Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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Always Passing / Alan Clinton
<1> The essay leading off this issue of Reconstruction, "History, Ethnicity and Religion and the Sudanese North-South Conflict," points out not only the slipperiness of race, but the fact that it is erased and reappears depending on various political contexts. Muslims in Northern Sudan, although claiming an ethnic identity, "are not Arab in a genetic sense." Rather, the goal was to pass as Arab in order to gain status (trade relationships, escape from slavery) with Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, what may have begun for many as a pragmatic conversion has in turn passed into an identity claimed with belief and conviction, one that happens to justify the brutal treatment of peoples in Southern Sudan.
<2> Of course, the science of genetics has kicked the very concept of race into the dustbin of metaphysics, but no one listens to science it seems when its findings are inconvenient. Using Chinese weapons, nomadic Sudanese are killing their brothers and sisters in the South in order secure grazing rights while Northern Sudan's "national" oil company taps the terrorized South for its resources. All in the name of Islam's preservation, of nationalism, of passing as Arab. Those bits of melanin we use to distinguish race are activated and deactivated in what Mary Elizabeth Adams refers to, with full anthropological seriousness, "ritualistic bed tanning." "For the young white female, getting a tan may now be a rite of passage from innocence to sexual being," but it is ironically so because dark skin is perceived as less naked than pale skin. One wonders to what extent this rite of passage also hinges on the stereotype of rampant African sexuality.
<3> In "Guess Who's Welcome to Dinner," Tru Leverette describes the "new racism" as racism which appears in drag as its opposite. Like white students who attend "Pimp and Ho" parties on college campuses in the name of nothing other than good fun, contemporary romantic comedies like Guess Who and Something New don blackface as a plot device which, for all its comedic potential, promotes the idea "that desire is nonpolitical and is [therefore] the realm in which the races must find harmony." Even worse, self-righteously trying to pass off such films as promoting racial harmony achieves the exact opposite by "reinforcing historical politics that relegate racism and sexism to the personal and private realm and thereby undermine efforts to secure social justice at the public and avowedly political level."
<4> In this light, the title to this issue's supplementary section "Facing the Future After Richard Wright" becomes all the more provocative. From Richard Wright to Dr. Martin Luther King could be read as a relay of communication that has been intentionally submerged in a post-war American culture so inimical to social justice not only in terms of race, but in terms of class equality. It is to both Wright's and Dr. King's credit that they saw the struggles of race and class as inextricable. Yet, in American public schools, when and if Wright is taught, where does his allegiance to the Communist Party pass? Why is Dr. King's later turn to socialism erased in American textbooks and suppressed by his own family?
<5> If Richard Wright and Martin Luther King were with us today, would they be interested in the "pseudo-democracy" of the cell phone in the West and its more utopian political potentials in Africa, or the non-narrative montage that passes for media coverage of armed conflict, both issues addressed in the "Technopolitics" section of this issue? If we take seriously Wright's and King's Marxist/Socialist interest in systems as well as symptoms, we can only answer in the affirmative. For the sort of passing that we need as concerned citizens of the world is that passing through and passing between that is characteristic of the truly integrated intellectual. In reading "A Cell Phone Named Desire" and "Hyperspaces for Freedom," one might be struck at the irony that these investigations into technological politics are the most poetic essays in mode. In contrast, the essays in the issue that deal with tanning and the new diary (the personal blog), two subjects that might seem most resistant to scientific inquiry, are the most traditionally scientific in approach: taking surveys, analyzing data, visualizing data in charts. This double irony suggests something to me about the methods of cultural studies. If we follow Nietzsche and own up to the fact that all knowledge projects, including our own, are expressions of desire, then the question of what kind of desire we wish to promote or attempt comes to the fore. Rather than truth, rather than correct and incorrect methodologies, we should always be passing. Over, under, in between. A methodology is not adopted in any polemical sense, but is allowed to haunt a subject, and our "findings" take the form of a frisson as the specter passes over. Nella Larsen, the bi-racial "mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance" discussed by Yolanda Manora, could serve as the patron haunt of this new critical ethic. Always passing, not only does Eminem move through Medieval psychomachia without realizing it, but systematic thought haunts the singular which is in turn haunted by its other. Always passing, even the most urgent of issues such as the crisis in Sudan may need to pass over history before the angel of death will leave.
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