[re-posted from September 11, 2019]
A book review of…
Race and America’s Long War
by Nikhil Pal Singh, University of California Press, 2017
“Policing makes race when it removes normative barriers to police violence. War makes race when it removes legal barriers to war’s limitation.”
Reviewed book, author bio: Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, and Founding Faculty Director of the NYU Prison Education Program. A historian of race, empire, and culture in the 20th-century United States, Singh is the author most recently of Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017). He is also the author of the award-winning book, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004), and author and editor with Jack O’Dell of Climin’ Jacob’s Ladder; The Black Freedom Movement Writing of Jack O’Dell. A new book Exceptional Empire: Race, Colonialism and the Origins of US Globalism is in-progress, and forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Singh’s writing and historian interviews have appeared in a number of places including New York Magazine, TIME, the New Republic, and on NPRs Open Source and Code Switch.
The internal colony
In 1996, I met Scott Douglas of Greater Birmingham Ministries — an African American activist and former member of the Communist Party USA. I was only just out of the army, from which I’d retired as a member of Army Special Forces (1st SFOD-D, 7th Special Forces Group, and 3rd Special Forces Group). Scott became a mentor over the next three years, and the first book he recommended I read was Hammer and Hoe, a history of Black communists organizing in the South during the 1930s, by Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley.
This was my initiation — having read Cornel West’s iconic Race Matters during my last active duty deployment (in Haiti, 1994) — into the history of the Black Radical Tradition (and the Black Prophetic Tradition), a highly class-conscious tradition within the Black Freedom Struggle, and one with which I came to associate very closely as a member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (now Liberation Road) and, as a North Carolinian then, a supporter of Black Workers for Justice.
After several splits among leftist formations over the previous decade and a half, one formation that transgressed these sectarian boundaries in the interest of preserving an element of Black leftist unity was the Black Radical Congress, which included both West and Kelley, as well as Angela Davis, Manning Marable, Julianne Malveaux, Amiri Baraka, Amina Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Marlene Archer, Barbara Ransby, and a good number more of these well-known Black activists and intellectuals — including a couple of folks I knew personally, like Jarvis Tyner from the CP (I’m an alum) and Bill Fletcher from FRSO (also an alum).
One of the interpretive frameworks I was blessed with during this period was that of the Black Nation, which has complex genealogy, but in a nutshell is an interpretive framework that looks at African America as a nation — in the ethnic-cultural-linguistic-historical sense — which is colonized: an internal colony requiring all the things colonies do. Enforced dependency, armed bodies loyal to the colonizing nation, and colonial surrogates to help administer the colony on behalf of the colonizer. It’s sometimes a problematic standpoint (if totalized), but one that provides some important insights into race in America.
9–11 and cowboy movies
By 1999, a growing anti-austerity movement from outside the US began infiltrating our own body politic, focused on the World Trade Organization, and culminating in a huge street action in Seattle that provoked an over-the-top police reaction. This gave us hope, not about police overreactions, but that we might be moving again, after a decades-long hiatus, toward the growth of anti-capitalism in the US. This was the background in August, 2001, when members of the BRC attended the UN World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa.
We were all captured by a sense of guarded optimism about the state of movements . . . then on September 11th of that year, a handful of Wahhabi saboteurs converted four passenger-laden commercial aircraft into guided missiles. They targeted a financial, military, and political target (they hit the financial and military targets, the WTC and Pentagon, and one was downed before it could reach the US Capitol).
The ensuing outburst of patriotic fervor and militarism annulled the gains that the left perceived it had made; and the right again became ascendant, mobilizing our civil religion, Americanism, and our offended national masculinity. These two emotional drivers fueled the expansion of (disastrous) US military actions abroad and the strengthening of the security state at home.
There were two images that predominated on the airwaves on September 11, 2001. One of them was the hypnotically controlled and uniform repetition of the film clips of aircraft crashing into the buildings and the billowing erasure of the Manhattan skyline. The other was the authoritative father. He was everywhere, in every guise, embodied not only in George W. Bush but also in a surfeit of self-anointed “terrorism experts,” and in the ubiquitous big-dick posturing by male politicians and reporters. The whole nation was being carried along on a narrative straight out of the male revenge fantasy. The state of emergency obliged the “women and children” to figuratively cringe in the background, while the martial warrior-father prepared to unleash his pure, supra-rational masculine energy on the evildoers. The nation became the family, and its preservation depended upon the restoration of absolute authority to the tough (white) father.
Ann Kibbey, writing about the political climate in the U.S. at the time, pointed out how effectively the Bush handlers had used the mythic American signifier of the Western film (and the American frontier myth) in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
This westward expansion myth provided us with a vocabulary that mapped onto the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, but at the same time a refreshed martial vocabulary for the policing at home. The frontline soldier called “hostile territory” (areas not under tight US control) “Indian country,” or “Apache territory,” as did the police at home whose practices were aimed at population control aimed at Black and (some) Latino communities (as well as a few actual First Nations people). Nikhil Pal Singh’s book cites this Western archetype, and much more, in this book about the disappearing distinction between military operations and policing.
Continuum of violence
Race and America’s Long War focuses on the continuities between military adventures abroad and militarized policing at home, and how these phenomena have been, since the beginning of the European colonial project, racialized. More than that, however, he argues, using the interpretive framework of the Black Radical Tradition, that “the United States pursuit of war since the September 11 terrorist attacks has reanimated a longer history of of imperial statecraft that segregated and eliminated enemies both within and overseas.”
Singh, discussing the history of Charles Sloane, a former cop who developed modern policing theories and later served as an advisor in Vietnam, notes that Sloane — perhaps the original author of the phrase “thin blue line” — once wrote, “If one gives some thought to the subject, there is but little difference between fighting an enemy in a declared war and fighting an enemy, the criminal, at home or on the crime front.”
Singh notes that while Sloane was in Vietnam, civilian and military advisors, as well as later troops, would refer to Vietnam as “Indian country.”
What was most striking to me, at first glance, was that when I wrote Borderline in 2015, I was exploring the way that war-making was man-making, that is, how masculine pop-archetypes are formed by war, which in turn reproduces the pop-archetypes. Singh is showing how war-making is race-making, as the boundary “between civilization and savagery” is racialized. There was a very strong correspondence between his and my research and conclusions even when my focus was on gender as a system of power and his was on race as a system of power. If there is a bridge here, I’d say that it’s Maria Mies’s thesis that the three associated targets of white bourgeois men that mark the development of capitalism are (1) women, (2) nature, and (3) colonies — all these counted as conquerable nature (with women and colonies defined into nature, a theses I’ll only cite here).
Western “civilization” after the Enlightenment developed through the conquest of colonies. American expansion after the Civil War was driven by a war against indigenous people until the Spanish-American War, whereupon the United States began expanding its extra-continental colonies through inter-imperial war. The normative/ideal Western male was defined by his separateness, by boundaries separating him from women, from nature, and from the “unwashed masses” of conquered colonies. He was unlike any of these, and yet he was obliged to transgress those boundaries in order to subdue women, nature, and colonies. Women were domesticated. Nature was tamed. Colonies were disciplined for extraction.
By the Victorian period in the latter part of the nineteenth century, anxious and influential men like the founders of “muscular Christianity” began to describe a “crisis of masculinity” for “white” men based on a surfeit of gentility and migration to the “soft life” of the cities. One of the most vocal of these critics would become the president of the United States: Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was an emblematic leader when “a fear about the softness of American society raised doubts about the capacity of the United States to carry out its imperial destiny.” Continental expansion had ceased, and with it the basis of the national myth of [white] frontier masculinity. There was a fear that the loss of white masculinity constructed as conquest would lead to national impotence. Churches spread this fear as well, along with the fear that urban life would bring about a “moral softening.” Immigration had increased, and this discourse included talk about “race suicide.” (Borderline, p. 274).
Here is Singh in Race and America’s Long War, Chapter 3, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” extrapolating the so-called “global war on terror” backwards into the mythic den of racialized frontier masculinity, with primary emphasis now on the race-making aspect of this national (white) myth.
The effort to set the “global war on terror” in a teleological progression of post-World War II struggles against tyranny, however, conflated a range of actors, regions, and time scales. The older tradition of frontier and colonial wars similarly sought to distinguish between “savage atrocities” and “civilized atrocities.” … … … the English liberal John Stuart Mill defended the suspension of “international morality” in wars of colonial intervention on the grounds that “barbarians” could “not be depended upon for observing any rules,” or trusted to place their “will under the influence of distant motives.” Defined by the lack of any discernible rationality or ethic of mutuality, barbarians (like “terrorists”) thus represented an essentialized threat to civilization. This conception not only obscured the asymmetries of power that were the sources of war and conflict; it also depoliticized the counterviolence of dominated peoples. (Singh, pp. 106–7)
This theme of how counter-violence is narrated is a recurrent one in Race and America’s Long War. And it is along a continuum of violence — or a taxonomy of violence — that Singh addresses the relation between war and “crime.” Crime is a signifier for a post-war period in an “internal colonial” idiom. War is for conquest of the external barbarians; “war on crime” is for control of the internal barbarians (the “hostile Indians”). Here is where the blurred lines of the militarization of police and the policification of the military begin to clarify; and their rubric is counter-insurgency.
COIN of the realm
When I was teaching counter-insurgency (COIN, in the US DoD lexicon) in Honduras, Colombia, and Peru in the early nineties, as a representative of US Army Special Forces, we called COIN-training FID — meaning foreign internal defense. Think about this linguistic inversion. Foreign meant foreign to us, but it’s the next part that’s interesting: internal defense.
Liberal law, for all its perversions and concealments and contradictions, at least claims that the rule of law, domestically, is a question of preserving order. We all watch Law & Order on TV, and we would be offended if were termed Law & Internal Defense, because we defend against enemies — others. And yet here we are, looking at an explicit and official description of “internal defense,” which presumes not aberrant threats to order, but that order itself is predicated on the isolation, demonization, containment, and even destruction of an enemy that has — in the terms we used during the Vietnam counter-insurgency occupation — breached our perimeter.
In Vietnam, we learned early that Vietnamese (all Vietnamese) were a threat to be controlled or eliminated, called therefore gooks or dinks to strip them of their essential humanity. We racialized them. An observation I have made repeatedly since then is that “all ground wars become race wars.” And this is one of the central themes of Singh’s book: war-making is also race-making.
This may seem counter-intuitive when we consider the wars against Germany, for example, fought by Americans who not infrequently had German heritage (the enemy were nonetheless reduced to “krauts”), but WWII was not directly a war of conquest or colonial population control by the allies, but of “self-preservation” against a new imperial competitor. In that context it differed from most American military adventures. (If there is one lesson we ought to learn from WWII, it is that in periods of extreme instability, outcomes are simultaneously unpredictable and more dangerous by orders of magnitude.)
Our counter-intuition about WWII is the prevailing one that defines race in an ahistorical and constricted way. Singh’s playbook on race, on the other hand, incorporates the insights of Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism (Robinson was critical of it), who demonstrated how capitalism built itself upon pre-existing racializations that were necessary to justify the conquest and subjugation of early capitalist peripheries. Before the development of trans-Atlantic trade (including the slave trade), those peripheries were still in Europe and Eurasia. The Irish, for example, when they stood in the way of capital’s next commodity frontier, were racialized — that is, set apart based on ostensibly “natural” characteristics. Race is not fixed, because war-making is not fixed. Under these conditions emerged a “white” race, with historically variable entry qualifications, that stood in for normative, fully human, eligible for meaningful citizenship.
“Race,” says Singh, “is a modality of group domination and oppression. Yet it requires a story (whether biological, sociological, anthropological, cultural, or historical) explaining how and why such practices persist and can be justified.”
The tension between war-making/race-making and the alleged universalizations of liberal philosophy and political economy re-emerges again and again, requiring wad-knots of painfully drawn justification.
The perspectives of counterinsurgency experts exhibit uncanny resonances with those of domestic race relations managers. In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), for example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that “measures that worked for most groups will not work here.” The lack of strong patriarchal authority and a concomitant disintegration in “the fabric of conventional social relationships,” along with near-total “isolation” from the white world, had created a situation in which “crime, violence, unrest, and disorder — most particularly the furious unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure . . . is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Even if the consequences of centuries of white racism (or for that matter, European and U.S. colonialism) was acknowledged, these dynamics, as Moynihan famously remarked, were now perpetuating themselves “without white assistance.” The violence that had created these conditions was in effect converted into a potential for antisocial violence that could be curbed only with the exercise of legitimate force. According to Moynihan (in one of the less frequently cited parts of his report), this meant increasing black military service, by which means “a world run by strong men of unquestioned authority” could overcome the social pathology that had been spawned by a “disorganized and matrifocal family life.”
As modern-day Lockeans, liberal counterinsurgents viewed themselves as expanding the boundaries of the community of the free without regard to prior racial or colonial status. In the words of George McBundy, national security advisor [Kennedy-Johnson, 1961–66] and member of the CI Special Group, “There is no safety yet for free men anywhere without us [the United States], and it is the relation between this astonishing proposition and the complexities of each part of the world that makes the conduct of our foreign affairs such an overwhelming task.” But universal expansion was predicated on the delimitation wrought by racial and colonial violence, including the irresistible translation of social and political debilities into naturalistic terms. (italics added) (Singh, pp. 64–65)
These absurdities still prevail in white consciousness today, and create the pretext for ostensibly color-blind martial policing.
Cops & capital
Singh shows a recursive history between war and policing — both race-making practices. In the chapter/essay “Race, War, Police,” he describes how Vietnam was regarded as a laboratory for COIN by the Joint Chiefs of Staff even as the lessons-learned from Vietnam were being enthusiastically studied by the infamous racist and frormer Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Daryl Gates.
“The very idea,” writes Singh, “of distinct domains of foreign and domestic policy is a hindrance to understanding the institutionalized and distinctively renewable violence that constitutes U.S. racial formations after World War II.”
A focus on processes of domestic racial exclusion and reform obscures the institutional and ideological exchanges and logistical networks that connect, revitalize, and repurpose local and regional racial despotisms within and throughout the U.S. globalist idiom. The ideational chains, technology, and personnel transfers linking inwardly concentrated and outwardly tested state violence thickened, particularly during the Vietnam era, simultaneously renovating and reinforcing long-held colonial assumptions about group attributes and behaviors that indicate a threat. In other words, it wasn’t simply the case that the war overseas came home, or that domestic racial conflicts were externalized: for both national-security and police professionals, home and world were always racially disaggregated spaces. The world as they imagined it was one of “white spots” set against a “darkened” landscape of global, civilizational disorder. (pp. 69–70)
Law & Order’s puerile police propaganda aside, policing in the US began as a form of white “internal defense.” As Singh cites, even Ben Franklin, who reluctantly manumitted his last slaves in 1781, wrote: “The majority of Negroes are of a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful, and cruel in the highest degree.”
The citizen militia, developed to attack recalcitrant Indians, morphed into the slave patrol. Locke was clear and unapologetic in his dual claim that (1) liberalism’s prime directive was protection of property and (2) African slaves were naturally property.
Marx and Luxemburg
From here, Singh pulls Marx himself into the argument, with some corrective criticism.
The moment when Marx refuses the historicist separation of capitalism and slavery sharpens the argument that capitalist development represents a more general and generalizing form of domination . . . Only later does Marx characterize this relationship in teleological terms, describing “the incompleteness” of the “development of capitalist production,” which joins to “modern evils . . . inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production” . . . What if this incompleteness is a permanent feature of capitalism? (Singh, p. 88)
In the second chapter/essay, “From War Capitalism to Race War,” Singh connects the development of this dual “defense” paradigm directly to capitalism, albeit with a (very sound in my view) critique of Marx and white Marx-ists. Using the aforementioned Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism, Singh describes how the psychological as well as public pretext for enclosure, indenture, extermination, and slavery necessitates the racialization of whatever group was inhabiting a commodity frontier, from the Irish to plantation slavery to Islam. Singh is very well grounded in Marx, and Luxemburg obviously, because he deploys a racially-cognizant version of her critique of Marx, building on Robinson’s insights, to describe racial capitalism as an historical foundation of modern war and policing.
I discovered Singh while looking up material by Jason Moore — a sociologist, geographer, and historian at Binghamton University — and Singh cited Moore in the book. For Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, capitalist accumulation begins as a revolutionary shift from accumulation-by-land to accumulation-by-money, profit taken from the “point of production” by under-compensation of labor can only work if there are sufficiently cheap flows going through that point of production and through that laborer as flow nodes: cheap raw materials, energy, and food, for example.
Expansion is driven by both the imperative to constantly renew the production process and competition from without. The cheapest things are at first the easiest things (those nearest and requiring the least refinement—low hangning fruit). As time goes by, those things nearest and requiring the least refinement are exhausted, and those further afield are sought and exploited. The pulse moves outward. But at each stage, the exploitable “natures” themselves become more difficult to get and often more difficult to refine. The money collected from sales diminishes as more money is laid out for feedstock labor, raw materials, energy, and food.
This dynamic of diminishing returns sends the capitalist to unexploited regions, which Moore describes as frontiers. And when we think about it historically, “frontiers” were always those places where people from the centers confronted people/nature in the margins (even internally, through commodification of the former commons) in the search for fresh, “free” resources. This is why Moore says that the “new law of value” has to show that accumulation occurs in two places at once: the point of production, through under-compensation of labor, and the frontier, where “cheap nature” is still available through plunder and structurally or militarily enforced unequal exchange.
It is those extractive frontiers, internal and external, mentally divided from civilization as savagery or “underdevelopment”, that are racialized in racial capitalism, and when neither exploitation nor extraction are any longer profitable, these populations become “disposable humanity,” useless eaters, surplus population. With (racial) capitalism’s assumption of scarcity, this means that talk of extermination is never far behind.
The first chapter is concept-rich (like all of them), and I cannot possibly do it justice here, but it connects the theses on war and police in the first chapter to subsequent chapters which integrate these critical analyses in an assessment of the present-day global new-right resurgence (and the Trump cult in the US).
Embodied in the figures of the slave, the migrant worker, the household worker, and the unemployed, among others, [capitalist] appropriation encompasses forms of both coercion and ethical and political devaluation that are inseparable from the capitalist processes of valorization. Thus, rather than opposing notions of absolute sovereignty and its power over life and death with ideas of a biopolitically productive materialist history, we might instead recognize how the two have been braided together through the conquest and commodification of black bodies (as well as the conquest and commodification of indigenous lands) that for Marx constitutes the moment of “so-called primitive accumulation.” We might extend this idea of appropriation to include the unpaid work of women the world over, the accumulated unpaid work represented by labor migration, and war capitalism’s differentiation between the internally ordered, rule bound spaces of production and market exchange and the exceptional zones of armed appropriation. The latter are domains for enacting “plunder” — that is, primitive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession) — but also for developing cutting edge procedures and commercially fungible police and military infrastructures: the slaver’s double-entry account book, the colonial railroad, the border control zone, freeway removals, forward military bases and super-max prisons. Such innovations have generally proceeded insofar as they are unfettered by legally protected human beings, thus creating the material basis for advancing new prejudices built upon the old. (Singh, p. 92)
On the page following this quote, he cites Frederick Douglass on how black people have been perceived since manumission, when they have entered “into an order of abstract equivalence” (liberal law’s perception of the wage relation). I said above, “Under these conditions emerged a ‘white’ race, with historically variable entry qualifications, that stood in for normative, fully human, eligible for meaningful citizenship.” White (or now, native) workers’ perception of non-white/non-citizen labor as a threat to white/native labor “is in turn narrated as a loss of country — or sovereign capacity — which calls forth the fantasy of a war of extermination against the offending party.” Here, we can begin to articulate Trumpism into Singh’s theses.
Bare life, permanent war, & proto-fascism
Capital accumulation spurs population increase and also voraciously depletes living labor. The constant, violent dislocation of these two processes requires constant management in the form of police and military solutions — that is, directly coercive interventions. It spurs forms of moral, temporal, and spatial sequestration that become part of the framework of crisis management, through which the simultaneous production of growth and death can be viewed less as a contradiction than as a necessary dimension of historical progress. Racism’s toxicity, in this view, is a by-product of capitalist abstraction and a material event. It is as much our inheritance as the environmental degradation resulting from capitalism’s appropriation of cheap nature. (Singh, pp. 96–7)
Throughout his book, Dr. Singh shows all the ways in which policing has adopted and applied military counter-insurgency doctrine to “hostile” racial enclaves within the US. This is all a matter of historical record. In chapter/essay three, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” he begins to unbraid the racist western film tropes, the merger of military and police, the history of European fascism, and the emergence of a uniquely American proto-fascism personified in the Trump cult.
Singh begins with a definition of sovereignty — the legal right to decide who lives and who dies — then focuses on upon whom this right impacts most directly in liberal regimes. He employs a concept introduced by the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt who was critically cited by the leftist intellectual Giorgio Agamben: bare life. “Bare life” is the reduction of populations who are deemed incapable of citizenship to mere bodies, disposable at the whim of the state. Because this flies in the face of the aspirational language underpinning the universalizing pretensions of liberal law, liberal regimes — who depend upon those subjugated bodies — are forced to define “states of exception” that accomplish this reduction. A quick example might be the way slavery was legally abolished, but it was quickly replaced by tenant farming and prison labor, the latter of which stripped the person down to bare life, something the sovereign (who decides who live and who dies) can use and use up as a mere body — a draft animal.
The racialized migrants currently rotting in Trump’s concentration camps have been reduced to “bare life.” [2019]
It is the expansion of this capacity to define who is a mere, non-rights-bearing body is a signal development in fascistic movements. One of the first things the Bush II administration did after the 9–11 attacks was effectively declare the entire world a battlefield (the global war on terror), which has identifiable legal effects, i.e., to claim the battlefield exceptions to liberal law as applicable anywhere or anytime it is convenient. Obama was just as enthusiastic as Bush in embracing this newfound executive power (now inherited by Trump), and Obama gleefully and extra-judicially assassinated thousands, including American citizens, even though he cut back on torture, which had been revived as a “legally exceptional” practice after 9–11.
When the arch-racist Woodrow Wilson remarked on the bloody US occupations of Haiti and the Philippines, as Singh quotes, Wilson said, “If we have been obliged by circumstances . . . to take territory . . . we have considered it our duty to administer that territory not for ourselves, but for . . . those to whom it does really belong.” This lie — both nations were being viciously exploited as their residents were hunted for sport by racist white American occupation troops — is emblematic of what Singh calls a “discourse of disavowal,” an intentional forgetting that is necessary as an ideological prop for US expansion and the US exceptionalism. Disavowal as discursive escort.
Under the influence of liberal progressivism [Progressivism was obsessed with “scientific” racism and eugenics. -SG] and exigencies of overseas colonization, the harshest versions of white supremacy were recast in the language of racial uplift and “benevolent assimilation.” (Singh, p. 99)
This all began to break down after 9–11, when the reinstatement of torture as policy, unilateral war, targeted assassinations, renditions, and the suspension of rights for domestic “suspects” were again giving the lie to liberal laws claims that torture, e.g., or imprisonment without due process, or assassination on presidential whim, are all wrong all the time.
In Borderline, I noted how a film trope — Sergei Eisenstein’s “tempo task” — was employed as a kind of consequentialist counterpoint to liberalism’s Kantian categorical imperatives, which constitute the state of exception required for the suspension of personhood and citizenship and reduction to ”bare life.”
Kibbey borrows the term “tempo task” from Sergei Eisenstein to describe the sense of urgency that was injected into public discourse as preparation for war. The “tempo task” allows the protagonist to forget the rules to get the job done and save lives. Typically, this is when the women and children are pushed back into the house, while the man goes out into the street for the showdown, or when the bomb is ticking and the bad guy has the information beaten out of him just in time. The “tempo task” has become the modern default for war-making propaganda, but also for the reclamation of martial male prerogative. (Borderline, p. 116)
A quote in Singh’s book by Elbridge Colby, an Army captain in the 1920s, epitomizes how this suspension is justified by racialization expressed as a set of dehumanizing stereotypes.
When Oriental peoples are accustomed to pillaging and being pillaged, accustomed to torturing and flaying alive distinguished prisoners, you are dealing with opponents to whom the laws of war mean nothing, who, as General Hull said of the American Indians, respect no rights and know no wrong. (cited in Singh, p. 107)
Colby’s son, William Colby, went on to become the Director of Central Intelligence, and his grandson, also Elbridge Colby, became a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and neoconservative “expert” with Progress for a New American Century.
The transition, says Singh, from this history to Trumpian cultism, is concealed by our “discourse of disavowal,” which has since WWII been scripted as “democracy versus totalitarianism.” It is interesting that when the Bush-Cheney administration was overseeing Abu Ghraib and the Fallujah massacre, they framed their opponents as Islamo-fascists [the reactionary flip-ya, calling enemies “fascists”]. As we said in the Army, “Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.”
What has broken through the surface with the Trump phenomenon is that far from being antithetical, capitalist (liberal) democracy carries the seeds of racialized reaction inside itself as a kind of inevitable development, like getting grey hair as one ages.
[T]he effective indifference to torture and indefinite detention among U.S. officials and notable public intellectuals suggests that the current moment marks not a fight against new fascisms, but the historical renovation of “the inner solidarity of democracy and totalitarianism.” (Singh, p. 109)
Capitalist cores require exploitable colonies, or “peripheries.” Peripheries are administered apart from civil law, beyond civil law, and require a reduction of the mass of inhabitants to “bare life.” War and policing are transmission belts of violent reactionary predispositions — secrecy, authoritarianism, and naked violence — back into the general society. The US is an extremely militaristic society. And reaction, in whatever form, has two characteristics we seldom account for: (1) it emerges in capitalist democracies in crisis, and (2) it’s most formidable class base is always an insecure middle-class. Trump’s biggest voting bloc was white and suburban/exurban, not rural.
Racial heterogeneity in the armed forces
As an aside here, and as a veteran, this, too, is contradictory, because only around six out of ten US troops are “white.” One out of four is black, and one out of five is Latino. I don’t want to misrepresent this as a developing core of opposition like Odaocer overthrowing his Roman bosses. Black soldiers, in my own experience, especially career troops, can be quite reactionary, as can many Latinos (a trickier category, and even more heterogeneous than African American), and the glue that binds them to their white “brothers,” speaking now of male troops, is a culture of profound misogyny, around which — and reinforced by sports — that they can establish interracial solidarity. Another phenomenon I saw magnified in Special Operations was interracial solidarity between whites, Pacific Islanders, and Latinos, established through a shared negrophobia. (This may have changed, since I left decades ago.) In the military, as in US society more generally, African America had a qualitatively different aspect in the taxonomies of racism as the least assimilable. Kind of the mirror-image of Asians as the “model minority.” Nonetheless, there is discontent, and with the sharpening of racialized rhetoric from the Malignant Narcissist in Chief, the potency of this discomfort increases.
The grim fact is that for African Americans, who had a fifteen percent chance of being locked up in 1970, when I joined the Army, that number has jumped to seventy percent; and joining the military is one of the surest ways to partially inoculate oneself from this fate. This, and job security as well as health care, are powerful reasons for black folk who have avoided the criminalizing justice net until they are eighteen years old to join the US Armed Forces.
It’s also a reason why black parents often encourage their young people to join the military. It is one place where it is most difficult (definitely not impossible) to have one’s status as citizen downgraded by “laws of exception” — which Singh traces to slavery — to “bare life.” The price, however, is that one has to become willing to step on racialized Others outside the US, and accept the dominant and deceptive political narrative that justifies those actions.
Liberalism and racial formation
Everybody learns some combination, some version, of the rules of racial classification, and of their own racial identity, often without obvious teaching or conscious inculcation. Race becomes ‘common sense’ — a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world. (Omi & Winant, Racial Formation, p. 96)
The outlandish difference between 1970s rates of black incarceration and those of today, Singh points out, can be traced to the triangulation tactics of the Democratic Party after it had been totally captured by neoliberalism.
Under President Bill Clinton, [the US state] brought the broad expansion of domestic police powers through the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act (1994) and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996), both precursors to the USA Patriot Act (2001). Finally, it began to create (just in time for the demise of the Soviet Union) the infrastructure for America’s own gulag archipelago, which now extends from Camp Delta, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Camp Justice on the British Island of Diego Garcia, domestic “supermax” penitentiaries like Pelican Bay in California, and unidentified “black sites” in the United States and around the world. (Singh, p. 117)
The elements for US proto-fascism have been systematically put in place for decades, waiting for their Trump to show up. I am reminded, with all these contradictions, of Aimé Césaire, who in Discourse on Colonialism wrote acerbically:
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.
In chapter 3, “Racial Formation and Permanent War,” Singh explores this phenomenon of war-making/race-making through the racial formation theory of Michael Omi and Howard Winant. As the term “racial formation” suggests, race is not discernible except as “an unstable and decentered complex of social meanings.” Liberalism tries to solve its inhering racialism using liberal categories that have already foreclosed this term and its definition using a “color-blind” narrative. This narrative has not been employed as an antidote to white supremacist ideology and practice, but “to undermine normative, legal, and political claims about racial inequality in the United States.”
Liberal law regards every citizen as an abstracted individual — race-less, gender-less, age-less, neither rich nor poor, and thoroughly un-situated. “Color-blindness” fits that narrative, inasmuch as liberal law counts every citizen as an abstract equal. The law (and the liberal) claim to be color blind, as if all that remains of the citizen is a disembodied ghost with a proprietary body (that can be rented out on the market as labor). The legerdemain of liberal law is that this formal “equality” is used to conceal and reproduce actual and dramatic inequalities. Blackness, or being a woman, or a poor person, when these statuses contribute to oppressive circumstances, are invisible to the law, by removing the context, especially historical context, from every encounter before the law. A labor contract that is signed cannot be contested based on a worker’s desperate living situations that lead her to sign the contract, for example. The boss has the informal power (money and property), but that’s invisible to liberal law.
At any rate, this contradiction generates a multitude of quandaries, and after WWII, when the global Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the US began centering on post-colonial national liberation struggles around the world, the color-blind narrative was central to US ideology, and the US came under intense external pressure to dim the glare of then-existent US legal apartheid in the eyes of these many postcolonial nations (also racialized). This hypocrisy on the world stage, combined with an ever more restive Black Freedom Struggle, led to the overthrow of legal segregation and expansion of the franchise in the 1960s.
It was during this period when the armed forces were thoroughly integrated, and with the draft’s preferential option for the poor, Black troops in particular were over-represented in the enlisted ranks. My first sustained contact with African Americans was in the Army, where more than half my comrades in Vietnam were Black, including more than half of my supervising NCOs. The contradiction — which still pertains in US military adventures, this time in Southwest Asia instead of Southeast Asia — was that while we expressed and even embraced racial solidarity in the ranks (there were violent exceptions, but I was in a paratroop unit that required hungry young volunteers and had better unit cohesion), we shared a contempt for Vietnamese, which US soldiers—black, white, and brown—referred to as “gooks” or “dinks.” (Race-making)
We were the sovereigns, at least the grunts were in our free fire zones; we could decide who lived and who died. We were little moving pockets of sovereign America hacking through the forested mountains of this “nonsovereign space.”
Upon return to “the world,” as we called the US in Vietnam, that battlefield solidarity dissolved, and veterans, but especially black veterans, joined the counter-hegemonic social movements in droves. It didn’t take very long. Even while we were in Vietnam, there were some of us who said it in moments of exhausted clarity: “If I were Vietnamese, I would be Vietcong.”
This is reflective of Singh’s thesis of race “less as a meaning complex that is given, anchored in a set of biological or ethnic classifications of specific population groups within a particular nation-state, and more as an epistemic field that has been extended and filled according to specific historical imperatives of national sovereignty.”
Of foremost importance to reproducing race is a distinction between sovereign and nonsovereign space and the concomitant development of legal and ethical doctrines of sovereignty as conferring the right to use legitimate violence (up to an including the right to kill) in the colonial confrontation. Racial classification emerged in this context as a flexible rubric for collectively marking and also individualizing a kind of “anticivilizational chaos” or excess, categorically opposed to sovereignty as a civil domain and protector of life. (Singh, pp. 137–8)
[R]ace persists as empirical description and effect in observations about everyday life, even as it is disqualified a priori as a source of social action and power that might require adjudication. (Singh, p. 140)
Race was erased from liberal legal discourse and replaced by generic categories that concretely targeted racial minorities, especially African Americans, but which dispensed with any mention of race: crime, in particular.
Key to this tendency (not a “strategy,” so much as a form of legal-ideological bricolage) was a discourse of racial uplift and assimilation into normative white society. Tokenism, celebrity-worship, and opportunism were employed in the context of the post-Civil Rights era to manage black populations inside the US. Black spokespersons dimly reflected the long debate between W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington — the radical and accomodationist perspectives on race in the US. Black civil society in many cases actually assisted in the suppression of the radical perspective; and the radical interpretive framework of the “Black nation” was pushed out of public and academic view. Even Dr. Martin Luther King’s increasingly radical edge that led him to anti-imperialism (and lost him virtually all white establishment support prior to his death) has been domesticated in our race-talk, with the assistance of the dominant fractions of black civil society. Questions of class and imperialism were disappeared by media and most of the academy.
excursus: Black civil society
I risk a digression here, in way of holding a virtual conversation, on the contradictory dynamics of black civil society in the United States and what James Warren named “the Black misleadership class.” The late Bruce Dixon summarized this stratum as “both an actual and aspirational class, which ultimately sees its interests as tied to those of U.S. imperialism and its ruling circles.”
Black society, inasmuch as it is distinctively African American (there’s that “nationality”), is still organized into a bourgeoisie, a comparatively small middle-class (including civil society), a large working class, and an expanding unemployed and legally disabled underclass. But the Black “political class,” as critical voices like Black Agenda Report emphasized, is joined at the hip with the white bourgeoisie and with (selectively integrated) civil society interlocutors who “manage” a good deal of black politics through various historical networks.
Yet, as black persons in a civil society fraction which ultimately answers to the white bourgeoisie, on the one hand, these same folks, as black people (class irrespective), face an aggressive and hostile party of white supremacy on the other, this comparatively privileged group are still obliged to adapt to a Democratic establishment for self-defense — completely understandable — and these dependencies distort black class politics as much as they do white class politics, albeit very differently. Class dynamics between a hegemonic group and a subaltern group are always this complicated.
Civil society is where elites can recruit for diversity and lash the fortunes of the most promising members of African America to a Democratic establishment that is likewise lashed to global finance capital—a kind of financially incentivized brain-drain. The prerequisite is performance, in both senses. Performance as performing tasks responsibly, and performance as in theatrical performance — the ability to code-shift in ways that don’t discomfit white elites, as well as the ability to enthusiastically soldier . . . or say things one may not mean with great conviction in public on behalf of one’s bosses.
This is irresistible in the larger context of African America as occupied territory with an occupied people. The paths out of desperation are pre-constricted (the stick) and these few positions are often well-compensated (the carrot). Appealing solely to whatever moral failures black civil society has ignores how these “moral shortcomings” are mitigated by a background of occupation. On the other hand, a colonial surrogate, no matter how well-intentioned, still answers his or her master’s call — in this case, finance capital.
And it would be unfair to just say, everybody’s getting paid. It is the position one is in, for example, when Southern African Americans who still face great danger, political and existential danger, and shelter from the political danger inside the Democratic Party. Who would not become conservative, at least in general aspect, when membership in a party is not so much an opportunity to express oneself politically as the only safe room in a house full of murderous enemies? We cannot forget that Booker T. Washington, though we can now portray him as a kind of “weaker” actor than DuBois, did not see African America’s choices as oppression or emancipation, but as accommodation or extermination (lynching was then widespread, frequent, and unpunished).
War for conquest, crime for control
In September 2019, in the wake of Bermuda’s devastation by Hurricane Dorian, President Donald Trump — a buffoonish pimp and con-man who ascended to his office on a wave of white paranoia in the wake of the 2007–8 long recession — intervened in Bahamian rescue efforts, in order to prevent more Black bodies from entering the US. His underlying claim was that among the Bahamians there were substantial numbers of gang members and drug dealers.
So how did Trump happen in our “post-racial era” more than five decades after the US abolished legal apartheid?
Singh tells the story of Bill Clinton’s “favorite public intellectual,” Robert Kaplan, author of the then-well-known essay, “The Coming Anarchy.”
[I]n the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Kaplan diagnosed a fundamental weakening of the U.S. nation-state as an engine of homogenization and conflict stabilization, ascribing the failures of both (yet again) to the pathologies of black urban dwellers, who, unlike the Jews and Irish before them, preferred the hostiltities and illusory gratifications of “negritude” to the virtuous trials of assimilation. Kaplan further suggested that the dangers of the inner (racial) fragmentation of the nation-space were magnified by a global situation in which a contagion of state failures, particularly in Africa (where else?), had the potential to inflame conflicts along racial and civilizational lines. He observed (following the urban military theorist Martin Van Creveld) that fighting crime and waging war were gradually becoming indistinguishable and that “national defense” was no longer defined by unitary territorial logic but rather by multiscalar tactics and strategies of pacification and control. (Singh, pp. 146–7)
Unassimilated black bodies (bare life) were threats to national sovereignty. All this notion needed to explode into a hyper-surveillance state with absolute authority to act pre-emptively (before the commission of hostile or “criminal” acts) was September 11, 2001.
The Baghdad roadblock meets “stop-and-frisk.”
Crime, visible to liberal law, combines with “group-differentiated spatial confinement, bodily dispossession, denial of civic honor and recognition, and vulnerability to violence, injury, and ill-health,” invisible to liberal law, to produce “racism without race.”
And Obama?
Obama’s rise was scripted from a carefully selected combination of African American civil-rights narrative elements and postracial prescriptive postures, adherence to color-blind policies, and multicultural pablum. (Singh, p. 149)
I would add that Obama is a skillful rhetorician and political tactician whose “marrying multiculturalism to ersatz populism” destroyed three consecutive political incompetents, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
2008 happened, and by 2016 Republicans — a party whose central (though not sole) organizing principle is still negrophobia (and now xenophobia) — ran “against Obama” and for the restoration of imperial sovereignty (Make America Great Again). The birther drivel of a few conspiracy theorists was mainstreamed in this reactionary surge (He’s a sleeper “black Muslim.”). The irony is that Obama, in both domestic and foreign policy — with a few ameliorative sops — followed the paths laid down by his predecessors, especially in his enthusiasm for killing Muslims.
The day after Obama’s inauguration, a New York Times headline announced the new president’s first order for air strikes by unmanned predator drones in South Waziristan. (Singh, p. 181)
“We did not,” Singh writes of Trump’s 2016 victory, “suddenly awaken in a different country the day after the election.”
Bill Clinton’s tenure — apart from Toni Morrison’s famous and totally decontextualized remark that Clinton as “the first black president “— was punctuated by dog-whistle racism: Sister Soulja, Ricky Ray Rector, superpredators, Lani Guinier, the list is long and ugly. Clinton set up the situation for Trump, as did Bush, years before anyone gave Trump a second thought. (Clinton and Trump actually buddied around some, on golf courses, at parties, and on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express” plane.)
All Trump needed was the rocket fuel of gender to consolidate his case. His subtextual narrative was one of white male victimhood at the hands of black folk, immigrants, and feminists.
“Trump is a creature of the long war,” says Singh, “and it now appears that he wants to bring the war home.”
Last word
I could go on about this book for longer, but I hope I’ve given a decent snapshot of it. I’ve not described even a tenth of the richness of this book that Singh himself calls a set of provisional theses.
This book is a valuable addition to any social theory bookshelf, and would make an excellent read for a group interested in race, war, and policing. I leave Nikhil Pal Singh to summarize:
The essays in this book represent a series of meditations on these inter relationships as they have unfolded in and through the afterlives of U.S. slavery, continental conquest, overseas expansion, and contention with fascism, with specific reference to the contemporary history of race and politics. At its core, my inquiry has sought to show how race making and war making constitute and enduring nexus of U.S. government power that unfolds both at home and abroad. Equally significant, I have sought to demonstrate how racial devaluation has been inextricable from the state management of capitalism’s destructive creation and creative destruction, which increasingly place the planet itself at risk. (p. 182)