Racism and the credit rating
Apparently, when America's credit rating falls, so does the sky. Never mind that Standard & Poor's, the agency that downgraded the nation's bond rating from AAA to AA+, blessed subprime securities and collateralized debt obligations with similarly golden marks, or that two other leading agencies, Moody's and Fitch, reaffirmed the country's top-tier status. What matters, according to most conservatives and even many so-called liberals, is that a Wall Street (backed) watchdog criticized the federal government's ability to pay its bills, owing to political posturing over the debt ceiling, and that crime has never been committed by a white president. Oh, those blacks and their bad credit.
Lest you think I'm being to tough on Bill-O and his ilk, consider the following thoughts on the conflation of racism and class by Marxist philosopher Etienne Balibar:
In its deployment of class racism for the reification of capital authoritarianism, the state co-opts the semiotic regime through which racial discourses are forged. Racialization may be discursive, but the levers of discourse are representationally sanctioned. Accordingly, dehumanization through disenfranchisement is manifested materially, at the level of the real. In Michigan and Georgia, for example, judicial review recently upheld voting laws that require constituents to show photo identification or sign a sworn affidavit attesting to their identity before receiving a ballot—a modern poll tax designed to hinder turnout among these state's impoverished and left-leaning demographics, including the vast majority of nonwhite citizens. Danger averted, for corporate elites.First, class racism is connected with a political problem that is crucial for the constitution of the nation-state. The 'bourgeois revolutions'...had raised the question of the political rights of the masses in an irreversible manner...The idea of a difference in nature between individuals had become juridically and morally contradictory, if not inconceivable. It was, however, politically indispensable, so long as the 'dangerous classes' (who posed a threat to the established social order, property, and power of the 'elites') had to be excluded by force and by legal means from political 'competence' and confined to the margins of the polity—as long, that is, as it was important to deny them citizenship by showing, and by being oneself persuaded, that they constitutionally 'lacked' the qualities of full fledged or normal humanity (Balibar, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 1991).
What is urgently needed, now, is a critical reevaluation of phenotypical difference along materialist, rather than purely discursive, lines. If the biocultural dimensions of race are hybridized through an insistence on the the fluidity of their microobjective composition, corporeality, itself, can be revealed as a site of continual contestation, whereby molecular racialities submerged within lactified corporeal hierarchies are revealed as always already immanent to the molar racialities undergirding resource centralization, whether the resources in question are dollar bills, judges, or electoral rights. Moreover, when the constitution of spaces inhabited by myriad racial populations is unmasked as a complex relational process, in which individuals interact with, translate, and withdraw from not only the metafictional race-object, but also themselves, politicization can become minoritarian, negating the predetermination of identity status by planting a multiplicity of micro-racialities within claustrophobic social spaces that, in their becoming-toward-difference, denaturalize the ethnic coding of economic antagonism. In a society where the institutional racialization of labor, to borrow Balibar's term, has shifted from manual to mechanized, the human body is fashioned into an assimilable machine destined for a single specialized task, paradoxically vanquished in its creative potentiality and valorized for its mechanical utility. Organically overexploited to the point of degeneracy, yet demanding—even desiring—a master to assemble its parts into a functional whole.
Historically, American masters were white, from the founding fathers onward, leading to a predominantly colorless aestheticization of American executive competence and intellectual superiority. Under the inversion of masterhood brought by Obama's presidency, however, governing whites—dare I say "white supremacists"—are confronted with a threat to corporeal exploitation and the fragmentation of their own organs, even if just at the level of separation between labor and cultural intelligence. Put simply, American capitalism's inherited governors are faced with the possibility that their own actions led to their displacement, an abject experience if ever there was one.
Posted by Kris Coffield at 8/23/2011 2:47 AM 
Categories: Politics/Theory
Tags: credit rating etienne balibar race
Categories: Politics/Theory
Tags: credit rating etienne balibar race
Excellent and balsy post, Kris. I haven't seen many claims linking racism to the credit rating downgrade, though race is often in the background of discussions about opposition to Obama's policies. To me, the shift away from discursive explanations of racial tension is made even more exigent by recent corporatist developments, such as the Citizens United decision, that have opened the way for heavily monetized, privatized, publicly traded enterprises to flood our legislative and electoral system with donations that trump individual contributions. Wisconsin and Michigan are prime examples - how much influence did the Koch brothers buy in those two states?
Discursive explanations are extremely use in explaining the performativity and normalization of identity structures, but they disregard the materiality and material effects grounding those discourses. In that sense, they seem, to me, to be philosophies of homogenization, not actual difference. In other words, they say ground differences in the articulation of a specific discourse, rather than the "real" locus from which any given discourse originates. We're different because we say we're different and hold fast to differing perspectives, not because we're actually different at a material level. Maybe I'm oversimplifying. Someone correct me if I'm off-base.
Reply to this
Since you made similar claims about heteronormativity and sexuality in a previous post, I wonder if we can talk about the fetishization of the mechanized body, or about the co-option of sexuality within the racialization of labor, given your persistent statement that sex and race are co-constitued. Are sexual antagonisms constituted in conjunction with racial antagonisms? From a realist perspective, wouldn't this seem not to be the case because many non-racists maintain aversion to alternative sexual expression? Now that I think about it, the opposite seems to be the general rule...
Very interested in your thoughts on my first question, if you get the chance or anyone else wants to chime in.
Reply to this
Absolutely, we can discuss the fetishization of race-labor. In gentrifying the body, the industrial process, even - perhaps especially - in the digital age, relegates the body to mechanization. At the same time, however, this process carves boundaries between the fulfillment of machinic specialties and the lack of productive capacity, such that some men are 'disembodied'. Moreover, the breakdown of the industrial machine entails the advancement of superbodies or superhumans. All of this creates a somatic phantasm (or community composed thereof), on which the trajectory of productive - and even consumptive - desire is directed. In my opinion, the same can be said for sexuality, which is similarly governed according to standards of efficiency. Are not family values valorized by corporatists and their political ilk precise because the hierarchy of the latter necessitates the patriarchy of the former?
Reply to this