Review of The Racial Imaginary Ed. by C. Rankine, B. Loffreda, & M.K. Cap (Clara B. Jones)

The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind Edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, & Max King Cap

Fence Books

http://www.fenceportal.org/

285 pages $19.95 USD

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones*

Who is permitted to write about Race and People of Color? Claudia Rankine is a renowned poet whose popularity seems to increase as her “prosecutorial” formulations multiply. Receiving several prestigious nominations and awards, Rankine is at her best when writing about the Universal or the Transcendent (“Some years there exists a wanting to escape.”), literary configurations that Rankine dismisses in the volume under review. The Introduction to The Racial Imaginary, written with the writer, Beth Loffreda (hereafter, R&L), informs us that Rankine initiated the Racial Imaginary project online with “an open letter about race and the creative imagination” (p 13), soliciting readers' responses. The resulting book presents 28 selected posts, illustrated by strong and timely artwork chosen by the artist Max King Cap.

R&L's Introduction is most emphatic when rejecting “the imagination [as] a free space” (15) and when arguing that “To say, as a white writer, that I have a right to write about whoever I want, including writing from the point of view of characters of color—that I have a right of access and that my artistry is harmed if I am told I cannot do so—is to make a mistake.” (15-16). These themes continually resonate with the reader. The volume is divided into five Sections—Institutions, Lives, Readings, Critiques, and Poetics. Institutions highlights R&L's distinction between Race and Racism, and a wide range of intensely personal, even, confessional, voices describe their experiences, mostly in the form of seemingly cathartic expressions of white guilt, realizing the Editors' prediction that, “[The 'internal tumult' will] be made up of some admixture of shame, guilt, loathing, opportunism, anxiety, irritation, dismissal, self-hatred, pain, hope, affection, and other even less nameable energies.” (21). The entries in the book's first two Sections, and their sometimes discomforting revelations, left me wondering about the power differentials and dynamics between Rankine and most of the other writers. The potential for Rankine's voice to influence, if not intimidate, her subordinates should be considered; although, Rankine might counter that attempts to construct a hierarchy based upon rank, prominence, or authority inherently reflects structural racism, classism, and sexism. Clearly, Rankine intended her Racial Imaginary project to be an egalitarian and communal effort.

The Section, Readings, begins with a well-researched and instructive essay by Joshua Weiner. He has a fundamentally progressive goal, “to disrupt the structure, so that we can see it” (124). Weiner's tools for dismantling power structures are ideas and words, and his cogent analysis of representations of identity in several texts, privileges the universality of the theme, “the individual and society”.

Critique is a brief Section addressing the challenging topic, “writing race”. As a self-described “black woman”, Diane Exavier states, “I feel like race isn't something I always want (or need) to talk about, but it is something that other people won't let me forget.” (205). Importantly, this author proposes a solution: “I truly believe that it is the recognition of the Other that ultimately leads to unification.” (206). However, Exavier does not tell us how to do this. In the same Section, Soraya Membreno's perspectives on race and ethnicity are refreshing and unique in this volume. “I am Hispanic, yes, but that's not your business.” (212). And, later in her essay, “Race does not define me, it is my culture, but it is not me.” (213). Membreno asserts her right to define her own identity, a timely topic given recent debates about Rachel Dolezal's “passing” (also see Lacy M. Johnson;s piece in this section and Tamiko Beyer's essay on page 245).

The Poetics Section includes 15 brief entries on how individual poets engage the topic, “Race” in their practices. I wish this Section had been expanded to include more personal reflections on the process of writing poetry. The book would have benefited from a discerning summary chapter written by R&L with the purpose of placing in perspective similar and different themes and trends across essays, including, a (revised) conceptual framework, particularly, since many of the contributors' views seem incompatible with those of the Editors as proffered in their Introduction. Throughout the volume, this reviewer was annoyed by numerous editorial oversights, and one has the impression that the book was hastily assembled. Nonetheless, The Racial Imaginary is recommended as a genuine attempt to initiate a conversation about Race. The Editors present a variety of viewpoints from a diverse group of contributors.

A particularly evident, though, possibly, useful, consequence of reading each essay is thinking about the inherent inconsistencies of assumptions and intellectual constructs employed by the authors, and it might be worthwhile for scholars to “unpack” the subtexts and deep structures within and between Sections. Indeed, Rankine, herself, may have some ambivalence about her rejection of the Universal and the Transcendent, since the “voice” of her 2014 book, Citizen (Graywolf), employs many generic references and sentences relevant to all humans, especially, marginalized groups other than blacks (“You are you even before you.”; “Why do you feel okay saying this to me?”; As usual, you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said.”). Furthermore, Rankine is aware that, in a Postmodern world, identity is fractured, though she advances a collective identity and meta-narrative based on Race. Hopefully, Rankine and Loffreda will expand this program and other writers will initiate their own. The project under review makes clear that poets need to talk among themselves about definitions, motivations, craft, and priorities and that poets of color should dialogue about the potential to ignore facts that do not fit particular narratives or metanarratives.

*Not sure if this was published; maybe on amazon.com; i recall not being pleased with it...

...Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates (Essay by Clara B. Jones)

A Common Project Unites Claudia Rankine And Ta-Nehisi Coates

by Clara B. Jones

Currently, the topics of race and racism, dominate the US media, with Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates as central figures in the conversation. Rankine's collection of non-traditional poems, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014; hereafter, Citizen), won, among other honors, the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Poetry, and Coates' book, Between the World and Me (Random House, 2015; hereafter, BWM), won the 2015 National Book Award for Non-fiction. Both of these authors have become “public intellectuals,” but critical treatments of these works are virtually missing from the conversation on race and racism. The present essay attempts, tentatively, to place Rankine and Coates in critical perspective, highlighting the commonalities and similar limitations, of their books. I suggest that these authors advance a liberal, rather than, a radical, meta-narrative characterizing race and racism as stable or essential traits based on a racial binary (African-American : White). There are conceptual limitations to their perspectives which we must challenge if we want to imagine a more radical future.

“Institutional racism” and the racial binary as organizational frameworks

Both Rankine and Coates address aggression and violence—personal, social, economic, and political. “Micro-aggressions” among acquaintances and intimates are the particular concern of Rankine (“Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present.”), while Coates, in his book-length “letter” to his son, is primarily concerned with the vulnerability of the black male body (“I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog.”). Rankine and Coates intend to expose oppressive conditions and “institutional [structural] racism” as causes of and explanations for conditions of African-Americans, particularly, the black underclass. The latter authors characterize institutional racism as a top-down system of beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, and conventions maintaining the social, economic, and political superiority of whites, while subordinating its victims. Rankine and Coates advance the perspective that institutional racism constitutes a system of rule-governed roles, norms, and expectations, particularly, via explicit or implicit legal formulations (e.g., work, gerrymandering, inequitable incarceration, media coverage). The authors describe oppressive conditions without advancing a radical critique, following, instead, liberal traditions that do not perturb the status quo by bringing about systemic change. The wide appeal of and popular support for these authors, then, might be explained by their proposals to reform the operations of institutional racism rather than to dismantle the elitist, hierarchical, and capitalist structures of which institutional racism is only one component.

The Rankine-Coates Project and Social Change

Rankine and Coates promote a pragmatic view that, in a democracy, equality should be maximized, inequality, minimized, a mainstream perspective. By suggesting that slavery's footprint causes the present oppression of African-Americans, the authors foster a “pessimism” about the country's capacity for progressive change similar to the state of politics after World War II when ideas of “social modification” were dampened by the realities of the Nazi era and the rise of state Capitalism. Radical critiques, on the other hand, promote tactics and strategies of social transformation.

Rankine and Coates limit themselves to descriptions of oppressive conditions rather than to analyses of social, political and economic contexts having the potential to unpack what the late British-Caribbean cultural theorist, Stuart Hall called, the “culture industry,” the production and reinforcement of cultural norms via social institutions and discourse (Citizen: “You hear one say to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation.”; BWN: “The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun.”). Neither Rankine nor Coates, however, links race and the ways it is manifest in society (e.g., via education, housing, income inequality, advertising, marketing) to broader national and international conditions (e.g., global poverty, climate change, free-market Capitalism), promoting contemporary “identity politics” rather than a broader vision of resistance incorporating, following Hall, “difference” (rejection of binaries), “self-reflexivity” (rejecting the “universal” speaking voice such as “institutional racism”), and “contingency” (recognizing change in individuals and societies). In order to advance a radical critique, Rankine and Coates would need to promote fundamental structural change in American society and in Capitalism that would bring about a new, more equitable, cultural and social architecture, not only their suggested, moderate improvements in the ways that whites and blacks engage with one another, including, improved racial accord and the advancement of blacks.

Hall went on to point out that social change must be motivated by action; however, agency by African-Americans is virtually missing from Rankine's and Coates' projects that depend, instead, upon scenarios whereby victimizers (“whites”) free their victims (African-Americans) from oppression and subjugation. Thus, the Modernist meta-narrative (“institutional racism”) of the Rankine-Coates project depends upon a comprehensive world-view rather than a Post-modern understanding that social, economic, and political relations are fractured, changing, and unstable processes, and, in this sense, their world-view is an appeal to emotion rather than to reason (Citizen: “Aren't you the one that screwed me over last time here?”; BWM: “I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana's home in Philadelphia.”). One searches without success in Citizen and BWM for materialist concepts that are pragmatic and that situate the oppressed and the oppressor in complex, differentiated relation to each other. Thus, the potential of the Rankine-Coates project for radical change must be challenged and is, possibly, undermined, by ideas and concepts fundamental to contemporary progressive thought. This is to say, a truly radical critique of social relations would outline pragmatic initiatives to address and to change the causes and consequences of racism as one symptom of broader deficiencies in the structuring of social, cultural, and economic relations in America.

Conclusions: the Rankine-Coates Project and Discourse

Following progressive formulations, race is a “construction”, not only, a “construct,” since race is “performed” by individuals in society. Power is “discursive” (based on reciprocal communication), a function of spoken, written, and behavioral discourse, so that its understanding becomes something more than enforcement by authorities (the police, the military, the central government, the law as institutional/structural racism). From a radical perspective, power is, also, enforced via social relations (public education, norms, voting, advertising), and these relations must be changed in order for sustainable societal change to occur. Citizen and BWM, then, cannot pertain only to victimized African-Americans since African-Americans and non-African-Americans participate discursively among themselves, creating “alliances” among “citizens.”

Just as the discourse of power can reinforce individual and social norms, so might it, according to Stuart Hall, generate “sites” of opposition or conflict, “margins” from which change might arise. Since discourse requires transactions between and among African-Americans and other “citizens,” Rankine's and Coates' projects, ultimately, fail because both avoid critiques of power manifested as actively complicit transactions among “citizens” as they interact personally, socially, economically, and politically (Hall's “culture industry”). A radical critique would formulate how these interactions, and the institutions within which interactions take place, should be and could be restructured. Recent publications by Rankine (C. Rankine & B. Loffreda, Eds., The Racial Imaginary, Fence Books, 2015) and Coates (“The black family in the age of mass incarceration”, The Atlantic, October 2015) continue to suggest that neither author is situated to call for an oppositional program of social, economic, and cultural change. Instead, Rankine's and Coates' projects seem to promote liberal, non-threatening, and familiar portraits of race and racial reform in America rather than disruptive, radical calls to action that would significantly modify the fundamental architecture and functions of institutions themselves.

Originally published in Entropy.