Optimism and Paranoia

PIK Professor John Jackson talks about the new reality of race in America.

B. Davin Stengel

In his new book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology John L. Jackson, Jr. identifies a new paradigm of race relations in the United States, arguing that while the civil rights movement put an end to legalized segregation, America remains divided along racial lines. Many African-Americans distrust the rhetoric of political correctness, he explains, and continue to see the threat of hidden racism lurking beneath the surface of public conversations. Jackson notes that this is not only a racial story. Most current headline-making controversies, he says, are based on the slippage between what people say and what they really mean.

BDS: In Racial Paranoia you write, “…relatively minor issues fuel racial paranoia: they are its bread and butter, the coin of its realm. The smaller the slight, the more telling its de cardio implications.” Could you elaborate on the idea of de cardio racism and what you mean here?

JLJ: Well, academics are always trying to coin these phrases. De cardio racism is a way of saying that the only way to try to figure out if you’re seeing an actual racial wolf in sheep’s clothing is to look for the small stuff—to look for the things people can’t always self-consciously protect themselves from projecting, if that makes sense. De cardio racism basically says let’s forget about the sort of rhetoric that people spew; that stuff is always canned already. Let’s try to look between the lines, and somewhere in there, in the details, could be the devil of continued commitments to racialism. I think that’s what de cardio racism tries to capture, that it’s not just hypersensitivity to say that one might need to read between the lines of interracial social interactions.

If de cardio racism can have any kind of traction as an analytic, it should open up a way to create different terminology for the newness of our collective present—a different language for talking about what the stakes of interracial interactions and relationships actually are and how to make sense of all their complexities. I think now all we do is ask, “Is this an explicit form of racism? Do you have evidence to back up your accusation of racism? Have you called someone a racist, and if you have, can you prove it in a court of law?” The idea is, if you can’t do any of those things, then you need to apologize, because you’ve said something that is completely unfair and inaccurate.

I think if we don’t begin to recalibrate what the discourse is around racial difference, we’re always going to say, “Well, if it doesn’t look like the racisms of the past—if it doesn’t follow from de facto and de jure forms of racism—then we just need to move on because it’s not real.” That thinking might allow some people to sleep very well at night, and it might also be a good rallying point for politicians who have a particular kind of ideological perspective, but it doesn’t really help us to deal with what I think is the unshakable reality of our racial present. If we want to address that seriously, we’re going to have to find a different language for making sense of where we are today as a diverse society.

BDS: In the conclusion of Racial Paranoia you quote psychologist Joseph White, who wrote, “A black person who is not suspicious of the white culture is pathologically denying certain objective and basic realities of the black experience.” Could you talk a little bit about that pathology, the person who isn’t suspicious when perhaps reason dictates that they should be?

JLJ: I’m not sure that Joseph White’s comment is all that controversial. At the heart of it he’s saying, given the history of this country, it would seem foolhardy or Pollyanna-ish to imagine that you can grow up in a racist world—knowing that this means that you’re marginalized systematically—and have that not somehow influence the ways in which you understand your relationship to the rest of the body politic. I mean, it has to. If it doesn’t, either you’re completely repressing some of these obvious, self-evident kinds of distinctions we’re making between peoples in this country, or you’re the epitome of a kind of racial optimist who wants to say that we can push through it, that there’s a productive force that comes with imagining a world you want to inhabit, and that you can will it into existence.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d all have to say there are ways in which no matter what we might think about hot-button issues like affirmative action or racism or reverse discrimination, we can’t shake our history. And just changing the discourse by sanitizing public conversation doesn’t make that history go away. It might make us more polite to one another in certain stretches, but it definitely doesn’t make us honest about our historical baggage, and it doesn’t give us the tools we need to forge the best possible future.

BDS: Elsewhere you’ve talked about “racial optimism” in describing an aspect of Barack Obama’s approach to talking about race. I don’t think you would characterize him as somebody who’s pathologically denying the realities of contemporary race relations in America, but what do you make of his particular brand of racial optimism, versus the sort that might be bound up with serious denial or self-deception?

John L. Jackson, Jr., Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology

JLJ: I think a cynical reader of a figure like Barack Obama would say, this is someone who has to perform a kind of racial optimism because it’s politically salient, because it will help him as a candidate. But I think if you just do a little bit of digging—read stuff that’s been written about him, read his own descriptions of his past—one thing you’ll find is that Obama is someone who’s always done this interesting two-step. He’s been able to see the reality of racial difference and to understand why racial camps form the way they do, but at the same time he trusts that if people are able to find a way to put that aside for a second, there will be enough points of connection and mutual understanding that they’ll be able to work together. I think that’s been his MO the entire time. He wants to say race is real, and racism is clearly still operative in the present; but it doesn’t have to be a straitjacket. We’ve already made incredible advances—he wants to imagine that he embodies one example of that—but we don’t have to pooh-pooh race as being a mirage. We can say race and racism are still real, but not allow that to limit our possibilities for building a multiracial America.

I think it’s fascinating the way Obama uses his own multiracialism. Traditional multiracialism was set up in opposition to conventional racial designations, right? So these are folks who don’t want to be considered only one race, based on assumptions about hypodescent and America’s “one-drop rule” for reckoning blackness. They feel like none of these senseless categories really do justice to the complicated nature of their actual identities and identifications. And so usually it’s about multiracialism at the expense of, say, a traditional notion of what it means to be black, especially for someone who understands himself to have mixed ancestry.

Part of what Obama does, and he’s been doing this for a long time, is he actually changes the nature of what that debate looks like. He wants to say that you can actually be committed to the legitimacy of multiracialism, but that doesn’t mean you have to dis-identify with traditional political and social definitions of blackness. In some ways that’s a radical understanding of what racial subjectivity can look like in the present, and it’s diametrically opposed to the ways in which traditional notions of black identity, white identity, Asian identity, and so on, have usually been lined up against one another.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays whether he wins the presidency or not, because he’s actually given people a way to have their racial cake and eat it, too—to not necessarily choose between either being invested in a certain historical definition of blackness or opting out of this commitment for a more open-ended investment in a person’s multiple lineages. I think in some ways this will play very well. In other ways it probably won’t, but it’s a concerted effort to change the categories we’re using to talk about the racial landscape we inhabit. I think it’s an important intervention—politically, conceptually, theoretically, and practically—and I think if it actually takes, if people start to buy it and redeploy it, all the debates we’ve been having around census categories, all that stuff, will start to look a little bit different the next go-round.

BDS: What would you say to those readers who are on board with the core ideas put forth in Racial Paranoia—people who see real social value in fostering more open and honest conversations across racial lines—but who might personally find the idea of navigating those sorts of conversations overwhelming, or who maybe are experiencing something like “empathy fatigue”?

JLJ: That’s a good question. And I do think empathy fatigue is real and definitely a potential danger in trying to negotiate this minefield. If I have an obvious disciplinary bias, it’s in the fact that I think all critical citizens of the world have to be anthropological in the way they approach their everyday lives. It’s easy to shut off all these self-conscious and critical faculties that get in the way of allowing you to mechanically do the stuff you do every day. It’s easy to go on autopilot. We often think folks have too much to deal with day to day, too many anxieties, too many real substantive issues—keeping a roof over their head or keeping food on the table for their families—that they don’t have time to be critical in the way that academics might. But I say we live in a moment now where we don’t really have the luxury of not being critical citizens, of not approaching our commonsense cultural assumptions with some degree of skepticism and self-consciousness. I think there’s no way of getting around the fact that we’re in an era where the less reflective we are about these things, the less equipped we’ll be to negotiate this complicatedly multiracial, multi-religious, decidedly class-segregated planet.

I think what we do need to do—to not allow what we might call empathy fatigue to so overwhelm us that we begin to lose sight of the ultimate goal—is say, “What is my relationship to the people I see on any given day? What are the kinds of interactions that I have, and what are the small ways that I might potentially be complicit in allowing racial cynicisms, pessimisms, and paranoias to thrive?” I would also say we need to beat back the tendency to think that the only important way to combat racism is in an almost therapeutic mode. This shouldn’t be about everyday social interactions as therapy for self or other. I think that’s something probably better carried off in the official domain of psychiatry and psychology. I think our job is to try to step outside of some of the cultural baggage we’ve been trained to think constitutes who and what we are, to begin to imagine all the ways in which we might be fanning the flames or reenergizing societal assumptions about race, family, community, pathology—assumptions that serve as the seedy underbelly of our continued commitment to the racial status quo.