Istry of higher education, science and innovations of the republic of uzbekistan andizhan state institute of foreign languages

1. Race consciousness in English literature

This course paper is, in part, a reaction to the emergence of critical race theory, the new scholarship about race being produced by people of color in American law schools. 2 As I see it, one of the historically significant features of the critical race theory movement is that, after nearly two decades of relative consensus about what a progressive race reform agenda encompasses, a new generation of scholars is in a sense following Malcolm X's advice, and reinterpreting the meaning of "this civil rights thing." [2.25]

The reappearance and refinement of race consciousness in many critical race theory works symbolizes the break with the dominant civil rights discourse. For example, Mari Matsuda calls for a new jurisprudence that would look "to the bottom," with the central idea that one's position in the social structure of race relations makes a qualitative difference in how one sees and experiences the world. Kimber Crenshaw argues that everyday institutional practices embody "white norms" that are camouflaged by a stance of cultural neutrality presented as "perspectivelessness."' Gerald Torres demonstrates how legal categories embody dominant cultural assumptions that mistranslate the inner reality of Native American communities and require cultural conformity as the price of legal recognition. And Richard Delgado more generally contends that race makes a substantial difference in how scholars approach legal topics; he emphasizes storytelling and narrative as elements of a distinctive voice employed by people of color.
The commitment to a race-conscious perspective by many critical race theorists is dramatic because explicit race consciousness has been considered taboo for at least fifteen years within mainstream American politics and for far longer within the particular conventions of law and legal scholarship. Instead, race has been understood through a set of beliefs-what I call "integrationist" ideology-that locates racial oppres-sion in the social structure of prejudice and stereotype based on skin color, and that identifies progress with the transcendence of a racial consciousness about the world. In 1964, when Malcolm X asserted that this conventional interpretation of civil rights excluded black nationalists, he could not have foreseen that nationalist activism would revitalize and transform the struggle against racial oppression in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to be relegated once more to the cultural margins and the desperate streets in the 1980s.
But Malcolm X did identify the basic racial compromise that the incorporation of the "the civil rights struggle" into mainstream American culture would eventually embody: Along with the suppression of white racism that was the widely celebrated aim of civil rights reform, the dominant conception of racial justice was framed to require that black nationalists be equated with white supremacists, and that race consciousness on the part of either whites or blacks be marginalized as beyond the good sense of enlightened American culture. When a new generation of scholars embraced race consciousness as a fundamental prism through which to organize social analysis in the latter half of the 1980s, a negative reaction from mainstream academics was predictable. That is, Randall Kennedy's criticism of the work of critical race theorists for being based on racial "stereotypes" and "status-based" standards7 is coherent from the vantage point of the reigning interpretation of racial justice. And it was the exclusionary borders of this ideology that Malcolm X identified.
In this Essay, I want to explore the ideological roots of this particular political moment-in which the repudiation of race consciousness defines conventional civil rights thinking-by contrasting integrationist and black nationalist images of racial justice, and by comparing the ways that white and black communities have understood race. My argument, in summary form, is that the boundaries of today's dominant rhetoric about race were set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the context of an intense cultural clash between black nationalists on one side, and integrationists (white and black) on the other. Current mainstream race reform discourse reflects the resolution of that conflict through a tacit, enlightened consensus that integrationism understood as the replacement of prejudice and discrimination with reason and neutrality-is the proper way to conceive of racial justice, and that the price of the national commitment to suppress white supremacists would be the rejection of race consciousness among African Americans.
To understand the dynamics that produced this particular cultural bargain, it is important to comprehend the different meaning that race consciousness historically represents for whites and blacks in America. Within the white community, the conflict over race traditionally has been structured around an opposition between white supremacists who supported segregation, and white liberals and progressives committed to integration and civil rights reform. To white liberals and progressives, looking through the prism of integrationist ideology, a nationalist conception of racial identity was understood to distinguish backward, ignorant whites from cosmopolitan, educated whites.
Whites who took race as central to their self-identity thereby expressed a commitment to racial supremacy, whereas whites who opposed racism understood that opposition to require the transcendence of racial identity in favor of integration and color-blindness. In other words, most white liberals and progressives, projecting themselves as the enlightened avant-garde of the white community, automatically associated race nationalism with the repressive history of white supremacy, and never developed either a consciousness or a political practice that comprehended racial identity and power as centrally formative factors in American social relations.
In contrast, within at least a faction of the African American community, advocates of black nationalism consistently have opposed an integrationist understanding of racial progress. Instead, black nationalists asserted a positive and liberating role for race consciousness, as a source of community, culture, and solidarity to build upon rather than transcend. They developed a thoroughgoing critique of integrationism as either inevitably, or at the very least historically, linked to assimilation.
Within the white community, the issue of race consciousness symbolically divided whites committed to racial justice from whites committed to racial domination. But within the black community, the issue of race consciousness historically divided those committed to norms of racial solidarity from two groups: first, from assimilationists who found white culture more attractive; and second from those who concluded that if the price of black racial identity was the continuation of white racial identity in its traditional, repressive form, then integration was preferable.
The conflict between nationalists and integrationists in the late 1960s and early 1970s represented a critical juncture in American race relations. At that time, black nationalism arguably had overtaken integrationism as the dominant ideology of racial liberation among African Americans, while virtually all liberal and progressive whites embraced a theory of integration as the ultimate definition of racial justice. Although there has been some refinement since this historical moment-particularly with the development of a national commitment to a limited form of "cultural pluralism" the basic boundaries of contemporary mainstream thinking about race were set in the early 1970s when a loose coalition of "moderate" African Americans joined with liberal and progressive whites to resist-and equate-black nationalists and white supremacists.
The reemergence of race consciousness among scholars of color should be an occasion for liberal and progressive whites to reevaluate our position concerning the racial compromise that mainstream visions of racial justice embody. I believe that the failure of the progressive and liberal white community to comprehend the possibility of a liberating rather than repressive meaning of race consciousness has distorted our understanding of the politics of race in the past and obscures the ways that we might contribute to a meaningful transformation of race relations in the future.
Specifically, deep-rooted assumptions of cultural universality and neutrality have removed from critical view the ways that American institutions reflect dominant racial and ethnic characteristics, with the consequence that race reform has proceeded on the basis of integration into "white" cultural practices-practices that many whites mistake as racially neutral. And even when a commitment to consider the possible ethnocentrism of institutional practices exists, the attempt to construct a racially neutral culture has commonly produced only bland institutional forms whose antiseptic attempts at universalism have ensured the alienation of anyone with any cultural identity at all.
In order to comprehend the historical frame within which contemporary race reform discourse operates, it is necessary to review the ideological and cultural dynamics that led to the installation of integrationism as the dominant and enlightened way to understand race, and to the rejection of black nationalism as an extremist and backward doctrine. Of course, this is a complex story; I want simply to describe this cultural development in broad outline form.
To that end, Part I summarizes the central analytics and assumptions of the integrationist worldview, roughly in the form that it was understood in the 1960s and 1970s. In the background of today's dominant discourse about race are the traces of profound cultural anxiety rooted in the broad-ranging critique that militant nationalists lodged against the assumptions of everyday life in American institutions.