Once more on the Black-white Binary

My previous post offers an antiracist critique of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. Put concisely, I argue that Stamped fails to be a “definitive history of racist ideas in America,” because it operates within a Black-white binary.

Given the recent surge in antiracist rhetoric and movements, another post critiquing   the Black-white binary is in order. But this time, I don’t want to do most of the speaking. Instead, I offer the penetrating insights of a seasoned antiracist and critical race theorist, Richard Delgado.

In Derrick Bell’s Toolkit—Fit to Dismantle that Famous House?, Delgado argues that CRT’s founder didn’t provide a comprehensive account of racism, because he taught in Black-and-white. To explain why this matters, Delgado first turns to two of Bell’s favorite topics: Brown v. Board of Education and U.S. Reconstruction.

Regarding Brown v. Board, Delgado writes:

Recall how at the very time Brown v. Board of Education announced a ringing breakthrough for [B]lack schoolchildren, U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell was operating Operation Wetback, a massive roundup of Mexicans, many of them United States citizens, for deportation to Mexico, and how just a few years earlier, a presidential decree had ordered all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to wartime detention centers, many losing farms and businesses in the process.

Turning to U.S. Reconstruction, Delgado continues.

By the same token, during Reconstruction southern planters refused to hire the newly freed blacks, instead bringing in Mexicans and Asians to carry out the work the slaves previously performed.

Delgado argues that historic examples such as these reveal that “[i]gnoring how society racializes one group at the expense of another, then, is risky business. To understand when one is being manipulated or used to suppress someone else, each minority group must attend to the broader scale.”

Delgado bolsters his argument for the need to see beyond Black-and-white by specifying seven ways that any binary racial thinking impedes antiracist justice. I’ll list each, accompanied by one or more supporting examples Delgado provides.

Binary thinking:

1)      Obscures “how society arranges progress for one group to coincide with repression for another.” Considering the early 2000s, Delgado notes that “At a time when Indian litigators are winning striking breakthroughs for tribes, California has been passing a series of anti-Latino measures, including English-Only, Proposition 187, and restrictions on bilingual education.”

2)      Leads to “affirmative pitting of one disadvantaged group against the other.” Delgado highlights that “During California’s Proposition 187 campaign, proponents curried [B]lack votes by portraying Mexican immigrants as competitors for [B]lack jobs.

3)      Obfuscates “over-identification with whites.” In People v. Hall, the California Supreme Court applied legal restrictions on Blacks and Indigenous people to justify banning Chinese testimonies against whites in criminal trials. Delgado recounts that “Chinese on the West Coast responded indignantly to People v. Hall, the Chinese testimony case, on the grounds that it treated them the same as supposedly inferior Negroes and Indians.”

4)      Promotes “interference with moral insight and generalizations.” Binary thinking suggests one racialized group is the paradigm or template for the others. But this is false, for “all the groups are exceptional; each has been racialized in different ways.” Delgado writes: “Blacks were enslaved. Indians were massacred and then removed to the West. Japanese Americans were relocated in the other direction. African Americans are stereotyped as bestial or happy-go-lucky, depending on society’s shifting needs; Asians, as crafty, derivative copycats or soulless drones; Mexicans as hot-tempered, romantic, or close to the earth. Blacks are racialized by reason of their color; Latinos, Indians, and Asians on that basis but also by reason of their accent, national origin, and, sometimes, religions as well. All these groups were sought as sources of labor; Indians and Mexicans, as sources of lands. Puerto Ricans, Indians, and Mexicans are racialized by reason of conquest. Latinos, Indians, and Asians are pressured to assimilate; [B]lacks to do the opposite. The matrix of race and racialization thus is constantly shifting, sometimes overlapping, for the four main groups.”

5)      Encourages “minorities to succumb to the siren song of uniqueness.” Recalling the previous examples, Delgado says that “binary thinking can also warp minorities’ views of themselves and their relation to white,” leading them to think that they alone have suffered from white supremacy and white nationalism.

6)      Impairs the “ability to generalize and learn from history.” Rather than learn from the whole of racial history, many reinvent the antiracist wheel. As a counter example, Delgado emphasizes that “Had it not been for a single alert litigator on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who recognized [Westminster School District v. Mendez’s] importance and insisted that the organization participate in Mendez as amicus, Mendez would have been lost to African Americans and the road to Brown would have been harder and longer.”

7)      Perpetuates the “impairment of coalitions.” Ideologies of white supremacy pit racialized minorities against each other. As Delgado writes: “[N]either the NAACP nor any other predominantly African American organization filed an amicus brief challenging Japanese internment in Korematsu v. United States, or in any of the other cases contesting that practice. Earlier, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a politically moderate litigation organization for Latinos, distanced itself from other minority groups and even from darker-skinned Latinos by pursuing the ‘other white’ strategy. And in Northern California, Asians, Mexican Americans, and [B]lacks recently have been at loggerheads over admission to Lowell High School and UC-Berkeley.”

We needn’t agree with all Delgado’s interpretations or claims to endorse his main point: Just antiracism requires resisting binary racialized thinking, and attending to the forms of oppression marshalled against each racialized group. Christians should already be championing this view through word and deed. Christ’s mandate to be with the marginalized requires both.