Digifesto

July 2, 2018

“The Theory of Racial Formation”: notes, part 1 (Cha. 4, Omi and Winant, 2014)

Chapter 4 of Omi and Winant (2014) is “The Theory of Racial Formation”. It is where they lay out their theory of race and its formation, synthesizing and improving on theories of race as ethnicity, race as class, and race as nation that they consider earlier in the book.

This rhetorical strategy of presenting the historical development of multiple threads of prior theory before synthesizing them into something new is familiar to me from my work with Helen Nissenbaum on Contextual Integrity. CI is a theory of privacy that advances prior legal and social theories by teasing out their tensions. This seems to be a good way to advance theory through scholarship. It is interesting that the same method of theory building can work in multiple fields. My sense is that what’s going on is that there is an underlying logic to this process which in a less Anglophone world we might call “dialectical”. But I digress.

N.B. Sep. 17 2020 – These informal notes were part of the process of writing “Racial categories in machine learning”, with Bruce Haynes.

I have not finished Chapter 4 yet but I wanted to sketch out the outline of it before going into detail. That’s because what Omi and Winant are presenting a way of understanding the mechanisms behind the reproduction of race that are not simplistically “systemic” but rather break it down into discrete operations. This is a helpful contribution; even if the theory is not entirely accurate, its very specificity elevates the discourse.

So, in brief notes:

For Omi and Winant, race is a way of “making up people”; they attribute this phrase to Ian Hacking but do not develop Hacking’s definition. Their reference to a philosopher of science does situate them in a scholarly sense; it is nice that they seem to acknowledge an implicit hierarchy of theory that places philosophy at the foundation. This is correct.

Race-making is a form of othering, of having a group of people identify another group as outsiders. Othering is a basic and perhaps unavoidable human psychological function; their reference for this is powell and Menendian (Apparently, john a. powell being one of these people like danah boyd who decapitalizes their name.)

Race is of course a social construct that is neither a fixed and coherent category nor something that is “unreal”. That is, presumably, why we need a whole book on the dynamic mechanisms that form it. One reason why race is such a dynamic concept is because (a) it is a way of organizing inequality in society, (b) the people on “top” of the hierarchy implied by racial categories enforce/reproduce that category “downwards”, (c) the people on the “bottom” of the hierarchy implied by racial categories also enforce/reproduce a variation of those categories “upwards” as a form of resistance, and so (d) the state of the racial categories at any particular time is a temporary consequence of conflicting “elite” and “street” variations of it.

This presumes that race is fundamentally about inequality. Omi and Winant believe it is. In fact, they think racial categories are a template for all other social categories that are about inequality. This is what they mean by their claim that race is a master category. It’s “a frame used for organizing all manner of political thought”, particularly political thought about liberation struggles.

I’m not convinced by this point. They develop it with a long discussion of intersectionality that is also unconvincing to me. Historically, they point out that sometimes women’s movements have allied with black power movements, and sometimes they haven’t. They want the reader to think this is interesting; as a data scientist, I see randomness and lack of correlation. They make the poignant and true point that “perhaps at the core of intersectionality practice, as well as theory, is the ‘mixed race’ category. Well, how does it come about that people can be ‘mixed’?” They then drop the point with no further discussion.

[Edit: While Omi and Winant do address the issue of what it means to be ‘mixed race’ in more depth later in the book, their treatment of intersectionality remains for me difficult. Race is a system of political categorization; however, racial categories are hereditary in a way that sexual categories are not. That is an important difference in how the categories are formed and maintained, one that is glossed over in O&W’s treatment of the subject, as well as in popular discourse.]

Omi and Winant make an intriguing comment, “In legal theory, the sexual contract and racial contract have often been compared”. I don’t know what this is about but I want to know more.

This is all a kind of preamble to their presentation of theory. They start to provide some definitions:

racial formation: The sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed.
racialization: How phenomic-corporeal dimensions of bodies acquire meaning in social life.
racial projects: The co-constitutive ways that racial meanings are translated into social structures and become racially signified.
racism: A property of racial projects that Omi and Winant will discuss in Chapter 4.
racial politics: Ways that the politics (of a state?) can handle race, including racial despotism, racial democracy, and racial hegemony.

This is a useful breakdown. More detail in the next post.

Leave a comment

June 25, 2018

Race as Nation (on Omi and Winant, 2014)

Today the people I have personally interacted with are: a Russian immigrant, three black men, a Japanese-American woman, and a Jewish woman. I live in New York City and this is a typical day. But when I sign onto Twitter, I am flooded with messages suggesting that the United States is engaged in a political war over its racial destiny. I would gladly ignore these messages if I could, but there appears to be somebody with a lot of influence setting a media agenda on this.

So at last I got to Omi and Winant‘s chapter on “Nation” — on theories of race as nation. The few colleagues who expressed interest in these summaries of Omi and Winant were concerned that they would not tackle the relationship between race and colonialism; indeed they do tackle it in this chapter, though it comes perhaps surprisingly late in their analysis. Coming to this chapter, I had high hopes that these authors, whose scholarship has been very helpfully thorough on other aspects of race, would shed light on the connection between nation and race that would help shed light on the present political situation in the U.S. I have to say that I wound up being disappointed in their analysis, but that those disappointments were enlightening. Since this edition of their book was written in 2014 when their biggest target was “colorblindness”, the gaps in their analysis are telling precisely because they show how educated, informed imagination could not foresee today’s resurgence of white nationalism in the United States.

Having said that, Omi and Winant are not naive about white nationalism. On the contrary, they open their chapter with a long section on The White Nation, which is a phrase I can’t even type without cringing at. They paint a picture in broad strokes: yes, the United States has for most of its history explicitly been a nation of white people. This racial identity underwrote slavery, the conquest of land from Native Americans, and policies of immigration and naturalization and segregation. For much of its history, for most of its people, the national project of the United States was a racial project. So say Omi and Winant.

Then they also say (in 2014) that this sense of the nation as a white nation is breaking down. Much of their chapter is a treatment of “national insurgencies”, which have included such a wide variety of movements as Pan-Africanism, cultural insurgencies that promote ‘ethnic’ culture within the United States, and Communism. (They also make passing reference to feminism as comparable kind of national insurgency undermining the notion that the United States is a white male nation. While the suggestion is interesting, they do not develop it enough to be convincing, and instead the inclusion of gender into their history of racial nationalism comes off as a perfunctory nod to their progressive allies.)

Indeed, they open this chapter in a way that is quite uncharacteristic for them. They write in a completely different register: not historical and scholarly analysis, and but more overtly ideology-mythology. They pose the question (originally posed by du Bois) in personal and philosophical terms to the reader: whose nation is it? Is it yours? They do this quite brazenly, in a way the denies one the critical intervention of questioning what a nation really is, of dissecting it as an imaginary social form. It is troubling because it seems to be subtle abuse of the otherwise meticulously scholarly character of their work. They set of the question of national identity as a pitched battle over a binary, much as is being done today. It is troublingly done.

This Manichean painting of American destiny is perhaps excused because of the detail with which they have already discussed ethnicity and class at this point in the book. And it does set up their rather prodigious account of Pan-Africanism. But it puts them in the position of appearing to accept uncritically an intuitive notion of what a nation is even while pointing out how this intuitive idea gets challenged. Indeed, they only furnish one definition of a nation, and it is Joseph Stalin’s, from a 1908 pamphlet:

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up, manifested in a common culture. (Stalin, 1908)

So much for that.

Regarding colonialism, Omi and Winant are surprisingly active in their rejection of ‘colonialist’ explanations of race in the U.S. beyond the historical conditions. They write respectfully of Wallerstein’s world-system theory as contributing to a global understanding of race, but do not see it as illuminating the specific dynamics of race in the United States very much. Specifically, they bring up Bob Blauner’s Racial Oppression in America as a paradigmatic of the application of internal colonialism theory to the United States, then pick it apart and reject it. According to internal colonialism (roughly):

There’s a geography of spatial arrangement of population groups along racial line
There is a dynamic of cultural domination and resistance, organized on lines of racial antagonism
Theirs systems of exploitation and control organized along racial lines

Blauner took up internal colonialism theory explicitly in 1972 to contribute to ‘radical nationalist’ practice of the 60’s, admitting that it is more inspired by activists than sociologists. So we might suspect, with Omi and Winant, that his discussion of colonialism is more about crafting an exciting ideology than one that is descriptively accurate. For example, Blauner makes a distinction between “colonized and immigrant minorities”, where the “colonized” minorities are those whose participation in the United States project was forced (Africans and Latin Americans) while those (Europeans) who came voluntarily are “immigrants” and therefore qualitatively different. Omi and Winant take issue with this classification, as many European immigrants were themselves refugees of ethnic cleansing, while it leaves the status of Asian Americans very unclear. At best, ‘internal colonialism’ theory, as far as the U.S. is concerned, places emphasis on known history but does not add to it.

Omi and Winant frequently ascribe theorists of race agency in racial politics, as if the theories enable self-conceptions that enable movements. This may be professional self-aggrandizement. They also perhaps set up nationalist accounts of race weakly because they want to deliver the goods in their own theory of racial formation that appears in the next chapter. They see nation based theories as capturing something important:

In our view, the nation-based paradigm of race is an important component of our understanding of race: in highlighting “peoplehood,” collective identity, it “invents tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds. 1983) and “imagined community” (Anderson, 1998). Nation-based understandings of race provide affective identification: They promise a sense of ineffable connection within racially identified groups; they engage in “collective representation” (Durkheim 2014). The tropes of “soul,” of “folk,” of hermanos/hermanas unidos/unidas uphold Duboisian themes. They channel Marti’s hemispheric consciousness (Marti 1977 [1899]); and Vasconcelo’s ideas of la raza cosmica (1979, Stavans 2011). In communities and movements, in the arts and popular media, as well as universities and colleges (especially in ethnic studies) these frameworks of peoplehood play a vital part in maintaining a sense of racial solidarity, however uneven or partial.

Now, I don’t know most of the references in the above quotation. But one gets the sense that Omi and Winant believe strongly that race contains an affective identifciation component. This may be what they were appealing to in a performative or demonstrative way earlier in the chapter. While they must be on to something, it is strange that they have this as the main takeaway of the history of race and nationalism. It is especially unconvincing that their conclusion after studying the history of racial nationalism is that ethnic studies departments in universities are what racial solidarity is really about, because under their own account the creation of ethnic studies departments was an accomplishment of racial political organization, not the precursor to it.

Omi and Winant deal in only the most summary terms with the ways in which nationalism is part of the operation of a nation state. They see racial nationalism as a factor in slavery and colonialism, and also in Jim Crow segregation, but deal only loosely with whether and how the state benefited from this kind of nationalism. In other words, they have a theory of racial nationalism that is weak on political economy. Their only mention of integration in military service, for example, is the mention that service in the American Civil War was how many Irish Americans “became white”. Compare this with Fred Turner‘s account of how increased racial liberalization was part of the United States strategy to mobilize its own army against fascism.

In my view, Omi and Winant’s blind spot is their affective investment in their view of the United States as embroiled in perpetual racial conflict. While justified and largely information, it prevents them from seeing a wide range of different centrist views as anything but an extension of white nationalism. For example, they see white nationalism in nationalist celebrations of ‘the triumph of democracy’ on a Western model. There is of course a lot of truth in this, but also, as is abundantly clear today when now there appears to be a conflict between those who celebrate a multicultural democracy with civil liberties and those who prefer overt racial authoritarianism, there is something else going on that Omi and Winant miss.

My suspicion is this: in their haste to target “colorblind neoliberalism” as an extension of racism-as-usual, they have missed how in the past forty years or so, and especially in the past eight, such neoliberalism has itself been a national project. Nancy Fraser can argue that progressive neoliberalism has been hegemonic and rejected by right-wing populists. A brief look at the center left media will show how progressivism is at least as much of an affective identity in the United States as is whiteness, despite the fact that progressivism is not in and of itself a racial construct or “peoplehood”. Omi and Winant believed that colorblind neoliberalism would be supported by white nationalists because it was neoliberal. But now it has been rejected by white nationalist because it is colorblind. This is a difference that makes a difference.

Leave a comment

June 24, 2018

deep thoughts about Melania Trump’s jacket: it’s masterstroke trolling

I got into an actual argument with a real person about Melania Trump’s “I really don’t care. Do U?” jacket. I’m going to double down on it and write about it because I have the hot take nobody has been talking about.

I asked this person what they thought about Melania’s jacket, and the response was, “I don’t care what she wears. She wore a jacket to a plane; so what? Is she even worth paying attention to? She’s not an important person whose opinions matter. The media is too focused on something that doesn’t matter. Just leave her alone.”

To which I responded, “So, you agree with the message on the jacket. If Melania had said that out loud, you’d say, ‘yeah, I don’t care either.’ Isn’t that interesting?”

No, it wasn’t (to the person I spoke with). It was just annoying to be talking about it in the first place. Not interesting, nothing to see here.

Back it up and let’s make some assumptions:

FLOTUS thought at least as hard about what to wear that day than I do in the morning, and is a lot better at it than I am, because she is an experience professional at appearing.
Getting the mass media to fall over itself on a gossip item about the ideological implications of first lady fashion gets you a lot of clicks, followers, attention, etc. and that is the political currency of the time. It’s the attention economy, stupid.

FLOTUS got a lot of attention for wearing that jacket because of its ambiguity. The first-order ambiguity of whether it was a coded message playing into any preexisting political perspective was going to get attention, obviously. But the second-order ambiguity, the one that makes it actually clever, is its potential reference to the attention to the first order ambiguity. The jacket, in this second order frames, literally expresses apathy about any attention given to it and questions whether you care yourself. That’s a clever, cool concept for a jacket worn on, like, the street. As a viral social media play, it is even more clever.

It’s clever because with that second-order self-referentiality, everybody who hears about it (which might be everybody in the world, who knows) has to form an opinion about it, and the most sensible opinion about it, the one which you must ultimately concluded in order to preserve your sanity, is the original one expressed: “I don’t really care.” Clever.

What’s the point? First, I’m arguing that this is was deliberate self-referential virality of the same kind I used to give Weird Twitter a name. Having researched this subject before, I claim expertise and knowing-what-I’m-talking-about. This is a tactic one can use in social media to do something clever. Annoying, but clever.

Second, and maybe more profound: in the messed up social epistemology of our time, where any image or message fractally reverberates between thousands of echo chambers, there is hardly any ground for “social facts”, or matters of consensus about the social world. Such facts require not just accurate propositional content but also enough broad social awareness of them to be believed by a quorum of the broader population. The disintegration of social facts is, probably, very challenging for American self-conception as a democracy is part of our political crisis right now.

There aren’t a lot of ways to accomplish social facts today. But one way is to send an ambiguous or controversial message that sparks a viral media reaction whose inevitable self-examinations resolve onto the substance of the original message. The social fact becomes established as a fait accompli through everybody’s conversation about it before anybody knows what’s happened.

That’s what’s happened with this jacket: it spoke the truth. We can give FLOTUS credit for that. And truth is: do any of us really care about any of this? That’s maybe not an irrelevant question, however you answer it.

Leave a comment

June 19, 2018

Omi and Winant on economic theories of race

Speaking of economics and race, Chapter 2 of Omi and Winant (2014), titled “Class”, is about economic theories of race. These are my notes on it

Throughout this chapter, Omi and Winant seem preoccupied with whether and to what extent economic theories of race fall on the left, center, or right within the political spectrum. This is despite their admission that there is no absolute connection between the variety of theories and political orientation, only general tendencies. One presumes when reading it that they are allowing the reader to find themselves within that political alignment and filter their analysis accordingly. I will as much as possible leave out these cues, because my intention in writing these blog posts is to encourage the reader to make an independent, informed judgment based on the complexity the theories reveal, as opposed to just finding ideological cannon fodder. I claim this idealistic stance as my privilege as an obscure blogger with no real intention of ever being read.

N.B. Sep. 17 2020 – Ironically, I see now that these blog posts get a steady stream of traffic. For my formally published work on this topic, please see “Racial categories in machine learning”, coauthored with Bruce Haynes.

Omi and Winant devote this chapter to theories of race that attempt to more or less reduce the phenomenon of race to economic phenomena. They outline three varieties of class paradigms for race:

Market relations theories. These tend to presuppose some kind theory of market efficiency as an ideal.
Stratification theories. These are vaguely Weberian, based on classes as ‘systems of distribution’.
Product/labor based theories. These are Marxist theories about conflicts over social relations of production.

For market relations theories, markets are efficient, racial discrimination and inequality isn’t, and so the theory’s explicandum is what market problems are leading to the continuation of racial inequalities and discrimination. There are a few theories on the table:

Irrational prejudice. This theory says that people are racially prejudiced for some stubborn reason and so “limited and judicious state interventionism” is on the table. This was the theory of Chicago economist Gary Becker, who is not to be confused with the Chicago sociologist Howard Becker, whose intellectual contributions were totally different. Racial prejudice unnecessarily drives up labor costs and so eventually the smart money will become unprejudiced.
Monopolistic practices. The idea here is that society is structured in the interest of whites, who monopolize certain institutions and can collect rents from their control of resources. Jobs, union membership, favorably located housing, etc. are all tied up in this concept of race. Extra-market activity like violence is used to maintain these monopolies. This theory, Omi and Winant point out, is sympatico with white privilege theories, as well as nation-based analyses of race (cf. colonialism).
Disruptive state practices. This view sees class/race inequality as the result of state action of some kind. There’s a laissez-faire critique which argues that minimum wage and other labor laws, as well as affirmative action, entrench race and prevent the market from evening things out. Doing so would benefit both capital owners and people of color according to this theory. There’s a parallel neo-Marxist theory that says something similar, interestingly enough.

It must be noted that in the history of the United States, especially before the Civil Rights era, there absolutely was race-based state intervention on a massive scale and this was absolutely part of the social construction of race. So there hasn’t been a lot of time to test out the theory that market equilibrium without racialized state policies results in racial equality.

Omi and Winant begin to explicate their critique of “colorblind” theories in this chapter. They characterize “colorblind” theories as individualistic in principle, and opposed to the idea of “equality of result.” This is the familiar disparate treatment vs. disparate impact dichotomy from the interpretation of nondiscrimination law. I’m now concerned that this, which appears to be the crux of the problem of addressing contests over racial equality between the center and the left, will not be resolved even after O&W’s explication of it.

Stratification theory is about the distribution of resources, though understood in a broader sense than in a narrow market-based theory. Resources include social network ties, elite recruitment, and social mobility. This is the kind of theory of race an symbolic interactionist sociologist of class can get behind. Or a political scientist’s: the relationship between the elites and the masses, as well as the dynamics of authority systems, are all part of this theory, according to Omi and Winant. One gets the sense that of the class based theories, this nuanced and nonreductivist one is favored by the authors … except for the fascinating critique that these theories will position race vs. class as two dimensions of inequality, reifying them in their analysis, whereas “In experiential terms, of course, inequality is not differentiated by race or class.”

The phenomenon that there is a measurable difference in “life chances” between races in the United States is explored by two theorists to which O&W give ample credit: William J Wilson and Douglas Massey.

Wilson’s major work in 1978, The Declining Significance of Race, tells a long story of race after the Civil War and urbanization that sounds basically correct to me. It culminates with the observation that there are now elite and middle-class black people in the United States due to the uneven topology of reforms but that ‘the massive black “underclass” was relegated to permanent marginality’. He argued that race was no longer a significant linkage between these two classes, though Omi and Winant criticize this view, arguing that there is fragility to the middle-class status for blacks because of public sector job losses. His view that class divides have superseded racial divides is his most controversial claim and so perhaps what he is known best for. He advocated for a transracial alliance within the Democratic party to contest the ‘racial reaction’ to Civil Rights, which at this point was well underway with Nixon’s “southern strategy”. The political cleavages along lines of partisan racial alliance are familiar to us in the United States today. Perhaps little has changed.
He called for state policies to counteract class cleavages, such as day care services to low-income single mothers. These calls “went nowhere” because Democrats were unwilling to face Republican arguments against “giveaways” to “welfare queens”. Despite this, Omi and Winant believe that Wilson’s views converge with neoconservative views because he doesn’t favor public sector jobs as a solution to racial inequality; more recently, he’s become a “culture of poverty” theorist (because globalization reduces the need for black labor in the U.S.) and believes in race neutral policies to overcome urban poverty. The relationship between poverty and race is incidental to Wilson, which I suppose makes him ‘colorblind” in O&W’s analysis.

Massey’s work, which is also significantly reviewed in this chapter, deals with immigration and Latin@s. There’s a lot there, so I’ll cut to the critique of his recent book, Categorically Unequal (2008), in which Massey unites his theories of anti-black and anti-brown racism into a comprehensive theory of racial stratification based on ingrained, intrinsic, biological processes of prejudice. Naturally, to Omi and Winant, the view that there’s something biological going on is “problematic”. They (being quite mainstream, really) see this as tied to the implicit bias literature but think that there’s a big difference from implicit bias due to socialization vs. over permanent hindbrain perversity. This is apparently taken up again in their Chapter 4.

Omi and Winant’s final comment is that these stratification theories deny agency and can’t explain how “egalitarian or social justice-oriented transformations could ever occur, in the past, present, or future.” Which is, I suppose, bleak to the anti-racist activists Omi and Winant are implicitly aligned with. Which does raise the possibility that what O&W are really up to in advocating a hard line on the looser social construction of race is to keep the hope of possibility of egalitarian transformation alive. It had not occurred to me until just now that their sensitivity to the idea that implicit bias may be socially trained vs. being a more basic and inescapable part of psychology, a sensitivity which is mirrored elsewhere in society, is due to this concern for the possibility and hope for equality.

The last set of economic theories considered in this chapter are class-conflict theories, which are rooted in a Marxist conception of history as reducible to labor-production relations and therefore class conflict. There are two different kinds of Marxist theory of race. There are labor market segmentation theories, led by Michael Reich, a labor economist at Berkeley. According to this research, when the working class unifies across racial lines, it increases its bargaining power and so can get better wages in its negotiations with capital. So the capitalist in this theory may want to encourage racial political divisions even if they harbor no racial prejudices themselves. “Workers of the world unite!” is the message of these theories. An alternative view is split labor market theory, which argues that under economic pressure the white working class would rather throw other races under the bus than compete with them economically. Political mobilization for a racially homogenous, higher paid working class is then contested by both capitalists and lower paid minority workers.

Reflections

Omi and Winant respect the contributions of these theories but think that trying to reduce race to economic relations ultimately fails. This is especially true for the market theorists, who always wind up introducing race as an non-economic, exogenous variable to avoid inequalities in the market.

The stratification theories are perhaps more realistic and complex.

I’m most surprised at how the class-conflict based theories are reflected in what for me are the major lenses into the zeitgeist of contemporary U.S. politics. This may be because I’m very disproportionately surrounded by Marxist-influenced intellectuals. But it is hard to miss the narrative that the white working class has rejected the alliance between neoliberal capital and low-wage immigrant and minority labor. Indeed, it is arguably this latter alliance that Nancy Fraser has called neoliberalism. This conflict accords with the split labor market theory. Fraser and other hopeful socialist types argue that a triumph over identity differences is necessary to realize racial conflicts in the working class play into the hands of capitalists, not white workers. It is very odd that this ideological question is not more settled empirically. It may be that the whole framing is perniciously oversimplified, and that really you have to talk about things in a more nuanced way to get real headway.

Unless of course there isn’t any such real hope. This was an interesting part of the stratification theory: the explanation that included an absence of agency. I used to study lots and lots of philosophy, and in philosophy it’s a permissible form of argument to say, “This line of reasoning, if followed to its conclusion, leads to an appalling and untenable conclusion, one that could never be philosophically satisfying. For that reason, we reject it and consider a premise to be false.” In other words, in philosophy you are allowed to be motivated by the fact that a philosophical stance is life negating or self-defeating in some way. I wonder if that is true of sociology of race. I also wonder whether bleak conclusions are necessary even if you deny the agency of racial minorities in the United States to liberate themselves on their own steam. Now there’s globalization, and earlier patterns of race may well be altered by forces outside of it. This is another theme in contemporary political discourse.

Once again Omi and Winant have raised the specter of “colorblind” policies without directly critiquing them. The question seems to boil down to whether or not the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality can be mitigated better by removing those mechanisms that are explicitly racial or not. If part of the mechanism is irrational prejudice due to some hindbrain tick, then there may be grounds for a systematic correction of that tick. But that would require a scientific conclusion about the psychology of race that identifies a systematic error. If the error is rather interpreting an empirical inequality due to racialized policies as an essentialized difference, then that can be partially corrected by reducing the empirical inequality in fact.

It is in fact because I’m interested in what kinds of algorithms would be beneficial interventions in the process of racial formation that I’m reading Omi and Winant so closely in the first place.

Leave a comment

June 17, 2018

a few philosophical conclusions

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are a converged epistemic paradigm that is universally valid. Education in this field is socially prized because it is education in actual knowledge that is resilient to social and political change. These fields are constantly expanding their reach into domains that have resisted their fundamental principles in the past. That is because these principles really are used to design socially and psychologically active infrastructure that tests these principles. While this is socially uncomfortable and there’s plenty of resistance, that resistance is mostly futile.
Despite or even because of (1), phenomenology and methods based on it remain interesting. There are two reasons for this.
1. The first is that much of STEM rests on a phenomenological core, and this gives some of the ethos of objectivity around the field instability. There are interesting philosophical questions at the boundaries of STEM that have the possibility of flipping it on its head. These questions have to do with theory of probability, logic, causation, and complexity/emergence. There is a lot of work to be done here with increasingly urgent practical applications.
2. The second reason why phenomenology is important is that there is still a large human audience for knowledge and for pragmatic application in lived experience knowledge needs to be linked to phenomenology. The science of personal growth and transformation, as a science ready for consumption by people, is an ongoing field which may never be reconciled perfectly with the austere ontologies of STEM.
Contemporary social organizations depend on the rule of law. That law, as a practice centered around use of natural language, is strained under the new technologies of data collection and control, which are ultimately bound by physical logic, not rhetorical logic. This impedance mismatch is the source of much friction today and will be particularly challenging for legal regimes based on consensus and tradition such as those based on democracy and common law.
In terms of social philosophy, the moral challenge we are facing today is to devise a communicable, accurate account of how a diversity of bodies can and should cooperate despite their inequality. This is a harder problem than coming up with theory of morality wherein theoretical equals maintain their equality. One good place to start on this would be the theory of economics, and how economics proposes differently endowed actors can and should specialize and trade. Sadly, economics is a complex field that is largely left out of the discourse today. It is, perhaps, considered either too technocratic or too ideologically laden to take seriously. Nevertheless, we have to remember that economics was originally and may be again primarily a theory of the moral order; the fact that it is about the pragmatic matters of business and money, shunned by the cultural elite, does not make it any less significant a field of study in terms of its moral implications.

Leave a comment

June 16, 2018

fancier: scripts to help manage your Twitter account, in Python

My Twitter account has been a source of great entertainment, distraction, and abuse over the years. It is time that I brought it under control. I am too proud and too cheap to buy a professional grade Twitter account manager, and so I’ve begun developing a new suite of tools in Python that will perform the necessary tasks for me.

I’ve decided to name these tools fancier, because the art and science of breeding domestic pigeons is called pigeon fancying. Go figure.

The project is now available on GitHub, and of course I welcome any collaboration or feedback!

At the time of this writing, the project has only one feature: it searches through who you follow on Twitter, finds which accounts are both inactive in 90 days and don’t follow you back, and then unfollows them.

This is a common thing to try to do when grooming and/or professionalizing your Twitter account. I saw a script for this shared in a pastebin years ago, but couldn’t find it again. There are some on-line services that will help you do this, but they charge a fee to do it at scale. Ergo: the open source solution. Voila!

Leave a comment

June 12, 2018

bodies and liberal publics in the 20th century and today

I finally figured something out, philosophically, that has escaped me for a long time. I feel a little ashamed that it’s taken me so long to get there, since it’s something I’ve been told in one way or another many times before.

Here is the set up: liberalism is justified by universal equivalence between people. This is based in the Enlightenment idea that all people have something in common that makes them part of the same moral order. Recognizing this commonality is an accomplishment of reason and education. Whether this shows up in Habermasian discourse ethics, according to which people may not reason about politics from their personal individual situation, or in the Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’, in which moral precepts are intuitively defended under the presumption that one does not know who or where one will be, liberal ideals always require that people leave something out, something that is particular to them. What gets left out is people’s bodies–meaning both their physical characteristics and more broadly their place in lived history. Liberalism was in many ways a challenge to a moral order explicitly based on the body, one that took ancestry and heredity very seriously. So much a part of aristocratic regime was about birthright and, literally, “good breeding”. The bourgeois class, relatively self-made, used liberalism to level the moral playing field with the aristocrats.

The Enlightenment was followed by a period of severe theological and scientific racism that was obsessed with establishing differences between people based on their bodies. Institutions that were internally based on liberalism could then subjugate others, by creating an Other that was outside the moral order. Equivalently, sexism too.
Social Darwinism was a threat to liberalism because it threatened to bring back a much older notion of aristocracy. In WWII, the Nazis rallied behind such an ideology and were defeated in the West by a liberal alliance, which then established the liberal international order.

I’ve got to leave out the Cold War and Communism here for a minute, sorry.

Late modern challenges to the liberal ethos gained prominence in activist circles and the American academy during and following the Civil Rights Movement. These were and continue to be challenges because they were trying to bring bodies back into the conversation. The problem is that a rules-based order that is premised on the erasure of differences in bodies is going to be unable to deal with the political tensions that precisely do come from those bodily differences. Because the moral order of the rules was blind to those differences, the rules did not govern them. For many people, that’s an inadequate circumstance.

So here’s where things get murky for me. In recent years, you have had a tension between the liberal center and the progressive left. The progressive left reasserts the political importance of the body (“Black Lives Matter”), and assertions of liberal commonality (“All Lives Matter”) are first “pushed” to the right, but then bump into white supremacy, which is also a reassertion of the political importance of the body, on the far right. It’s worth mention Piketty, here, I think, because to some extent that also exposed how under liberal regimes the body has secretly been the organizing principle of wealth through the inheritance of private property.

So what has been undone is the sense, necessary for liberalism, that there is something that everybody has in common which is the basis for moral order. Now everybody is talking about their bodily differences.

That is on the one hand good because people do have bodily differences and those differences are definitely important. But it is bad because if everybody is questioning the moral order it’s hard to say that there really is one. We have today, I submit, a political nihilism crisis due to our inability to philosophically imagine a moral order that accounts for bodily difference.

This is about the Internet too!

Under liberalism, you had an idea that a public was a place people could come to agree on the rules. Some people thought that the Internet would become a gigantic public where everybody could get together and discuss the rules. Instead what happened was that the Internet became a place where everybody could discuss each other’s bodies. People with similar bodies could form counterpublics and realize their shared interests as body-classes. (This piece by David Weinberger critiquing the idea of an ‘echo chamber’ is inspiring.) Within these body-based counterpublics each form their own internal moral order whose purpose is to mobilize their body-interests against other kinds of bodies. I’m talking about both black lives matter and white supremacists here, radical feminists and MRA’s. They are all buffeting liberalism with their body interests.

I can’t say whether this is “good” or “bad” because the moral order is in flux. There is apparently no such thing as neutrality in a world of pervasive body agonism. That may be its finest criticism: body agonism is politically unstable. Body agonism leads to body anarchy.

I’ll conclude with two points. The first is that the Enlightenment view of people having something in common (their personhood, their rationality, etc.) which put them in the same moral order was an intellectual and institutional accomplishment. People do not naturally get outside themselves and put themselves in other people’s shoes; they have to be educated to do it. Perhaps there is a kernal of truth here about what moral education is that transcends liberal education. We have to ask whether today’s body agonism is an enlightened state relative to moral liberalism because it acknowledges a previously hidden descriptive reality of body difference and is no longer so naive, or if body agonism is a kind of ethical regress because it undoes moral education, reducing us to a more selfish state of nature, of body conflict, albeit in a world full of institutions based on something else entirely.

The second point is that there is an alternative to liberal order which appears to be alive and well in many places. This is an order that is not based on individual attitudes for legitimacy, but rather is more about the endurance of institutions for their own sake. I’m referring of course to authoritarianism. Without the pretense of individual equality, authoritarian regimes can focus on maintaining power on their own terms. Authoritarian regimes do not need to govern through moral order. U.S. foreign policy used to be based on the idea that such amoral governance would be shunned. But if body agonism has replaced the U.S. international moral order, we no longer have an ideology to export or enforce abroad.

Leave a comment

June 6, 2018

Notes on Omi and Winant, 2014, “Ethnicity”

I’m continuing to read Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States (2014). These are my notes on Chapter 1, “Ethnicity”.

There’s a long period during which the primary theory of race in the United States is a theological and/or “scientific” racism that maintains that different races are biologically different subspecies of humanity because some of them are the cursed descendants of some tribe mentioned in the Old Testament somewhere. In the 1800’s, there was a lot of pseudoscience involving skull measurements trying to back up a biblical literalism that rationalized, e.g., slavery. It was terrible.

Darwinism and improved statistical methods started changing all that, though these theological/”scientific” ideas about race were prominent in the United States until World War II. What took them out of the mainstream was the fact that the Nazis used biological racism to rationalize their evilness, and the U.S. fought them in a war. Jewish intellectuals in the United States in particular (and by now there were a lot of them) forcefully advocated for a different understanding of race based on ethnicity. This theory was dominant as a replacement for theories of scientific racism between WWII and the mid-60’s, when it lost its proponents on the left and morphed into a conservative ideology.

To understand why this happened, it’s important to point out how demographics were changing in the U.S. in the 20th century. The dominant group in the United States in the 1800’s were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs. Around 1870-1920, the U.S. started to get a lot more immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Ireland. These often economic refugees, though there were also people escaping religious persecution (Jews). Generally speaking these immigrants were not super welcome in the United States, but they came in at what may be thought of as a good time, as there was a lot of economic growth and opportunity for upward mobility in the coming century.

Partly because of this new wave of immigration, there was a lot of interest in different ethnic groups and whether or not they would assimilate in with the mainstream Anglo culture. American pragmatism, of the William James and Jown Dewey type, was an influential philosophical position in this whole scene. The early ethnicity theorists, who were part of the Chicago school of sociology that was pioneering grounded, qualitative sociological methods, were all pragmatists. Robert Park is a big figure here. All these guys apparently ripped off W.E.B. Du Bois, who was trained by William James and didn’t get enough credit because he was black.

Based on the observation of these European immigrants, the ethnicity theorists came to the conclusion that if you lower the structural barriers to participation in the economy, “ethnics” will assimilate to the mainstream culture (melt into the “melting pot”) and everything is fine. You can even tolerate some minor ethnic differences, resulting in the Italian-Americans, the Irish-Americans, and… the African-American. But that was a bigger leap for people.

What happened, as I’ve mentioned, is that scientific racism was discredited in the U.S. partly because it had to fight the Nazis and had so many Jewish intellectuals, who had been on the wrong end of scientific racism in Europe and who in the U.S. were eager to become “ethnics”. These became, in essence, the first “racial liberals”. At the time there was also a lot of displacement of African Americans who were migrating around the U.S. in search of economic opportunities. So in the post-war period ethnicity theorists optimistically proposed that race problems could be solved by treating all minority groups as if they were Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups. Reduce enough barriers and they would assimilate and/or exist in a comfortable equitable pluralism, they thought.

The radicalism of the Civil Rights movement broke the spell here, as racial minorities began to demand not just the kinds of liberties that European ethnics had taken advantage of, but also other changes to institutional racism and corrections to other racial injustices. The injustices persisted in part because racial differences are embodied differently than ethnic differences. This is an academic way of saying that the fact that (for example) black people often look different from white people matters for how society treats them. So treating race as a matter of voluntary cultural affiliation misses the point.

So ethnicity theory, which had been critical for dismantling scientific racism and opening the door for new policies on race, was ultimately rejected by the left. It was picked up by neoconservatives through their policies of “colorblindness”, which Omi and Winant describe in detail in the latter parts of their book.

There is a lot more detail in the chapter, which I found quite enlightening.

My main takeaways:

In today’s pitched media battles between “Enlightenment classical liberalism” and “postmodern identity politics”, we totally forget that a lot of American policy is based on American pragmatism, which is definitely neither an Enlightenment position nor postmodern. Everybody should shut up and read The Metaphysical Club.
There has been a social center, with views that are seen as center-left or center-right depending on the political winds, since WWII. The adoption of ethnicity theory into the center was a significant culture accomplishment with a specific history, however ultimately disappointing its legacy has been for anti-racist activists. Any resurgence of scientific racism is a definite backslide.
Omi and Winant are convincing about the limits of ethnicity theory in terms of: its dependence on economic “engines of mobility” that allow minorities to take part in economic growth, its failure to recognize the corporeal and ocular aspects of race, and its assumption that assimilation is going to be as appealing to minorities as it is to the white majority.
Their arguments about colorblind racism, which are at the end of their book, are going to be doing a lot of work and the value of the new edition of their book, for me at least, really depends on the strength of that theory.

Leave a comment

June 4, 2018

Notes on Racial Formation by Omi and Winant, 2014, Introduction

Beginning to read Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, Third Edition, 2014. These are notes on the introduction, which outlines the trajectory of their book. This introduction is available on Google Books.

Omi and Winant are sociologists of race and their aim is to provide a coherent theory of race and racism, particularly as a United States phenomenon, and then to tell a history of race in the United States. One of their contentions is that race is a social construct and therefore varies over time. This means, in principle, that racial categories are actionable, and much of their analysis is about how anti-racist and racial reaction movements have transformed the politics and construction of race over the course of U.S. history. On the other hand, much of their work points to the persistence of racial categories despite the categorical changes.

N.B. Sep. 17 2020 – These informal notes were part of the process of writing “Racial categories in machine learning”, with Bruce Haynes.

Since the Third Edition, in 2014, comes twenty years after the Second Edition, much of the new material in the book addresses specifically what they call colorblind racial hegemony. This is a response to the commentary and question around the significance of Barack Obama’s presidency for race in America. It is interesting reading this in 2018, as in just a few brief years it seems like things have changed significantly. It’s a nice test, then to ask to what extent their theory explains what happened next.

Here is, broadly speaking, what is going on in their book based on the introduction.

First, they discuss prior theories of race they can find in earlier scholarship. They acknowledge that these are interesting lenses but believe they are ultimately reductionist. They will advance their own theory of racial formation in contrast with these. In the background of this section but dismissed outright is the “scientific” racism and religious theories of race that were prevalent before World War II and were used to legitimize what Omi and Winant call racial domination (this has specific meaning for them). Alternative theories of race that Omi and Winant appear to see as constructive contributions to racial theory include:

Race as ethnicity. As an alternative to scientific racism, post WWII thinkers advanced the idea of racial categories as reducing to ethnic categories, which were more granular social units based on shared and to some extent voluntary culture. This conception of race could be used for conflicting political agendas, including both pluralism and assimilation.
Race as class. The theory attempted to us economic theories–including both Marxist and market-based analysis–to explain race. Omi and Winant think this–especially the Marxist theory–was a productive lens but ultimate a reductive one. Race cannot be subsumed to class.
Race as nationality. Race has been used as the basis for national projects, and is tied up with the idea of “peoplehood”. In colonial projects especially, race and nationality are used both to motivate subjugation of a foreign people, and is also used in resistance movements to resist conquest.

It is interesting that these theories of race are ambiguous in their political import. Omi and Winant do a good job of showing how multi-dimensional race really is. Ultimately they reject all these theories and propose their own, racial formation theory. I have not read their chapter on it yet, so all I know is that: (a) they don’t shy away from the elephant in the room, which is that there is a distinctively ‘ocular’ component to race–people look different from each other in ways that are hereditary and have been used for political purposes, (b) they maintain that despite this biological aspect of race, the social phenomenon of race is a social construct and primarily one of political projects and interpretations, and (c) race is formed by a combination of action both at the representational level (depicting people in one way or another) and at the institutional level, with the latter determining real resource allocation and the former providing a rationalization for it.

Complete grokking of the racial formation picture is difficult, perhaps. This may be why instead of having a mainstream understanding of racial formation theory, we get reductive and ideological concepts of race active in politics. The latter part of Omi and Winant’s book is their historical account of the “trajectory” of racial politics in the United States, which they see in terms of a pendulum between anti-racist action (with feminist, etc., allies) and “racial reaction”–right-wing movements that subvert the ideas used by the anti-racists and spin them around into a backlash.

Omi and Winant describe three stages of racial politics in United States history:

Racial domination. Slavery and Jim Crow before WWII, based on religious and (now discredited, pseudo-)scientific theories of racial difference.
Racial hegemony. (Nod to Gramsci) Post-WWII race relations as theories of race-as-ethnicity open up egalitarian ideals. Opens way for Civil Rights movement.
Colorblind racism. A phase where the official ideology denies the significance of race in society while institutions continue to reinforce racial differences in a pernicious way. Necessarily tied up with neoliberalism, in Omi and Winant’s view.

The question of why colorblind racism is a form of racism is a subtle one. Omi and Winant do address this question head on, and I am in particular looking forward to their articulation of the point. Their analysis was done during the Obama presidency, which did seem to move the needle on race in a way that we are still seeing the repercussions of today. I’m interested in comparing their analysis with that of Fraser and Gilman. There seem to be some productive alignments and tensions there.

Leave a comment

May 27, 2018

Notes on Pasquale, “Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem”, 2018

I’ve taken a close look at Frank Pasquale’s recent article, “Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem” in American Affairs. This is a topic that Pasquale has had his finger on the pulse of for a long time, and I think with this recent articulation he’s really on to something. It’s an area that’s a bit of an attractor state in tech policy thinking at the moment, and as I appear to be in that mix more than ever before, I wanted to take a minute to parse out Frank’s view of the state of the art.

Here’s the setup: In 1945, Hayek points out that the economy needs to be managed somehow, and that this is the main economic use of information/knowledge. Hayek sees the knowledge as distributed and coordination accomplished through the price mechanism. Today we have giant centralizing organizations like Google and Amazon mediating markets, and it’s possible that these have the kind of ‘central planning’ role that Hayek didn’t want. There is a status quo where these companies run things in an unregulated way. Pasquale, being a bit of a regulatory hawk, not unreasonably thinks this may be disappointing and traces out two different modes of regulatory action that could respond to the alleged tech company dominance.

He does this with a nice binary opposition between Jeffersonians, who want to break up the big companies into smaller ones, and Hamiltonians, who want to keep the companies big but regulate them as utilities. His choice of Proper Nouns is a little odd to me, since many of his Hamiltonians are socialists and that doesn’t sound very Hamiltonian to me, but whatever: what can you do, writing for Americans? This table sums up some of the contrasts. Where I’m introducing new components I’m putting in a question mark (?).

Jeffersonian	Hamiltonian
Classical competition	Schumpeterian competition
Open Markets Institute, Lina Khan	Big is Beautiful, Rob Atkinson, Evgeny Morozov
	Fully automated luxury communism
Regulatory capture (?)	Natural monopoly
Block mergers: unfair bargaining power	Encourage mergers: better service quality
Allow data flows to third parties to reduce market barriers	Security feudalism to prevent runaway data
	Regulate to increase market barriers
Absentee ownership reduces corporate responsibility	Many small companies, each unaccountable with little to lose, reduces corporate responsibility
Bargaining power of massive firms a problem	Lobbying power of massive firms a problem (?)
Exit	Voice
Monopoly reduces consumer choice	Centralized paternalistic AI is better than consumer choice
Monopoly abuses fixed by competition	Monopoly abuses fixed by regulation
Distrust complex, obscure corporate accountability	Distrust small companies and entrepreneurs
Platforms lower quality; killing competition	Platforms improve quality via data size, AI advances; economies of scale
Antitrust law	Public utility law
FTC	Federal Search Commission?
Libertarianism	Technocracy
Capitalism	Socialism
Smallholding entrepreneur is hero	Responsible regulator/executive is hero

There is a lot going on here, but I think the article does a good job of developing two sides of a dialectic about tech companies and their regulation that’s been emerging. These framings extend beyond the context of the article. A lot of blockchain proponents are Jeffersonian, and their opponents are Hamiltonian, in this schema.

I don’t have much to add at this point except for the observation that it’s very hard to judge the “natural” amount of industrial concentration in these areas in part because of the crudeness of the way we measure concentration. We easily pay attention to the top five or ten companies in a sector. But we do so by ignoring the hundred or thousand or more very small companies. It’s just incorrect to say that there is only one search engine or social network; it’s just that the size distribution for the many many search engines and social networks is very skewed, like a heavy tail or log normal distribution. There may be perfectly neutral, “complex systems” oriented explanations for this distribution that make it very robust even with a number of possible interventions.

If that’s true, there will always be many many small companies and a few market leaders in the tech sector. The small companies will benefit from Jeffersonian policies, and those invested in the market leaders will benefit (in some sense) from Hamiltonian policies. The question of which strategy to take then becomes a political matter: it depends on the self-interest of differently positioned people in the socio-economic matrix. Or, alternatively, there is no tension between pursuing both kinds of policy agenda, because they target different groups that will persist no matter hat regime is in place.

Leave a comment