Antagonism, not diversity
How the Left should talk about Race
Liberals see racism as a problem of tolerance, which can be solved by insisting on diversity and inclusion. In liberalism, race is a category of identity, so there can be many different races, and they intersect with other types of identity such as gender, sexual orientation, etc. Liberal discourse about race is riddled with inclusive caveats: you can’t talk about the oppression of Black people without also mentioning Brown people, and if you mention them you should probably also mention Native people, Asians (actually don’t lump all Asians together in one term, that’s marginalizing), and of course don’t forget to mention the intersections with Gender, Queerness, etc.
This never-ending series of identities is not only annoying to deal with in language, it also has a serious problem: where is the White identity located? Indeed, we’ve seen that some white supremacists have adopted the liberal-style identity politics discourse and now claim that whiteness is marginalized, and that there shouldn’t be anything wrong with celebrating White culture and taking a stand for White interests.
To counter this, the liberals are forced to afford a special place for Whites as the identity which should renounce their own particular culture and has the responsibility to create the space for other identities to express themselves, to include and tolerate. So for liberals, Whiteness becomes a kind of universal identity, emptied of all concrete content. Very similar in fact to how the color white works as an “empty” color that merely creates the space for other colors to appear. This is the essence of liberal racism.
The Left is in a unique position to get us out of this, and come to a better understanding of racism, through the logic of antagonism. Class antagonism is a notion developed by Marxists to explain why the lower classes don’t simply revolt against the upper classes who exploit them, but rather use what little power they do have to exploit those below them in the hopes of moving up.
For Marx, there are really only two classes on an abstract level: the exploiters and the exploited. The actual concrete classes that really exist (bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, proletariat, rabble) are generated as different reactions to this abstract contradiction. So instead of thinking of exploiters and exploited as two defined complementary groups, we need to think of exploitation as something that splits every group from within, every person even. Antagonism is not a split between two complementary halves, it’s a split that creates a non-identity of the Whole with itself.
Applied to race, we can say that the split runs between Black and White, and that the different racial identities are different positions taken in regards to this split. This explains then for example also how the Black community is split from within between “light-skin” and “dark-skin”. Or how “white trash” designates people who aren’t civilized enough to be properly white. Or why labeling Antonio Banderas a “person of color” triggers such a backlash.
It also potentially creates a different axis of solidarity. In a liberal world, I can tolerate and include other identities but there is no shared experience, because I can never know what it’s like to be some x identity that I’m not. In a Leftist discourse of racial antagonism however, we are all subject to the same split, making possible a real connection and a common struggle.
