by Osha Neumann
If “Truth with a capital T” is taken to imply some truth that stands outside of and utterly independent of history and time, eternal, unfiltered by consciousness, untouched by human hands, not subject to review or emendation, it’s no wonder that both sides at the Santa Cruz conference give it a wide berth. Such truths belong to religion and revelation. They should be kept out of politics and science. What we do need are truths that are not just true for me or for you, truths that can be shared. We need truths with dimension and depth; truths that are pools in which we see ourselves reflected. We need:Truths that tip toe quietly so as not to wake the children;
Truths that bray like a billy goat;
Truths that gush like sweat from the pores of marching miners;
Truths that erupt like spit from the mouths of angry shouters;
Truths that diffuse like a warm vapor from the whispering mouths of lovers;
Truths that penetrate like a dank smell of old latrines in the woods.
We need a world in common.
The System is a labyrinth large as the world.
THE COLOR OF REASON
I reject your theology, your history, your morality by which you don’t live, your Gods and your standards and in total all of it, lock stock and barrel, because you don’t live by them and I know that you don’t live by them by the way you treat me.
—James Baldwin39
Five years before the end of the millennium, this country was in the grip of an obsession with the trials of Orenthal J. Simpson, an African-American former football player, sometime actor, and pitchman for Hertz Rent-A-Car, who was accused of murdering his estranged blond wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a White Jewish man, Ron Goldman, who apparently stopped by her house to return a pair of glasses. A predominantly Black jury acquitted Simpson in the criminal trial. A predominantly White jury found him liable in the civil trial that followed. Opinion polls showed that most Whites believed he had done it; most African-Americans that he had not. Both saw in the other’s view an expression of racial bias. Neither thought the other was being objective.
Pundits expressed dismay at the racial divide this case revealed. They did not seem to notice that there was something on which both sides agreed: Either he did it or he didn’t. There was a truth to be discovered. No one thought there were two alternate streams of reality, White and Black—in one of which OJ plunged the knife into Nicole and Ron, splattering their blood on his socks and glove, and another in which he was home practicing his golf swing at the time a person or persons unknown did the awful deed. The truth was hidden, but it was one. There was, however, no tribunal on which both sides could agree that could arbitrate what appeared to be a dispute between the races about what that single truth might be. Certainly it would not have worked to “appeal to reason.” What reason? A White reason? A Black reason? A reason that transcended race?
In the Sixties, we spoke of “The Movement” as if it were a single entity, but in fact it was always divided along lines of race. In 1966, SNCC had embraced Black Power and decided to expel whites. It explained its decision in a position paper entitled “The Basis of Black Power”:Negroes in this country have never been allowed to organize themselves because of white interference. As a result of this, the stereotype has been reinforced that blacks cannot organize themselves. The white psychology that blacks have to be watched, also reinforces this stereotype. Blacks, in fact, feel intimidated by the presence of whites, because of their knowledge of the power that whites have over their lives. One white person can come into a meeting of black people and change the complexion of that meeting . . . People would immediately start talking about brotherhood, love, etc.; race would not be discussed. 40
The demand by people of color for recognition of the pervasiveness of racism and the demands by women for acknowledgement of sexism came as a shock to white men in the movement. We had been the heroes of our own fairy tale of revolution. Now others were writing a script in which we were cast in a less flattering light. We were used to being center stage. Now we were being told to move onto the wings. The solidarity we had imagined was largely a myth. The fault lines between oppressor and oppressed ran through the movement. The divisions ran deep and crisscrossed each other unexpectedly. The oppressed could also be the oppressor. What was the basis of unity? We no longer had the answers.
I had always believed that reason was universal. Its strictures applied to everyone. Its inclusiveness was a guarantee of human solidarity. It was the necessary foundation of that solidarity. If I had been asked, I would have said it transcended all divisions of race, class, and gender. It had not occurred to me that the reason to which I pledged allegiance could be seen as a project of mostly dead European white men, and that others might question its universality on that ground. The political movements to which I had given my allegiance were largely white. But after I left the Motherfuckers, people of color came to play an increasingly important role in my personal life. The man I loved most in my life, my best friend until he died of esophageal cancer, was Puerto Rican and Dominican. And my wife is African American. Neither of them let me rest in my unexamined assumptions about race.
I lie down next to Arisika. Her skin is luminous and soft. Its color varies with the light. I am white. My skin color also changes with the light. But though the color of our skin changes, the fact that Arisika is black and I am white does not. We cannot escape the social meaning of color. I am the color of the men who owned her ancestors. And sleeping with me, she sleeps with the enemy. I am also her lover, her husband, and her friend. We endeavor to make a separate peace.
I say “we endeavor,” but this is not quite accurate. I have no sense of effort. Nothing we two can do together can erase the meaning of race in America. The recognition of the meaning of Arisika’s color for white America is part of who she is, both for herself and for me. In my being with Arisika, color does not disappear. But as in speech, where the sounds of words become transparent with meaning, so, for me, Arisika’s body is like a word soaked with the meaning of who she is for herself, and what she chooses to share with me. So full of these meanings is her body for me, that there is no room—or so I hope—for the defining gaze of the overseer.
For the racist, the consciousness of people of color is reduced to the corrupt effluvium of their bodies. Racism, in the crude form exemplified by the stereotype of the beer bellied Southern sheriff and hooded Klansmen, is easy to dismiss as irrational. But covert racism pervades the system. It insures that disproportionate numbers of African Americans will be consigned to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. And the System still presents itself to the world as a rational enterprise.
No thought emanating from a society divided along lines of class, race, and gender can completely transcend those divisions. Reason, though aspiring to universality, in practice leaves those divisions intact. This “leaving intact,” is reason’s Achilles heel, as well as the necessary condition of all thought in an unfree society.
I keep wanting to shrug off this pessimistic assessment of the possibility of universality, and rush out to fill my lungs with the fresh air of reason, whose currents sweep unencumbered across the planet. I want to get on with the argument, offer a quick acknowledgement that bias is inevitable, and proceed. The Theory of Relativity, I protest, is not white, male, or Jewish. The same with Marxism and psychoanalysis. You can not judge the truth of an idea by its origin. The theory of relativity is ether true or false—for Blacks and Whites, Jews and Gentiles, bosses and workers. Marxism is not the same as fascism, though both are ideologies whose principal exponents have been white men. Even the statement that universality is suspect claims for itself universal applicability.
I am a white, six-foot-tall, bearded, partially disabled, middle-class Jewish American. I can imagine my writing characterized as white and male. I can not imagine it described as bearded or six feet tall. Thoughts do not have the same relation to the thinker that attributes have to objects. Objects are a particular color, so and s
o big across, such and such shape. If we could describe all their attributes, nothing would be left over. The ball is red. It can not escape its redness. But the “I” is always other than the thoughts it thinks. The thinker is not the thought. We are always one step ahead of ourselves.
Whiteness and masculinity are not physical characteristics of thought. Just as my writing is not an emanation of my beard, it is not an emanation of my white skin or male sexual organs. Whiteness and maleness are ideas and ideologies. The writing of white men will probably reflect these ideas and ideologies because white men are usually brought up in a white world and a patriarchal culture. A white man stolen at birth and brought up by wolves would have a different story to tell. In Europe, white male voices have risen up, time and again, on the side of the outcast, the downtrodden and exploited. They have, on occasion, opposed ideologies of whiteness and maleness. And yet thought that stands in opposition can also betray its link to what it opposes. It may set itself against the prevailing forms of domination, but it cannot totally free itself from them. The thought of Marx and Freud, Voltaire and Jefferson, Socrates and Hegel is male, white, and European. And it is not. It is bounded and free.
Defenders of the achievements of European writers and thinkers insist that the truths they have discovered are universal. They often rail against anyone who questions that universality and exposes its unsavory underpinnings. On the other hand, those who do not find their truth reflected in the European canon, those who find themselves cast out, disparaged, and rendered invisible, at times deny altogether that any truth is universal and end up labeling thought as one would produce in a market: white thought in this bin; male thinking in that. And in the next aisle over—Black science and women’s rationality.
Reason is not Black or White, male or female. This principle lies at the foundation of everything I believe. You cannot pry my fingers loose from it. It’s my life raft. The fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner links the Declaration of Independence to white racism. But it does not mean that the idea that we all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a white idea. Its whiteness consists in its fluid accommodation to the institution of slavery, and all subsequent inequalities. It is white in so far as it has permitted and facilitated that accommodation.
It’s no wonder that those who have suffered under a system that treats them as things—all the while laying claim to rationality and universality—become wary of claims made in the name of reason and come to distrust high sounding talk about “equality” and our common “essential humanity.”
We do not encounter “essential humanity” walking down the street, waiting at a bus stop, or standing ahead of us at the checkout counter. We encounter particular humans of varying shapes, sizes, genders, colors, and proclivities. There are myriad differences between us, myriad ways in which we are not equal, but we are told they are irrelevant. They are contingencies, unconnected to our essential humanity. They fall outside the net.
The process of abstraction by which liberal theory distills a common humanity does not require us to actually come together to resolve our differences. It sweeps us together in theory, but not in practice. It does not demand that we organize society in a way that insures the convergence of our interests. The System wants to have it both ways. It declares us all equal under the skin, and uses our skin as a marker for sorting those who are treated as humans and those who are not. It is dependent for its very existence on the perpetuation of gross inequalities. It can produce a steady crop of Clarence Thomases, Colin Powells, and Condoleezza Rices. A Barack Hussein Obama can be president of the United States! It does not tremble when Black and White people have sex together, when women have sex with women, and men with men, despite the squeals of prurient dismay arising from certain quarters. In the South, the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave masters pee in the same toilets, after a huge struggle. But it still remains the case that in the global gradient of wealth and power, the poorest people are the darkest, and in no country—including the United States—are the lighter skinned people, as a whole, poorer than the darker.
Women and people of color are still buffeted by howling gales of malice that strip them of their dignity, their dreams, their agency, and their very lives. They cannot ride out the storm by clinging to the hope that the storm will abate as soon as their “essential humanity” is recognized. And so, born into a sea of troubles, they construct life-raft identities from the debris that has been cast aside to obtain the concept “human.” They form identities from all those traits, which they are told by liberal theory are meaningless and irrelevant, but which they have found are precisely the traits on which the system has inscribed their fate.
We tend to think of identity as something concrete, whole, and unmediated—the opposite of what is universal and abstract. But while the concepts “woman,” or “African-American” are less inclusive than the concept “human being,” they remain concepts. By proclaiming the importance of their identity, women and African Americans are not taking the side of being against thought. They think themselves in opposition to the System. They enter into a battle, which is, among other things, a battle of ideas. They demand recognition of the ways in which their gender and skin color have determined their history, and shaped their consciousness.
A multiracial/multigendered global corporate hegemony would still be a disaster, despoiling the planet, sickening us, breeding misery and starvation in the midst of plenty. It would still be a hideous irrationality. But the system is not blind to color or gender. It is built on preexisting foundations of white supremacy and patriarchy. As Christians built their churches on the foundations of pagan temples, so capitalism has built its structure of class division on foundations of race and gender exploitation. It has taken the stones of those old structures and incorporated them into the walls of the temple of Mammon. The domination of women by men goes back to the beginning of recorded history. The large scale exploitation of people of African descent begins in the fifteenth century with the European slave trade. These primitive modes of domination have not disappeared in the development of capitalism. They are integrated into its structure at the deepest level. While it would appear at first glance that capitalism could organize itself quite well on the basis of race and gender equality, hierarchies of race and gender persist with only minimally diminished virulence. They provide a rationale for super-exploitation, and serve to mask the fundamental class structure of capitalist exploitation. In the dust stirred up by conflicts about race and gender, that structure disappears from view, just as fish beneath the water disappear when the surface is turbulent.
The extent to which hierarchies of race and gender will remain if the class structure of capitalism is abolished cannot be known until we have completed the process of dismantling those structures. Until we pull at the system we will not know how it comes apart. But this much we do know: The system is a totality. And an effective challenge to it must be a total challenge.
The unity necessary for such a challenge cannot be reached by impatiently brushing aside concerns about race, gender, and identity. That is to say, it cannot be reached over the bodies of those who feel turned to stone by the institutionalized gaze of patriarchy and white supremacy. To dismiss their concerns is to indulge in the kind of abstraction which the system has made suspect. We cannot get to the universal by bracketing gender and race and setting it aside. The universal only manifests itself through the particular. Our myriad histories and endlessly varied bodies are the medium through which, and only through which, our common humanity emerges. This common humanity exists inextricably bonded to our diversity.
We can embrace diversity without giving in to a distrust of all abstraction and claims to universality. Distrust of universalizing reason is understandable. We long for connection, for a place on the earth where we feel we belong. We long for family and community. We long for roots, for tribal ways, for the world as it was when the concrete and the particular were no
t threatened by the giant anonymous engines of rationality and abstraction. The train those engines drive seems increasingly headed for disaster.
The irrationalities of the System, which claims to be the embodiment of rationality cannot be attributed solely to a problem of implementation—shoddy execution of the master plan. The fact that the theory of relativity leads in practice to the possibility of nuclear holocaust does not make it wrong, anymore than the fact that Nazis counted off their victims makes arithmetic wrong. But it does speak to the inadequacy of a reason that is limited to science and mathematics, and to the need for a larger horizon for rationality.
When the distrust of the rationality of the system leads to a distrust of all thought that moves towards the universal by way of abstraction, then our ability to think together a way out of the labyrinth is put in jeopardy. For in order to flush the system out of hiding and prevent its constant shape-shifting, we must find a way to hold it in thought so that we can grasp it in fact and tear it apart.