. Black subordination no longer
requires racial myths to perpetuate it. Vulnerable blacks can be
defrauded, imprisoned, disenfranchised and left to die in floodwaters
without appeals to race.
Yet
isn’t it obvious that whites sometimes hate blacks simply because they
are black? No, Jones says. When whites express contempt or hatred for
blacks it is because of the stigma attached to servitude, or because
blacks have refused to submit quietly to economic marginalization.
Jones
celebrates interracial working-class solidarity (though she recognizes
that white workers have generally resisted uniting with black workers).
At the same time, she is ambivalent about whether “blackness” itself can
ever be a basis for identity or solidarity. She says of Owens, “Because
generations of white people had defined him and all other blacks first
and foremost as ‘Negroes,’ he had no alternative but to acknowledge — or
rather, react to — that spurious identity.” Even if what blacks have in
common is not their race but “an overarching political vulnerability
traced back to enslaved forebears, a political and historical status,”
there might be times, she admits, when it would be legitimate to
describe this commonality using the language of race. However, she also
believes that doing so keeps a “destructive” idea alive.
Jones’s
argument shares features with W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory in his 1940
book, “Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race
Concept.” But the differences make a difference. Du Bois too welcomed
multiracial working-class solidarity, yet he thought that many oppressed
whites were strongly attached to their “whiteness” as a marker of
status, despite the fact that it brought them few or no material
advantages. While Jones contends that racial justifications for unequal
treatment are tactical and self-serving lies, Du Bois emphasized that
those who accept racist thinking are generally self-deceived, entranced
by mystifying fictions. And although he is no less concerned about black
economic disadvantage than Jones, Du Bois worried as well about the
self-contempt that racial defamation causes. Material well-being without
self-respect, he insisted, is an undignified existence.
Precisely
because race is, as Jones says, a “strange and shifting idea,” both
malleable and capacious, Du Bois believed it could be remade and used
for good. Over the years, those who have had the label “black” imposed
on them have revised its meaning to better reflect their experiences and
collective memory, and employed it as a means of overcoming their
oppression. Thus, “black is beautiful,” “black pride,” even “black
power.” When Du Bois called on the “darker races” to stand together
against imperialism, economic exploitation and white supremacy, he was
invoking race, but not in a morally troubling way.
Engagement
with Du Boisian ideas might have made “A Dreadful Deceit” more
convincing (and its practical implications less ambiguous). Still, if
contemporary discussions of race could be focused on the
interconnections between racial ideologies, political power and economic
vulnerability, as Jones would like, that would be a dramatic
improvement over the “postracial” narratives that currently reign.
A DREADFUL DECEIT
The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America
By Jacqueline Jones
Illustrated. 381 pp. Basic Books. $29.99.
Tommie Shelby, a
professor of philosophy and of African and African-American studies at
Harvard, is the author of “We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical
Foundations of Black Solidarity.”
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