by Carol Gray
On April 5, 2019, eighty students and faculty at the University of Connecticut participated in a discussion between University of Connecticut’s Fred Lee and Yale University’s Lisa Lowe about Lee’s recent book, Extraordinary Racial Politics: Four Events in the Informal Constitution of the United States. The University of Connecticut’s Department of Political Science, Institute of Asian/Asian-American Studies, and Borderlands: A Critical Graduate Symposium hosted the discussion.
Extraordinary Racial Politics analyzes the distinction and relationship between what Lee dubs “extraordinary racial politics” and “ordinary racial politics.” The former often appears in state crises and mass mobilizations, while the latter is often manifested in state routines and everyday life. More dynamically, extraordinary racial politics ruptures out of, yet also resets ordinary racial politics. The book explores this dynamic with reference to the Indian Removals of the 1830s, the Japanese internment during WWII, the post-war civil rights movement, and the movements for Black, Red and Asian-American power in the 1960s–1970s.
“Extraordinary Racial Politics” entrenching new norms
Lee insisted in the public discussion that extraordinary racial politics, while sometimes perilous, are also promising. He noted that liberal democrats, due to fears of totalitarianism, tend to reject all extraordinary racial politics as inherently violent and unstable. He explained, however, that ordinary racial politics may be as or more violent and that extraordinary racial politics may not be ephemeral. Rather, extraordinary racial politics can become incorporated into ordinary politics, entrenching new norms. Such was the case with the partial incorporation of the demands of the civil rights movement in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
On the question of peril, Lee noted that the exception from law often creates the space for the new norm, as was the case in the removal of the Cherokee by President Andrew Jackson. Jackson refused to implement the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which held, in relevant part, that “the Cherokee nation … is a distinct community occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.” In a possibly apocryphal anecdote, Jackson declared that “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Jackson effectively created a state of emergency surrounding the land-based conflict between southeastern Indians and southern states thereby entrenching the norm of Indian Removal against the sovereignty of Native peoples.
Acting in the role of discussant, Lowe pointed out that Lee’s book provides “a new way to conceptualize the possibilities of U.S. racial politics to bring social transformation. The Civil Rights and radical movements in the ’70s made demands for social change that have still not yet been fulfilled and could be thought of as ongoing and still unresolved.” She affirmed the relevance of Lee’s book in this perilous time of white nationalism, Muslim bans, and migrant detention. As “the current administration exhausts us daily with crises,” Lowe observed, “Extraordinary Racial Politics helps us to see that Trump is not a complete outlier to his predecessors; rather, this moment is a culmination of the historical contradictions of U.S. democracy differently manifested and normalized in the decades before.”
Lowe discussed how Extraordinary Racial Politics is illuminating not only for political theory, but also ethnic studies. She discussed how Lee’s book brings political theorists Carl Schmidt and Hannah Arendt into conversation with racial theorists Michael Omi, Howard Winant, and Charles Mills, while also providing a vehicle for rethinking European political philosophy. Lowe noted: “The extraordinary is embedded in the ordinary. The extraordinary is always trying to subsume the ordinary. I appreciate the idea of the refounding of the political through the extraordinary…”
Along these lines, Lee discussed how the civil rights movement demarcated a pre– and post–civil rights era. Prior to this event, white-monopolized citizenship made denials of black people’s rights and racial conflict more generally external to the polity. The civil rights movement, for Lee, effectively internalized contests over black citizenship and racial conflict more generally. In other words, it racially divided what had been a racially united (white) U.S. citizenry. Lowe noted that Lee’s book allows us to see historical moments as part of a series of dialectics, such that “the contemporary white nationalism in crisis is not just about this moment but goes back to the founding of the United States.” She described how the civil rights movement caused a “disruption of national polity” subverting the dominant paradigm.
The discussion progressed to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, another case in Lee’s book. Lowe described how the U.S. government’s perception of the emergency of the “yellow peril” resulted in the government’s attempted expulsion of “the disloyal Japanese American who could not be assimilated.” Contextualizing the Japanese internment within the framework of wars of the 21st empire, Lowe stated that
The relationship between extraordinary politics and war…is not limited to that moment of Japanese internment…Once the U.S. ascends to world power, the extraordinary is always erupting…and always being normalized.
Lowe queried, “Are the extraordinary and the ordinary moments in relation to each other?” Lee agreed that the two sides are co-equal, not separate. Lowe posed that if “the extraordinary and the ordinary are in constant interaction throughout history…perhaps it’s more dynamic than this schematization might imply?”
Relationship to Gramsci
Lowe asked if it would be helpful to place Lee’s ideas of extraordinary and ordinary politics in relation to Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony as something that is constantly being reformulated. She noted that not all politics occur in relation to the State. She elaborated:
Gramsci elaborated hegemony not as brute domination but as open, shifting, dynamic achievement of consent to rule that always includes dominant, residual and emergent features, suggesting that the length and complexity of crisis cannot be mechanically predicted, but instead develop over long historical periods, emphasizing historical forces. In this sense, Gramsci placed importance on the Subaltern, the not-yet-class-identified groups beneath the level of the State, whose force and formation can only be grasped with historical hindsight.
Lee agreed it is important to understand the extraordinary/ordinary dialectic in relation to Gramscian subalternity and hegemony.
Lowe observed how Michael Omi and Howard Winant offer a reformulation of Gramsci where race, class and gender become regions of hegemony … whereby [the 1950s to 1970s U.S. racial politics are] a rewriting of the rules of race. There was an equilibrium, then a disequilibrium, then another equilibrium, as U.S. racial politics moved between periods of relative crisis and relative stability.
She added, we should understand Gramsci, as Stuart Hall did, as rethinking Marxism in relation to race and colonialism. Gramsci was writing about the industrialized North and the agrarian South. Lee agreed with Stuart Hall’s claim that Gramsci was speaking about race, especially in the Italian context; however, he added that
The crisis of hegemony that Gramsci talks about is just one mode of extraordinary politics. The Japanese internment had to do with rival imperialism. It was not a case of the traditional elites Gramsci speaks about losing their moral and intellectual leadership…. Really, what cases like the internment do is take existing contradictions and rework them. The problems are never solved, but they are continuously reworked.
Multiple kinds of “extraordinary politics”
Lowe suggested, and Lee agreed, that there were multiple kinds of “extraordinary racial politics.” Drawing attention to Lee’s account of the post-civil rights era, Lowe said,
In the postwar period, you have many different kinds of demands for liberation and decolonization around the globe, and the United States ascends to global power by intervening—by covert proxy war, capital investment, and military basing—in these formerly colonized sites. I’m quarrelling a little with the idea that you used to have brute oppression, plunder and genocide and now you have a more normalized cooption of rights…Even in the U.S., insurgent violence is always present where there is counterinsurgent state violence.
Lee clarified, in response, that even in the most “hegemonic” modes of racial rule, “coercion is not eliminated from consensus.” The question for him concerned the relative calibration of consensus and coercion. The question of the extreme violence in, say, the pre–civil rights United States is “do you use force as a first resort without even bothering to pretend that there are equal rights based on equal citizenship?”
Moving into the post-civil rights era, Lee explored the rise of what he called cultural racism. He claimed that cultural ideas about race are more often associated with Asianness than blackness. Lee brought Frantz Fanon into the discussion, paraphrasing Fanon to the effect that “for the White, the Negro symbolizes the biological…the idea of black bodies versus Asian cultures [that] point to differential racialization.” He explained that “hegemony is always an uneven terrain and it affects different groups unequally.”
Q&A:
From President Trump to the ongoing nature of war
During the question and answer segment, one question led Lowe to connect the idea of colonial land grabs to the modern-day mortgage crisis. Lee agreed that what Karl Marx called “primitive accumulation” has not really ended. He added that “it is a centuries long project—the big ideas of colonialism define modernity.” Harkening back to land grabs under the Indian Removal Act, Lee discussed how that removal point treated Amerindians as “populations,” not as “nations.” Lee framed Indian Removal as a turning or inflection point within a centuries-long colonial project. He noted: “The extraordinary exists only within the context of the ordinary… [and that] the telos of extraordinary politics is to establish a new normal.”
Lowe and Lee largely agreed that Trumpism is “white nationalism in crisis” and “white Jacksonian democracy reloaded.” There are, for instance, parallels between Jackson’s and Trump’s attempts to consolidate executive power in the name of national emergencies—to the detriment of federal “checks-and-balances” as well as subaltern well-being. Lee added: “the post–civil rights order is over. Trumpism killed it.” According to Lee, the state of exception is increasingly the new normal of the Trump era, and recourse to law enforcement has proven to be an ineffective strategy of resistance.
An audience member posed the question: Are events such as the Japanese internment ever really over? For example, are reparations for the Japanese internment part of that event?
Lowe said that “just because there are reparations does not mean there is redress.” Lee agreed that though the State would like the public to believe the event is over, that is not the case. If one looks at war studies, there is always the question: Is the war really over? How many times are wars fought? They are fought on the battlefield but then again in history books, in memorializing, and other ways. Wars, like colonialism, are ongoing in nature. There are process-like structures such as anti-black segregation and Asiatic exclusion, yet also event-like structures such as the civil rights movement and the Japanese internment.
The discussion between Lowe and Lee generated many conversations following the talk. The role of “extraordinary racial politics” discussed in Lee’s book is a critical question today in the U.S. and beyond. Will future “extraordinary racial politics” liberate oppressed peoples or will they rearticulate colonial and racial inequities?
Carol Gray is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Connecticut and a candidate for certificates in Human Rights and in Race, Ethnicity and Politics. Formerly a Public Defender with the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Springfield, MA, Gray was a Fulbright Scholar from 2013–2014 in Montreal, Canada and a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar in Cairo from 2010–2011.
