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Against Race by
Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press, 2000)
Reviewed by Molefi Kete Asante
 Periodically
there appears a book that runs counter to the wisdom of experience
in the African American community. Against Race by the sociologist
Paul Gilroy is just such a book. Gilroy, a British scholar, who
teaches at Yale University, made a reputation in the states with
the postmodern work, The Black Atlantic. I see this book as a continuation
of that work’s attempt to deconstruct the notion of African
identity in the United States and elsewhere. Of course it runs squarely
against the lived experiences of African Americans. The history
of discrimination against us in the West, whether the United States
or the United Kingdom or other parts of the western world, is a
history of assaulting our dignity because we are Africans or the
descendants of Africans. This has little to do with whether or not
we are on one side of the ocean or the other. Such false separations,
particularly in the context of white racial hierarchy and domination,
is nothing more than an acceptance of a white definition of blackness.
I reject such a notion as an attempt to isolate Africans in the
Americas from their brothers and sisters on the continent. It is
as serious an assault and as misguided as the 1817 Philadelphia
conference that argued that the blacks in the United States were
not Africans but "colored Americans" and therefore should
not be returned to Africa. To argue as Gilroy does that Africans
in Britain and the United States are part of a "Black Atlantic"
is to argue the "colored American" thesis all over again.
It took us one hundred and fifty years to defeat the notion of the
"colored American" in the United States and I will not
stand idly by and see such misguided notion accepted as fact at
this late date in our struggle to liberate our minds. We are victimized
in the West by systems of thinking, structures of knowledge, ways
of being, that take our Africanity as an indication of inferiority.
I see this position as questioning the humanity and the dignity
of African people.
It should be clear that Gilroy’s
new book, Against Race is not a book against racism, as perhaps
it ought to be, but a book against the idea of race as an organizing
theme in human relations. It is somewhat like the idea offered a
decade or more ago by the conservative critic, Anne Wortham in her
reactionary work, The Other Side of Racism. Like Wortham, Gilroy
argues that the African American spends too much time on collective
events that constitute "race" consciousness and therefore
participates in "militaristic" marches typified by the
Million Man March and the Million Woman March, both of which were
useless. The only person who could make such a statement had to
be one who did not attend. Unable to see the awesome power of the
collective construction of umoja within the context of a degenerate
racist society, Gilroy prefers to stand on the sidelines and cast
stones at the authentic players in the arena. This is a reactionary
posture. So Against Race cannot be called an anti-racism book although
it is anti-race, especially against the idea of black cultural identity
whether constructed as race or as a collective national identity.
Let us be clear here, Against Race
is not a book against all collective identities. There is no assault
on Jewish identity, as a religious or cultural identity, nor is
there an attack on French identity or Chinese identity as collective
historical realities. There is no assault on the historically constructed
identity of the Hindu Indian, nor on the white British. Nor should
there be any such assault. But Gilroy, like others of this school,
see the principal culprits as African Americans who retain a complex
love of African culture. In Gilroy’s construction or lack
of construction, there must be something wrong with African Americans
because Africa remains in their minds as a place, a continent, a
symbol, a reality of origin and source of the first step across
the ocean when they are really not African. But Gilroy does not
know what he is talking about here. This leads him to the wrong
conclusions about the African American community. The relationship
Africans in the Americas have with Africa is not of some mythical
or a mystical place. We do not worship unabashedly at the doorsteps
of the continent although we have an active engagement with all
that it means. Are we always conscious of it? Of course not! You
will not find all African Americans walking around the streets of
Philadelphia or Chicago or Los Angeles thinking about engaging Africa,
yet we know almost instantly that when we are assaulted by police,
denied venture capital or criticized for insisting on keeping Europe
out of our consciousness without permission that Africa is at the
center of our existential reality. We are most definitely African,
though modern, contemporary, Africans domiciled in the West.
Actually Gilroy spends a considerable
amount of time in this book explaining how race, a false concept,
"is understood." He writes "Awareness of the indissoluble
unity of all life at the level of genetic materials leads to a stronger
sense of the particularity of our species as a whole, as well as
to new anxieties that the character is being fundamentally and irrevocably
altered" (p. 20). I do not know how Gilroy can move from this
position to indict the African people as the carriers of this anxiety
about "race," clearly a concept that was never promoted
by African people in this country or on the continent. It is essentially
a Anglo-Germanic notion, manufactured and disseminated to promote
the distinctions between peoples and to establish a European hierarchy,
as well as a hierarchy among Europeans themselves.
I am of the opinion that Gilroy
has no understanding of what Randall Robinson means in The Debt:
What America Owes to Blacks? In fact, Gilroy would proclaim Robinson’s
work of the genre that does not extend "beyond the color line."
But it is not color that creates problems in the Western world between
African descended people and whites, particularly Anglo-Germans.
It is rather a strange belief on the parts of whites that they are
superior to Africans, that they have a right to establish and maintain
a hierarchy over blacks by force of arms or customs or laws or habits.
Gilroy’s notion that "anti-racism"
has lost credibility and authority and therefore there has to be
a new language "beyond the color line" seeks to get us
to renounce race-thinking as a dramatic strategic gesture. The problem
with this line of thinking, however, is that those who practice
racism, those who support in their workplaces, and in their daily
lives the institutions that discriminate against people on the basis
of their "races" understand what they are doing. What
is absurd is our belief that they are ignorant of the false divisions
that are maintained by white racial domination.
It may be true that fascism is
a major political orientation of national wills in the last century,
as Gilroy contends, but fascism’s most daring and dangerous
manifestation has always been in white racial domination and white
supremacist notions. This is true whether they have been expressed
in Germany, Britain, Australia, or the United States. To deplore
or lambast African fraternal gatherings without an appreciation
of the successful historical reactions to racism and white supremacy
in the American public by black nationalism is to miss the point
of this century. The most exacting antidote to white racism is African
American nationalism where African agency, self-determination, and
self actualization allow Africans to live their lives regardless
of white racial insanity. Otherwise, in violent reactions or in
acquiescence the African person becomes lost in the same madness
of race as the white racist.
One of the advantages of having
an organic relationship with the ordinary people of the African
American community is that one does not forget what the issues are
in the struggle against racial domination. Ordinary Africans in
the United States are not wrestling with the identity issues of
the elite classes who are seeking ways to express an abstract cosmopolitanism
devoid of actual contact with African people. I believe that Gilroy’s
issues are those of Africans who are trying to de-Africanize Africans
in order to make us more acceptable to whites. This was the old
canard when the issue was our hair, our skin color, or our speech.
But we knew even then that these were false issues and that nothing
could please the racist but the annihilation of the African. Unfortunately,
instead of the racist having to perform the task of making Africans
invisible, now scholars like Gilroy rush to demonstrate that there
is something wrong with being an African.
The reality is that any new language
about race or identity ought to be straightforward, blunt, and uncompromising.
It should say that one does not have to give up his or her heritage,
ancestry, or color in order to exist in the world. Why should African
descended scholars be promoted for advancing ethnic abstractness.
I prefer the language of my late father who said, "if you cannot
accept me as I am and for who I am then that is your problem, not
mine." I do not believe that this is arrogant or militant;
I believe it is the only authentic voice that is necessary to bring
about a new language of race in this century.
There is much to applaud in Gilroy’s
visionary statement about an intercultural society but it is not
the "raceless future" aspect of his argument. First, I
do not look forward to such a colorless, heritage-less, abstract
future, and do not see why anyone should look for it. Only those
who have a need to escape from their own histories have a need for
such a raceless future. On the contrary, it is much more hopeful
that we defeat the notion of racial superiority and establish a
broad new moral vision based on mutual respect for all human beings.
I cannot believe that racelessness, whether that means racial amalgamation
or the obliteration of the African phenotype, would amount to anything
except the diminishing of the world. Where Gilroy has a point is
his intense desire to counter the rise of European fascism, but
I think that he has the wrong idea about how to counter that resurgence.
To me, it is not in the elimination of race or races, but in the
elimination of racism, the defeat of white racial domination, that
we will discover the way to a new humanism.
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