Abstract

“This is not who we are.” One hears this claim increasingly across the political gamut of media commentators and private citizens assessing the meaning of the Trump presidential regime’s reactionary policies, intensified ethnic cleansing operations, and increased repression of dissent. The claim reveals attachment to the vision of the U.S. that presumes a fundamental commitment to egalitarianism and the intrinsic dignity and worth of all human beings. That is to say, those who make this claim, this plea even, have accepted the image of the U.S. as the “city on the hill,” the very beating heart and exemplar of the modern democratic society. This conviction requires either ignorance or denial of actual U.S. history: economic history, political history, and social history. This is exactly who and what “America” has been. In 1956 in Paris, Frantz Fanon’s “Racism and Culture” clarified why that is the case and why under current social-political relations, it couldn’t be any other way.

Fanon delivered “Racism and Culture” as an address to the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists held in Paris, France, in September of 1956[^1]. The post-World War Two French language journal Presence Africaine and its founding director Alioune Diop convened the conference to address “the crisis of culture…and also analyzed the causes of cultural crisis: the trans-Sahara and Atlantic slave trade and slavery (Kidnapping of Africans and their sale and subjugation far away from our home Continent), racism, colonization, industrialization, and Christianity” (Uhuru). The attendees included the central figures from the Negritude Movement among French language writers like Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Amadou Hampâté Ba, as well as James Baldwin and Richard Wright from the United States. Dr. W.E.B. DuBois could not attend as the U.S. state department had confiscated his passport in the McCarthyist repression of Black and left radicals during the 1950s. The Congress’s final resolution notes the involuntary absence also of the delegation from South Africa. In summary, the Congress resolved that African “artists, writers, scholars, theologians, thinkers, and technicians participate in the historic task of unearthing, rehabilitating and developing those [Black] cultures so as to facilitate their being integrated into the general body of World culture” (First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists 227). The Congress also asserted that this end could not be achieved under conditions of colonialism and racism.

In the address, Fanon asserts that the colonial society is constitutionally racist. That is to say, racism is the culture of colonialism. Racist culture did not spring fully formed from the bows of Portuguese caravels or Spanish galleons. The racist culture -the beliefs, rituals, practices, lifeways of colonialism, the embodied ideology- evolves in a dynamic relationship with the evolving political economy of colonial relations, racial capitalism. Changing social relations resulting from new technologies, emerging sectors of the capitalist economy, and forms of resistance force the ideology to shapeshift without changing the fundamental premises of coloniality: the asserted superiority of the colonizer and the colonizer’s culture and the asserted claim to the colonizer’s right and duty to possess the land, exploit the people, and rule. The appeal to racial superiority explained for the colonizers their success in establishing the colony. Whatever the form of colonialism, the ideology casts its spell: direct colonialism, indirect colonialism, settler colonialism, internal or domestic colonialism, or neo-colonialism. The colonial ideology, racism, works most persistently in the settler colonial form, as the settler must always face the dispossessed native and so often the displaced descendants of enslaved and indentured workers that form the domestic, internal colonies.

Even though the colonial ideology of racism has shapeshifted according to the demands of the developing social relations in the public sphere, the foundational belief in biologically grounded racial hierarchy remains the bases of the common sense understanding of what racism means and what racism does. Fanon explains:

Vulgar racism in its biological form, corresponds to the period of crude exploitation of man’s arms and legs. The perfecting of the means of production inevitably brings about the camouflage of the techniques by which man is exploited, hence of the forms of racism….It is therefore not as a result of the evolution of people’s minds that racism loses its virulence. No inner revolution can explain this necessity for racism to seek more subtle forms, to evolve. (35–36)

That is, the biological delusions that constitute racist ideology do not disappear under pressure from developments in the productive processes. Rather, the developing expectations of politeness in public racialized spaces reconfigured how racist behavior could manifest in the public sphere. The transformation of social interactions did not dismantle the colonial structure of social relations, nor the colonial structure of productive relations. Racism never stops being the culture of colonialism; the manner of racist action instead changes its form, until it does not, that is to say, until the colony reverts to the older form, what one might call the base form that ever lies latent in the consciousness of the colonizers.

The First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists convened ten years after the end of World War Two. The atrocities of Nazi racial policies discredited the overt biological form of racism. Even though structural expressions of the biological form like Jim Crow segregation in the United States and apartheid in Southern Africa, as well as in other less notorious colonial societies, would persist for another twenty years in the U.S. and nearly 50 years in Southern Africa, the concept of race became subject to deconstruction and re-definition outside of the biological, ongoing attempts to provide scientific evidence for white supremacy notwithstanding. Fanon and his contemporaries attending the Congress were engaged in various forms of anticolonial struggle during the era. The pressure created by these movements for desegregation, national liberation and socialist revolution impelled the old structures to crumble or transform. Colonial ideology under the imperial countries had to replace public narratives of superiority rooted in biology for assertions of cultural superiority.

Just twenty years prior to the 1956 Congress, the old racialized hierarchies would appear immovable. They greased the gears of the colonial social system, forming the content of a way of life conducive to capitalist extraction. The achievement of the taken-for-granted character of these sets of social relations allowed Fanon to challenge the need for individuals in a colonial society to repress their learned racism: “Psychologists spoke of a prejudice, having become unconscious. The truth is that the rigor of the system made the daily affirmation of a superiority superfluous” (37). In effect, by the time anti-racist and anti-colonial activists began to dismantle Jim Crow structures around the world, the symbolic order implicit in the social relations already constituted the intellectual and emotional structures of those social relations. The withering away of the public expressions of the older form did not displace the delusions at the base of those forms. Their dismantling in the public sphere instead submerged them until such a time as system crisis would compel them forth again.

So, whereas the post-World War Two momentum toward an official anti-racist consensus, slowly built and hard won such as it is, required a repudiation of the structurally racist public sphere across all sectors of society, the internalized common sense of racism continued to shape the ideologically mediated experience of social relations, relations between people and classes. The colonial nation has a history. The state teaches the official version of the history, sure to honor the founders and builders of the colony, but not the actual builders. The official story may or may not sympathetically describe the tragically ill-equipped natives who required rushing into modernity. The colonizer’s conquest is proof of superiority, superior technology, superior religion, superior culture, superior civilization, superior genes, superior race. The colonizing artists and storytellers create moving artifacts of the imagination that allow the settlers’ descendants to re-live those heady days of conquest, vicariously share in the hardships, and enjoy the exuberance of their ancestors’ accomplishments. As a result, “This means that a social group, a country, a civilization, cannot be unconsciously racist” (37). Therefore, although the leaders in the society moved to erase signs of the colonial ideology from the public sphere, the people of the society, both colonizer and colonized, know the racist content at the center of the society’s world of meaning.

Nonetheless, the official move away from an openly racialized society meant that acknowledgements of lingering racism become tied to individual failings in primarily interpersonal interactions. Fanon continues: “The habit of considering racism as a mental quirk, as a psychological flaw, must be abandoned” (38). He thus establishes that already in the mid-1950s in the face of Jim Crow policies throughout the capitalist West and among its settler colonies, these societies actively began individualizing racists while effectively absolving the society at large of racism: “It is at this level that racism is treated as a question of persons. ‘There are a few hopeless racist, but you must admit that on the whole the population likes….’” (39). Doing so did not and does not preclude the fact that the racism of racist individuals incubates in a racist human environment. This is why I say that racism is the culture of colonialism, the semiotic content of the colonial world order that informs again the beliefs, rituals, practices, and lifeways of the colonial society. Moreover, modern societies have developed, have taken their shapes, within and through the practice and processes, visible and invisible, of capitalist colonialism.

Additionally, denial of the colonial character of social relations does not only inform the symbolic order of the colonizer. Many among the colonized also repeat the plea, “This is not who we are.” This is the sentiment of the colonized subjects who overidentify with the colonizer, an overidentification that makes sense in the social world that places the colonizer at the center of every human endeavor, embracing the logic of the colonizer, offering obeisance to the ruling powers and their ruling culture. Fanon explains that “The oppressor, through the inclusive and frightening character of his authority, manages to impose on the native new ways of seeing, and in particular a pejorative judgment, with respect to his original [cultural-political-social]forms of existing” (38). This sentiment results from the profound alienation from the internal home culture within the colonized subject that so many colonized persons feel. Assimilationist aspirations offer a path to mitigate the psychically destabilizing experience of one’s assumed and ascribed inferiority. The very persons whose life experiences so often militate against the assertion instead embrace the notion that “This isn’t who we are,” convinced that the “we” includes them.

This denial by sectors of the colonizers and sectors of the colonized requires the denial of the colonial character of the United States. The national narrative relegates the U.S.A.’s colonial experience to an era designated Colonial America. Current citizens and tourists can re-live the era with a visit to Colonial Williamsburg. The United States, through the history of the American War for Independence, has enjoyed a contradictory anti-colonial reputation that obscures the U.S. ownership class’s capture of the North American colonial booty from the British Empire in the late Eighteenth Century. Rather than a cessation of the colonial project, the U.S. extended colonialism under a new flag for a new colonial state. The U.S. is a settler colonial state. So, despite the denial by sectors of both the colonizers and the colonized, as Fanon succinctly declares, “In reality, a colonial country is a racist country” (39–40), and as such, “The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal” (40). Why, then, would this not be “who we are?”

Accordingly, the full-throated embrace of the white supremacist order has characterized the Trump Era from the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. The presidential campaigns that promised mass deportations created the discursive space for renewed calls for re-segregating society. The movement Trump embodies increasingly declares, “This is who we are,” and insists on a very exclusive “we”. They work to return the country’s social order to its true center, its most authentic expression of their preferred pattern of human relations, what the builders constructed it to be, a racialized, gendered, capitalist, class hierarchy self-defined as the pinnacle of Western Civilization. Their discourse on the national characteristics of the U.S. finds its roots in the mythic narratives of the visionary settlers, revolutionary patriots, intrepid pioneers, and Christian dispensation, but it seeks to revive real-world historical structures that re-entrench white male monopoly at every site of power in the society. The intensity of social crisis in the U.S. has unleashed every culturally embedded form of racism against non-white, non-Christian peoples. The classic racist tropes repopulate public discourses on public policy in the public and private spheres, and among public and private citizens, the descendants of the settlers distort the meaning of “Black fatigue”[^2] as they openly express how the very existence of Black people burdens them.

The Donald Trump Era of the United States is exactly what this country is and has been throughout its 250 year history, the era of British rule notwithstanding. One can fight against the racism and the other “isms” that Trump’s presidential regime embodies and emboldens, but the fight against racism alone insufficiently addresses the problem. We do not solely struggle against the ideas in our heads but against the systems that shape and reinforce those ideas. The First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists resolved that “the growth of culture is dependent upon the termination of such shameful practices…as colonialism, the oppression of weaker peoples and racialism” (First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists 227). Fanon closes “Racism and Culture” on the same point: “In conclusion, universality resides in this decision to recognize, and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures, once the colonial status is irrevocably excluded” [my emphasis] (44). When we overturn colonialism, when we undo imperialism, we overturn the base of capitalist relations and starve racism of its structural sustenance. Those U.S. Americans upset by and opposed to the reactionary turn in the U.S., instead of saying, “This is not who we are,” need to begin saying, “This is who we have been. We will be this no longer.”

Work Cited

Fanon, Frantz. “Racism and Culture.” Trans. By Haakon Chevalier. Toward The African Revolution. Grove Press: New York, 1967.

“First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists: Resolution.” African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources. Eds. Molefe Kete Asante and Abu S. Abarry. Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1996.

Uhuru. “The First International Congress of African/Black Writers and Artists and the Crisis of Cultures – September 19-22, 1956.” https://peace-int.org/en/first-international-congress-of-african-black-writers-and-artists/

[^1]: Presence Africaine published Racisme et Culture (Racism and Culture) in the June-November edition, 1956.

[^2]: Racist posters on various social media platforms have been creating short form videos expressing their “fatigue” with Black people, particularly recognizably working class Black people in public spaces, completely distorting Mary-Frances Winters’ and Mareisha N. Winters Reese’s book Black Fatigue on the psychological and physical toll Black people endure living in a racist society.