Quantification of Race and Racism

I found Annie Cheng's analysis of the danger or fragility of constructive theory in racism to be a sound articulation of a point that we've been bringing up since the first class – the problem created by the need to define and explain racism in order to extricate it from society as an act which itself has the possibility of reifying racist tendencies and assumptions: “The path connecting injury to pity and then contempt can be very brief” (14) The need to define blackness, culturally, has perhaps resulted in a more tenacious compartmentalization than otherwise would have been. This is something we discussed in a recent class, when Sam pointed out the absurdity of the expectation of “black” culture, or the “typical” black individual. It seemed to me then that this homogenization was a direct by-product of the historical need to construct a single unified political body of African Americans, in the name of enacting potent campaigns for civil rights.

But, as Cheng suggests, the construction of a single identity or set of identities can be explained as springing forth, much earlier, from the vast complex stew of American melancholy and guilt, of the need to 'other' black slaves in order to cope with the dissonance of the founding principles of the country, with its foundation on unequal labor: “America is founded on the very ideals of freedom and liberty whose betrayals have been repeatedly covered over.” (10) And amidst all of this is the somewhat unsettling question of how to “quantify” the damage done by racism, or the suffering caused by those subject to it – a strangely scientific notion amidst an entirely humanist struggle.