Intermission.

The Impossibility of Race

We are told it is the era of the post-Race; an era evincing the tying off of another antagonistic thread; a time, moreover, for the Nation to reclaim its ethical destiny, casting the blight of the Bush regime into the same grand burial plot of Richard Nixon and other exceptional imposters of national spirit; an era finally of the return of importance, of the central issues of economic stability and personal wealth, to John Stuart Mill and Horatio Alger, of happiness maximization and the adage that hard work makes us free.

Though convincing as this narrative may seem, the Thersites in many of us is hampered by the slightest sense of intuitive unease. Despite the repetition of Act 1, Scene 1, Race is exploding.

It is exploding Everywhere for some, Nowhere for others.

For the believers of Everywhere, racism is not simply felt. It is a suffocatingly ubiquitous assault on all our senses. For our memory, the countless Obama caricatures, Freudian images recalling the outrageously hateful spirit of 19th Century Punch. For our sense of history, Obama, the NAACP, and a segregated Philadelphia swimming pool. For our entertainment, the endless creation of black criminals on the evening news. For our sense of geography, the mad races of the Sudan and Afghanistan killing each other over abstractions or the chance to rule completely.

For the asserters of Nowhere, there is no sense. The persistence of such things is simply a vestige of a dead past, the death rattle of a historic time made null by the repetition of our very first Act. For them, the real problem lies in the remonstrations of every little Thersites, every agitator, every agonistic madman finding pleasure in archaeology, in the digging up of the dead past, in the disturbance of our suburban tranquility.

It is here where we must return to our scene above. Race, in this sense antagonism, is only found in two places - one, in the direct scenes of violence where our Hero viciously smites his prey and two, in the recurrent shrieks and gasps of the dead and dying.

The direct violence – the slavery and brutality, the transformation of trees with human limbs and strange fruit, sharecropping and the feudal face of early Southern capitalism, economic discrimination - has come and gone from the American stage. For the asserters of Nowhere, this going was reached through agreement like democracy itself. While signed in blood on the floor of some Appomattox replica, the settlement was seemingly an equal agreement between two former foes. For them it is America who is the wisest. During the Civil War, He fought for his soul and the soul of those He devoured. In the middle half of the 20th century, his courts of justice and his president’s acts made the move for desegregation. Now in his final move, his citizens have voted in droves for a man of mixed blood.

But this score has not been settled simply from above. The vanquished too have agreed, choosing America as their adopted Father and heeding his belief in the value of work. For the Nowheremen, there is no need to revisit this scene

It is the Everywheremen that keep persisting. To them, the indirect violence, the shrieks and gasps of the dead and dying still lay un dealt with, like the heart ever pumping in Poe’s rotten walls. It is the chorus who is crazy, deaf, dumb, and blind. At this the believers in Everywhere grow increasingly frustrated. But the more they flail about, the more insane to the chorus they appear. It is they who are treated as the problem, not the problem itself.

It is through this process that Race becomes impossible.