Page 52 - Culture Society and Economy

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GILROY: NEITHER BLACK NOR ATLANTIC

Gilroy clearly conceives of race as an ideological-cultural phenomenon – a
‘cultural construction’ not constituted by contemporary material forces.
Racism exists as an ideology without any apparent contemporary material
base. Racism is more a ‘culture’ than an ideology. This culture is modi-
fied by historical circumstances but the phenomenon which it references
is not constituted by contemporary economic and political forces and
interests. Past bases of racism (slavery, colonialism) were material. Presently,
however, racism is cultural: ‘We must locate racist and anti-racist ideology
as well as the struggle for black liberation in a perspective on culture as
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a terrain of class conflicts.’ Gilroy wrote:

We are fully aware that the ideological status of the concept ‘race’ qualifies
its analytic use. It is precisely this meaninglessness which persistently
refers us to the construction, mobilization and pertinence of different forms
of racist ideology and structuration in specific historical circumstances. We
must examine the role of these ideologies in the complex articulation of
classes in a social formation, and strive to discover the conditions of exis-
tence which permit the construction of ‘black’ people in politics, ideology
and economic life. Thus there can be no general theory of ‘race’ or ‘race
relations situations’, only the historical resonance of racist ideologies and
a specific ideological struggle by means of which real structural phenomena
are misrecognized and distorted by the prisms of ‘race’. 9

Racism thus arises subjectively, is the result of an ‘error’ on a grand
historical-cultural scale. Clearly this is a purely constructivist theory of
racism. For it implies that there is no objective basis either for a sense of
race or for racism. From the point of view of the oppressed black popula-
tion, it denies that there are significant distinctive characteristics among
black people other than what has been imposed on them from outside by
racists. Therefore, there is no need to attempt to study how such a sense
may have developed, what such distinctive characteristics may be and
how they were originated by the creative efforts of black people them-
selves, often but not always in opposition to an externally imposed racism.
There is no need to analyze how these characteristics may have developed
and changed over time and what were the economic, political and ideo-
logical forces which shaped the black population and were in turn shaped
by them. At the same time, from the point of view of racists and racism,
the implication is that such an outlook arises simply out of ‘prejudice’. In
this sense, blackness (and whiteness for that matter) is substance-less –
empty signs with no ‘there’ there, to recall the semiotic formula. White
people are people who happen to be white; black people, people who
happen to be black. This argument is applied not only to race but also to

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