The Impossibility of Multiracial Democracy

Christopher Chamberlin (bio)

Abstract

Democracy becomes modern after it abolishes slavery and assumes its primary feature—race. Paradoxically, political theory cannot formalize a notion of democracy that incorporates the ex-slave or a post-slavery democracy that does not prescribe racial genocide. This essay shows that this paradox is structural, and tracks its transformation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s nineteenth-century meditations on the specter of abolition to UNESCO’s postwar statements on race, particularly through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s subsequent critiques of racial capitalism. It concludes by reflecting on the ethics of war as a materialization of the impossibility of multiracial democracy.

The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? . . . This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and contin­ued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.

–W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction

Two Axioms

Modern democracy is radically racial. Because race was the essential ingredient that made slavery modern, distinguishing it from ancient and feudal iterations of domination, the same clause applies to the form of power that supersedes it. This will be our first axiom: in the act of bringing slavery to an end, democracy contracts its main feature—race—which now permeates it. This connection between race and democracy is complicated by black radical thought insofar as it theorizes the constitutive elements of slavery as a mode of power and deliberates how those same elements survive abolition. This premise destabilizes the successionist narrative about the relation between premodernity and modernity that our first axiom projects, challenging the possibility of answering the following in any straightforward way: When did slavery end? And when did democracy begin?

In the epigraph, W.E.B. Du Bois frames the slave as the definitive horizon of modern politics, a disturbance that reveals the truth of democracy’s relations of power and a figure of negativity constitutively excluded from its domain. In his midcentury writings, Du Bois sees the transcendence of slavery as a long unfinished task, a project violently interrupted a century before by the quashing of radical reconstruction. A new chance to defeat the color line presented itself in the project for an industrial democracy that would be both multiracial and international in scope, a vision crafted out of Du Bois’s increasingly apparent engagement with the work of Marx and his growing understanding of the “dark world” as a revolutionary vanguard (Dusk of Dawn 134-62;Balfour 182n18). It is precisely against this nomination of the sexually undifferentiated laborer as a telos of black freedom that Saidiya Hartman presents the female slave as an untranscendable horizonof democratic thought. In contradistinction to the situation of productive labor, “sexual violence and reproduction characteristic of enslaved women’s experience,” Hartman writes, “fails to produce a radical politics of liberation or a philosophy of freedom” (167). The depiction of the passage from subjection to political agency through the act of the general strike, as in Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (55-83), sidelines the centrality of sexual and reproductive labor to slavery. It also elides black women’s labor as a highly compromised site of political resistance.

The inability to elaborate a politics of freedom in the wake of the violence constitutive of the historical experience of black women renders a philosophy of democracy that includes them unthinkable. This can be stated the other way around: only through the categorical exclusion of slavery’s reproductive labor—that is, the transgenerational repetition of blackness as a status of absolute exclusion—does democracy become philosophically coherent, precisely because “[f]or the enslaved, reproduction does not ensure any future other than that of dispossession nor guarantee anything other than the replication of racialized and disposable persons” (168). Democracy encounters a limit to its powers in an abstract and material labor that “replicates the fate of the slave across generations” (169) and reproduces racial blackness as an entity unassimilable to political representation (be it liberal or revolutionary). The labor of the female slave, as Hartman describes it, is a constitutive element of slavery that also resists induction into a regime of equality. The structural excess that Hartman nominates under the heading of “black women’s labors,” or what Amber Jamilla Musser calls the “fleshy limit of theory” (176), figures here as the interminably receding verge of a democratic praxis.

Modern democracy brings slavery to an end but possesses no remedy for undoing the sexual mode of reproduction that replicates its inequality. Slavery’s reproductive labor survives, repressed, within the democracy that follows it, and in which it perpetually returns. This creates the impasse that defines democracy in the modern conjuncture. An inherent difficulty consequently plagues the attempt to formally represent or concretely propose multiracial democracy, a difficulty, I want to suggest, that is determined by the same deadlock that prevents the delineation of a politics of liberation from the sexual dimension of slavery. I mean this in the most basic sense: no social or political theory can formulate either an account of democracy that incorporates the ex-slave or a vision of post-slavery democracy that does not presume or prescribe racial genocide. Invariably, democracy and multiracialism emerge as an impossible combination. We are therefore faced with the need to couple the opening proposition with a second axiom that negates it: modern democracy is on one level radically racial, and on another level, radically notracial.

In this essay, I will trace out this impossibility of multiracial democracy, resulting from the contradictory and simultaneously racial and non-racial form of modern democracy, as it manifests in two signal statements on Western democracy, one from the nineteenth century and the other from the twentieth. The first is contained in the observations made by Alexis de Tocqueville and his intellectual co-conspirator, Gustave de Beaumont, concerning the specter of abolition. The second is contained in the declarations on racial equality issued by the United Nations after World War II, particularly as elaborated and critiqued by one of its philosophical standard-bearers, Claude Lévi-Strauss. The question of the “ultimate relation of slaves to democracy” (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction 13) is raised by both of these radical attempts at formulating the scope and nature of its post-slavery form, where slavery comes to represent both an origin of and a limit to democracy. My interest lies not only in showing how this limit is theorized before and after the advent of abolition, but in tracking how the impasses of multiracialism mutate after the American form of democracy expands from a national dilemma into a global project.

To be clear, it is not my argument that Tocqueville, Beaumont, Du Bois, and Lévi-Strauss lack the critical acumen to conceive a political form properly inclusive of the figure of the female slave, but that their formulations are limited by the inability to account for an irresolvable structural feature of modern democracy: the persistent reproduction of racial inequality after slavery. This structural limit of multiracialism reveals itself in the radical temporal (that is, historical) or spatial (that is, geographical) fixes that my symptomatic readings of these nineteenth- and twentieth-century documents propose for addressing racial inequality but that perversely end up converting democracy into a program for racial violence. These theoretical models serve as test-cases for my main claim that race has no democratic solution. In the final part of this essay, I suggest instead that multiracial democracy can and must fail. To that end I reconsider war as a possible realization of democracy’s inherent contradictions, a failure that is dismissed or repressed in the various solutions to multiracialism that this essay examines.

Imaginary Equality: Tocqueville and the Paradox of a Free Black Population

Alexis de Tocqueville’s self-confessed inability to imagine democracy surviving the end of racial slavery illustrates a core problem in modern political thought. In the two volumes comprising Democracy in America,¹ the French jurist sets out to survey American civil and political society and describe its unprecedented break with the European political order. The Old World was encumbered by the decay of aristocratic society, and its previous experiments with democracy, as in the French example, were too sudden and destructive to effect a deeper change in the “laws, ideas, customs, and manners which were necessary to render such a revolution beneficial” (1: 6).² Tocqueville credits the contrasting success and stability of American democracy to a firmly established “imaginary equality,” a belief, rooted in common mores (moeurs) or customs, in the fundamental equality of men (2: 217). This imaginary equality in the “public mind” is necessary to establish the general equality of conditions that strikes Tocqueville as “the central point at which all [his] observations constantly terminated” (1: 1). Just as importantly, this imaginary equality serves as a political seismic damper, mitigating the resentments that arise from the exacerbation of the “real inequality” of conditions between masters (the rich) and servants (the poor) (1: 361). For Tocqueville, the importance of democratic institutions in the United States, particularly the mores that underwrite them, lies almost exclusively in their capacity to curtail the mutual hostilities that inequality breeds and the violent impulses those resentments precipitate. Equality is for Tocqueville thus neither a good in itself nor a natural endowment of humanity, but rather an illusion that apprentices the poor to their subordination. These are important aspects of the democratic imaginary, but they are not essential to its function. Imaginary equality acts as a way to neutralize the turmoil of economic inequality and to prevent the accumulation of wealth from reaching unsustainable proportions.

Democracy specifically disperses the passions released by the inequalities unleashed by the institution of the right to property—the advent of which, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account, is coterminous with the invention of modern civil society (44). In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau assigns the cause of the social degeneration of Europe to the mutual valuation, reciprocal regard, and contractual commitments that are required by the exigencies of modern commerce (65-71). This increasing qualification of humanity, the new valuation of subjects’ prestige and social reputation, is part and parcel of the division of labor that institutes inequalities of “wealth, nobility or rank, power and personal merit” (66). The abstract nature of market relations (especially contract relations) suppresses the “natural” and restraining sentiment of pity that once moderated aristocratic inequality, multiplying in its place the modern passions: love, envy, shame, and contempt. In sum, the universal qualification and comparative evaluation of man’s values (prestige, authority, abilities, and so on)in civil society precedes and inevitably leads to the inequality of man. The modern passions make the inequality of man dangerous. Property is the vortex of these evils, writes Rousseau, insofar as this abstract social form externalizes the minor inequalities of ability inherent in nature into major and enduring inequalities in power and possession (53). Property becomes a proxy for human value, and after an expectation of an equal right to the latter becomes universal, “it was no longer possible for anyone to be lacking it [property or human value] with impunity” (49). “When both the most powerful and the most miserable made of their strengths or their needs a sort of right to another’s goods, equivalent, according to them, to the right of property,” concludes Rousseau, “the destruction of equality was followed by the most frightful disorder” (55).

While Rousseau sees no practical way of stopping this spiral of inequality and affect, which he would not live to see lead toward the triumph and terror of the French Revolution, Tocqueville presents American democracy as having developed a happy counterweight to the passions released by the right to property. Imaginary equality—as it exists in the “mass of those ideas which constitute [the] character of mind” (1: 299) or in the “moral and intellectual characteristics of social man taken collectively” (1: 318)—suppresses the love, envy, shame, and contempt that arise out of the division of labor and the inequality of material conditions. Against Rousseau’s moral denunciations, Tocqueville sees the more-or-less equal distribution of property under democracy as a bulwark against a desire for revolution—that “other” modern passion. When everyone has something to lose, Tocqueville reasons, no one wants to risk losing it all in a revolution (1: 301-16). Democracy is, in his estimation, less a form of realizing social equality than a mode of managing the passions released by privacy, possession, and privation.

Even so, Tocqueville locates in the peculiar order of property in the Southern United States a glaring exception to these considerations, one that abruptly suspends his entire line of inquiry. “All that I have just said [about democracy],” writes Tocqueville, “is consequently inapplicable there” (2: 218). Slavery repulses Tocqueville. He sees it as a calamity, a vestige of premodern power that violates democracy’s ethos of equality. Tocqueville rejects the idea of innate and permanent inferiority as unscientific, deeming it incapable of either explaining the inequalities of slavery or of justifying its existence (an inclination that led him to break with his former protégé, Arthur de Gobineau, when the latter published The Inequality of Human Races in the 1850s [see Painter 9n16]). Tocqueville is also certain that slavery will not last the century, that it will either be abolished by decree or that slaves will violently seize freedom for themselves (1: 382). He therefore ultimately understands slavery as incidental and contradictory to democracy, but also neither as fatal to its constitution nor necessary for its survival. Because he understands slavery as spatially and temporally separate from democracy (seeing it as contained geographically to the South and as historically waning), Tocqueville does not believe that slavery presents an obstacle to the historical propagation of the democratic form or to its formal theorization. Rather, nothing threatens the fact and idea of American democracy more than the terminationof slavery. Why? The “abstract and transient fact of slavery,” Tocqueville argues, has the concrete and permanent consequence of forging an association between servility, inferiority, and color in the collective mind (1: 355). “Slavery recedes,” writes Tocqueville, referring to its gradual abolition in the Northern states, “but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary” (1: 356-57). Inequalities in law, social status, and material conditions could hypothetically be abolished by rescinding slavery and redressing its injuries, but no democratic instrument could abolish the imaginary inequality that slavery implants in the manners and mores of the public mind. “God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence,” he writes exasperatedly (1: 355). The hardwiring of racism in the mind of the collective subject undercuts the political will to work through and eradicate its effects. For all intents and purposes, Tocqueville concludes, one can make an abstract “accurate distinction between slavery itself, and its consequences,” but this connection cannot be undone in practice (1: 354-55).

Perplexed, Tocqueville observes that the consequences of slavery survive its abolition and that formal and imaginary inequality have an inverse relationship:

Whosoever has inhabited the United States, must have perceived, that . . . the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known. (1: 357).

For Tocqueville, not slavery but the creation of a free black population threatens to plunge democracy into an abyss. The “free slave” magnifies the problem of slavery by synthesizing the contradiction between symbolic equality and imaginary inequality. In contrast to a system of overt bondage, post-slavery democracy amplifies the consequences of slavery because it activates a moral animus against the living embodiment of inferiority, the ex-slave, who is now formally included among the ranks of the “free.” This racial prejudice makes it impossible to integrate the ex-slave into a political community founded on sentiments, habits, and passions that do not differentiate between blackness and slavery.

Tocqueville concludes that the imminent end of slavery will lead to two possible consequences, both of which he freely admits are not tenable: blacks and whites will either have to “wholly part or wholly mingle” (1: 370). The former would involve the outbreak of a race war in which these factions would either destroy each other in an apocalyptic showdown or form separate monoracial nations, as was roughly the case in the recently concluded Haitian Revolution. The latter case, the so-called “commingling” of the races (1: 371) seems to be an even more remote possibility:

I do not imagine that the white and the black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. . . . A despot who should subject the Americans and their former slaves to the same yoke, might perhaps succeed in commingling their races; but as long as American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task; and it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated it will remain. (1: 370-71)

If the ascendance of despotism “might perhaps” force the sexual commingling of the races in the same political space, then a democratic solution to multiracialism seems unimaginable for Tocqueville, since he believes that only a monoracial post-slavery society can be democratic and that only a despotic regime could facilitate a multiracial society. Tocqueville considers theimaginary inequalityproduced and maintained by racial prejudice too malignant to produce any other distribution of outcomes.

Real Inequality: Beaumont and the Impossibility of Post-Slavery Amalgamation

The imaginary inequality between black and white people—which cannot be symbolized, formalized, or written in a democratic formula—portends the existence of real inequality, provided that we define it differently than Tocqueville does when he uses this same term to refer to “actual” disparities in the material conditions between owners and laborers. Rousseau, for instance, understands material and symbolic inequality to be integral aspects of the relations of property intrinsic to modern civil society. Tocqueville, however, finds the critical relationship in American democracy to be that between its formal institutions and the manners and customs that enable those institutions to subsist. Additionally, for Tocqueville, the life of institutions and that of the public mind do not mutually constitute each other. He staunchly maintains that mores are the “real cause” of the democratic system of governance, which allows him to explain the survival of slavery’s customs and manners after abolition (1: 321). The respective symbolic-material (Rousseau) and imaginary (Tocqueville) forms of inequality are therefore distinct.

Real inequality denotes not a relative difference between the symbolic or imaginary qualities of man but the very negation of the slave’s humanity, not a negation of any determinate features of the slave (such as “wealth, nobility or rank, power and personal merit” [Rousseau 66]) but a negation of personhood. The immeasurable distance between persons and slaves under racial slavery can neither be expressed in terms of a common value nor bridged in the imagination. Real inequality names both an image of racial blackness that, as Michel Foucault argues, “expresses without formulating” (Foucault 36) hierarchy and an unquantifiable gap within the field of human quality that cannot be symbolized. Human equality, which Rousseau presumes to be a general and uniform process of valuation that attends the formation of civil society, only persists through this exclusion of the real inequality between person and slave. Finally, insofar as status is transmitted from mother to child under a racial regime of slavery, the “sexual violence and reproduction characteristic of enslaved women’s experience” (Hartman 167) is the primary vehicle for the reproduction of real inequality.

For these thinkers, the abolition of slavery and the incorporation of the ex-slave into democracy would consequently trigger a catalytic reaction in the chemistry of democracy. The enfranchisement of the slave attempts to “count” the antithesis of human equality among the field of values generated from its exclusion, and thereby opens an absolute and volatile misalignment withinthe democratic imaginary. This imaginary inequality is one that “Abolition-democracy” creates (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction 83), but that its symbolic and material powers of inclusion cannot remedy. Through this symptomatic reading of Tocqueville’s writing, we can see that the ex-slave does not primarily name a sociological position, material condition, or object of the public imagination, but a structural obstacle to the symbolic totalization of democracy. To slightly reframe Du Bois’s formulation, there isnoultimate relation between slaves and democracy because the status of the slave is reproduced through the process of racialization that follows abolition. Racializing the slave into a species of democratic personhood therefore has the effect of making the consequences of slavery—the production of blackness as a being inassimilable to the community of the free—those of democracy’s own. Slavery is thereby transformed, through abolition-racialization, from an external negation of democracy into its internal obstacle. What was for Tocqueville merely incidental to and unnecessary for democracy becomes, through the overdetermined cancellation of slavery and under the counterfeit of racial blackness, retroactively constitutive and irresolvable.³

            Tocqueville’s close friend and collaborator, the lawyer Gustave de Beaumont, composes his own thoughts on the structural failure of racialization under democracy in the form of a sociological novel. Marie, or, Slavery in the United States holds the distinction of being “the first abolitionist novel to focus on racial prejudice rather than bondage as a social evil” (“Overview”). Blending the conventions of romantic tragedy with empirical analysis, Beaumont declares himself to be “offering truth under the veil of fiction” (3), a method more appropriate for speculating on the conundrum of antiblack animus than the new political science deployed byTocqueville in his comparative analysis of democratic institutions. “It is, above all, these secondary consequences of an evil whose first cause has disappeared [i.e., slavery] which I have endeavored to develop,” writes Beaumont (6). Marie is a mundane love story about the romance between a French sojourner to the United States, Ludovic, and Marie, the white-appearing daughter of Baltimorean gentry who is revealed in the course of events to be a woman of color. The tragedy of the narrative is supposedly double: the first is the “flaw” of her “mixed” origin, magnified by the absurdity of its social significance due to her ability to pass as white, and the second is her eventual death as the result of the persecution the couple suffer for their interracial relationship. The sociological and literary dimensions of Marie align with the two tragic post-slavery scenarios imagined by Tocqueville, which Beaumont treats separately. The empirical analyses in the book’s appendices establish the political and economic unfeasibility of setting up a black nation separate from the United States, whether in the Americas or through the Liberian colonization scheme (206-16). The romance, meanwhile, explores the cultural impossibility of interracial marriage, which would be the “best . . . means of fusing the white and black races” and “the most obvious index of equality” (245). The post-slavery promise of “mingling” the races obtains in Beaumont’s novel its truer meaning. To force the races to “wholly mingle” (Tocqueville 1: 370) is to deploy a system of controlled breeding that dilutes the blackness of blackness until racial homogeneity is regained and democracy re-won.⁴ Yet even what we can describe with Jared Sexton as an “amalgamation scheme” would be impossible (Amalgamation Schemes). Marie not only dies of racist persecution before this hypothetical purification can be completed, but she is herself the product of a century of eugenic engineering. Her “complexion [is] even whiter than the swans of the Great Lakes” (58), but it does not grant her immunity from what society perceives as the general dishonor of blackness.

If there is a point on which Tocqueville and Beaumont offer strikingly differing assessments, it is in their respective diagnoses of the nature of racism’s persistence after slavery. This difference depends on the definition of “color,” which transforms the imaginary inequality of the slave into its post-slavery status. Whereas Tocqueville despairs at the probability of “seeing an aristocracy disappear which is founded upon visible and indelible signs” of color (1: 356), Beaumont directs his readers’ focus to the invisible yet equally indelible signsof color that mark Marie and that are reproduced, in the novel, as an artifact of social relations: society rumor, legal tradition, or pure fabulation. These different accounts of race—understanding it either as a visible or as an invisible sign—speak to the limits of representing real inequality. Indeed, this epistemological conundrum becomes acute after partus sequitur ventrem, the law of slavery that determines the sexual reproduction of status, ends. For Beaumont, the indelible nature of color and its unbreakable link to inferiority is ultimately not determined by law (because the law of slavery can and would be abolished), cultures of perception (because race can be invisible), or sex or sexual reproduction (because inferiority is imposed laterally, not genealogically, through acts of social misrecognition). Beaumont’s ideal realization of equality through a “fusing [of] the white and black races” (245) is revealed as an unattainable eugenic project. Not even a hypothetically successful erasure of the “signs of color” over the course of several generations would eradicate the violence of racism. The failure of this temporal solution to real inequality reproduces, again, the impossibility of multiracial democracy.

As a consequence of the nature of the racism they witnessed, the violent separation or destruction of one race (to “wholly part”) or the complete unification of both by a despotic state (to “wholly mingle”) become the two impossible solutions that Tocqueville and Beaumont are compelled to imagine as the only possiblefate of American democracy. We know that an unholy mixture of these two scenarios came to pass. The mass enlistment of slaves into the Union Army proved decisive to the outcome of the Civil War, while the reconstruction project carried out by the Freedman’s Bureau after the war attempted to impose a form of multiracial society in the South against the popular sentiments of whites, before it was abandoned. A third and worse compromise came to pass. Slavery was abolished, only to be replaced by the legal regime and extralegal violence of Jim Crow, a form of “reenslavement under another name” (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction 180). This refractory relationship between inequality across its real, symbolic, and imaginary registers would define the color line that Du Bois understands to be the defining ontological crisis of democracy in the twentieth century.

UNESCO and the Scientific Preservation of Multiracial Democracy

One of the most ambitious attempts to dislodge the ontological crisis of multiracial democracy emerged after World War II, when a new international order of civil society elevated racial equality to a fundamental principle of global justice. This was a watershed moment in the history of liberalism. “The principle of racial equality,” writes the historian Domenico Losurdo, “became a constitutive element in liberal identity only from the mid-twentieth century onward” (322). Since the signing of the United Nations charter in 1945, the writings of this international body have addressed racial prejudice repeatedly, identifying it not only as incompatible with global democracy but as corrosive to its very foundation. This consensus arose in response to war and racial genocide in Europe, as well as to decolonial and civil rights movements globally that drew attention to the similarities between racial fascism and the practices of Western democracy. Racism could no longer be tolerated or understood as ineradicable. In order to survive, democratic institutions had to actively remove racial prejudice from their body politic. Analyses of national socialism generated by Frankfurt School theorists argued that democratic societies that tolerate, cultivate, and mobilize racism subvert their own institutions and devolve into fascism, war, and self-destruction. If multiracial democracy once seemed like an impossible future project to observers like Tocquevillle and Beaumont, a new postwar consensus now proclaimed that its immediate realization was both possible and necessary.

The UN issued a trove of proclamations on the relation of race to democracy, and mobilized an international group of social and natural scientists—including biologists, anthropologists, and sociologists—to articulate and thereby move toward addressing the obstacles to a global democratic order. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was formed to lead this effort. Founded only a few months after the signing of the UN charter in 1945, it recognized racism as the principal social evil that the international system of democratic governance was brought into existence to combat. The threat racism posed to the maintenance of international peace made the globalization of democracy necessary. This is how the UNESCO charter diagnoses the nature of this evil:

the “war which has now ended was . . . made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality, and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races.” (qtd. in “The Race Question” 1)

The relation between racism and democracy is one of mutual negation: as a doctrine of inequality, racism contradicts the principle of equality. Articulated in this charter is also a new solution to prejudice. If racism was once thought to be fueled by passions and customs that only despotism could contain, then the experience of world war suggested that racism posed a more immediate threat to democracy than despotism, one that had the ability to survive the defeat of fascism. The advent of fascism thus changed official understandings of the concept of racism from an ineradicable custom to an effect of racial propaganda. Perhaps eliminating its connection to the imaginary was still impossible, but racism could and must be actively managed through an anti-propaganda campaign, through education and the dissemination of scientific research. A “Division of the Study of Racial Questions” was set up within UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences in 1950 and assigned the task of waging an educational offensive against the misconceptions of race.

The most resounding statement to come out of this early effort was the pamphlet “The Race Question” issued by UNESCO in 1950. Its stated intention was to replace the myths surrounding race with facts. Its powerful denunciation of the extant science of racial biology ignited a public firestorm in the scientific community and set the terms for a long-running controversy over the nature of race among biologists, geneticists, and evolutionary anthropologists (see Brattain). This fifteen-point document was co-authored by an international cohort of social scientists, including luminaries like Ashley Montagu, E. Franklin Frazier, Gunnar Myrdal, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. “The Race Question” sought to do nothing less than make a scientific case for multiracial democracy and to locate the ethics of antiracism in human nature. The “first requirement of modern man,” the pamphlet contends, is to recognize the unity of mankind as a natural fact and racial differences as superficial groupings of physical appearance that have no fixed social, cultural, or biological determinants (8). Citing Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, the authors claim that racism comprises an artificial resistance to the natural extension of sympathies across differences of race and nation, an inclination for which all hitherto existing human and natural history stands as evidence. If there is no biological basis for racial supremacy or racial purity, then “universal brotherhood” doeshave a biological basis: “man is born with drives toward co-operation” that must be satisfied lest “men and nations alike fall ill” (9).

While condemning biological race science as it stood, “The Race Question” does not foreclose the possibility that race has a basis in natural biology and defends questions about the nature of race as scientifically valid. Drawing on a new consensus that had formed in antiracist anthropology over the past decade, the authors insist on an indelible and irreducible tension between the natural ontology of race and knowledge about it, thus retaining a claim on nature while preserving race as the object of an indefinite rational inquiry. They acknowledge, for example, that the then-prevailing taxonomy of humans—its division into “Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid groups”—captures “dynamic, not static” biological processes, which scientific classification can only embalm by convention into arbitrary categories but that it can never categorically know for certain (6). As such, the idea of biological race—and of nature—does not disappear, but neither do these concepts emerge unaltered by their purification of the myths of racialism. As scholars have pointed out, this conception of racial biology enabled a postwar colonialism founded on a cultural and psychological, rather than typological, understanding of racial differences (see Gil-Riaño), and the UNESCO statement’s narrow definition of racism, offers little in the way of critiquing anti-black oppression (see Bernasconi). But this does not exhaust the pamphlet’s political philosophy. Neither a determinate scientific fact nor pseudoscientific illusion, “race” is transformed by “The Race Question” into an internal limit of scientific epistemology and absolute knowledge. Race becomes a quantum of nature about which nothing definite can be known.

Why, then, does “The Race Question” ultimately preserve this tension between the ontology and epistemology of race—which seems so counterintuitive, and satisfies neither the conservative demand for colorblindness (i.e., that race does not exist in culture) nor the more radical critique of the naturalization of race (i.e., that race does not exist in nature)? Because multiracial democracy and the confrontation with racism depend on it. Race has to be preserved by the scientific community (and the democracy it serves) as a scientific fiction, as a formal epistemological gap, so that racism can be addressed. And that is because scientific uncertainty about the nature of race is a powerful method through which racism can be named and condemned. By conserving its status in the unknowable “real” of nature, any knowledge of race can only be approximate and speculative, damning any political formation based on the certainty of the meaning of race as both scientifically illegitimate and ethically bankrupt. Maintaining race as a biological unknown enables all racism, or “certain” propositions about race, to be condemned as antibiological. Against over a century of scientific racism, and the prewar position of scientific neutrality taken by its liberal wing, UNESCO sought to press science into the service of multiracial democracy. It did so by aligning multiracialism with nature itself and by re-conceiving democracy as the social form of the biological inclination for human cooperation and the political form of the natural fact of universal brotherhood. The genocidal and segregationist scenarios prophesied by Tocqueville and Beaumont stemmed from a compulsion that UNESCO was seeking to avoid, namely to understand democracy as a solution to the aftermath of slavery. The final solutions pursued by the Nazi regime—“wholly mixing” the races (i.e., a eugenic program to eradicate racial otherness) and “wholly parting” them (i.e., genocide)  as answers to the “race question”—were conclusively revealed to be violent subversions of democracy. After the globalization of multiracial democracy, such solutions had to be condemned, deterred, and prohibited if democracy was to survive in its intrinsic irresolution. Rather than a problem to be eliminated once and for all, race, in UNESCO’s formulation, has to be preserved as a perpetual question for democracy. The great gambit of “The Race Question” was not to realize multiracial democracy but to make its failure sustainable. This called for the riskiest of maneuvers: defending race asan ontologically impossible object of power-knowledge.

Lévi-Strauss and the Diversification of Racial Capitalism

Claude Lévi-Straus was one of the principal architects of the idea of scientific democracy promulgated by UNESCO. His early career was steered by UNESCO’s political concerns and profoundly influenced the organization’s theoretical foundations, even if their relationship was one fraught by substantive disagreements. Lévi-Strauss helped draft “The Race Question” in the same year that he completed his Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté (1949). Shortly thereafter, he helped develop UNESCO’s International Social Science Council, serving as its inaugural Secretary General from 1952 to 1961. In The Savage Mind (1966), Lévi-Strauss famously contends that “primitive” and “modern” thought are equally rigorous in their symbolic method. An anchoring entry to Structural Anthropology (“The Place of Anthropology”) was first commissioned by UNESCO, and Lévi-Strauss made regular contributions to The UNESCO Courier in the 1950s and 1960s, the international body’s flagship journal that hosted interdisciplinary debates on global issues in the human sciences (Stoczkowski). So dense was the collaboration between UNESCO and Lévi-Strauss that structural anthropology merits recognition as the theoretical infrastructure of Western postwar democracy.

UNESCO eventually commissioned Lévi-Strauss to follow up on his contribution to “The Race Question” with an extended statement. This sequel, “Race and History,”was widely distributed in pamphlet form and is now regarded as a “classic of antiracist literature” (Stoczkowski 5).⁵ While it did not explicitly contradict the UNESCO scientific community, the pamphlet attempted to work out how UNESCO’s declarations on universal racial equality would logically reproduce racial inequality on another, higher level. Lévi-Strauss points out the relation between the globalization of multiracial democracy and modern racial capitalism, a paradox that he traces to the reliance of UNESCO’s fix for democracy (the globalization of racial equality) on a universalist theory of human development that lacks a provision for thinking difference. In the process, Lévi-Strauss produces one of the earliest outlines of a structuralist theory of history, which he gears toward asking a question that was on the minds of the representatives of the so-called Third World: how did “white man’s civilization” consolidate its global power in the twentieth century in the first place?

 Lévi-Strauss begins by outlining the paradox that UNESCO’s formalization of multiracial democracy presents. “The strength and the weakness of the great declaration of human rights,” he writes, is its promotion of the ideal of universal equality, which, in either condemning or denying otherness, struggles to reconcile itself to the “factual diversity” of racial difference (“Race and History” 102). Modern political thought has striven in vain to articulate a compromise that can “account for the diversity of cultures while seeking, at the same time, to eradicate what still shocks and offends [it] in that diversity” (102). In naturalizing universal equality against the scientifically baseless belief in racial inequality, the United Nations’ philosophy of global democracy logically needs to concretely determine human nature and/or teleologize human development. These propositions are implicated in an older theory of social evolutionism that underwrites the racialism of anti-miscegenation laws, genocidal programs, and colonial slavery. That is because this concept of social evolutionism—insofar as it conceives of all human societies as inhabiting “phases or stages in a single line of development, starting from the same point and leading to the same end” (102)—can imagine human diversity only as a false or transitional stage, can recognize human difference only in order to observe its historically provisional nature or to intervene and eliminate those differences, thereby recognizing and eliminating human otherness in the same conceptual movement.

For Lévi-Strauss, evolutionary schemas such as developmentalism and social Darwinism amount to a “false evolutionism” (102): defective theories of human history that authorize ethnocentric accounts of primitive and advanced societies. He insists that these schemas all fundamentally misapply a notion of sexual reproduction to cultural development (102-3). Evolutionary biology correctly assumes that (say) a horse begets another horse, that physical characteristics are determined by genetic heredity and are subject to the variability of sexual permutation. But cultural innovations do not sexually reproduce. An axe does not beget an axe, and therefore the appearance of one cannot serve as evidence for a genealogical development of culture. Rather, for Lévi-Strauss, the achievement of any culture exclusively indexes the singularity of the general conditions and extant dilemmas in which that achievement emerges as a social solution: “the originality of each culture consists . . . in its individual way of solving problems” (115). Rather than abandon a theory of history in favor of a synchronic analysis, Lévi-Strauss introduces a combinatory logic of historical development as an antidote to social evolutionism, borrowing key features of his reasoning from lateral innovations in the field of population genetics (Müller-Wille 3). In this structuralist understanding, any cultural “achievement” is subject to the “relative probability of a complex combination,” which characterizes each culture as a type of unconscious and collective gambler (“Race and History” 124). For Lévi-Strauss, then, history is stochastic, not developmental. Its features are the product of contingency, its cultural inventions the outcome of chance combinations, accomplishments that are for various factors either accumulated (and retained, to be “transferred” to another wager) or lost. Not only does this schema of historical development render a qualitative measure between cultures unfeasible, but it allows Lévi-Strauss to posit the goodof cultural alliances and the superiorityof open cultures. What he calls “coalitions” enable disparate cultures to “pool” their resources across different historical bets, increasing the chances of hitting the jackpot of cultural mutation. The most “cumulative” histories are thus not produced by autarkic (that is, racially homogenous) cultures but by syndicates, “cultures which, voluntarily or involuntarily, have combined their play and, by a wide variety of means (migration, borrowing, trade and warfare) have formed . . . coalitions” (126).

Yet those “superior” coalitions, in the course of collaborating, erase the differences that originally made their alliance fruitful. Through repeated interaction, the resources of syndicated cultures are homogenized, the diversity of their bets centralized, and a new stagnation emerges. An incorporation of diversity destroys otherness; open cultures are therefore also a detriment to human progression. If Lévi-Strauss’s understanding is correct, contemporary Western civilization, as represented in the United Nations, is now the principal violator of human advancement, not only because of its status as a global hegemon but because of the compulsory terms of its means of confederating all societies. “Western civilisation has stationed its soldiers, trading posts, plantations and missionaries throughout the world; directly or indirectly, is has intervened in the lives of the coloured people,” compelling subjugated cultures to “imitate Western ways sufficiently to be able to fight them on their own ground” (117). With this statement, Lévi-Strauss implicitly warns UNESCO about the way in which the globalization of democracy becomes an accessory to the destruction of diversity or to cultural/racial genocide on a planetary scale. Across the centuries, he continues, the West has pursued two spatial fixes, two strategies for preventing global homogeneity and the triggering of its own homeostasis. The first is to “increase internal diversity,” or introduce social inequalities within a new global democratic space that increase the “development of the exploitation of man by man” (131). Lévi-Strauss describes this “solution” as capitalism. The second spatial fix is to increase its external diversity by assimilating human otherness from outside the global democratic space, to “admit new partners” to its hegemony. This solution is captured by “the history of imperialism and colonialism” (131).

In understanding equality to be coextensive with nature, UNESCO’s project for global democracy reproduces racial inequality absolutely. What Lévi-Strauss describes as a mode of imperial capitalism is a combination of two strategies of diversification: of the “internal diversification” of culture through social inequality and of the “external diversification” of global democracy through empire. Implicitly, these two strategies are themselves alternatives to two specters of homogeneity that modern democracy cannot countenance: the pursuit of genocide as the destruction of otherness and the implementation of slavery as the preservation of an otherness outside the democratic relation. Not only does the sexual theory of human history that this globalization of multiracial societies presumes elide the history of white supremacy, as Lévi-Strauss reveals, but a structuralist account of history reveals the logic of racial capitalism. His conclusion is that under racial capitalism social inequalities or racial extermination increase in direct proportion to the realization of global democracy.

Du Bois puts a finer point on this discrepancy between “color” and “democracy” in Color and Democracy. He excoriates the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference that outlined the ambitions of the soon-to-be founded United Nations, criticizing the Western powers’ unwillingness to reckon with the role of colonialism in the causes of World War II (Du Bois also joined the American delegation to the inaugural United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945).For Du Bois, the pronouncements of postwar democracy were increasingly overdetermined by the imperial dynamics of racial capitalism. UNESCO’s politicization of the human sciences is in his reading inconsequential to a new mode of racial power that operates outside scientific epistemology:

these facts [of science that dispute racial hierarchy] do not affect our actions today, because government and economic organization have already built a tremendous financial structure upon the nineteenth-century conception of race inferiority. This is what the imperialism of our day means. (Color and Democracy 54)

The logic of capitalist accumulation “encourages by reason of its high profit to investors a determined and interested belief in the inferiority of certain races” (56). The moribund ideas of nineteenth-century racialism—like a dead (as opposed to extinct) language that has users but no native speakers—organize social practices that may encourage but do not require its practitioners to gain fluency in its tongue. The idea of race therefore does not function as conscious knowledge, does not need to be philosophically coherent or scientifically justified to enable the economic valorization of racial inequality. According to Du Bois, the capitalization of a “nineteenth-century conception of race” proceeds regardless of contemporary challenges (scientific or otherwise) to the precise meaning of race; economic activity (the realization of surplus value) on the basis of racial inequality requires no basis in the order of ideas because it follows the blind law of capitalist accumulation. Capital, coupled to a colonial project that is itself heir to a racial schema that it does not possess, shares with the new multiracial democracy its form as a global project. But racial capitalism has an advantage that multiracial democracy does not: it does not operate as a formally consistent philosophy, working only through a disparate web of commercial codes, laws of contract, and terms of exchange, none of which require any conceptual unification. Racial capitalism “thinks” outside formalization in a process so general that it exceeds any form of knowledge or human cognition. In contrast to UNESCO’s tactic of preserving the epistemological uncertainty of race in “The Race Question,” which is promoted as a means to prevent the resurgence of international aggression, Du Bois sees in the holding pattern that maintains the irresolution of multiracial democracy a guarantee of its subversion in a revolt—in the last instance, in a war between the West and the “dark world.”

War: A Better Failure of Multiracial Democracy?

            My analysis has focused on a limit to the democratic form, rather than a limitation of the democratic imagination. This amounts to something more dire than an impoverishment of political philosophy or the historical failure to realize a democratic ideal. Indeed, we are accustomed to describing actually-existing democracy as lacking vision, as a watered-down practice of collective politics that accommodates existing arrangements of power at the expense of more radical articulations of international solidarity and multiracial coalition. Our critical reflexes are trained to describe a fictitiously universal demos as an imagined community that only coheres around the spoken or unspoken exclusion of a perpetual outsider, one that requires the racial or sexual contract underwriting the social contract to be disassembled. A progressive appraisal may even understand democracy as a constantly changing and inherently unattainable ideal that does not—and has never—existed in any substantial sense at all but that nonetheless requires the lines of exclusion it imposes to be constantly deliberated and redrawn. This marks democracy as an unfinished historical project, a perpetual struggle to renew its egalitarian principles and practices. Democracy appears here as an open question, although one that also views racialization as an inessential development of its essential (that is, nonracial) form.

But everything in this essay hinges on being precise about the nature of this impossibility: a world of difference lies between the historical notion of impossibility, which proposes an unbridgeable gap between a set of principles and their practical implementation, and a structural notion of impossibility. In contrast to the former, a structural notion of impossibility sees the coincidence between the idea and the practice of multiracial democracy as perfectly possible—but only as the very act of its undoing. Not only is multiracial democracy possible, in other words, it has already happened. What Tocqueville and Beaumont confronted in nineteenth-century slavery, I would venture, was an earlyactualization of multiracial democracy, a “solution” to the impossible relation between the slave and democracy. The inevitability of abolition confronted Tocqueville and Beaumont with the problem of coming up with a new“solution” to multiracial democracy. They mistook its structural impossibility for an historical one. But their alternatives also avoided a third, seemingly worse solution. Their proposal to “wholly mix” or “wholly part” white and black were alternatives to a coincidence between race and democracy that Tocqueville believes could only portend war: “as [freemen] cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily declare themselves as enemies” (1: 375). War—the breakdown of a multiracial polity in an irresolvable antagonism between “friends” and “enemies”—is in this reading a possible realization of democracy, but one that is also its undoing.

If democracy’s actualization can only result in a program of racial violence—as the foregoing symptomatic readings of Tocqueville, Beaumont, and UNESCO’s writings on race suggest—then the difference between its success and failure is invalid, both critically and politically. This calls for a redirection of our attention to the differences between democracy’s forms of failure. Global, multiracial democracy cannot ethically be pursued to its logical ends, but are there ways to imagine or enact a better failure? One failure, and a possibility that has been peremptorily dismissed or conspicuously ignored in the accounts critiqued so far, is precisely the one that Tocqueville feared would be an inevitable outcome in the absence of a scheme for black “expatriation” to Africa or compulsory racial amalgamation after slavery: a war between ex-slave and ex-master. If the outbreak of war is a failure of democratic procedure, what are its political implications? How does war differ from—how might it even comprise a better failure of democracy than—multiracial and international coalition (Lévi-Strauss), the preservation of the epistemological uncertainty of race (UNESCO), or the “dual visions of black freedom and peace” (Dusk of Dawn xxvi) that Du Bois’s staunch pacifism maintained throughout the 1950s and 1960s? War is a collective action. But the “war” I am after here is distinct in nearly every other way from the sovereign version of the term. As a failure of democracy, or rather a materialization of its emergency, this war is not waged in the name of a government, on behalf of a people, or for the attainment of an ideal. As non-sovereign, this war is not a state of exception and does not declare an enemy. Bloodshed is not a necessary component (although it is not excluded either). By extension, this war does not have any conditions of victory or strategic objectives—defensive, offensive, or preemptive—aiming only to realize the inner tendencies of multiracial democracy in a manner differentfrom the actually existing failures of democracy in segregation and genocide, in the various forms they continue to take today. I would venture that war in this sense can only be defined as a repetition of the war that terminated slavery, a political act more general and diverse than the general strike Du Bois recognizes as a tipping point in the Civil War, and which he erroneously categorizes as the act sufficient to incorporate the ex-slave as a subject of political representation. Slaves’ “general strike,” their abandonment of Southern plantations en masse, was necessary for Union victory in 1865, but it was also alone insufficient, failing as it did to enfranchise what Hartman describes as the figure of the female slave. As a repetition of the violence of abolition with a possible difference, this notion of war, then, repeats the traumatic origin of modern democracy, a war that works-through the very resistance to a war between master and slave, a rearticulation and displacement of democracy’s structural antagonism. The outcome of this confrontation cannot be guaranteed in advance, and the material conditions that result may be no better than those under which it began. The opposite may even be the case. Actualizing multiracial democracy in war may well “replicate the fate of the slave” (Hartman 169). But it also opens the possibility of a fate otherwise. Precisely in this sense might this failure of democracy be a better one, in which the issue of slavery’s sexual labor cannot be determined in advance.

Footnotes

1. For the most part, I limit my discussion of Democracy in America to the problem of multiracialism. For more expansive accounts of Tocqueville’s commentary on the race question, see Mitchell and Chapter 6 of Fredrickson.

2. Margaret Kohn suggests that “democracy” as used in this text blends notions of equality, political liberty, and bourgeois society that we would today refer to specifically as “liberal democracy.”

3. To put a finer point on it, we could specify blackness as the residue of racialization, that remainder in the racial division of democracy by slavery that cannot be enumerated.

4. Until that feat is achieved, it also means exchanging the relations of racial domination under slavery for the relations of gender domination between husband and wife.

5. Its spiritual successor, “Race and Culture,” a paper presented by Lévi-Strauss nineteen years later to a stunned audience at a global antiracism summit, would be more explicit in its criticism of UNESCO’s global ambitions (Visweswaran).

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