The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism

By Joseph Darda

How Americans learned to wait on time for racial change

What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism—with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness—has entrenched it further? In The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism, he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies.

Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal "frontlash," from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781503630932

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The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism

Joseph Darda

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2022 Joseph Darda. All rights reserved.

Portions of chapter 1 appeared as Antiracism as War in Representations, no. 156, © 2021, University of California Press. Reprinted with permission.

Portions of chapter 3 appeared as The Race Novel: An Education in MELUS 45, no. 3, © 2020 Oxford University Press. Reprinted with permission.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Darda, Joseph, author.

Title: The strange career of racial liberalism / Joseph Darda.

Other titles: Post 45.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Series: Post 45 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021025881 (print) | LCCN 2021025882 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503630345 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503630925 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503630932 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Anti-racism—United States—History—20th century. | Liberalism—United States—History—20th century. | Racism—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Race relations—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC E184.A1 D268 2022 (print) | LCC E184.A1 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973/0904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025881

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025882

Cover design and illustration, by Rob Ehle, mimmicks the original book jacket of C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 10/15 Minion Pro

Loren Glass and Kate Marshall, Editors

Post•45 Group, Editorial Committee

For Cathy Schlund-Vials

Derrick Bell: Racism is permanent.

Charlie Rose: And so what’s the cure?

—Charlie Rose, August 17, 1992

Contents

INTRODUCTION: The Bend of the Arc

1. Antiracism as War

2. Antiracism as Civil Rights

3. Antiracism as Education

4. Antiracism as Integration

5. Antiracism as Color Blindness

EPILOGUE: Time Now

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

The Bend of the Arc

C. VANN WOODWARD HEARD HIS NAME. The historian had traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to witness the culmination of the march from Selma to the marble stairs of the state capitol, from which Martin Luther King asked twenty-five thousand demonstrators, including Woodward, How long?¹ Woodward, a Sterling Professor at Yale, stood with a small band of distinguished academics that included John Hope Franklin, John Higham, Richard Hofstadter, and William Leuchtenburg. Higham carried a closed umbrella to which he had attached a makeshift cardboard sign. It read, in big block letters, U.S. HISTORIANS.

King gave Higham reason to hold the umbrella a little higher. Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War, the minister, standing behind a wall of microphones, stated. "And as noted historian C. Vann Woodward, in his book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land."² King devoted almost five minutes to glossing The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the slender 1955 volume in which Woodward identified segregation as not an age-old regional tradition but a result of white elite machinations after the Civil War to undermine Reconstruction. The Bourbon Democrats—the conservative, laissez-faire southerners who wielded states’ rights to undercut the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—had assembled the Jim Crow regime, Woodward observed, inviting King and his other readers to infer that it could be disassembled. That strange career couldn’t last forever. In his memoir, Woodward recalled hearing King describe his book as the historical bible of the civil rights movement—an endorsement that other scholars, including his former students, would recite and that would grace the cover of future editions of The Strange Career of Jim Crow.³ The civil rights leader might have said it, but the historian had no one to cite but himself.⁴

The book that King commended in Alabama originated in the wake of the Warren court’s unanimous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Woodward had, at the invitation of Thurgood Marshall, contributed to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s November 1953 brief in the case. Although the court, as Woodward himself later admitted, seemed more impressed by sociological evidence than by historical arguments, Marshall and the LDF cited him and his research in the brief and before the court.⁵ When Woodward delivered the Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia that fall, he built on the work he had done for the NAACP, choosing as his title The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The historian, a native of Arkansas and a descendant of slaveholders, addressed a multiracial but segregated audience and dedicated the resulting book to Charlottesville and the hills that look down upon her, Monticello. Using the forceful, straightforward language that had made him an asset in the courtroom, Woodward argued that Jim Crow had shallow roots. The policies of proscription, segregation, and disenfranchisement that are often described as the immutable ‘folkways’ of the South, impervious alike to legislative reform and armed intervention, are of a more recent origin, he told the Virginia audience. And the belief that they are immutable and unchangeable is not supported by history.⁶ Marshall and the LDF had declared segregation unconstitutional and un-American. The white historian, then teaching at Johns Hopkins, declared it un-southern.

The older Woodward wanted his book remembered as the historical bible of the civil rights movement, but the suggested reading list at the back of the first edition suggested something else. It included Harry Ashmore’s The Negro and the Schools, Kenneth Clark’s Desegregation: An Appraisal of the Evidence (an able assessment of recent developments in desegregation), E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro in the United States, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (a most helpful synthesis of modern scholarship in the field), and Lee Nichols’s The Breakthrough on the Color Front—classics of racial liberal thought during and after World War II. Woodward didn’t write the historical bible of the civil rights movement. He wrote the historical bible of racial liberalism.

Racial liberalism, which dominated racial thought from the onset of the Second World War to the Brown decision, arose as an answer to the crisis of late colonialism that the war had accelerated. Anticolonial and antiracist movements surged. Colonial governments fell. Segregation in the United States came under fire as Black soldiers and marines fought for freedom in the Ardennes and on Luzon and returned to conditions of unfreedom in Georgia and Texas. The Soviet Union, armed with stories of the horrors of the American South, cultivated allies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, limiting the West’s access to the natural resources and markets of the decolonizing world. Racial liberals knew that something had to give and, fending off hardline segregationists on the right and materialist antiracists on the left, refashioned the United States as a liberal antiracist nation with a theory, if not a consistent practice, of freedom and equality for all.⁷ The nation faced, they believed, a difficult but achievable task: to align behavior with belief, conduct with creed, to reform the minds of good but sometimes misinformed white people, to eradicate race prejudice, not to redistribute resources or reckon with white racial dominance, including the theft of Indigenous lands and Black lives.

More than a few scholars have said this before, revealing how a moderate, reformist antiracism ensured not the downfall but the endurance of white racial rule.⁸ Race, the historian Nikhil Singh writes, is a modality of group domination and oppression that requires a story (whether biological, sociological, anthropological, or historical) explaining how and why such practices persist and can be justified.⁹ This book is about the stable structure of the stories we tell about race in the United States. Racial liberalism furnished new stories about why Black and Indigenous people and people of color continued to have less, to live shorter lives, and to face greater violence after World War II but also something more enduring: the narrative structure, the time measure, of a whole assemblage of stories. The first state antiracism in the United States, racial liberalism urged trust in time, setting the nation’s racial gaze forever on the near future. The racial liberal’s faith in the clock—in progress, in the moral arc of the universe—thwarted materialist antiracisms and undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constituted a time-limited crisis to be addressed with time-limited remedies.

That narrative structure surfaces in the language of racial liberalism, which taught the nation to see racism (and often race itself) as time-bound and external to the United States. The idea of racism as something to defeat (antiracism as war), to right (antiracism as reform), to enlighten (antiracism as education), or to cure (antiracism as integration) and race as a fiction to dismantle (antiracism as color blindness) suggested that it had, as a deviation from an otherwise democratic national tradition, an imminent end date, militating against lasting change. Woodward and his cohort offered the nation a scaffolding for stories of the fulfillment of the American creed on an indefinite tomorrow, of scientific solutionism and humanist enlightenment, of color-blind children. Or perhaps their children’s children.

Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to a long segregationist movement or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movements also met resistance from a liberal frontlash, from antiredistributive allies who all along constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it.¹⁰ This frontlash did not arrive out of nowhere in 1945, but, amid the dramatic worldwide fallout from the world war, liberalism had to do heavier lifting than ever before. From Locke to Mill, liberalism had masked the continuous, violent division of the human—into colonies, through enslavement and genocide—with the idea of linear time. Other civilizations, Western thinkers believed, had not advanced as far as theirs and deserved less until they did, under the West’s tutelage, somewhere off in an ever-deferred future. Liberalism, as David Theo Goldberg, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Charles Mills, and other scholars argue, has never not been a racial liberalism.¹¹ But the liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s, with colonialism in crisis and the Cold War escalating, accelerated that assurance, vowing to end racism in a single generation with some of the same liberal instruments of science and government that had long sustained it. Liberal scientists, officials, novelists, and jurists thought they could see a just national future on the horizon, and when that future didn’t arrive—when enlightenment didn’t come and the cure didn’t take—they rushed ahead to color blindness, imagining that they had reached the end of racial time, the last bend in the arc.

The end of World War II, sometimes described as a racial break, triggered a shift in Western racial regimes from hierarchical theories of difference to normative theories, from avowed state racism to avowed state antiracism.¹² While that transformation brought about affirming material change for some, hierarchies and norms share a stratified structure that liberalism, then and now, disguises with a linear arc. The arc got shorter in the United States of the 1940s and 1950s, and that, far from freeing, made it all the longer.

Woodward, the consummate racial liberal, trusted in time. The 1955 Oxford University Press edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow did not reach a wide audience at first. Sales remained modest until 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to integrate Little Rock Central High School and OUP issued a revised trade edition with a new chapter, ‘Deliberate Speed’ vs. ‘Majestic Instancy,’ in which Woodward addressed the events since the 1954 Brown decision. Most of his readers, including King, would have bought and read that revised and enlarged edition. Eight months after Woodward delivered his Richard Lectures at Virginia, Chief Justice Earl Warren had handed down the court’s infamous second ruling in Brown that the defendant school districts desegregate with all deliberate speed—an ornate formulation credited to Justice Felix Frankfurter, who credited it to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who credited it to the English Chancery, which never used it. Most legal scholars at the time instead traced it to Francis Thompson’s 1893 poem The Hound of Heaven, in which a lost soul, chasing hedonic gratification and human love, flees God, and God follows With unperturbèd pace, / Deliberate speed, majestic instancy.¹³ Woodward, alluding to Thompson’s poem and advancing a Reconstruction-as-overreach argument, defended the court’s gradualist decision. Those who prefer the more heroic and poetic construction of the court’s ruling would do well to ponder the unhappy history of ‘majestic instancy’ in the First Reconstruction, he wrote. However deliberate and halting its speed, the Second Reconstruction would seem to promise more enduring results.¹⁴ Woodward later balked at the suggestion that he had cast segregation as an institution that would bend to a few right-thinking reformers, but he did think that time—social advancement, the evolution of the nation—would bring an end to white racial rule, as radicals had not, he thought, allowed it to after the Civil War.¹⁵ The historian believed in the near but not too near future.

Woodward’s own career after Selma tells the tale of racial liberalism’s decline and bearing on future racial ideologies. In the 1966 second revised edition, he hailed 1965 as a moment of historical importance in the record of American race relations, after which formal segregation could at last be pronounced virtually a thing of the past.¹⁶ The historian then entered what one former student later described as his Tory period.¹⁷ He refused to endorse the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Faculty Fund after Stokely Carmichael took over as committee chairman. At the 1969 meeting of the American Historical Association, Woodward, then heading the AHA, fought off a challenge from the Radical Historians’ Caucus, later bragging in a letter to his daughter-in-law that all’s well with establishment pigs.¹⁸ When Yale students sought to bring Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker to New Haven for a semester, he worked behind the scenes to block the invitation.¹⁹ In the 1974 third revised edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Woodward rewrote 1965 as the moment at which a historic movement reached a peak of achievement and optimism and immediately confronted the beginning of challenge and reaction that called in question some of its greatest hopes and most important assumptions.²⁰ Most assumed that the man had changed. Others argued that the times had changed around him.²¹ But so had Woodward and other racial liberals’ sense of time. The near future that they had imagined came and went, and it left them scrambling to invent an end to racial time either in color blindness (Woodward’s choice) or a nonredistributive multiculturalism. Racial liberalism faded after 1965, but racial liberal time lived on in and structured the two dominant racial ideologies that succeeded it.

The time of racial liberalism can be distilled into one sentence, which Woodward heard that day in Montgomery standing beside his fellow historians: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.²² Woodward might have found a different meaning in that sentence, which King borrowed from the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, than the civil rights leader. King first used it in a 1956 mass meeting at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, then in a 1957 address to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, then at the 1959 NAACP convention in New York. Although he sometimes couched it in the liberal language of the nation’s evolutionary growth and full realization in the not too distant future, King imbued the statement with a double meaning: gradualist and messianic, looking to the future and to a different, cosmic order of time.²³ When he declared that the arc of the moral universe bent toward a transcendent freedom for all at the end of the march from Selma, King launched into a recitation of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, inviting listeners to hear either a nationalist anthem (justice on Earth) or a divine subversion of that red, white, and blue assurance of overcoming (justice in death, in the afterlife). The Black churchgoer, Hortense Spillers, the cultural theorist, writes, hears double and in excess of a sermon’s words, linking the contrastive narrative energies of accommodation and insurgence.²⁴ The young minister, with the nation watching, invited that doubling.

On March 31, 1968, at the National Cathedral in Washington, King envisioned the bend of the arc for the last time, but not before debunking the nation’s faith in inevitable forward movement. Time is neutral, he said. Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. We cannot, he added, wait on time.²⁵ This book is about how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change, the enduring harm of that trust in the clock, and alternative theories of time and transformation, including King’s, that don’t count on the bend of the arc. Racial liberalism did not end Jim Crow. It reformed it. Then things got strange.

A Stranger Career

World War II set the terms for the new racial liberalism. On November 12, 1941, Pearl S. Buck, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature, read an editorial in the New York Times that attributed a Harlem crime wave to state and local government’s lack of investment in the neighborhood. (The murder of a white teenager in Central Park had set off what the Amsterdam News described as a media blitzkrieg on Harlem.)²⁶ The editorial called for increased employment opportunities; higher wages; vocational training; more and better facilities for child care; [and] more, cheaper and better housing.²⁷ Buck disagreed enough to write a letter to the editor four times the length of the original Times editorial. Harlem’s struggles did not stem from economic disinvestment, she argued, but from white New Yorkers’ ill will toward the neighborhood’s Black residents. The reason why colored Americans are compelled to live in ghettos, where they are helpless against high rents and miserable housing, is the segregation to which race prejudice compels them, she wrote. Race prejudice and race prejudice alone is the root of the plight of people in greater and lesser Harlems all over our country.²⁸

Buck, the child of missionaries and the author of the best-selling novel The Good Earth, identified racism as a divergence from a democratic inheritance that could doom the United States and the free world for which it, in her mind, stood. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, she observed, the colored peoples are asking each other if they must forever endure the arrogant ruling white race, and they looked to the multiracial United States to gauge the future.²⁹ Another world war and stirring anticolonial and antiracist movements led her and others to articulate the tenets of an emerging racial liberalism: racist attitudes led to racist social structures, and changing the former would change the latter; racism contradicted a founding egalitarian creed that the United States now struggled to fulfill; and the rest of the world looked to it as a model for reform and multiracial governance. Buck’s 1942 book American Unity and Asia led with her letter to the Times.

The horrors of the Holocaust, the decline of colonial regimes, and the rise of a communist Eastern Bloc forced an about-face in liberal thought. Liberalism had all along been a racial liberalism that rendered some societies legitimate and modern and others illegitimate and backward, some bodies valuable and endowed with inalienable rights and others valueless and rightless. Western liberal thinkers had naturalized and obscured the racial divisions that colonialism, enslavement, and genocide created but maintained that race had little bearing on liberalism. That changed after World War II. American liberals now addressed race as the central concern of liberal thought. Scientists, officials, novelists, and jurists declared liberalism a racial liberalism.

Historians of race, including Mark Anderson, Daniel HoSang, Jodi Melamed, Naomi Murakawa, and Chandan Reddy, have identified how liberal antiracism allowed the United States to contain radical antiracisms and maintain control of what counted as rational racial knowledge, whether through the unacknowledged Americanism of anthropology (Anderson), a constraining white gaze on politics (HoSang), the dissemination of official antiracisms through literatures of difference (Melamed), a distinction between racist violence as erratic and biased and carceral violence as methodical and deserved (Murakawa), or the rerouting of demands for freedom and liberation through instruments of state violence (Reddy).³⁰ No longer was it the mesmerizing narratives of the white man’s burden, Melamed writes, but those of liberal antiracisms—of reform, of color blindness, of diversity in a postracial world—that explained (away) the inequalities of a still-racialized capitalism.³¹ Racial liberalism inaugurated an age of antiracism in which all condemned racism while little changed in the fortunes of Black and brown people in the United States. This nonsensical racism without racists wouldn’t have held together long if not for a shift in racial liberal time from the distant to the near future, from the far off of the white man’s burden to the not long of the white man’s solution.

Liberal foundations and other NGOs led that transition. The war, the Julius Rosenwald Fund announced in 1945, has stimulated new efforts in the field of group relations on the part of old organizations, and has prompted the creation of many new ones.³² More than two hundred new agencies, it found, had formed in the final eighteen months of the war. A 1948 head count discovered eight hundred more.³³ But the largest of them did not regard their good works as ends in themselves but as models for government action. The measure of success for a foundation, as Edwin Embree, the head of the Rosenwald Fund, liked to say, should be whether the work is taken up by the state.³⁴ Embree and other liberal elites recognized the state, which had grown stronger through the emergencies of the Depression and another world war, as the vehicle for a rising racial liberalism and sought to direct the coming age of reform.

The wartime swing toward stronger government and weaker civil liberties wouldn’t seem like an ideal environment for civil rights reform, but President Franklin Roosevelt, though unwilling to desegregate the armed forces, did use executive orders to answer some demands from Black soldiers, workers, and organizers. Carey McWilliams, the California leftist and future editor of the Nation, called on Roosevelt to use the wartime strength of his office to enact antiracist reforms, stressing, in his 1943 Brothers under the Skin, the opportunity to use wartime emergency controls to develop a new pattern of relationships [among racial and ethnic communities]. McWilliams came to see, as did Embree and other liberal reformers, the war-strengthened state as the first and last audience for arguments about racial change. The problem of colored minorities in the United States is merely a reproduction on a miniature scale of a set of similar problems which will be faced by whatever federation of powers or international organization emerges from this war, McWilliams argued, as if writing a letter to the president, who had issued the Atlantic Charter, the forerunner to the United Nations Charter, in 1941. By taking the initiative here, we might be in a position to assert real world leadership in relation to these same problems after the war.³⁵ The government’s embrace of liberal antiracism in the 1940s and 1950s, while often attributed to Cold War self-interest (Cold War civil rights), originated during World War II, when liberals like Embree and leftists like McWilliams looked to the wartime executive as the ultimate horizon of antiracist struggle.³⁶

Foundations, endowed with the eternal wealth of industrial fortunes, did not see redistribution but education as the answer to what ailed the United States, and they modeled that agenda for the government. An American Dilemma, the 1944 urtext of racial liberalism, which the Carnegie Corporation first commissioned in 1937, recommended an educational offensive against racial intolerance and celebrated the Office of War Information’s messaging on race and Black service in the army, marines, navy, and defense industries. When now, in the war emergency, the Negro is increasingly given sympathetic publicity by newspapers, periodicals, and the radio, and by administrators and public personalities of all kinds, Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist and lead author, wrote, one result is that the white Northerner is gradually waking up and seeing what he is doing to the Negro and is seeing also the consequences of his democratic Creed for his relations with Negroes.³⁷

The Carnegie Corporation, the Rosenwald Fund, and other foundations encouraged the nation to read for change, distributing book lists for white liberals with titles like Basic Readings for Americans Concerned about Race Relations and A Selected List of Readings on Racial and Cultural Minorities in the United States, with Special Emphasis on Negroes. When the President’s Committee on Civil Rights issued, at the Truman administration’s behest, recommendations for reform, it concluded with a call for a long term campaign of public education to inform the people of the civil rights to which they are entitled and which they owe to one another.³⁸ The turn to education as a low-cost solution to centuries of stolen land, lives, and labor made literature, as Melamed shows, a leading instrument of nonredistributive antiracism through which white readers could get to know difference while reinforcing their claims to the wages of whiteness.³⁹ Although some scholars maintain that the affective work of literature can counteract the violence of racial theft—that racial liberalism does not have to be the soft glove of white wealth accumulation—affective engagement has often stood in for material change, further elevating the status of white liberal elites and offloading blame onto Black and brown communities or members of the white working class, whom they assume not to have received an education in antiracist feeling.⁴⁰

The racial liberalism of Buck, Embree, and An American Dilemma reached a far wider audience than decision makers in Washington and readers of Lillian Smith and Richard Wright. In 1948, the UN Social and Economic Council directed UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) to recommend a programme of dissemination of scientific facts designed to bring about the disappearance of that which is commonly called race prejudice. UNESCO assembled a committee of anthropologists and sociologists to draft a statement. Although the committee members hailed from seven different countries, the United States had the most voices in the room, including the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and the British American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who served as lead author. The final statement, The Race Question, reflected the American racial doctrine to which Frazier, a silent coauthor of An American Dilemma, and Montagu had contributed. The problem of race, it established, has its roots in ‘the minds of men’ as a belief in the innate and absolute superiority of an arbitrarily defined human group over equally arbitrarily defined groups that threatens the essential moral values.⁴¹ Through intergovernmental organizations, war, and business, the United States transmitted racial liberalism to the world, circulating the idea that racism constituted a wrongheaded belief that could be remedied with scientific facts and a moral education. That idea minimized the enduring legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide, as we know, but it also gave cover to the future theft of land and labor in the decolonizing world. The settlement of Western armies and multinationals in Africa and Asia had nothing to do with race, UNESCO maintained, as long as they thought and said the right things. In forecasting the end of racism in an undefined near future, racial liberals renewed it as a material regime.

Racial liberalism derived coherence from Jim Crow. Adherents regarded it as the antithesis of segregation, a construction that shut out race radicalisms and bred a host of other binaries—exclusion versus inclusion, biological racism versus cultural difference, racial essentialism versus environmental root causes—that made reform look like the revolution radicals had foreseen. The old world is dying, but a new world is being born, Carlos Bulosan, the novelist, remembers his brother telling him amid the California labor movement of the 1930s. The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living.⁴² A new world did arrive, but much of the old world lived on in it. Inclusion, it turned out, could be as violent as exclusion. Cultural and environmental ideas about race could sustain the same hierarchies that biological arguments had. That does not mean that racial liberalism constituted a new Jim Crow. But racial liberalism did use Jim Crow to foreclose more radical alternatives that could have brought about the world that Bulosan dreamed might come.

Bulosan and other Asians in the United States found themselves caught between two racial binaries in the age of racial liberalism. Heeding the social science of the time, racial liberals built a wall between racial and ethnic difference, obscuring their interconnectedness, biologizing Blackness (often under the guise of culture), and imagining the nation as a drama in Black and white—or, in the words of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students, Negroid and Caucasoid. (Their third, catchall racial division, Mongoloid, surfaced as, at most, an afterthought in mainstream thought and then vanished into ethnic murkiness.) Asian, Indigenous, Latinx, and other non-Black communities of color faced either erasure or recruitment to a liberal anti-Blackness through the coordinated binaries of white/nonwhite and Black/non-Black.⁴³ Pauli Murray, the civil rights and women’s rights activist, noted in the introduction to States’ Laws on Race and Color, her 1951 guide to state segregation laws, a critical resource for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that state houses also targeted Indians, Chinese, Japanese and other Orientals with restrictive legislation but admitted that she didn’t know what to do with that information.⁴⁴ It didn’t conform to the dominant language of the time. Activists have been struggling ever since to find a coalitional language that doesn’t elide anti-Blackness, that doesn’t traffic in what one scholar describes as people-of-color-blindness.⁴⁵ Racial liberalism did not invent white racial dominance or anti-Blackness, of course, but it did, while insisting that we shall overcome, limit the tools with which a rising generation, the civil rights generation, could combat them.

Setting themselves against segregationists, through whom they defined racism as exclusion, racial liberals declared themselves the bearers of antiracism. The term racism did not come into wide usage until the 1940s—most credit the anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s 1940 Race: Science and Politics—and that established segregated water fountains as an enduring icon of racism and integrated classrooms as a signifier of antiracism. This iconic racism and antiracism obscures the fact that, as the historian Manning Marable once observed, Black people have been ‘integrated’ all too well, that capitalist development has occurred not in spite of the exclusion of Blacks, but because of the brutal exploitation of Blacks as workers and consumers.⁴⁶ A constraining discourse, racial liberalism did not account for that kind of integration or for Bulosan’s Marxist antiracism. When C. Vann Woodward sat down to write The Strange Career of Jim Crow a few months after the Warren court overturned Plessy, he thought he would chronicle the rise and fall of segregation in the South. He didn’t know that he would also chart the ideological conditions for the rise and fall of the civil rights movement.

Metaphors We Die By

Antiracism as war, as reform, education, and integration. Antiracism as color blindness. The time of racial liberalism registers in the figurative language most Americans, including conservatives and radicals, use to address race. That language can be difficult to do without. Some of the best arguments against a dematerialized racial liberalism have been made in the racial liberal terms of crisis and solution, encouraging activists to, for example, treat the disease and not just its symptoms.⁴⁷

The cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their field-making Metaphors We Live By, argue that human thought processes are largely metaphorical, that figurative language, far from mere ornamentation, structures how humans conceive of and act on their environment. If one culture understands argument as war and another as dance, that will, they suggest, structure differences in how the societies debate. (It may also structure differences in whether and how often they go to war.) In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept, Lakoff and Johnson write, a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor.⁴⁸ When a culture understands argument as war, it may lose sight of how argument can be collaborative. When a culture conceives of racism as a disease on a nation, it may overlook how racism constituted that nation and how antiracism might take forms not limited to cure-seeking. We live by metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, but we also die by them—some with less and some with more, some sooner and some later. The figurative language of race tends to reflect dominant material racial interests. That language in the age of racial liberalism sustained the misdistribution of resources and life chances with a subtle but constant command: look to the state, wait on time.

Linear time, the time of racial liberalism, often goes unnoticed because it feels natural. We struggle to think outside it. Try to represent what the notion of time would be without the processes by which we divide it, Émile Durkheim wrote in 1912, a time which is not a succession of years, months, weeks, days and hours! This is something nearly unthinkable.⁴⁹ The historian Lynn Hunt, echoing Durkheim some one hundred years later, observes, Time feels like an essential and defining feature of human life, yet, when pressed to define it, we inevitably fall back upon duration, change, and ultimately, the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future.⁵⁰ Language itself acts as a barrier to investigating linear time not as a transcendent fact but