Both Class and Race

In an interview with Stephen Colbert about her upcoming book, The History of White People, Princeton University History Professor Nell Irvin Painter was asked, “So, I don’t see race; are you white?” To which Painter replied, sarcastically, “Well, I have a PhD. Does that make me white?”
This quote suggests a different way of thinking about the way that educational achievement affects one’s racial identification as well as one’s class identification. The question that Painter provocatively poses is: does being successful make one less black? This formulation is reminiscent of a place like Brazil where “whitening” is a metaphor for climbing the social ladder. By rendering achievement and whiteness equivocal (albeit ironically so), Painter points out a central question in our contemporary society: what is the relationship between wealth and race?
It is not a new question either. In his 1948 speech at the University of Chicago “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the U.S.A.,” Chester Himes insisted on the differentiation between middle class blacks and poor blacks in the eyes of “truly liberal white people who are strongly opinionated on the racial theme.” He pointed out that these people gained their views about black people are based on their interactions with blacks “who have attained financial success or material security, in fact fame and great esteem, through a trenchant sort of dishonesty, an elaborate and highly convincing technique of modern uncletomism.”
Both Himes and Painter insist on class differentiation within the black community. Both Himes and Painter insist that there is a strong identification of being successful with being white. This is the intersection of class and race in America today.
What can this tell us about affirmative action programs?

First, these arguments are intensely historical. Himes does not argue from statistics; rather, he opts for phrases such as “modern uncletomism,” a phrase that implies a strong continuity of black experience across historical time. This is in strong contrast to the timelessness of liberal arguments in favor of affirmative action which reject any historical grounding for affirmative action, arguing that affirmative action cannot be made a form of redress of past injustices.
We must reject this argument because it denies the historical nature of racial oppression. Moreover, it denies the modes through which this historically constructed oppression is reproduced in our current moment in favor of a view that stresses “virtual equality” of white and black subjects that exists, presumably, prior to their constructions as racially oppressed subjects. This existence prior to race is transformed into the “color-blind” readings of the constitution in the pro-affirmative action ruling in  Bakke.
Second, these arguments reject the primacy of statistical methods of calculating disadvantage. Painter’s question, “Does that make me white?” implies an impossible situation in which equality is achieved at the expense of one’s own racial and historical identity.
This suggests a much more dire reading of our current situation. Indeed, race-based affirmative action has generated a statistical equivalence of the American racial demographic in almost every major American school. This has occurred contemporaneously to the systematic incarceration of 1 in 10 black men between the ages of 25 and 29 while those who are left behind to work low wage rates at fast food restaurants contemplate the possibility of getting rich selling drugs. The relationship between these two phenomenon is far from clear; however, it is clear that the former does not preclude the latter. In fact, it is possible that the production of materially, financially successful “uncletomism” is actively enlisted in the justification of poor blacks.  “Look! You can go to Harvard if you just try hard enough!”
Colbert did not answer Painter’ question, probably because no one really knows the answer.
Photo credit: Comedy Central