Abstract
The Myth of Post-Racial America belongs to a growing cadre of scholarship that debunks the notion of a racially egalitarian society in the Age of Obama. In the tradition of McConahay and Hough’s “symbolic racism,” Bobo’s “laissez-faire racism,” and Bonilla-Silva’s “color-blind racism,” the text centers on the critical disconnect of mainstream racial attitudes from racialized realities. That is, work of this ilk centers on the raison d’être of modern racial debate: supposedly neutral aspirations for a “color-blind” society coupled with the desire to employ “color-conscious” views to address racism. Consequently, the text delivers a scathing exposé of the invention of racial categories and their collusion with colonialism, capitalism, and captivity.
H. Roy Kaplan presents a seventeen-chapter treatise on the development of race and racism as a chief variable in human action and order. Through an historical, theoretical (and at times empirical) overview of both causes and effects of racial categorization and racism, Kaplan writes in four broad strokes. First, he discusses the origins of humankind and how race took shape as a meaningful marker of human difference and rationale for stratification. Second, he provides a succinct, yet encompassing, overview of why people hold racial prejudice in relation to competition for scarce or valuable resources. Kaplan next turns to an analysis of material racial disparities and the sacrosanct belief in meritocracy (largely structured by the white/nonwhite color-line) in terms of education, health, crime, housing, and politics. Fourth, the final chapters and postscript examine the import of inter-racial dialogue and activism in order to reduce racism and racial inequality.
Kaplan’s text serves as a cursory overview of the major currents, actors, and debates that, from the top down, came to shape today’s racial landscape. Toward this end, I view the text’s focus on the development of colonial expansion and trade, the prevalence of scientific racism, and the enshrinement of racist doctrine in laws and social structures as a handy resource. Especially for teachers aiming to convince the skeptical student, Kaplan’s review of social scientific findings and major legal precedent unequivocally demonstrate the saturation of racism in modern society. Together, the bantam-weight size chapters serve up heavy-weight evidence of the white supremacist foundations of our contemporary moment.
What does Kaplan take away from this whirlwind racial review of international history and present-day America? At base he contends “… competition and materialism led to the emergence of status distinctions [and] … From these movements racism evolved to rationalize the existing social order established in white European nations” (p. xxi). Hence—as denoted in the subtitle reference to the “Age of Materialism”—Kaplan anoints cupidity and avarice as the “principle source of pathologies in modern society” (p. 75). The heart of the book unapologetically pumps lifeblood into the thesis that human desire for material domination birthed the ideological configuration of racial prejudice. Woven throughout, this string of thought pulls together a neatly packaged critique of the individualist pursuit of resources and fetishization of material goods.
While this animating theme remains a consistent line throughout, the text holds two noteworthy shortcomings. First, materialism and racism are less a “cause and effect” theory than a “chicken or egg” story. To be clear, I do not seek a coup de main in which I pronounce Kaplan either right or wrong, but his taken-for-granted tone and timbre of capitalistic materialism’s causation of both race and racism may leave puzzled those better acquainted with the literature on race, colonialism, and slavery (particularly the ideas of Winthrop Jordan). His thesis begs for at least an interrogation of the notion that the pre-modern religious and political underpinnings of race and racism may have also caused and rationalized economic exploitation just as much as the pursuit of materialism reified race. Unfortunately, Kaplan leaves the debate unmentioned, due largely in part to his belief that materialism is the origin of all evil. Perhaps if Kaplan’s central thesis were better bolstered with citations and evidence, one might be more persuaded by his sermon.
Second, Kaplan uses morphing and vague definitions of racism throughout. At times racism is framed as an intentional “struggle for power and privilege” (p. xi). At another place it is the result of a biological “fear-based flight or fight reaction” tendency such as the “Startle Reaction” (p. 77). Racism sometimes manifests (recalling Fromm and Adorno) as either “rational or reactive hate” or an “authoritarian personality type” (p. 78), while at other times racism becomes “an ideology to legitimize hegemony.” While racism may certainly have many faces, Kaplan does not present a nuanced prism-like theory that refracts the resource-competition model of human domination into a spectrum of human interaction. Rather, racism appears to operate like a neo-Kantian transcendental force. That is, aside from the constantly shifting definition of racism, Kaplan depicts racism’s function as an all-powerful ideological force that invades the black boxes of human minds that fall prey to the temptations of materialism. Transformed into nihilistic cultural dupes, people then robotically act out their prejudice on others (and in the case of people of color, on themselves). His rendering is most apparent in discussing some African Americans as: “Naïvely brainwashed into self-loathing by the dominant white Eurocentric culture …” (p. 82). While I sympathize with Kaplan’s goal of burning down the strawman of “post-racial” rhetoric, his lack of analytic precision glosses over a key principle of racial hegemony—it is always, unsettled, unfinished, and requires our consent. While white supremacy certainly has an intra-racial effect on nonwhites (creating divisions and animosities that reproduce social marginality), one must avoid a priori readings of cultural behaviors as direct reflections of racist ideology.
While these two points pose a serious enough critique in their own right, they do not prevent Kaplan’s elucidation of “post-racial” discourse as a white supremacist myth. Overall, The Myth of Post-Racial America makes a strong case for the continued significance of race in a Herrenvolk nation in which “non-whites and other minorities are still viewed as outsiders” (p. 220).