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That institutions are extremely problematic is exactly why we have to engage to change them

antiblackness

progress possible

Racial progress is possible—the historical record errs our way despite widespread discrimination—pessimism is the worst option

Kennedy 14—Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University (Randall, “Black America's Promised Land: Why I Am Still a Racial Optimist”, http://prospect.org/article/black-americas-promised-land-why-i-am-still-racial-optimist, dml)

Beneath the malaise is a deep current of racial pessimism that has a long history in American and African American thought. Pessimists believe that racial harmony predicated on fairness is not part of the American future. They posit that the United States will not overcome its tragic racial past. They maintain that blacks are not and cannot become members of the American family (even with a black family occupying the White House). They believe that the United States is a white nation that will always be governed on behalf of white folk. For pessimists, the Obama presidency is no sign of racial transcendence; to the contrary, it is a demonstration of the intractability of American pigmentocracy. For them, the Obama ascendancy shows that in order to rise to the top of American politics, a black politician must be willing to forgo substantively challenging the racial status quo (though he is allowed to cavil about it rhetorically). For them, the Obama administration simply mirrors the racial diversification of an existing order in which a relatively small sector of upper-crust blacks prosper while the condition of the black masses stagnates or deteriorates—the consequence of a misbegotten theory of racial trickle-down. For them, the Obama era is littered with bitter incongruity: While a black man is commander-in-chief, Michael Brown and thousands like him are stalked, harassed, brutalized, and occasionally killed in Ferguson-like locales across America. The pedigree of black racial pessimism is impressive. In its ranks one finds such figures as Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Randall Robinson, and the extraordinary W.E.B. Du Bois. One encounters Frederick Douglass declaring in 1847, “I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution. I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shriveled in a thousand fragments.” In that tradition, one also finds Derrick Bell, professor of law at Harvard, teaching in the 1990s that the United States is irredeemably imprisoned by its past, that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society,” and that “black people will never gain full equality in this country.” The tradition of black racial pessimism has its white counterpart. According to Thomas Jefferson, “The two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” Alexis de Tocqueville doubted that “the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing,” but believed “the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere.” According to Abraham Lincoln, differences between blacks and whites “will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” But the pessimists, black and white, have not been the only influence on American thought about the prospects for racial progress. Arrayed against them are optimists who contend that blacks are (or can become) members of the American family and insist that racial harmony bottomed on fairness is attainable. This, in fact, has been the predominant tradition among blacks. Its adherents include Booker T. Washington, Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Jackson, and John Lewis (joined by whites such as the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton). The most memorable spokesman for the optimistic tradition was Martin Luther King Jr. On April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, he told his followers to take heart because he knew that, eventually, they would overcome the obstacles they faced. He knew this because he had “been to the mountaintop” and glimpsed the Promised Land, though he might not make it there himself. King was vague, however, about the Promised Land’s boundaries and topography. He had famously spoken of a nation where individuals will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Yet that formulation is popular partly because it is open to contending interpretations. Is it a condemnation of all racial distinctions? Or is it a condemnation only of invidious racial distinctions? Is it meant to posit a rule of non-discrimination that should go into effect immediately even at the cost of barring efforts to rectify past racial wrongdoing? Or is it meant to posit a rule of nondiscrimination that should go into effect only after the consequences of past wrongdoings have been ameliorated? These questions underlie the debate that has been raging for decades over competing conceptions of the racial Promised Land. In one conception, the Promised Land is a society henceforth substantially free of intentional racial discrimination in major domains of the public sphere. In this society, no effort is made to rectify the oppressive consequences of past racial misconduct because, it is argued, trying to do so is futile, unfair to those innocent of past wrongdoing, and conducive to the perpetuation of race-mindedness. This view has been propounded vigorously in the legal writings of Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, mainly in critiques of affirmative action. Chief Justice John Roberts, also a champion of this view, expressed it epigrammatically when, abjuring a race-conscious plan for school integration, he quipped that the best way to stop racial discrimination is to stop racially discriminating—no matter whether the aim is to assist or oppress a vulnerable group. Under this conception, we enter the racial Promised Land when racial discrimination is a negligible feature of social life, even if the vestiges of racial subordination in the past are evident and consequential. Let’s call this model of racial justice the conservative conception of the racial Promised Land. The progressive conception of the racial Promised Land is more ambitious. It envisions two essential landmarks. The first is the requirement of the conservatives that invidious racial discrimination be reduced to a negligible influence. The second condition is that the vestiges of past discrimination—the racial gaps that so dramatically scar the social landscape—be erased. Pursuant to the progressive perspective, we will reach the racial Promised Land when blackness is no longer a uniform that, holding other variables steady, signals that its wearer bears a notably higher risk than whites of premature death, impoverishment, unemployment, incarceration, victimization by criminality, homelessness, police harassment, and similar afflictions. Today, one can go into a hospital, visit the ward for newborns, and make accurate estimates about the babies’ varying life trajectories on the basis of their racial identities. When accurate estimates of this sort are no longer possible, progressives contend, we will have reached the racial Promised Land. Some observers insist that what I have dubbed the conservative model of the racial Promised Land is at hand or at least nearby. They maintain that, for the most part, we have overcome. They proclaim “Mission Accomplished” or at least mission near-accomplished. This is mistaken. Intentional invidious racial discrimination constitutes a force in American life that is far from negligible. It is a substantial headwind that blacks and other racial minorities face in many key areas, including housing, finance, employment, criminal justice, electoral politics, and markets for romance and marriage. There is a library of empirical literature establishing this fact beyond sensible controversy—studies based on similarly situated but racially disparate testers who meet different fates when they seek to buy automobiles, rent housing, get jobs, or obtain loans. And then there are the lessons of everyday life that suggest forcefully that in crucial interactions with police officers, prosecutors, judges, and other authorities armed with discretion, outcomes differ, all too often, depending on the race of the person being assessed. It is difficult to imagine that the dismal train of events surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown would have been identical had they been white. Even more distant is the progressive conception of the racial Promised Land. In practically every key index of well-being, a chasm separates the circumstances in which whites and blacks typically find themselves. The income gap separating blacks and whites widened from about $19,000 in the late 1960s to about $27,000 in 2011. The wealth gap increased from $75,000 in 1984 to $85,000 in 2011. Blacks are nearly three times more likely to live in deep poverty than whites. Black men are six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated. And on. And on. And on. We have failed to reach the racial Promised Land in either its conservative or its progressive definition. With respect to both of these destinations, our society remains far afield. Still, I put myself in the optimistic camp. Why? I am hopeful first and foremost because of the predominant trajectory of African Americans—a history that John Hope Franklin framed with the apt title From Slavery to Freedom. In 1860, four million African Americans were enslaved while another half-million were free but devoid of fundamental rights in many of the jurisdictions where they lived. In 1860, the very term “African American” was something of an oxymoron because the Supreme Court had ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that no black, free or enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States. But within a decade, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established birthright citizenship and required all states to accord all persons due process and equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited states from withholding the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. People who had been sold on the auction block as youngsters helped to govern their locales as public officials when they were adults. In 1861, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi resigned from the United States Senate to join the Confederate States of America, which he led as president. In 1870, Hiram Revels, the first black member of Congress, occupied the seat that Davis abandoned. The First Reconstruction was overwhelmed by a devastating white supremacist reaction. But the most fundamental reforms it established proved resilient, providing the basis for a Second Reconstruction from the 1950s to the 1970s. During that period, too, the distance traveled by blacks was astonishing. In 1950, segregation was deemed to be consistent with federal constitutional equal protection. No federal law prevented proprietors of hotels, restaurants, and other privately owned public accommodations from engaging in racial discrimination. No federal law prohibited private employers from discriminating on a racial basis against applicants for jobs or current employees. No federal law effectively counteracted racial disenfranchisement. No federal law outlawed racial discrimination in private housing transactions. In contrast, by 1970 federal constitutional law thoroughly repudiated the lie of separate but equal. The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade racial discrimination in privately owned places of public accommodation and many areas of private employment. The 1965 Voting Rights Act provided the basis for strong prophylactic action against racial exclusion at the ballot box. The 1968 Fair Housing Act addressed racial exclusion in a market that had been zealously insulated against federal regulation. None of these interventions were wholly successful. All were compromised. All occasioned backlash. But the racial situation in 1970 and afterwards was dramatically better than what it had been in 1950 and before. Today, at a moment when progress has stalled, we need to recall how dramatically and unexpectedly conditions sometimes change. Until recently who’d-a thunk it possible for the president to be an African American? In the 1980s, I used to ask law students how long affirmative action programs ought to last. Champions of such programs, seeking to ensure their longevity, would say that affirmative action would be needed until the country elected a black president. That reply would elicit appreciative laughter as listeners supposed that that formula would preserve affirmative action for at least a century. But then along came Barack Obama and with him the remark that soon became a cliché: “I never thought that I’d live to see a black president.” Obama’s election is much more than a monument to one politician’s talent and good fortune. Changes in public attitudes, law, and custom have clearly elevated the fortunes of African Americans as individuals and black America as a collectivity. Hard facts may give plausibility to the pessimistic tradition, but they make the optimistic tradition compelling. Despite the many wrongs that remain to be righted, blacks in America confront fewer racist impediments now than ever before in the history of the United States. The courage, intelligence, persistence, idealism, and sacrifice of Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks, Julian Bond and Bob Moses, Medgar Evers and Bayard Rustin, Viola Liuzzo and Vernon Dahmer—and countless other tribunes for racial justice—have not been expended for naught. The facts of day-to-day life allow blacks to sing more confidently than ever before James Weldon Johnson’s magnificent hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black National Anthem: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us Facing the rising sun of our new day begun Let us march on till victory is won. My optimism involves more than a sociological prediction. I am also swayed by my intuition regarding which of these hypotheses—the pessimistic or the optimistic—will do the most good. Hope is a vital nutrient for effort; without it, there is no prospect for achievement. The belief that we can overcome makes more realistic the possibility that we shall overcome. Optimism gives buoyancy to thinking that might otherwise degenerate into nihilism, encourages solidarity in those who might otherwise be satisfied by purely selfish indulgence, invites strategic planning that can usefully harness what might otherwise be impotent indignation, and inspires efforts that might otherwise be avoided due to fatalism. On Election Day 1996, exit polling showed General Colin Powell beating President Bill Clinton by a comfortable margin. But Powell was not Clinton’s opponent. Senator Bob Dole was. Powell had considered seeking the Republican Party nomination but declined in the end to do so. Before he made that decision, polls suggested that he could win the nomination and the general election, but friends were skeptical. Powell recalls that Earl Graves, the publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, told him, “Look, man … [w]hen [white voters] go in that booth, they ain’t going to vote for you.” Maybe Graves was correct. Real voting might have produced different results from the polls. Furthermore, whereas the actual candidates had suffered a year of merciless scrutiny on the campaign trail, Powell on Election Day was a mere hypothetical candidate who suffered from none of the wear and tear that a presidential contest exacts. At the end of a campaign, the general might not have remained so attractive. Still, Powell’s apparent popularity does provide a basis for conjecturing that America’s readiness to elect a black president had been an unrecognized part of the political landscape for longer than many had appreciated. Powell may well have denied himself the opportunity to make a successful historic leap by being self-defeatingly pessimistic. A major fear of many blacks is that acknowledging progress will prompt underestimation of racial obstacles that blacks at every socioeconomic level continue to face. When Americans are polled about their perceptions of racial affairs, whites are typically more upbeat than blacks. The more affluent they are, the more upbeat white observers tend to be. Inordinately impressed by progress, they all too often prematurely declare victory over racism. Although complacency nourished by an overly rosy view of racial affairs is a real danger, I stand by my conviction that a clear-eyed assessment favors black optimism. Who, after all, have been the figures most beneficial to blacks? Was it the Martin Delany who decamped for Africa, thinking America to be irremediably racist? Or was it the Martin Delany who returned, recruited blacks for the Union, and participated significantly in Southern politics during Reconstruction? Was it the pre-1966 Stokely Carmichael who sang “We Shall Overcome” in the splendid early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)? Or was it the post-1966 Stokely Carmichael (later renamed Kwame Ture) whose impatient bitterness helped to destroy the SNCC and rationalize an indulgent exile to Guinea that squandered a substantial talent? Was it my long-time colleague of blessed memory, Derrick Bell, who posited the permanence of racist white dominance? Or was it a student who rightly admired Professor Bell but eschewed his pessimism and followed a different path, a black student who, years later, put Bell’s hypothesis to a test by seeking the highest elected office in the land under the slogan “Yes We Can!”? That student, of course, was Barack Obama, and his presidency has been the setting for much debate between pessimists and optimists. Some detractors, perhaps the angriest, started from a position of raised expectations. They thought that Obama embodied the “audacity of hope” and that he would somehow bring about sweeping changes. Disappointed, they have expressed themselves in the angry, accusatory rhetoric of betrayal. Obama, Cornel West charges, “posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.” Others condemn Obama but without disappointment. They see their low expectations as having been validated. Certain pessimists have maintained that Obama’s election indicated little in terms of “real” racial progress. They even discount the symbolic significance of his ascendancy, stressing his exceptionality. Although he calls himself black, Obama is the offspring of a black African father and a white American mother and is thus distinguished genealogically from most African Americans. Much was made of his Muslim-sounding name. But some observers maintain that popular acceptance of that, too, should be viewed skeptically. It would have signaled more, they argue, had America elected a black person raised in, say, Detroit with a name such as Tyrone Washington or Jamal Jefferson. Pessimists argue that, substantively, the Obama presidency has delivered no more to blacks than would have been delivered by any other centrist-liberal Democrat (say, Hillary Clinton), and that in certain respects the Obama presidency delivered less because Obama sought excessively to prove that he was a president for all Americans and not merely black Americans. They contend that Obama’s blackness was an asset that he used for personal marketing and that the white establishment seized upon for advertising, “The United States cannot sensibly be accused of practicing or condoning racism! It just elected a black president!” Pessimists will now also enlist the horrifying events in Ferguson, Missouri, to reinforce their claim that despite the civil rights movement, antidiscrimination legislation, affirmative action, and the election of Obama, the narrative of race relations in America is a doleful tale—not a march upward from slavery to freedom, but a trek sideways from plantation to ghetto. What is an optimist in the waning years of the Obama presidency to say in the face of this challenge? Obama’s election signaled a dramatic, substantive change in racial beliefs and attitudes. In 1960, his victory would have been impossible: Too many whites would have been unwilling to vote for a black candidate—any black candidate—because of doubts about the capacities of anyone of black African ancestry. Recall that there were no black cabinet officers until Johnson appointed Robert Weaver as secretary of housing and urban development in 1966, and no black Supreme Court justices until Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall in 1967. The specter of black intellectual and characterological deficiency stunted the careers of many talented blacks, and still does. That Obama was able to win the presidency—twice—is a sign that rumors of racial inferiority, while still extant, are much diminished in influence. In thinking about the meaning of Obama, it is important, too, to focus on the special status of the presidency. The person who occupies that office is not only the head of the executive branch of the federal government, the person who nominates all federal judges, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and thus a person with the wherewithal to destroy most, if not all, of humankind. The president is also the nation’s mourner-in-chief, booster-in-chief, spouse-in-chief, and parent-in-chief. That a black man has been the master of the White House for the past six years does indeed reflect and reinforce a remarkable socio-psychological transformation in the American racial scene. If that is “tokenism,” give us more of it. I have emphasized progress that blacks have made in absolute terms: where they stood 50 years ago and where they stand today. But what about the position of blacks relative to whites—those yawning gaps in wealth, income, educational attainment, and risk of imprisonment that have remained unclosed and that have, in some ways, widened even further during Obama’s tenure? There is no use denying that reality. America remains racially stratified and will continue to be long after the Obama presidency. There is also no use, however, in denying other facets of the American racial reality. One is a comparative view. In considering the appropriate attitude to adopt toward America—allegiance, for example, or dis-affiliation—it is sensible to compare the United States to other divided societies. Negrophobia in America is, alas, all too present. But it pales in comparison with the prejudice against racial, ethnic, religious, and national minorities in many countries around the globe. As bad as the American racial problem is, as urgently as it calls for concentrated attention, its condition is less dire and more encouraging than might be gleaned from an analysis that views the American situation in isolation, divorced from international comparisons. There is also no good purpose served by ignoring manifestations of progress that display themselves even in heartrending crises. Consider the events in Ferguson. The killing of the unarmed teenager, the callous inattentiveness to his body, the militarized police response to protest, and the dubious investigation by local authorities of this tragic death display much of what is terrible in American race relations: an atavistic fear of young black men; quick resort to excessive force against African Americans; racial residential separation; black powerlessness that foments resentment; white dominance that encourages contempt; an utter lack of mutual trust. But the events in Ferguson have also revealed other responses. The federal government took note of what happened and actively involved itself via the president, attorney general, and the director of the FBI. The Ferguson tragedy became the leading news story all over the country. Blacks have not been the only ones calling the police to account and demanding reform. Whites from various walks of life, including right-wing politicians like Rand Paul, have also been doing so. Never in American history, in analogous circumstances, has there been a higher level of interracial empathy. Overcoming the racial burdens—individual, communal, institutional—that encumber us will take unremitting effort, major deployments of intelligence and imagination, daunting amounts of time, huge expenditures of money, and the resolute conviction that America’s racial affairs can and will improve. Is the uncertain prospect of a better future worth that investment? The lessons of American history and a comparison of our society with others around the world impel me to say yes. I am a racial optimist. Only time will tell whether my faith is wise.

Racial progress has occurred though legal change and meaningful change is possible--- reject pessimism because it ignores specific reforms that achieved lasting improvements in peoples’ lives.

Michael Omi, and Howard Winant 13, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, 2013 Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial Formation Theory

In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the ‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’ to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? ¶ Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.¶ Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us. While we argue that the right wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape.¶ So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a generation’ – count as ‘convergence’?¶ The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms – which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule.¶ So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social movements’: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and anti-war movements among others.¶ By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same ‘rearticulation’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of ‘colourblindness’ and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their confrontations with the various ‘backlash’ phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of ‘colourblindness’, reveal the transformative character of the ‘politicization of the social’. While it is not possible here to explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti-democratic social movements that are evident in US politics today.¶ What are the political implications of contemporary racial trends?¶ Feagin and Elias's use of racial categories can be imprecise. This is not their problem alone; anyone writing about race and racism needs to frame terms with care and precision, and we undoubtedly get fuzzy too from time to time. The absence of a careful approach leads to ‘racial lumping’ and essentialisms of various kinds. This imprecision is heightened in polemic. In the Feagin and Elias essay the term ‘whites’ at times refers to all whites, white elites, ‘dominant white actors’ and very exceptionally, anti-racist whites, a category in which we presume they would place themselves. Although the terms ‘black’, ‘African American’ and ‘Latino’ appear, the term ‘people of colour’ is emphasized, often in direct substitution for black reference points.¶ In the USA today it is important not to frame race in a bipolar manner. The black/white paradigm made more sense in the past than it does in the twenty-first century. The racial make-up of the nation has now changed dramatically. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the USA has become more ‘coloured’. A ‘majority–minority’ national demographic shift is well underway. Predicted to arrive by the mid-twenty-first century, the numerical eclipse of the white population is already in evidence locally and regionally. In California, for example, non-Hispanic whites constitute only 39.7 per cent of the state's population. While the decline in the white population cannot be correlated with any decline of white racial dominance, the dawning and deepening of racial multipolarity calls into question a sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit black/white racial framework that is evident in Feagin and Elias's essay. Shifting racial demographics and identities also raise general questions of race and racism in new ways that the ‘systemic racism’ approach is not prepared to explain.3¶ Class questions and issues of panethnicizing trends, for example, call into question what we mean by race, racial identity and race consciousness. No racially defined group is even remotely uniform; groups that we so glibly refer to as Asian American or Latino are particularly heterogeneous. Some have achieved or exceeded socio-economic parity with whites, while others are subject to what we might call ‘engineered poverty’ in sweatshops, dirty and dangerous labour settings, or prisons. Tensions within panethnicized racial groups are notably present, and conflicts between racially defined groups (‘black/brown’ conflict, for example) are evident in both urban and rural settings. A substantial current of social scientific analysis now argues that Asians and Latinos are the ‘new white ethnics’, able to ‘work toward whiteness’4 at least in part, and that the black/white bipolarity retains its distinct and foundational qualities as the mainstay of US racism (Alba and Nee 2005; Perlmann 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2006; Waters, Ueda and Marrow 2007).¶ We question that argument in light of the massive demographic shifts taking place in the USA. Globalization, climate change and above all neoliberalism on a global scale, all drive migration. The country's economic capacity to absorb enormous numbers of immigrants, low-wage workers and their families (including a new, globally based and very female, servant class) without generating the sort of established subaltern groups we associate with the terms race and racism, may be more limited than it was when the ‘whitening’ of Europeans took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words this argument's key precedent, the absorption of white immigrants ‘of a different color’ (Jacobson 1998), may no longer apply. Indeed, we might think of the assimilationist model itself as a general theory of immigrant incorporation that was based on a historically specific case study – one that might not hold for, or be replicated by, subsequent big waves of immigration. Feagin and Elias's systemic racism model, while offering numerous important insights, does not inform concrete analysis of these issues.¶ It is important going forward to understand how groups are differentially racialized and relatively positioned in the US racial hierarchy: once again racism must be seen as a shifting racial project. This has important consequences, not only with respect to emerging patterns of inequality, but also in regard to the degree of power available to different racial actors to define, shape or contest the existing racial landscape. Attention to such matters is largely absent in Feagin and Elias's account. In their view racially identified groups are located in strict reference to the dominant ‘white racial frame’, hammered into place, so to speak. As a consequence, they fail to examine how racially subordinate groups interact and influence each others’ boundaries, conditions and practices. Because they offer so little specific analysis of Asian American, Latino or Native American racial issues, the reader finds her/himself once again in the land (real or imaginary, depending on your racial politics) of bipolar US racial dynamics, in which whites and blacks play the leading roles, and other racially identified groups – as well as those ambiguously identified, such as Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans (MEASA) – play at best supporting roles, and are sometimes cast as extras or left out of the picture entirely.¶ We still want to acknowledge that blacks have been catching hell and have borne the brunt of the racist reaction of the past several decades. For example, we agree with Feagin and Elias's critique of the reactionary politics of incarceration in the USA. The ‘new Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2012) or even the ‘new slavery’ that the present system practises is something that was just in its beginning stages when we were writing Racial Formation. It is now recognized as a national and indeed global scandal. How is it to be understood? Of course there are substantial debates on this topic, notably about the nature of the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (Davis 2003, p. 3) and the social and cultural effects of mass incarceration along racial lines. But beyond Feagin and Elias's denunciation of the ferocious white racism that is operating here, deeper political implications are worth considering. As Alexander (2012), Mauer (2006), Manza and Uggen (2008) and movement groups like Critical Resistance and the Ella Baker Center argue, the upsurge over recent decades in incarceration rates for black (and brown) men expresses the fear-based, law-and-order appeals that have shaped US racial politics since the rise of Nixonland (Perlstein 2008) and the ‘Southern strategy’. Perhaps even more central, racial repression aims at restricting the increasing impact of voters of colour in a demographically shifting electorate.¶ There is a lot more to say about this, but for the present two key points stand out: first, it is not an area where Feagin and Elias and we have any sharp disagreement, and second, for all the horrors and injustices that the ‘new Jim Crow’ represents, incarceration, profiling and similar practices remain political issues. These practices and policies are not ineluctable and unalterable dimensions of the US racial regime. There have been previous waves of reform in these areas. They can be transformed again by mass mobilization, electoral shifts and so on. In other words, resistance is not futile.¶ Speaking of electoral shifts and the formal political arena, how should President Barack Obama be politically situated in this discussion? How do Feagin and Elias explain Obama? Quite amazingly, his name does not appear in their essay. Is he a mere token, an ‘oreo’, a shill for Wall Street? Or does Obama represent a new development in US politics, a black leader of a mass, multiracial party that for sheer demographic reasons alone might eventually triumph over the white people's party, the Republicans? If the President is neither the white man's token nor Neo, the One,5 then once again we are in the world of politics: neither the near-total white despotism depicted by Feagin and Elias, nor a racially inclusive democracy.¶ President Obama continues to enjoy widespread black support, although it is clear that he has not protected blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in history. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers’ rights – particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other people of colour are concentrated. He has not intervened to halt or slow foreclosures, except in ways that were largely symbolic. Workers and lower-middle-class people were the hardest hit by the great recession and the subprime home mortgage crisis, with black families faring worst, and Latinos close behind (Rugh and Massey 2010); Obama has not defended them. Many writers have explained Obama's centrism and unwillingness to raise the issue of race as functions of white racism (Sugrue 2010).¶ The black community – and other communities of colour as well – remains politically divided. While black folk have taken the hardest blows from the reactionary and racist regime that has mostly dominated US politics since Reagan (if not since Nixon), no united black movement has succeeded the deaths of Malcolm and Martin. Although there is always important political activity underway, a relatively large and fairly conservative black middle class, a ‘black bourgeoisie’ in Frazier's (1957) terms, has generally maintained its position since the end of the civil rights era. Largely based in the public sector, and including a generally centrist business class as well, this stratum has continued to play the role that Frazier – and before him, Charles S. Johnson. William Lloyd Warner, Alison Davis and other scholars – identified: vacillation between the white elite and the black masses. Roughly similar patterns operate in Latino communities as well, where the ‘working towards whiteness’ framework coexists with a substantial amount of exclusion and super-exploitation.¶ Alongside class issues in communities of colour, there are significant gender issues. The disappearance of blue-collar work, combined with the assault by the criminal justice system – chiefly profiling by the police (‘stop and frisk’) and imprisonment, have both unduly targeted and victimized black and brown men, especially youth. Women of colour are also targeted, especially by violence, discrimination and assaults on their reproductive rights (Harris-Perry 2011); profiling is everywhere (Glover 2009).¶ Here again we are in the realm of racial politics. Debate proceeds in the black community on Obama's credibilty, with Cornel West and Tavis Smiley leading the critics. But it seems safe to say that in North Philly, Inglewood or Atlanta's Lakewood section, the president remains highly popular. Latino support for Obama remains high as well. Feagin and Elias need to clarify their views on black and brown political judgement. Is it attuned to political realities or has it been captured by the white racial frame? Is Obama's election of no importance?¶ ***¶ In conclusion, do Feagin and Elias really believe that white power is so complete, so extensive, so ‘sutured’ (as Laclau and Mouffe might say) as they suggest here? Do they mean to suggest, in Borg-fashion, that ‘resistance is futile?’ This seems to be the underlying political logic of the ‘systemic racism’ approach, perhaps unintentionally so. Is white racism so ubiquitous that no meaningful political challenge can be mounted against it? Are black and brown folk (yellow and red people, and also others unclassifiable under the always- absurd colour categories) utterly supine, duped, abject, unable to exert any political pressure? Is such a view of race and racism even recognizable in the USA of 2012? And is that a responsible political position to be advocating? Is this what we want to teach our students of colour? Or our white students for that matter?¶ We suspect that if pressed, Feagin and Elias would concur with our judgement that racial conflict, both within (and against) the state and in everyday life, is a fundamentally political process. We think that they would also accept our claim that the ongoing political realities of race provide extensive evidence that people of colour in the USA are not so powerless, and that whites are not so omnipotent, as Feagin and Elias's analysis suggests them to be.¶ Racial formation theory allows us to see that there are contradictions in racial oppression. The racial formation approach reveals that white racism is unstable and constantly challenged, from the national and indeed global level down to the personal and intra-psychic conflicts that we all experience, no matter what our racial identity might be. While racism – largely white – continues to flourish, it is not monolithic. Yes, there have been enormous increases in racial inequality in recent years. But movement-based anti-racist opposition continues, and sometimes scores victories. Challenges to white racism continue both within the state and in civil society. Although largely and properly led by people of colour, anti-racist movements also incorporate whites such as Feagin and Elias themselves. Movements may experience setbacks, the reforms for which they fought may be revealed as inadequate, and indeed their leaders may be co-opted or even eliminated, but racial subjectivity and self-awareness, unresolved and conflictual both within the individual psyche and the body politic, abides. Resistance is not futile.

That institutions are extremely problematic is exactly why we have to engage to change them

Kimberle Crenshaw 88, Law @ UCLA, “RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW”, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331, lexis

One wonders, however, whether a demand for shelter that does not employ rights rhetoric is likely to succeed in America today. The underlying problem, especially for African-Americans, is the question of how to extract from others that which others are not predisposed to give. As Tushnet has said himself, rights are a way of saying that a society is what it is, or that it ought to live up to its deepest commitments. 135 This is essentially what all groups of dispossessed people say when they use rights rhetoric. As demonstrated in the civil rights movement, engaging in rights rhetoric can be an attempt to turn society's "institutional logic"'136 against itself - to redeem some of the rhetorical promises and the self-congratulations that seem to thrive in American political discourse. ¶ NOTE 136 BEGINS… ¶ 136 Cf. F. PIVEN & R. CLOWARD, POOR PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS 22-23 (I977) (noting that "the opportunities for defiance are structured by features of institutional life"). NOTE 136 ENDS. ¶ Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore, trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little beyond this observation. Their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change, one which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated, and it is difficult to imagine that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic. 137¶ FOOTNOTE 137 BEGINS… ¶ 137 See id. at 22-25. The observation concerning the inability to bring about change in some non-legitimating fashion does not, of course, rule out the possibility of armed revolution. For most oppressed peoples, however, the costs of such a revolt are often too great. That is, the oppressed cannot realistically hope to overcome the "coercive" components of hegemony. More importantly, it is not clear that such a struggle, although superficially a clear radical challenge to the coercive force of the status quo, would be a lesser reinforcement of the ideology of American society (i.e., the consensual components of hegemony). ¶ FOOTNOTE 137 Ends.¶ People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions that they are challenging. 138 Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic -- that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective. 139¶ FOOTNOTE 139 BEGINS… ¶ 139 Reforms necessarily come from an existing repertoire of options. As Piven and Cloward note, "if impoverished southern blacks had demanded land reform, they would probably have still gotten the vote." Id. at 33. ¶ FOOTNOTE 139 ENDS. ¶ The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by using its own logic against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the “rights” that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology, Blacks relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting formal rights. Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and limited by legitimation. The central issue that the Critics fail to address, then, is how to avoid the "legitimating" effects of reform if engaging in reformist discourse is the only effective way to challenge the legitimacy of the social order. Perhaps the only situation in which powerless people may receive any favorable response is where there is a political or ideological need to restore an image of fairness that has somehow been tarnished. Most efforts to change an oppressive situation are bound to adopt the dominant discourse to some degree.142 ¶ FOOTNOTE 142 BEGINS… 142 This engagement is apparently required of successful efforts at change. See F. PIVEN & R. CLOWARD, supra note 136, at I-32. ¶ FOOTNOTE 142 ENDS.

Radical pessimism trades off with creativity and empathy needed for change—refusal to recognize any concrete improvement is an act of fatalist self-righteousness

Clark, professor of law – Catholic University, 95 (Leroy D., 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23)

A Final Word Despite Professor Bell's prophecy of doom, I believe he would like to have his analysis proven wrong. However, he desperately leans on a tactic from the past--laying out the disabilities of the black condition and accusing whites of not having the moral strength to act fairly. That is the ultimate theme in both of his books and in much of his law review writing. That tactic not only lacks full force against today's complex society, it also becomes, for many whites, an exaggerated claim that racism is the sole cause of black misfortunes. n146 Many whites may feel about the black condition what many of us may have felt about the homeless: dismayed, but having no clear answer as to how the problem is to be solved, and feeling individually powerless if the resolution calls for massive resources that we, personally, lack. Professor Bell's two books may confirm this sense of powerlessness in whites with a limited background in this subject, because Professor Bell does not offer a single programmatic approach toward changing the circumstance of blacks. He presents only startling, unanalyzed prophecies of doom, which will easily garner attention from a controversy-hungry media. n147 It is much harder to exercise imagination to create viable strategies for change. n148 Professor Bell sensed the despair that the average--especially average black--reader would experience, so he put forth rhetoric urging an "unremitting struggle that leaves no room for giving up." n149 His contention is ultimately hollow, given the total sweep of his work. At some point it becomes dysfunctional to refuse giving any credit to the very positive abatements of racism that occurred with white support, and on occasion, white leadership. Racism thrives in an atmosphere of insecurity, apprehension about the future, and inter-group resentments. Unrelenting, unqualified accusations only add to that negative atmosphere. Empathetic and more generous responses are possible in an atmosphere of support, security, and a sense that advancement is possible; the greatest progress of blacks occurred during the 1960s and early 1970s when the economy was expanding. Professor Bell's "analysis" is really only accusation and "harassing white folks," and is undermining and destructive. There is no love--except for his own group--and there is a constricted reach for an understanding of whites. There is only rage and perplexity. No bridges are built--only righteousness is being sold. A people, black or white, are capable only to the extent they believe they are. Neither I, nor Professor Bell, have a crystal ball, but I do know that creativity and a drive for change are very much linked to a belief that they are needed, and to a belief that they can make a difference. The future will be shaped by past conditions and the actions of those over whom we have no control. Yet it is not fixed; it will also be shaped by the attitudes and energy with which we face the future. Writing about race is to engage in a power struggle. It is a non-neutral political act, and one must take responsibility for its consequences. Telling whites that they are irremediably racist is not mere "information"; it is a force that helps create the future it predicts. If whites believe the message, feelings of futility could overwhelm any further efforts to seek change. I am encouraged, however, that the motto of the most articulate black spokesperson alive today, Jesse Jackson, is, "Keep hope alive!" and that much of the strength of Martin Luther King, Jr. was his capacity to "dream" us toward a better place.

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