Despite Adolph Reed’s accurate remarks that ‘the race/class debate has vexed American intellectual life […] for more than a century’ (2002, 265), the relationship between race, class and modernity tends to be relatively neglected in American communication theory. This neglect persists despite the consolidation of critical race theory in the 1980s and its subsequent impact in the wider academy. Race does not emerge as a topic in James Carey’s Communication as Culture. In Speaking Into the Air, John Durham Peters includes a chapter about communication with animals, but nothing on race. Nor does it appear in Robert Craig’s well-cited disciplinary-defining essay, ‘Communication Theory As a Field’.
From the critical wing of the discipline, in One Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse puts considerable emphasis on the emerging New Left as an agent of social change. But in retrospect he misses the significance of the civil rights movement, the most powerful postwar American social movement. It would be a mistake to attribute this oversight to the movement’s pragmatic reformist tendencies eclipsing its more radical elements, a compromise that saw Malcolm X and the black Panthers break cause, but this revisionist concession masks a broader politics intending to domesticate the radical impulse found within the movement. Herbert Schiller does better. His Mass Communications and American Empire covers racial disparities, primarily through the lens of third-world marginalization.
But these kinds of topics have disappeared from Dan Schiller’s Digital Capitalism, published when racial disparities in computer ownership and use presented a 15 percentage point gap in the US, a divide that remains the same nearly 20 years later in 2015 (Fairlie, 2017). Racial hierarchy is implicit in Christian Fuchs’ analysis of commodity chains and the international division of digital labour. Here he connects
Lest one attribute these lamentable oversights and distortions to apparently justifiable narrow disciplinary constraints, Jeff Pooley reminds us that ‘the communication theory domain is expansive’ (2016, 3). From surveying the discipline, he found that ‘the line dividing influence from indifference, in other words, has remained strikingly arbitrary. The organization of media scholarship has always, if unevenly, reflected the media landscape itself.’ Pooley raises a good point, but it can be strengthened by noting how the Western media landscape is constructed around racial exclusion and exploitation (see González and Torres, 2011). So Pooley is right to note that ‘our field’s story of its past is notably unreflective – built atop invented traditions and pleasing illusions’ (2005, 200).
One by-product of these ‘pleasing illusions’ is the general neglect of the systematic construction of civic ascription around race that emerged to suit the needs of a proto-capitalist political economy, which in turn was reinforced by science and law to supplement armed commercial expansion. As Charles Mills writes, ‘The political economy of racial domination required a corresponding cognitive economy that would systematically darken the light of factual and normative inquiry.’ ‘White Ignorance’, he writes ‘plays itself out in the complex interaction of Eurocentric perception and categorization, white normativity, social memory and social amnesia, the derogation of non-white testimony, racial group interests, and motivated irrationality’ (Mills, 2015, 217).
This ignorance can (and does) present itself in scholarship, in what Gurminder Bhambra (2017) terms ‘methodological whiteness’. This methodological fallacy downplays the role of race as a structuring force while simultaneously viewing whiteness as a neutral and natural normative frame of analysis, as the parameter within which knowledge is constructed and legitimated. Bhambra adds that because of this fallacy, progressive neoliberals tend to misconstrue class analysis as
Accordingly, a goal in this chapter is to critique the ‘cognitive economy of racial domination’ as it manifests in this broad area of scholarship. Conceptualizing the reverberations and continuations of this domination requires temporarily setting aside the general canonical literature in communication theory. Instead I directly and indirectly build upon those who have also critiqued previous iterations of this racial domination. This includes Stuart Hall, who theorized identity as indeterminate, laden with multiplicities that are always in a process of becoming, Paul Gilroy, who did much to show how identity was connected to the development of circuits of accumulation during the course of modernity, and Sut Jhally, whose longstanding analysis of race in American media culture is the benchmark for any meaningful critique of contemporary life. Still, these insights mean very little if it amounts to simply inviting these insights into pre-existing and unchanged spaces. The proper barometer is whether those included have a say and the resources to shape the structure of and relations in that space.
It is worth mentioning that Hall, Gilroy, Jhally and other likeminded scholars inspired a generation of academics, often in and from the minority but not exclusively, to explore the experience of marginalized communities, to find ways for these communities to carve out theoretical and empirical space for their academic projects. In the last two decades demographic shifts and hiring trends in the US and UK academic systems have, albeit far from being ideal and with much work to be done on these fronts, taken some of the sharpness from the whiteness of communication theory. However, this does not mean that marginalization does not continue. So yes, curriculums and faculty compliments do change, but they do under the long shadow of an Anglo-American colonial present where concurrently amnesia of and nostalgia for Pax Britannica justifies Pax Americana.
Lastly, issues of ‘ignorance’ are only one component of American life as so it would be ill-advised to discuss these without also undertaking a study of the considerable amount of violence required to maintain racial hierarchies, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world. So while this chapter addresses issues like misrecognition and ideology, Chapter 7 turns to the more kinetic means to subordinate bodies.
To illustrate the ramifications of methodological whiteness and the colonial present, I want to contrast two recently published books that address the legacies of modernity. These are Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.
Continuing some of the themes put forward in The Better Angels of Our Nature, in Enlightenment Now Pinker (2018) argues that contrary to the views offered by radical social critics, by most metrics global living conditions are improving. Life expectancy has greatly increased due to a massive reduction in poverty and improved healthcare; supposedly both are by-products of economic growth, science and technology. Pinker attributes these developments to the worldview inherited from the Enlightenment. In short, he says, ‘The Enlightenment has worked’ (2018, 19). To his mind, the greatest impediments to improving the quality of human life are religion and superstitious cultural practices, plus the intellectuals that treat the Enlightenment ideals ‘with indifference, scepticism, and sometimes contempt’ (2018, 19). Although he does not mention them, by his reasoning he would be talking about black radicals like C. L. R. James who do not treat Enlightenment ideals with contempt but do show how these were unevenly lived. To counter these supposed harms to progress, Pinker believes that the goal should be for scientific experts to rule through discrete nudging here and there, as they can best distribute and allocate public goods. In plain terms, he says, ‘to make public discourse more rational issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible’ (2018, 407). Pinker’s conception of progress has an unshaken faith that reasonable, evidence-based deliberation inevitably leads to a democratic rights culture, one fully attendant to tolerance and fairness. The only difference is that this iteration proceeds with data.
However, in Pinker’s telling there is no space in the grand narrative for socio-material struggles. Contentious social movements never receive a mention in Enlightenment Now nor how industrial strikes for workplace protections and increased wages raised living standards. Similarly, the problems of rising wealth inequality are subordinated to poverty alleviation, as if the (lack of) distribution of basic provisions and comforts can be disconnected from wealth concentration. Also absent is even the suspicion that minor poverty alleviation is a technique to stall working-class rebellions, the very things that brought about the improvements in living standards that Pinker otherwise attributes to technological invention. He forgets that someone must build these things.
The unprecedented success of the mathematical method in the seventeenth century left a mark on philosophy, not merely because mathematics had not been discriminated from philosophy at the time, but because mathematical techniques – deduction from ‘self-evident’ axioms according to fixed rules, tests of internal consistency, a priori methods, standards of clarity and rigour proper to mathematics – were applied to philosophy also; with the result that this particular model dominates the philosophy as well as the natural science of the period. (2017, 3–4)
But in a passage worth separating for emphasis, Berlin adds: ‘This led to notable successes and equally notable failures, as the over enthusiastic and fanatical application of technique rich in one, when mechanically applied to another, not necessarily similar to the first, commonalty does’ (2017, 3–4). While certainly some of this ‘mood persists into the eighteenth century’ through the debates between rationalism and empiricism, the mood was superseded by Kant’s ‘great break’ (2017, 4, 13).
Berlin’s synopsis of this movement of thought culminates in Kant’s attention to the difference between judgement and truth. As Berlin (2017) explains, showing a doubter of Pythagorean geometry more right-angle triangles does little to convince them that suitable evidence exists. Reiterating that the problem with the early portion of 18th-century thought is the ‘identification of philosophy with science’, Berlin describes it as ‘the major fallacy which vitiates it’. Still, Berlin notes, mature Enlightenment thought reached another conclusion, this being that ‘the central dream, the demonstration that everything in the world moved by mechanical means, that all evils could be cured by technological steps, that there could exist engineers both of human souls and of human bodies, proved delusive’ (Berlin, 2017, 15, 17).
By the Eighteenth Century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations. Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies – was increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the global
spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it. (Buck-Morss, 2009, 21)
The disjuncture between universal rights but massive exclusion from those rights is the reason that Charles Mills says that the Enlightenment was ‘compromised from the start’ (2015, 217). While Mills’ conclusion has much merit, it is equally important to note that anti-racism developed out of this history too, with its accompanying claim to universal freedom rejecting that ‘the measure of mankind was the European’, as Cedric Robinson wrote (2000, 99; also see Gopal, 2019). Of course, far better to not to have had racial subordination to oppose in the first place.
Race in America
As an example of the role and consequences of bonded labour in capitalist modernity (and to counter Pinker’s improvised understanding of the Enlightenment) I want to discuss Ta-Nehisi Coates’ theorization of race in America. He offers an especially strong account of the enduring inequalities of ongoing accumulation by dispossession, exploitation and hierarchical civic status, all preserved by state-sanctioned violence. He couples this with various ‘moves of innocence’ that permit an historical amnesia about how the right to take black life has been systematically embedded and remains a core component of capitalism in the Americas.
The process of washing desperate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tasting and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life liberty labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of family; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. (Coates, 2015, 8)
In short, blacks are produced by state-sanctioned violence, recent versions being stand-your-ground laws and militarized police enforcing expansive drugs laws. It is a contradiction insofar as blacks are moral agents, yet these full rights are denied to them. One of the consequences of this contradiction is that the police and other state agencies have a licence to destroy black bodies without the perpetrators being held accountable for their violence. ‘It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originated in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy’ (Coates, 2015, 7, 8, 9). The police serve the people. And blacks are not ‘the people’. Marked by birth, they are excluded from this right. This systematic misrecognition leads to social death and physical death.
To elaborate, Coates suggests that the concepts Americans use to talk about race can sometimes ‘obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extract organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth’ (Coates, 2015, 10). Racism is materially rooted, ideologically embedded and bodily experienced. Similarly, he dislikes the impoverished version of black history where it chronicles firsts as if it is little more than answers to Trivial Pursuit questions. Or removes the violence and oppression in Africa prior to European colonialism. Still, as a social construct race has less to do with shared histories, cultures or beliefs directly, and more to do with subordination based upon position and identification. Certainly, as Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (1976) document in The Birth of African American Culture, there are remarkable differences in language and diet, lifestyle and family structure in black communities in the Americas. Even so, black culture is a useful term that reflects how during modernity these bodies were positioned relative to white supremacy. In line with Mintz and Price, Coates concludes that ‘there was nothing holy or particular in my skin; I was black because of history and heritage. There was no nobility in falling, in being bound in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn’t black; black skin wasn’t even black’ (Coates, 2015, 43, 55, 98).
Less interested in accumulated disadvantage, Coates’ theorization is predicated upon how violence positions and subjugates the black body. Through eloquently rejecting a biological or essentialist understanding
Through focusing on intergenerational violence, interpersonal violence and pre-emptive violence as mechanisms capitalism uses to enforce blackness, Coates maps how these processes come to shape the lived experience of African Americans. ‘Either I can beat him, or the police’, a refrain from his father, and a reoccurring motif Coates uses to discuss how black families attempt to keep children safe from state violence. As a result, ‘we were afraid of those who loved us most’. These processes also have a public component. To take the case of masculinity, there is a price and dilemma that involves institutions and norms too. ‘Fail to comprehend the street and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later’, Coates conveys. Young black men risk being beaten for not being tough while they are also at risk of being beaten for being threatening. Describing these as bleak choices does not convey how little choice is really involved, for each route results in a blackness marked by anxiety over their bodily integrity being wounded on all sides. Accordingly, ‘the lesson a black child learns early is that their bodies are in constant jeopardy’. Attributing this fear to the pathologies of blackness absconds from undertaking an analysis into the longstanding policies and politics that were set in motion during the American experience of modernity.
The social grammar of blackness Coates describes traverses class positions. While some class positions may reduce exposure to violence, it does not mitigate it entirely. He relays a story of a young man within his social group who had the manner, achievements and social attributes associated with promise but who, during a routine traffic stop, was nevertheless killed by the police. Coates reasons that if a young black man who exceeded the criteria set up by white American social life could be indiscriminately killed without cause then all others were greatly susceptible to state violence. All black men risk being ‘killed in the streets America made’ (Coates, 2015, 16, 17, 25, 82).
For Pinker, soon these streets will be made ‘with data’.
Through Pinker’s inattention to the salient issue of race and colonial formations his white ignorance is indicative of spectres that haunt certain scholarly tracks. It is also an example of how simplified thinking limits our ability to see the various mechanisms of class rule in action. For example, in contradistinction to Pinker’s flawed invocation of the Enlightenment, when Coates argues that the ‘American people’ are white what he means is that the boundaries of American democracy are congruent with the boundaries of whiteness to which it is set to serve.
To elaborate, forming throughout the 16th to 19th centuries, race is a modern civic ascription. It has several other premises, for example the socially acceptable stigma and licenced prejudice to those that do not conform to ‘white universalism’. A construction of differences – which while shifting assemblages and articulations seeks to mute pluralities – are claimed to be embodied, all the while being ‘fixed’ by ‘common sense’. These shifting constructions of difference are enrolled to naturalize social hierarchy. And as Coates relays, state- and market-sanctioned violence is used to proactively preserve the hierarchy.
All of these features are present in Reed’s account of race and class. He points to American plantations in the 19th century when whites petitioned for improved living conditions lest they become degraded to the status of blacks, or where they lobbied for racial exclusions to the franchise. Reed writes that ‘Planters’ commitment to black subordination, though certainly buttressed by beliefs in black inferiority, stemmed from their more practical concerns to compose a labor regime that would approximate as nearly as possible a restoration of slavery’ (2002, 267). Planters and their allies fought reconstruction efforts, labour protections and redistribution to undermine the ‘possibility that blacks and non-elite whites would form a durable alliance that could effectively challenge for power or disrupt, and perhaps radically alter, prevailing economic and class relations’ (2002, 268). This civic ascription became encoded into the American legal regime. For example, the US Naturalization Act of 1790 granted citizenship to ‘free White persons of good character’. This code was maintained in subsequent laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917 which barred Chinese workers and most Asians from acquiring citizenship. It is for this reason that Michael Omi and Howard Winant write that ‘race establishes the identity of human subjects, it structures social conflict and social cohesion, and it is deeply woven into other aspects of existence’ (1986, 56). Elsewhere they add that ‘every state institution is a racial institution’ (Omi and
It is from this vantage that resurgent discussions of the political experience of race, class, and communication can best be understood. At it most basic level there is a debate over whether race is essential to the reproduction of American capitalism, or merely a prominent but incidental feature. Upfront, Adolf Reed notes that ‘few people are prepared now, on either intellectual or moral grounds, to characterize racial injustice as a simple by-product, or “epiphenomenon”, of capitalist class relations’ (Reed, 2002, 265). So almost all participants in the debate agree with the conceptualization of race as a non-reductive, contradictory and political manner. Consolidating critical scholarship on the topic, Omi and Winant note that race is ‘an unstable and “de-centred” complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle’ (1986, 68). This ‘autonomous field of social conflict’ is maintained at through social relations and social structures, with floating signifiers used to mark identity (Omi and Winant, 1986, 52). In line with Hall, Gilroy and Jhally, this conception of race acknowledges it as a separate axis of domination and inequality.
Still – and his choice of words show how his point of entry into this debate is related to his longstanding disagreements with William Wilson’s work – Reed writes that there remain questions about ‘whether race has declined in significance as a factor in shaping life-chances, particularly among black Americans’ (2002, 265). To this end, Reed suggests that ‘reformulation of the debate has both subtly disconnected it from its radical roots in structural critique of American capitalism and established it on a polysemous foundation that gives it broader resonance, though at the price of lack of clarity’ (2002, 265). For him, the problem is that the ‘familiar juxtaposition’ between these concepts led to these things being ‘fundamentally distinguishable’. From his perspective this is a misstep. Rather, Reed proposes that ‘both are more effectively, and more accurately, seen as equivalent and overlapping elements within a singular system of social power and stratification rooted in capitalist labor relations’ (Reed, 2002, 266). This last sentence is telling. To use David Harvey’s terminology, for Reed race and class relations are different means to realize the extraction of surplus value.
Through appealing to the American historical record, Reed suggests that ‘hierarchies of civic status mediate and manage this stratification system by defining populations and assigning them ascriptively to what come to be understood as appropriate niches of civic worth and entitlement’. And so ‘race appears as a social category’, becoming
By contrast, Ellen Meiksins Wood’s political Marxism foregrounds the value struggles within wage labour regimes, which are set in motion through the separation of people from means of independent subsistence to complete the commodification of labour power thereby aiding the accumulation of abstract wealth. Herein, race is ‘a major “extra-economic” mechanism of class reproduction in US capitalism’ (Wood, 2002, 276). She means that capital is opportunistic and selective in using race and other kinds of civil hierarchies to divide the workforce, a view shared by W. E. B. Du Bois and Noel Ignatiev among others. Accordingly, for Wood the relative presence or absence of racism turns upon whether in that moment it serves the capitalist ruling class’s interests. From this vantage racial formations are modulated by capitalist class relations and strategies of accumulation. She adds that even if racial injustice evaporated, capitalism would persist. Put concisely, Wood argues that ‘capitalism is conceivable without racial divisions, but not, by definition, without class’ (2002, 276). Du Bois’ analysis of the ‘psychological wage’ proletariat whites receive is a good example of the kind of techniques of racial division used to prop up capital accumulation that Wood has in mind. This ‘wage’ is a civic ascription that gives white people relatively more status than black people. This ‘wage’ could be redescribed as a ‘loyalty rent’, one benefit of which is ‘white privilege’. As Theodore Allen (1994) used the term, white privilege refers to the relative credence given to the claims made by members of a racially segmented class-stratified society. These enduring and predictable stratifications are legitimated by ideologies that appeal to ascriptive essentialism. Yet, the relative privilege that white workers may gain still costs less to capitalists than the costs if all workers stood in solidarity and organized for higher wages for all.
According to David Roediger, Wood’s interpretation ‘remains broadly the dominant interpretation’ in the academy (Roediger, 2017, 25). Perhaps Roediger’s testimony comes from his experience of having worked within the American academic system and his encounters with the kind of methodological whiteness I have already described in this chapter. Nevertheless, Roediger relays how civic hierarchies facilitate the fragmentation of solidarity in the working class, allowing much
Returning to the main point, Reed proposes that the reason his empirical view is not widely shared – why there is even a debate about the relationship between race and class in the first place – is because progressive analysts are overly invested in formal definitions, they ‘proceed from a notion of capitalism as an ideal-typical system defined by generic economic categories’ (2002, 266). This formalism cannot fully account for actually existing capitalisms, each one an historically encumbered polity. To reframe the argument, capitalism does not strictly need racism in the same way that it does not strictly need railways or computers. These are contingent extra-economic historical developments, but they have all become readily enrolled as core elements in economically compelled exploitative relations to the point where in actually existing capitalism accumulation is less efficient without them. For Reed, the label ‘capitalism’ is little more than a summary of the outcomes by individuals and groups ‘pursu[ing] concrete material interests’ using ‘improvis[ed] institutional frameworks’ (2002, 268). While he grants that theoretical models can have ‘heuristic value’, this is only to the extent to which they do not hinder an analysis of the pursuit of concrete and specific material developments. Anything else is simply to reify capitalism, succumbing to the same kinds of epistemic errors capitalist ideology encourages.
Capitalism’s extra-economic dimensions
While playing out through stances on the utility of definitions of capitalism and empirical developments, the debate about race turns upon the extra-economic dimensions of capitalism, for example the role of the state’s force to back civic ascriptive categories that help markets reproduce themselves in ways that heavily favour capitalist
In this respect, whiteness is a ruling class social control formation; one which uses shifting implicit and explicit explanations to govern, deploying ideological justifications for discrimination based on ontological claims about the existence of those distinctively (in)capable of self-government. Recalling the passage from Susan Buck-Morss, whiteness advocates for unmarked universalism but is bundled with overt racist assertions of the innate superiority of the ruling class and the innate inferiority of others. So while white supremacy may well appeal to ‘biological characteristics’ it is ultimately about socio-economic relations and the control of capital that matters most. It is because of these differences that American whites get a social safety net and have ancestral wealth at their disposal, whereas, as Coates describes, blacks have criminal justice and penal warehousing. Indeed, a capitalist polity is absolutely and necessarily committed to sexism and racism because the system must mystify, externalize and justify the innate contradictions in its social relations. In short, whiteness and blackness are born from modernity. While both are social constructs – and so are malleable and contingent – they signify a relationship to authority, and by implication to capital. For this reason it would be helpful for more communication and technology scholars to study the ‘cognitive economy of racial domination’.
