Carter's RACE 4: Foucault, Modern Political Thought, the Jews, and Race

As stated in earlier posts, I am taking a slow pace through the arguments by J. Kameron Carter concerning the emergence of the modern racialized world. Carter has done many of us a great favor by taking time to read some of the lesser known writings of key figures of modern thought.

Perhaps you were not the kind of student I was, but I found myself barely keeping my head above water in the vast sea of writing which had some relevance to my dissertation research. Now and then, I would see an insight in someone’s thought, and hope to find the one essay or book I could read that would allow me to mine what I needed either (a) to add strength to my argument or (b) to show that I was not so dense as to have completely ignored someone important. I didn’t drown, but there was so much more that was missing. In addition, I was thankful for certain books of grand scope which helped me to organize and schematize large portions of the field I was studying. Carter’s book is that kind of book, and I am glad that I now get to join him in this conversation.

One writer I tried to understand through a few brief writings and lots of conversations with colleagues is Michel Foucault. Although it seemed obvious to me that I was influenced by is ideas, I did not try to make him a primary conversation partner. Carter, on the other hand, has carefully examined not only well-known texts, but also some lesser known speeches and essays which shed important light on the growth of modern racialized rationality and social structures.

Carter draws on Foucault to build a case for the centrality of the Jews for the emergence of race. The Jews, as the archetypal writers of counterhistorical narrative, help to shape the modern vision of history as not merely the accomplishments of the victors, but also of the struggles of the oppressed for liberation. In recognizing this significant contribution, Foucault and Carter see the way that modern understandings of race emerge from this consciousness of a distinct people that the Jewish covenant and scriptures bring into existence.

Modern Europeans, influenced by the Reformation as a movement of protest echoing the prophetic voice of the Jews, come to see their relationship to other peoples of the world in a racial frame. Fascinated by their own ways in contrast to the ways of others, and inclined to see themselves and their ways as superior to others, Europeans transform their adopted religion of Christianity into a messianic soteriology and eschatology of whiteness in history. Western Civilization claims triumphantly the meek and lowly Crucified One and his followers as a community called to elevate the rest of the world to its potentiality, by persuasion, force, or extermination. The Jews, as the exemplars of a peculiar people who gave birth to the vision of a liberative counterhistory, must ironically be eliminated in one way or another in order for whiteness to complete its salvific mission in history.

As I struggled to understand the ways the modernity’s churches have departed from their calling in order to serve false saviors and idols, I remained painfully unaware of the implications of race for modern rationality. I lived in the midst of Christian failure to overcome the racialized ideologies of U. S. culture, but did not see the radical nature of the problem. I knew that “racisms is a faith,” but I thought it to be something that could be pointed out and overcome through a process of clarifying teaching from the New Testament. I saw it as an intellectual error made favorable by an oppressive economic structure, and therefore a residue of the past that was being left behind, albeit far too slowly.

What I did not see was the way that modern politics, economics, and everything else has been structured by the invention of whiteness and a racialized world surrounding it. There were many texts that should have pointed me in that direction, but for the most part I had not read them. I did not receive the message from the books I had read from Latin American theologians, even though they were often addressing these matters.

Carter's RACE 2: The Racialized Jew

With apologies once again to Dr. Carter if I have misunderstood his argument, I am attempting to articulate some of what I am learning and thinking about as I read his new book.

In his critique of Cornel West and analysis of Michel Foucault (in Race: A Theological Account), J. Kameron Carter raises a matter of particular concern for professional theologians. There is a tendency in the profession of theology to be overly confident of the power of language. Thus, the critique of modernity, and if Carter is right, the critique of racialized understandings and structuring of bodies (politic), can emphasize the discursive structures of racial reasoning without adequate attention to the nondiscursive structuring, the production and reproduction of racialized bodies (politic), the “dynamics of relationships of force” (48).

This problem, it would seem to me, shines a light on the difficulty for white theologians to identify the effects of whiteness on theological theory and practice. Thus we find ongoing attempts at therapy through language to eliminate racism and racialized thinking. The most naïve form would attempt to create terminology to substitute for racialized language in a kind of idealistic method of changing the reality by changing its name. While this has some therapeutic value, it cannot in and of itself uproot and dismantle the power relations and structures of production which are the inherent logic and grammar of a racialized theopolitics. Next, Carter will interrogate Foucault’s concept of biopower and biopolitics as a more material analysis than West offered.

West, it would seem, probes the emergence of a discourse of biblical interpretation and other intellectual productions which deployed elements of the new scientific vision, Cartesian philosophy of mastery, and the normative gaze of classical aesthetics. The discursive structures “circumscribe how people of African descent come to be situated in the modern imagination” (49). The shortcoming of West’s excellent work, according to Carter, is that it can provide explanation for the conditions of the possibility of the emergence of white supremacy, but it does not explain why white supremacy was the actual result. He implies a level of contingency, which he then fails to name; thus, a hint of inevitability or necessity hangs in the air. Foucault goes on to recognize the moment of anxiety over the racialized Jew in modern Europe which elicits a pseudotheological articulation of a notion of the white nation around which an entire hierarchical construction of race comes into being. The biopolitics of the nation appears in the dialectical relationship of decentralized individualism with centralized administration and surveillance, such that the people themselves police nationhood in their own racialized, individualized, modernized, pseudotheologized bodies.