“When it comes to racial theory, embracing a more complex notion of the color line means that we must start in a new place with a new set of assumptions. First, there never has been a white/black binary. Continuing to use this language means that we persist in stuffing a complex racial history into a very limited conceptual category and setting up a straw man that obscures more than it reveals. … While the categories of race may shift in response to changing political and economic conditions, the fundamental belief in race as a guiding principal for viewing segments of the American population remains remarkably hardy. … Rather than recasting this history of changing racial categories into the logical of linear progress, for example, viewing America as less racist than in the past because the Census recognizes more racial categories, the emergence of new racial identities and categories are better understood as part of an ongoing color adjustment about the meaning of race. Second, what we have in the United States is a racial hierarchy, with a dynamic color line used to make people toe the line. … Seemingly, it became easier to engage in polite discourse about whether ‘race’ is real or whether the ‘white/black binary’ suppresses African American individuality than to confront structures of white supremacy that enabled whites to abandon urban public schools and demonize Black kids in the process. … We must reorient the racial continuum from its current status as a benign horizontal line, where the talk of centers and margins, metropoles and colonies inadvertently recenters attention on the center. Instead, the color line may be more profitably thought of as a vertical measuring stick - with whites clustered on the top, Black people and native peoples clumped on the bottom, and all other groups arrayed in between. A vertical color line points to social hierarchy, challenges of upward social mobility, and the politics of slope that are provided by changing opportunity structures. … This leads to a third and final key point for developing racial theory, namely, how different individuals and groups now strive to position themselves within a changing mosaic of contemporary American society characterized by a shape-changing, vertical color line. The essential categories of white and black have shrunk, creating a much larger and seemingly elastic border between them. Focusing on the middle should not detract from the ends of the racial hierarchy - whites on top, hyper visible Blacks and invisible native peoples on the bottom, and everyone else jockeying for a place in between.” ~ Patricia Hill Collins, "On Intellectual Activism: Coloring Outside the Color Line"
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 20:59:42 +0000
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