11
State actions were highly consequential in shaping the template of modern race relations. Where and when states enacted formal rules of domination according to racial distinctions, racism was reinforced, whites were unified as whites, challenges from those subordinated eventually emerged, and major racial conflict ensued. Where racial domination was not encoded by the state, issues and conflicts over race were diluted. These dynamics were central to the very different experiences of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil during this century.
Elites encoded racial domination in pursuit of nation-state building, selectively reinforcing earlier prejudice. In South Africa and the United States, blacks were sold out to encourage white unity and nationalist loyalty to the state, precisely because such loyalty was divided. Major intrawhite conflict impelled strong policies to build a coalition, restoring stability and thereby allowing for preservation of the polity and economic growth. Ongoing party and economic conflict brought refinement of ideology and policies toward this end, not in a functionalist manner but as a result of such conflict. Divided white identities were eroded by unifying whites racially as a nation, with elites using the instrument of the state to encourage such unity, and thereby to reinforce the power of the state itself. In contrast, Brazil’s early legacy of relatively little intrawhite conflict produced neither an ideology of racism to unify whites nor policies of racial domination to encourage such unity. An assimilationist Brazilian nation was unified inclusively, despite marked discrimination, inequality, and later class tensions.
For all the similarity in the strategic use of racial domination in South Africa and the United States, actual policy outcomes diverged according to differences in state structure and demography. Describing state action requires disaggregating the form of the state and pressures upon it. In South Africa, a strong centralized state was formed to protect whites from the indigenous black majority. Ongoing political and economic competition among whites reinforced racial domination and the power of the state, which ethnic and class factions sought to control. The central state in the United States was weaker, countered by local authorities in a structure designed to contain conflict, a structure that failed notably with the Civil War. Ongoing regional, party, and class competition after Reconstruction then recalibrated the federal balance of power. The polity was preserved after Reconstruction by central authority allowing for locally imposed Jim Crow. Washington acted by withdrawal. In both South Africa and the United States, the state served its own ends by preserving itself while meeting competing and varying pressures to appease and unify. Selective democracy reinforced these outcomes.
Not only did states reinforce race to unify the nation, but race also made nation-states. The political production of race and of particular forms of nation-state were linked processes. In South Africa, fears of the black majority informed efforts to build a strong central state and to unify whites as whites. In the United States, a decentralized and weaker central state preserved the polity by allowing for differences among whites. White unity was encouraged and built more fitfully. Brazilian elites, earlier more fearful of black revolts and less of intrawhite conflict, projected images of racial democracy in order to create the appearance of a more inclusive nation-state not of whites alone but of all Brazilians. In all three countries, political structures, solidarities, and racial constructions were continually contested.
These different constructions made preservation of the state and economic development possible in each of the three countries. Conflicts between and within capital and labor were contained by racial exclusion or inclusion, unifying white South Africans and Americans by race and all Brazilians as Brazilians. There were costs to these efforts, particularly from segregation, but less than the higher cost of conflict. With continued refinements of the racial order, growth and industrialization proceeded, a process that itself changed the situation in which costs and benefits were assessed.
Unmaking Legal Racial Domination and the Continuing Legacies of Discrimination
Just as the construction of racial orders emerged from a dynamic of nation building from above and real or potential challenges from below, changes in those racial orders emerged from the same general dynamic. It was black protest that forced the end of apartheid and Jim Crow, with international pressures and macroeconomic changes also playing an important role. However, in both cases reform would have been stymied had militarily strong, central state authority retained an ideological and strategic commitment to enforcing or allowing racial domination. The end of legal subordination thus came only after the impetus for race making had been reversed by further developments.
The gradual decline of intrawhite conflict did not by itself bring an end to apartheid and Jim Crow. Effectively reducing one conflict had served to exacerbate another. As the intrawhite conflict had diminished, reconciliation through racial domination provoked rising black assertions of solidarity and protest, which built upon sociocultural ties and shared experience. The strategic impetus of nation-state consolidation then shifted from resolving intrawhite conflict to resolving the increasingly pressing black–white conflict provoked by racial domination. In both South Africa and the United States, racial domination brought greater white unity, and then provoked black unity and protest that achieved legal inclusion in reconfigured nation-states. The dynamics of race making from above and from below come together to explain the end of official racial domination.
This argument can be presented in schematic form. The thesis of institutionalized racial domination provoked its antithesis of consolidated black identity and rising protest. These conflicting forces eventually produced a new synthesis of legal racial inclusion. Institutional exclusion had shaped and provoked assertions of identity and rights, which then forced a reconfiguration of those same institutions. But this schema must be clarified and refined according to particular histories. Change was driven by emerging pressures and agency, not by some abstract Hegelian determinacy. What appears in a schema as neat was far from it.
In South Africa, the cost of white unity was rising black protest. Conflict between Afrikaners and English remained but gradually diminished as a central political concern. Racial domination had worked to diminish intrawhite conflict by bolstering the privilege and status even of poorer Afrikaners. But the costs of segregation had risen with major black protest, elite division, industrialization, sanctions, and lost opportunities for market growth. With economic development increasingly dependent on blacks, these costs became unbearable. And black protest had by then replaced the English–Afrikaner conflict as the dominant threat to the state. Official racial domination had worked and then backfired, and was finally abandoned, despite white right-wing resistance. And as the South African state had been explicitly designed on the basis of racial domination, this transition required a new constitution, something not required in the United States.
In the United States, the South had been appeased after Reconstruction by allowing formal, localized, racial domination. A greater degree of state consolidation and white national unity was then largely achieved. By the mid-twentieth century, industrialization and prosperity had begun to spread to the South; increased black protest encouraged by and pushing for further reforms impelled central intervention in localized racial policies despite Southern resistance. Black protest did not threaten to destroy the polity but did threaten stability and growth. The central state had gained capacity by earlier appeasing the South, and then under pressure turned its new strength against that region’s racial order to enforce greater uniformity. Formal inclusion fulfilled the promise of the existing political form. The Union victory in the Civil War was finally consolidated a century later with a second Reconstruction, in which the racial order was remolded. Regional tensions that had encouraged a white coalition of supremacy persisted, but this intrawhite conflict was gradually replaced as the most pressing threat to national unity and stability by the black-white conflict it had engendered. To curtail the rising disruption of black protest, legal racial domination was ended by strong action from the center, though inequality remained.
The same process of ending legal racial domination is not applicable to Brazil. No comparable legal racial domination had been constructed to be reformed. This does not mean that social discrimination or economic inequality were less evident in Brazil. Instead, the lack of an official racial order that might have provoked stronger protest has left such discrimination largely unchanged.
Summarizing the argument in this way specifies the ongoing processes of race making as a consistent explanation of both legal racial domination and its end. Segregation was encoded to diminish threats to the nation-state posed by intrawhite conflict. By so diminishing ethnic or regional and class conflict, it allowed for core nation-state consolidation, reinforcing central authority. As long as such intra-white conflict remained prominent, emerging black protest did not result in reform but instead provoked a hardening of domination. Apartheid or Jim Crow could be ended only once those intrawhite threats to the united polity diminished and central authority had gained the capacity to force reforms. With white nation-state consolidation and reconciliation largely achieved, the imperative for racial domination faded. But racial domination nonetheless remained in place until black protest eclipsed intrawhite conflict. Again, the need for stability asserted itself, but this time it forced greater official inclusion. State power consolidated through racial domination was then turned on its head to dismantle that same domination.
The end of formal Jim Crow and apartheid does not mean that race has disappeared or will easily disappear as a salient issue in the United States or even South Africa. Official racial domination ran its course, but that is not the end of the processes it reinforced. Whites defined themselves as whites and reinforced racism in varying forms of post-abolition segregation for their own strategic purposes and benefit. Once race has been so constructed, whites cannot easily dismantle this awful creation. As Joseph Schumpeter observed, “Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist.”1
Unmaking racial domination does not unmake the prejudice upon which domination was built and then reinforced, nor dissolve a now-consolidated racial identity. The scars of race remain deeply embedded. Legal apartheid or Jim Crow have ended, but the historical foundation and entrenched legacies of discrimination and inequality persist. Racial identities, ingrained through painful experience and embedded in everyday life, do not quickly fade even if the institutions that reinforced them change. In the United States, racial identities remain salient, not least because the African-American minority views its solidarity as a vital resource for protecting its interests and for combating discrimination or countering threats to race-specified reforms. In post-apartheid South Africa, blacks are more confident that as the majority their interests will be served under democracy. Still, the previous ideological project of interpreting culture, ancestry, and economic interests according to race has left a deep scar. Even in Brazil, nascent racial identity and conflict encouraged by information about the former two cases is evident, with Afro-Brazilians pressing for further political and economic incorporation. In all three cases, democracy did not and has not brought equality, though it does allow for expressions of racial discontent accordingly.
The end or absence of official racial domination does not end racial identity or mobilization, but it may militate against them. Without apartheid, South Africans may increasingly focus on class or ethnic grievances and protest, with militant black nationalism largely eclipsed thus far by democratic inclusion of the majority. Race politics may diminish in salience, amid economic advance for some blacks and a resurgence of ethnic politics. But nonracial democracy did not immediately bring fundamental change in the lives of most South Africans. White privilege remains, effectively having been guaranteed in order to encourage the end of apartheid. Populist leaders have sought to retain a focus on race, combined with class or ethnicity, to challenge the new order or to assure their standing. Continued black deprivation may swing more people to support such efforts, building on remaining resentment over racism.
In the United States, race was long entrenched in issues of federalism, constructed in large part to contain divisions over slavery and recalibrated to contain divisions over the treatment of freed blacks. The interrelated issues of racial justice and states’ rights have remained unresolved despite the end of Jim Crow. Federal intervention for racial justice has provoked white resistance, as it had in the past, feeding a continued process. Indeed, a resurgence of states’ rights during the 1980s and especially after 1994 has threatened previous reforms. African-Americans may no longer be united by opposition to Jim Crow, but their fate remains linked by discrimination and threats to policies of redress. Indeed, white racism has in some ways been reinforced by the end of Jim Crow: continued deprivation of blacks has been attributed to innate inferiority rather than to discrimination, now falsely assumed by many whites to have ended. To resist this trend, African-Americans have sought to contain class or related divisions and to retain their solidarity and electoral blocs. Racial politics remains salient, though less organized as such than during the fight against Jim Crow and its aftermath.
The end of apartheid and Jim Crow has left South Africa and the United States in a situation in some ways similar to that of Brazil. In the absence of formal categories used for legal segregation, racial identity is somewhat diluted, but it endures. Discrimination evident before the institutionalization of racial domination continues after its end, reinforcing racial identity. But such identity is no longer defined and reinforced in opposition to official rules. Where no longer used as an explicit tool of domination and resistance to such domination, race may be transformed into an expression of cultural distinction. Blacks may then themselves project their distinctiveness as primordial, with assertions of their own difference replacing prior state enforcements of such difference. African nationalists and populists in South Africa make such cultural appeals. In the United States, activists have increasingly turned to cultural messages and claims of essentialism as a means of retaining black solidarity in the face of continued discrimination. The more long-standing focus on cultural assertiveness among Afro-Brazilians suggests the salience of this approach. But Brazil also suggests that such culturalism does not necessarily pose a fundamental challenge to polities committed to absorption of difference. Multiculturalism seen by activists as a challenge to national unity may instead be turned by others into a signal of national incorporation.
Racial solidarity in South Africa and the United States, long entrenched by now-abandoned official policy, retains a stronger trajectory than in Brazil. But if prior intrawhite conflict in South Africa and the United States had made the Brazilian option of racial democracy long inapplicable, the healing of those conflicts and the end of legal racial domination have now “Brazilianized” South Africa and the United States. The U.S. result has arguably been some decline in the significance of race, or at least less black unity and mass protest. Given continued and relatively unchallenged racial discrimination and inequality in Brazil, a comparable situation in South Africa and the United States is not cause for unrestrained celebration. “Colorblindness” in Brazil has been devastating for Afro-Brazilians; recent calls for such color-blindness in the United States, for instance by the Supreme Court, may also prove devastating to efforts at redress by African-Americans. What appears liberal is not. Meanwhile, Brazil seems to be headed in the opposite direction, with racial salience rising to challenge the image of liberalism and entrenched discrimination.
Racial identity is not primordial, but a remnant of past institutional arrangements and ongoing informal social practice shaping and shaped by those institutions. What appeared as cultural determinants of emergent racial orders were reinforced by institutional rules. Similarly, what remains now as cultural identity also is tied to structure. Until long-entrenched social discrimination ceases, race will remain as a historical legacy. Institutions must reinforce racial justice or race conflict will continue to shake the constructions of social order built on and still tied to foundations of racial discrimination.
General Implications
What emerges is a consistent pattern of efforts at institutionalized coalition building as a central component of racial dynamics. The evolution of Du Bois’s “problem of the color line” during the twentieth century was inextricably connected to the political dynamics of conflict resolution and avoidance. Alliances were forged, framed by the ideal of the nation-state. The institutions of the polity were applied to reinforce a nationalist identity and loyalty. Brazil did so directly and inclusively. South Africa and the United States could not. Entrenched internal conflict led to reinforcing nationalism by means of a racial identity employed to encourage white unity. Rules excluding blacks emerged to unify whites as dominant. And in the process black racial identity was also further consolidated, then acted upon, requiring a reconfiguration of national identity as more inclusive. The strategic calculations differed, either impelling racial domination and conflict or not, but the imperative of nation-state consolidation was evident in each situation. And throughout, South Africa, the United States, and Brazil suffered from the burdens of real or potential internal conflict.
That race making and nation-state building were so connected is not surprising, for these two processes were among the dominant social processes of the twentieth century. Nor is it surprising that these processes were contentious, since both race making and nation state building emerged as means to contend with internal conflict. The more contentious the internal conflict, the harder the state had to work for resolution through heightened racial domination. In Brazil, the state did not use the same techniques, but still had to contain conflict. In more general terms, states inheriting major internal conflict often fall back on constructing racial or ethnic justifications for loyalty. Without such contested loyalty, states can afford to be more “civic,” or at least to project themselves as such in official policy.
From the nineteenth through the twentieth century, elites and much of the populace have generally shared one political assumption: nation-state building was the overriding imperative for achieving internal stability, growth, and geopolitical standing. Disputes over polity boundaries emerged, but in any polity development required domestic peace. Internal conflicts had to be diminished or avoided and unified loyalty to the nation built where it was not inherited. Such solidarity would allow the state to rule, playing its essential role in further containing conflict, providing protection, and managing growth. This goal was imported from Europe to other countries where states had been earlier constructed by colonialism, and also was reinforced domestically by reminders of the cost of ongoing internal conflict.
Official and informal imaginings of a unified nation often have rested upon vicious demarcations that solidified those included by distinguishing those excluded. Shared allegiances were forged on the basis of common and enforced enmity. The advantages of unifying via internal exclusion were evident – selectively building on inherited prejudices reinforced unity among those sharing a particular prejudice – though at the cost of also reinforcing social cleavages, inequality,potential mobilization, and conflict. Countering prejudice to build a truly inclusive or “civic” nation was more difficult. When internal conflict emerged and reemerged, the crutch of exclusion was too handy to ignore. The nation-states of South Africa and the United States were built upon this logic. Brazil instead allowed formal inclusion, while retaining significant informal discrimination.
This argument is more broadly applicable. The image of the nation-state implies a convergence of the polity and of unified and inclusive loyalty to it, thereby supposedly overwhelming or healing subnational social cleavages. But nations have all too often been built through purposeful racial, ethnic, religious, class, or other internal exclusions. Official allocations and boundaries of citizenship rights have demarcated who is part of the nation and encouraged the loyalty of a core constituency, shaping and provoking later conflict. Such exclusion of specified others has been central to nation-state building, rather than tangential. What particular form of institutional exclusion was used depended upon historical prejudice and embedded conflic-tual issues informing elites about which encoded identity would unify core allegiance. Much as regional or ethnic conflict was diminished by racial exclusion and unity, ethnic conflict was contained by class exclusion and unity, and class conflict was contained by ethnic exclusion and unity. State structures and ideologies were similarly configured according to imperatives for selective nation-state building. An overview of other cases can here suggest such broader application of this argument.
Perhaps the most obvious extension of my argument about race is to the issue of ethnicity more generally. Spain had been unified with exclusion of its Jews. Much later many African states built upon colonial policies of ethnic exclusion to consolidate their independent rule, reforming such exclusion only after states were consolidated. But arguably the most notable instance of such a use of ethnic exclusion during this century was the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. The interwar period in Germany had brought significant and highly stratified internal class and related conflict, threatening to tear apart the nation-state. As my study of race suggests, did the Nazis then gain popularity by using anti-Semitism as a way to unite Germans against a common enemy? This would help to explain why Jews were so singled out and why anti-Semitism elsewhere, in the absence of equally threatening internal divisions, did not lead to comparable legal enactments, even if it does not explain the later genocide.
Expanding further, has legal exclusion by class been used for selectively reinforcing unity? The most prominent instance of the use of class exclusion for purposes of building a united polity is that of the Soviet Union, a case which potentially expands my framework beyond nation-states to a multinational state. Again, Russia before 1917 was torn by multifaceted, major internal conflict. Did the Bolsheviks use Communist ideology to gain unified support, and then once in power use vilification of the aristocratic upper class and exclusion of capitalists to consolidate pervasive loyalty? This argument takes seriously the class-based ideology of the Communist Party as a tool for building an expansive polity. Russia being a less developed industrial power, capitalists could more readily be excluded there than in Germany, though with later costs and ultimate failure. But is the case of the Soviet Union, in which national/ethnic distinctions were partially legitimated, comparable to nation-states?
Of course, class and related conflict did not always produce legal ethnic exclusions to heal such internal rifts. For instance, Mexico around 1910 experienced a violent internal revolution. But post-Revolution reconciliation was not based upon any official exclusions of “others.” In a sense, Mexico’s inclusionary corporatism is similar to that of Brazil, but unlike Brazil was founded amid bloody conflict that elsewhere produced more exclusion. After the 1920s, Mexico’s ruling party did not represent only the peasants of landed elite, but instead sought compromise, combining limited land reforms with capitalism. Does Mexico then demonstrate that legal exclusion was not preordained by internal conflict, suggesting some Latin American exceptionalism, or is there something different about how class conflict has been contained?
Class is different from race or ethnicity. Contrary to traditional class analysis, economic cleavages in themselves have rarely led to major conflict. Such conflict in this century has more often emerged where and when a class divide has coincided with and been aggravated by ethnic, race, religious, or other cleavages. Does the potentially fungible nature of economic disparity, allowing for compromise, leave class less salient than cleavages that are projected as more primordial, fixed or zero-sum? Certainly belief in potential class mobility, co-optation of working class leadership, ambivalence of middle classes, and the “extralegal processes” of class differentiation may diminish class antagonism per se.2 Does this account for how nation-states with major economic disparity but less ethnic or related conflict have remained intact?
And what does this tell us about democracy, which was long seen as either inapplicable to instances of great poverty, or likely to reduce such poverty, and yet has been maintained (more or less) amid extreme inequality? Certainly the cases explored in this book demonstrate that democracy neither is necessarily inclusive nor ensures that the interests of all will be met. Who is included in the nation and able to effectively use democratic citizenship largely determines substantive outcomes.3 This issue is now particularly pressing in the newly democratic South Africa, confronted by the challenges of inequality and potential class conflict.
My argument is suggestive in regard to these cases and issues, raising fruitful further questions. Exploring such extensions of my thesis beyond race demonstrates that various selective legal exclusions have often been used to reinforce nation-state unity.
Successful examples of constant civic inclusiveness are much more rare. Rather than benign inclusive nationalism, specified exclusion was the predominant logic of nation-state building in a century obsessed with stability and growth. The result has been institutional reinforcement of racial, ethnic, and other distinctions of identity, which people embrace as primordial, retain, and act upon even after institutional boundaries have been reformed. The full costs of such dynamics, in the form of resurgent conflict and hatred, are still being paid.