Introduction

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois famously foretold that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”¹ Surely he was correct. No problem more deeply troubled the American people,² throughout the century that he was then entering and we have just left, than race, for which Du Bois chose the metaphor, “the color-line.” Never just a matter of Black and White, race in all its pain and complexity was a problem for America throughout the twentieth century—from Jim Crow segregation to the orgy of lynching that spasmed across the decades; from attempts to wipe out Native peoples by dismantling Indian reservations in the 1920s to the racialized immigration laws of that same decade; from World War II race riots to the incarceration of the entire Japanese American people; from the midcentury fight for civil rights for African Americans to similar movements for the rights of Latinos, Native Americans, and others; from racial divides in opportunity and access to life’s good things (even physical safety) that persisted into the twenty-first century to the racialized anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, and anti-Muslim movements of our own generation.³

Du Bois lived ninety-five years. He published dozens of books, scores of pamphlets, and hundreds of articles. He wrote on many topics, but race was always at the core of his concern. I want to focus in this prefatory essay on three themes that seem to me to have been especially central to Du Bois’s theoretical thinking about race.⁴

Fig. I.1.
Statue of W. E. B. Du Bois on the campus of Fisk University. Photo by DeAundra Jenkins-Holder. Courtesy of Fisk University.

The first was a tension between seeing race as a biological essence and understanding it as a set of relationships that are constructed in the social negotiations that occur between people. When Du Bois wrote his famous words, race was widely assumed, by him and by others, to be a biological thing. In one of his first published writings, “The Conservation of Races,” he stated as a certainty:

We find upon the world’s stage eight distinctly differentiated races…. They are, the Slavs of eastern Europe, the Teutons of middle Europe, the English of Great Britain and America, the Romance nations of Southern and Western Europe, the Negroes of Africa and America, the Semitic people of Western Asia and Northern Africa, the Hindoos of Central Asia and the Mongolians of Eastern Asia.⁵

A sentence like this could have appeared in any turn-of-the-century anthropology textbook.⁶ Looking back from his later years, he reflected, “I was born in the century when the walls of race were clear and straight; when the world consisted of mutually exclusive races; and … there was no question of exact definition and understanding of the meaning of the word.”⁷ Du Bois even, on occasion, used the language of eugenics, for it was the way that educated people spoke and wrote in his era.

Although he used the language of biology and treated races as permanent and discrete categories, Du Bois knew race in another way as well. He was always conscious that he was constructing his own race over the course of his life. In “The Conservation of Races,” he continued:

But while race differences have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differences—the cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences—undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life.⁸

As I describe in chapter 8, Du Bois grew up among White, small-town New Englanders and performed New England White culture perfectly. Only when he ventured out to attend college at Fisk (because White Harvard would not have dusky Burghardt Du Bois) did he make a decisive choice to see himself as unambiguously Black. Even then, all the rest of his long life, alongside a rock-solid commitment to being a member of and an advocate for African Americans, he acknowledged and maintained an acute interest in his White forebears. He knew he was a man who had racial options, and he opted to be Black.⁹

A second theme in Du Bois’s writing is the interlocking global nature of race and its relationship to colonialism. Although Du Bois’s early work, as an activist, sociologist, and historian, centered on the United States and the racial situation of people of African descent here, as the color-line quote makes clear, he was also aware from the beginning that race was an international issue. During his later career he became an eloquent speaker for African liberation—indeed, for the freedom of all colonized peoples—and eventually he relocated to Ghana. From his new vantage point he saw the panorama of peoples across the globe, the intimate connection between colonialism and racial hierarchy, and the recurring racialized relationships that existed in many local contexts.¹⁰

The third theme that lurks in the crevices of Du Bois’s writing is racial complexity. This possibility occurred to me first in the mid-1980s, on a visit to Fisk University. Walking in a garden on a break from the archives, I came upon a slightly smaller than life-size bronze statue of what I took to be an Italian guy with a goatee. Up close, the plaque identified the gentleman as Fisk’s most famous son, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. In the quote about the color line, Du Bois spoke as if racial groups were discrete boxes—one was either Black or White, Red or Yellow, never both or in between. Yet in other writings, Du Bois showed his deep awareness of his own multiplicity, as I discuss in chapter 10.

Race in Mind is a gathering of what Keynes called “essays in persuasion,”¹¹ in this case, essays about race, considered both theoretically and empirically. It brings together work that I have been doing over more than two decades. Some of the essays printed here were first published in scattered, sometimes obscure places. Others are fresh creations for this volume. I have reworked each of the previously published essays thoroughly to bring it up to date and to correct any errors I may have made in the initial published form. I have tried to maintain the original content and tone insofar as possible and to indicate the context that gave birth to each essay.

My work on race over these decades has revolved around the three themes in Du Bois’s work to which I alluded above:

•  race-as-biology versus race as something constructed by social and political relationships;

•  race as a phenomenon that exists not just in the United States, but in every part of the world, and even in the relationships between nations; and

•  the question of racial multiplicity.

I did not set out consciously to follow Du Bois’s themes; at the outset I had not even studied his work carefully, beyond an undergraduate’s reading of The Souls of Black Folk. But over the years, as I sought to understand the ways that race has worked in the United States and in the modern world, I inevitably ran across Du Bois’s ideas again and again. Every time I thought that I had a brand-new idea that no one had thought before, sooner or later I would discover that Du Bois had been there first. I hope to add to his legacy, but I cannot eclipse it.

Whatever our similarities of theme, the provenance of my thinking about race is quite different from the context out of which Du Bois came to think about the subject. He came of age intellectually in the late nineteenth century, a time when racialist science was all the rage.¹² People styling themselves scientists marked populations off by color and continent; measured their skulls, their limbs, their eyefolds; and aspired to deduce from these and other physicalities their moral character, their aptitude for education, and their fitness for citizenship. Du Bois rejected such eugenic determinism, but like other intellectuals of his time he was caught to some degree in the web of its terms and concepts. As Du Bois’s critique and that of contemporaries like Franz Boas took hold, his prose broke freer of racialist terminology.¹³

I grew to adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s, when social scientists dominated the writing about race. Eminent scholars like E. Franklin Frazier, Gunnar Myrdal, Thomas Pettigrew, Kenneth Clark, Winthrop Jordan, and Milton Gordon had turned away from biological determinism to social explanations of the different life chances experienced by different racial groups. Yet even those writers seldom questioned the racial categories themselves. They assumed the existence of discrete races as social entities, even though they did not give credence to the theory that biology dictated social and cultural difference.¹⁴ As with Du Bois and the eugenicists, my early writing in the 1980s hews more closely to the language of the social scientists who were judged to be the smart people when I was coming up. It was only later, in the 1990s and beyond, that I was able to begin to break free of the determinist language of social science. Although my 1980s writing made room for racial complicatedness, it was only later that I was able to articulate more fully the mixed, constructed, and contingent qualities of race that I have since come to see.¹⁵

The places I have lived have led me to see race in one respect quite differently than did Du Bois. He was a product of rural New England, educated at Fisk, a Harvard PhD, a professor in Atlanta. For him, race was primarily a Black and White affair. Late in life he wrote in solidarity with other peoples of color, but Blackness was the central issue in race as he understood it. I am a product of the West Coast of the United States, born and raised in central Seattle, educated in graduate school at Berkeley, now a professor in Santa Barbara for more than fifteen years. In between I spent long periods in Hawai‘i, China, and Japan, and in recent years I have lived in Germany.

All this means that I have never understood race as just—or even primarily—a matter of Black and White. Central Seattle was home to a large African American population but also to many Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Indians, and working-class Whites. Race where and when I grew up had those six categories. In fact, race has been multipolar pretty much everywhere west of the Rockies. Racial Fault Lines, Tomás Almaguer’s history of the making of race in nineteenth-century California, depicts a multiple-sided system: Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Black, and White. Each of these racial groups had its own characteristics and historical evolution, even as their interaction was framed by an overall system of White supremacy. David Torres-Rouff’s study of the making of race in the making of place—the built environment—in Los Angeles history reveals a similarly complex system, with all the groups that Almaguer describes but also with some people moving in and out of racial categories. It turns out that there were several different kinds of Mexicans, for example, and that both the meanings and the boundaries of Mexicanness changed over time. Hawai‘i has a very different bouquet of racial groups than most of the continental United States, including Hawaiians, Chinese, Haoles (Whites), Japanese, Okinawans, Filipinos, Koreans, Samoans, Tongans, Mexicans, Blacks, a great variety of mixed people, and others. Hawai‘i is not without racial hierarchy and conflict, but the racial map there is complex, multiple-sided, and different from that in other parts of the United States.¹⁶

The scientific racialists who framed the racial thinking against which the young Du Bois struggled would surely have been surprised to hear what I have learned about race over the years I have been writing this set of essays. What I have found out might have surprised Du Bois himself. It would surely have surprised many of the social scientists of race whose work I read as a young scholar, and it would have been news to my younger self. But over these years I have come to see race, not as a simple set of fixed categories, but as a moving, morphing, complex, and shifting array of relationships.

THIS IS A BOOK of racial theory, but it is quite unlike some other books of theory. Some writers represent themselves as Theorists with a capital T and eschew any accompanying adjective. In positioning themselves thus, it strikes me that they are either silly, or confused, or lazy, for I do not believe there is such a thing as theory in the abstract.¹⁷ Theories are about things, problems, peoples, relationships, and the like. One can articulate a theory about the relationships between physical objects (Newton did that, as did Aristotle before him), a theory about the mechanics of flight (Leonardo), a theory about monetary policy (Milton Friedman), a theory about history (Fernand Braudel).¹⁸ Race in Mind is a book about racial theory.

Let me be clear, however, about what theory is good for. Theory is not a substitute for ideas, observations, evidence, or clear thinking. Theory is supposed to be a spur to those things. Above all, theory is not a magical template that one can place over a field of data and thereby achieve understanding. I hope that the reader will engage the theoretical ideas I present in these essays, consider the contexts from which they spring, and investigate the problems they may illuminate. I would be appalled if someone were to take my ideas and apply them mechanically, as if they were a magical guide to understanding. Theories are tools that may help along the way but achieving understanding is the reader’s job.

The book is arranged in two big parts. The first considers race and ethnicity theoretically. Among the threads that developed in my thinking over the decades during which I was writing these essays is my understanding of the relationship between race and ethnicity; chapters 1 and 4 in particular attend to the ways that race and ethnicity may be thought of as the same thing and the ways that they are different. It also has struck me, as it struck Du Bois, that racialized relationships exist in every part of the globe. The different countries of the world do not have the same racial system—there is no master model for how race works everywhere and always—but the local systems are related to one another, often through links of colonial relationship. Ultimately, all racial systems are about power, and specifically about the power to define difference and enforce privilege. Chapter 2 compares the systems of racial category construction in the United States and Britain. Chapter 4 sets up a way of thinking about racialized relationships at many points around the globe. Chapter 5 explores the racialized systems that have developed in a selection of countries in Northeast Asia and the Central Pacific. The other two essays in the book’s first part offer cautionary tales. Chapter 3 examines the late 1990s to mid-2000s fashion of Whiteness studies and finds it less than satisfying. Chapter 6 warns against taking too seriously the claims of a relatively new form of pseudoscience: DNA ancestry testing for race.

The book’s second part is about racial multiplicity. This is where the issue of constructedness comes to the fore, as people who are manifestly multiple in their racial ancestry manage their identities, affiliations, and loyalties. Chapter 7 describes how Asian Americans have dealt with an increasing level of multiplicity in their midst. In chapter 8, I tell the stories of several mixed people like W. E. B. Du Bois who had racial options but chose to affiliate themselves with their African American side. Chapter 9 explores the grounds and patterns by which Pacific Islander Americans, nearly all of them heirs to complex ancestral streams, choose among and express their ethnic identities. In chapter 10, Jeffrey Moniz and I explore the perhaps unique racial history and present of Hawai‘i and offer a new model for thinking about race from the vantage point of the middle ground. Some scholars have been quite critical of the multiracial idea; chapter 11 takes those criticisms seriously and evaluates their merits. In chapter 12, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly and I take issue with the very notion of models as ways of illuminating human experience, as we detail a number of times when the one-drop rule did not work as it was supposed to. The final chapter, built around the figure of Barack Obama as a racial emblem, looks back at the past twenty-five years of scholarship and activism around the multiracial idea, evaluates what those scholars and that movement have achieved, and points to places we might go in the years ahead. It also attempts to assess what President Obama as a racial figure means about the state of race in the United States.

NOTES

  1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994; orig. Chicago: McClurg, 1903), 9.

  2. Throughout this book I use the word American in the way that citizens of the United States, Britain, and some other countries habitually do: to stand for the people of the United States of America. I recognize, and am sympathetic to, the irritation that this generates among Canadians, Mexicans, Peruvians, and a whole lot of other people who can lay equal claim to being Americans. I do this, not to slight their claims to the title, but simply because American English doesn’t work very well if I employ studious circumlocutions. I hope they will forgive me for this choice.

  3. I explore the history of race in America through all these episodes and many more in Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  4. I distinguish here between his theoretical thinking about race and his practical writing on the subject. His practical writings were far more numerous, and revolved around a series of unsurprisingly more practical themes: the actual conditions under which African Americans lived; defense of African Americans against discrimination and second-class citizenship; proposals for ameliorating the condition of poor African Americans; expressions of solidarity with other peoples of color and colonized people generally; and so forth.

  5. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Holt, 1995), 20–27; orig. in American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers, No. 2 (1897).

  6. See, e.g., A. H. Keane, Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901).

  7. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984; orig. 1940), 116.

  8. Du Bois, “Conservation of Races,” 22.

  9. See Du Bois, “The Concept of Race,” in Dusk of Dawn, 97–133; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), esp. 61–131.

10. Some of Du Bois’s writings on race and colonialism as international issues, and his calls for solidarity among colored and colonized peoples around the globe, can be found in Africa, Its Place in Modern History (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1930); Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945); The World and Africa, an Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: Viking, 1947); Worlds of Color (New York: Mainstream, 1961); Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson, eds., W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005).

11. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931).

12. Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races (New York: Fertig, 1999; English orig. 1915; French orig. 1853–55); William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (New York: Appleton, 1899); Keene, Ethnology; United States Congress, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 61st Cong., 3rd sess., vol. 5: Dictionary of Races and Peoples (Washington, DC, 1910–11); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996).

13. Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), collected essays. For Du Bois’s development, compare the language in “The Conservation of Races” with that in Dusk of Dawn, cited above in notes 8 and 9.

14. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001; orig. 1939; E. Franklin Frazier, Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States (New York: Schocken, 1967; orig. 1940); E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957); Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1962; orig. 1944); Thomas F. Pettigrew, A Profile of the Negro American (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964); Thomas F. Pettigrew, Racially Separate or Together? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Kenneth B. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child (Boston: Beacon, 1965); Kenneth B. Clark and Talcott Parsons, eds., The Negro American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). In fairness, Jordan was more open than these other scholars to questioning the shape of racial categories.

On the rise of social science generally in the decades after World War II, see Paul Boyer, “Social Science into the Breach,” in his By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 166–77; and Kenton W. Worcester, Social Science Research Council, 1923–1998 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2001). Markers in the temporary dominance of the social sciences in American intellectual life include C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); and Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relationship to Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2007; orig. 1958).

15. Among other writers who have had a particular influence on the way I think are Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960); Clifford Geertz, “Deep Hanging Out,” New York Review of Books 45.16 (October 22, 1998); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: African American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1966); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).

16. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); David Torres-Rouff, Before L.A.: Race, Space, and Municipal Power in Los Angeles, 1781–1894 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Jonathan Y. Okamura, Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai‘i (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); see also Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 6th ed. (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2010). These understandings of the multipolar nature of the American racial system stand in sharp contrast to the (I think mistaken) presentation of a single Black–White continuum, with groups like Asians and Latinos placed in between, as in Eileen O’Brien, The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living beyond the Racial Divide (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Neil Foley and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva are a bit more sophisticated but still I think in error in Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Bonilla-Silva and David G. Embrick, “Black, Honorary White, White: The Future of Race in the United States,” in Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era, ed. David L. Brunsma (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 33–48.

17. That said, among the many works of more or less abstract theory that have influenced me are Pierre Bourdieu, Outline for a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997); Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); Stuart Hall et al., eds., Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21–80; Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000); and Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972). References to specifically racial theorists abound in the notes to the chapters that follow.

18. Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen, Anne Whitman, and Julia Budenz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; orig. 1726); Aristotle, Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford, 1999); Milton Friedman, Monetarist Economics (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991); Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).