John L. Jackson Jr. A Little Black Magic

John L. Jackson Jr.
A Little Black Magic
Social constructionism continues to rack up
rhetorical victories vis-à-vis contemporary iden-
tity politics and the encompassing culture wars.
Its heuristic power is undeniable, its foun-
dational presuppositions ubiquitous. This anti-
essentialist position serves as dogma, doxa, and
even hardwired habitus, despite the fact that
its social hegemony is not more than a couple
generations old. No matter, hoist the ﬂag and
cue the marching band, public displays of iden-
tiﬁcatory deconstructionism—speciﬁcally racial
deconstructions—are the order of the day. So
much so, in fact, that some recently retooled
versions of sociobiology avoid explicitly invoking
race at all, even and especially when arguing for
genetic explanations of group diﬀerences.
There was little overt reference to race in,
say, 1994’s controversial The Bell Curve, which
only made it all the more useful to unabashedly
hereditarian raciologists of the Arthur Jensen
and William Shockley persuasion. The Bell Curve
exempliﬁed a culturalization of race, an ethnici-
zation of race thinking, that clearly still trucked
in—more powerful for its Trojan-horsed subli-
mations—genetic notions of race in decidedly
nonracial idioms. An explicit invocation of race
The South Atlantic Quarterly 104:3, Summer 2005.
Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

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would have been far too predictable, too retro, too easily dismissed as racism
proper.
Even when The Bell Curve’s arguments get revamped and more explic-
itly reracialized for the twenty-ﬁrst century, these redemptively biological
formulations just defang themselves with perfunctory claims about racial
genetics’ ultimate irrelevance for public policy.1 Race is real, they argue, but
that really doesn’t matter. In an age of social constructionism, it seems, even
neo-eugenics must bow to its analytical status as lone hermeneutical super-
power. However, at the same time that genetics-based start-up companies
unequivocally champion the view that ‘‘race is a social construction’ on their
Web sites and in their glossy brochures, they simultaneously sell genetic
answers to laypeople’s questions about African origins and ancestors—a
racialized version of the proverbial cake, had and summarily eaten, too.
Clearly, there is something about the connection between race and aﬀect
that social constructionist challenges may not necessarily short-circuit—
or even address. The rhetorical avoidance of race does not automatically
buttress its antiessentialist cause. In fact, taking away race’s vocal chords,
the acoustic concreteness of its explicit bark, does not mean that one has
defused its bite. If anything, race becomes more compelling in silence,
when unspoken—as ‘ tactility and distraction’ more than explicit thematic,
taking advantage of what Michael Taussig calls ‘ a very diﬀerent apperceptive
mode, the type of ﬂitting and barely conscious peripheral vision perception
unleashed with great vigour by modern life.’ 2 When race and racism work
best, we don’t even think to talk about them; they cannot really be seen. We
noddingly eschew any and all public policy implications.
In an attempt to highlight race’s conspicuous falsehoods, some full-
ﬂedged deconstructionists argue that letting go of race as a salient social and
individual category is the precondition for ending racism in practice. Socio-
cultural constructions have real productive force, they say, a social power
that must be defused before racialized minorities can ever accept the glories
and privileges of full citizenship. Such hard versions of constructionism
work for the cultural Left and the cultural Right, for extremists and mod-
erates alike. In our social constructionist world, even the most unapolo-
getic racist can be found arguing that races don’t really exist. Here, one can
cite the likes of Leo Felton, New England’s famous ‘ black white suprema-
cist,’ a biracial love child of the 1960s who hid his black father’s existence
from fellow Nazi skinheads while committing antiblack hate crimes with
ravenous abandon. Felton refuses to reduce the whiteness he feels inside,

A Little Black Magic 395
the whiteness of his soul, to any narrowly biologized deﬁnition of black
identity predicated on America’s one-drop rule of hypodescent. Race is not
biology, he says. It is not about the body at all. To ground his case, Felton
uses the esoteric and Nazi-friendly work of Nietzschean Ulick Varange. ‘ We
attain now,’ Varange writes, ‘ to the grand formula for the 20th century out-
look on Race: Race is a horizontal diﬀerentiation of men. The materialism of
the 19th century, confusing race with anatomy, regarded Race as a verti-
cal diﬀerentiation of men.’ 3 Taking his cue from Varange’s 1948 formula-
tion, Felton disconnects racial identity from anatomy and uses that space
to fold his unbrown body into a debiologized notion of white privilege. Fel-
ton’s example indicates that divorcing race from genetic determinism does
not inevitably inoculate society from bigoted, racist oppression—even the
seemingly internalized and self-inﬂicted kind.
To appreciate just how denigrated and hollow race has truly become, one
need only recognize that electoral politicians seem to be the folks most
unselfconsciously and consistently invoking it these days, usually giving
lip service to its continued value with platitudes about mosaics and melt-
ing pots and patchwork quilts where every single color is vitally important,
particularly come election time. They have no patience for utopian theo-
ries of ‘‘planetary humanism.’ 4 Of course, that is only because politicians
are greedily pragmatic about such matters, hitching their rhetorical reins to
the most obvious thoroughbreds—even when constructionists might advise
them, counterintuitively, that the carts themselves really do all the actual
pulling.
Many scholars use the term postraciality to mark this antiessentialist and
hyperconstructionist moment, a term that privileges identiﬁcatory decon-
struction over and above any other heuristic project. All roads lead to the
dissolved racial subject, and even Gayatri Spivak has recanted her former
articulation of strategic forms of essentialist praxis. Racial Americana, I
would argue, is something like the ﬂipside to academia’s current postracial
zeitgeist—its orthogonal oﬀ-ramp, carrying us to a place where racial decon-
struction is less heuristic ﬁnish line than anxious starting block. It parses
race as one of the nation-state’s fundamental constitutive elements, inex-
tricably central to future understandings of how biopolitical, nanopolitical,
and necropolitical strategies constrain the hopes and dreams of national
citizenries. This is a biopolitics that ﬂags phenotype as ﬁnal arbiter of hier-
archical diﬀerence, categorizing and codifying bodies along a continuum of
recognizable somatic privilege.5 It means a nanopolitics mining the human

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John L. Jackson Jr.
genome for invisible racial solidities and causal absolutes, for submolecular
answers to visual social inequalities.6 Likewise, the necropolitical impulse
to control and determine life’s ultimate death, thereby consolidating claims
on social control and sovereignty, might help us to better explain death row’s
dark-hued tint.7 In each of these instances, race becomes a powerful and
necessary frame for thinking ‘ the body in pain,’ 8 both individual bodies and
the collective body politic.
Racial Americana, therefore, is skeptical of postraciality, cynical even,
and in this sense is explicitly in dialogue with the notion of a Pax Ameri-
cana, a phrase ambivalently marking/countermarking the country’s period
of ostensible peace after World War II—a peace belied by overt wars in
Korea and Vietnam, by covert military actions in Latin America, by struc-
tural violences against the struggling poor, and by ever impending nuclear
annihilation. Racial Americana, likewise, underscores academia’s current
phase of racial détente, an identiﬁcatory peace born of collective agree-
ments among scholars about the need to transcend racial essentialisms at
all costs, a high-ground response to Afrocentric excesses, white supremacist
machinations, and the subtly quotidian nuances of ‘‘inferential racism.’ 9
However, each one of these speciﬁc conﬁgurations (Afrocentrism, white
supremacy, and everyday, inadvertent raciology) mandates distinct analyti-
cal scaﬀolding for comprehension and transformation. By conﬂating these
very diﬀerent instantiations of racial ideology, an essentializing ethos can
remain safely ensconced within adamantly antiessentialist projects—politi-
cal projects most likely to falter at the nexus where an abstract antiessen-
tialism meets the particularities of local diﬀerence.
Americana itself is usually glossed as a way to invoke, even celebrate, the
folksy speciﬁcities of this country’s historical, geographical, and material
provincialisms: the Americanness of apple pie and small-town baseball,
of what Ishmael Reed lampoons as ‘ those jockey-dressed amulets on the
Southern Lawn of America’s consciousness.’ 10 This last example begins
to hint at race’s centrality to such quaint particularities, to the idiosyn-
crasies of a most ‘‘peculiar institution’ and its aftermath. Racial Ameri-
cana seeks to examine those aspects of Americanity that, like Reed’s amu-
lets, constitute American exceptionalism through the historical prism of
racial animus, aﬀect, and privilege. It is the Americana of everything
from Ray Charles’s soulful blues-strummed authenticities to Michael Jor-
dan’s tongue-extended slam-dunks (MJ, that bald-headed icon of post-
racial American desire), from segregated housing markets to ethnic grocery

A Little Black Magic 397
stores, from handmade Kwanzaa gift-giving to photographed black bodies
limply hung from southern trees. Racial Americana emphasizes the inextri-
cable linkages between race and nationhood, even and especially in a global-
izing context wherein many theorists are sounding the death knell for both
these kinds of ‘‘imagined communities.’ It focuses on the symbiotic rela-
tionship between race and gender, a relationship speciﬁcally carved from
the history of sexually vulnerable and exploited black bodies, the hazy and
chattel-slaved distance between ‘‘mama’s baby and papa’s maybe.’ 11
As much as we might try, every single day it gets more diﬃcult to escape
the truths of racial Americana, to escape its sordid history. The more we
squirm, the harder we ﬁght, the tighter our chains seem to become. They
are always with us, returning from repression at the very instant of their
supposed dissolution. An attempt to theorize race in the beginnings of a
new century might start with one of academia’s quintessential examples of
racial Americana: the habitual invocation of William Edward Burghardt Du
Bois, black son of the New England Berkshires and ﬁery racial conscience
for subsequent generations of Americans of all colors and classiﬁcations.
Du Bois is racial Americana personiﬁed, and we usually beckon Du Bois
by rote, without even a second thought—some kind of race-based Ror-
schach response. Like a scholastic reﬂex, the invocation is purely psycho-
muscular: a tapping on the racial knee leads to an almost involuntary exten-
sion of the Du Boisian leg. It has all become second nature.This is not meant
to disparage Du Bois—or those scholars who study his foundational work
on race and racism. Du Bois is just a handy, evocative, and overdetermined
example of the commonsensicalities that deﬁne racial Americana today: its
taken-for-grantedness, its prefabbed architectonic footprints. And this is
precisely the subject these special-issue contributors engage—an attempt
to extend Du Boisian analysis into the strictures of late capitalism’s newest
millennium, into its own inevitably exhausted collapse.
If Du Bois proved all too easily prophetic about the twentieth century and
its colored lines, the beginnings of this newest century have spawned diver-
gent pronouncements about the potential tomorrows of race relations and
racial discourse in American society. Clearly, the Jim Crowed categories of
black victims and white victimizers hardly seem up to the task of wring-
ing complete social sense out of a nation-state where the highest-ranking
African American judge is consistently hostile to any and all discussions of
racial community; where the inﬂux of workers from South America, Cen-
tral America, and the Caribbean can be said to ‘ brown’ every single mem-

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John L. Jackson Jr.
ber of the national citizenry; where the second conservative real-life Bush
presidency boasts a much more racially diverse staﬀ than a hyperliberal
progressive Bartlett presidency depicted on network television’s The West
Wing; where Chinatowns fear the threat of gentriﬁcation just as adamantly
as Harlems do; and where (thanks to a vocal multiracial movement) census
taxonomies change faster than the tampered-with stock prices of Fortune
500 companies. But what kind of racial theorizing helps us to understand
the diﬀerences within similarity that cloud our analytical engagements with
the everyday realities and surrealities of racial reasoning? More than ever,
we need to create new ways of understanding the social facts that underpin
race (as belief system, as common sense, as pseudopatriotism, as interper-
sonal shortcut, as biological mythmaking) and what those underpinnings
forewarn about the possible futures of social diﬀerence in the United States.
In this volume, contributors have been challenged to push beyond Du
Bois, not because we have exhausted useful readings of his powerful prose,
which we surely have not, but rather because he haunts us still, has never
gone away: the perpetually chanted incantation that always already grounds
authoritative claims about race making, claims that provide itineraries for
portions of the social journey yet to come. But what does that future entail?
Where do we go from here? And how much do we need the conjuring of
Du Bois’s ghost to get us there?
What might be most telling about this Du Bois–inﬂected charge, how-
ever, is that most of the contributors took the mandate so seriously that they
moved beyond Du Bois altogether, moved beyond his very invocation. For
many of the authors in this volume—Tess Chakkalakal on African American
anthologies, Nichole Rustin on Mary Lou Williams’s musical masculinities,
Donald Robotham on cosmopolitan utopianism—there is nary a mention
of this canonical ﬁgure. Certainly not in the ﬁction of Brackette Williams or
the poetic manifesto of Elizabeth Alexander. Most of the scholars oﬀer no
direct invocation of Du Bois at all, which is less dismissal than measured
nonfetishization. For there are far more fetishes to be summoned in this
land of racial Americana, much more than simple Du Boisian rearticula-
tion, and these scholars are determined to unmask such alternative incar-
nations: popularized recollections of the transatlantic slave trade; culture’s
debt to cloaked assumptions about race; Derrida’s signiﬁcance for discus-
sions of Tupac Shakur and everyday racism; September 11’s role in revising
the character of contemporary cross-racial coalitions. All of these moves—
from contributors who deﬁne themselves as anthropologists, sociologists,

A Little Black Magic 399
literary theorists, performance studies scholars, linguists, novelists, poets,
and visual artists—bespeak an interdisciplinary ethos organized around the
prospect of transcending Du Bois so as to dwell in the immanence of racial
irreducibility, an irreducibility tethered less to biological determinism than
to an adamant refusal of make-believe transcendence, of a priori racial tran-
scendentalism.
Not inconsequentially, the genre diﬀerences between and among these
entries are another rather signiﬁcant part of this story. The volume includes
ethnographic ﬁction, memoir, poetry, art, and autobiography, not to men-
tion both academic and popular essays. Indeed, racial Americana doesn’t
just allow for such generic eclecticisms; it demands them. Anything else
would risk losing sight of this mobile and protean category, artiﬁcially box-
ing it up into a singularly impoverished presentational form.
The scholars in this volume highlight several important attributes of
racial Americana. For one, they refuse a certain localization of social analy-
sis. Racial Americana is about so much more than American exceptional-
ism, and it is comprehensible only within a larger global context of deterri-
torialized identities and transnational ﬂows. With invocations of slave ships
and imperialist unilateralisms, of Haitian foremothers and internation-
ally circulating Norton readers, these scholars demand that we understand
American race relations within a decidedly international framework. To
think racial Americana is to think about racial formations that circulate all
over the world—even when their details morph and mutate with every bor-
der crossing.12
Moreover, this is no zero-sum game, where race’s centrality is predicated
on concomitant marginalizations of class, sexuality, religion, nationality,
and so on. We are not talking about some inﬂexible notion of racial reason-
ing that would imagine gender to be static and utterly beside the intellec-
tual point. Racial Americana demands a blackness that is gender-conscious,
variously contextualized, and willing to view culture as an utterly political
and politicized site, but it also recognizes the dangers of playing with racial
ﬁre in the ﬁrst place—its burns that never vanish, its quick-paced volatilities
and spontaneous conﬂagrations, its cannibalistic propensity to consume
everything in its path.
Recognizing the hazards of this discursive landscape, Racial Americana’s
contributors use everything at their disposal—self-reﬂexivity, popular cul-
ture, feminism, political economy, psychoanalysis, and more—to imagine
race as still decidedly alive and well. Not in a lazy and disingenuously genetic

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John L. Jackson Jr.
sense, but in a way that admits our inability to fully outrun this monstrous
creation. In fact, maybe this monster isn’t even alive at all, not really, not
in the way we might think. Instead, Racial Americana imagines the reali-
ties of race as much more like the walking dead, active but hollowed out,
human and thinglike at one and the same time. How else do we comprehend
a schizophrenic race that simultaneously disavows biology and searches
for nanopolitical anchorings? One that eschews racial language to argue an
even more absolutist and essentialist case?
No, race is not alive, not anymore. We’ve killed it, deconstructed it to
death, social-constructionized it out of fully animate existence. But it is
hardly that easy. Instead, our beast has risen from the dead and haunts our
every waking hour. It is the bogeyman in our collective social closet, make-
believe but all the more frightening for its irreality, its ghostly intangibility.
We can’t kill racial reasoning with human genomes or social construction-
ism because, in some very fundamental ways, we killed race long ago,13 and
its death is part of what plagues us today, keeps us all up at night. We can’t
ﬁnd the corpse, and there still seem to be sightings everywhere—of both
its waking life and its strangely uncanny demise.
What we have now, what Racial Americana highlights, is a zombiﬁed
notion of race, one that we constantly put to work, much like Zora Neale
Hurston describes the matter in her performative ethnography of Haitian
voodoo.14 Zombies are occupational slaves, she says, and they do all the
labor we ourselves would never want to undertake. These walking dead
are not just commodity fetishes (in the Marxian sense) but a commodiﬁed
form of death itself, slaving away for the masters who fear their very own
Frankensteinian ﬁends, masters who would feebly wish their creations oﬀ
into illusory oblivion—that is, had they not already grown overly dependent
on them for some much-needed surplus value.
The task, then, is not to ﬁnd out why and how race’s telltale heart con-
tinues to beat. That may already be conceding far too much. Instead, racial
Americana might trade in deconstruction for exorcism, for an analytic of the
séance, a starting point that imagines the dead to have agency—even if only
as the sacred sacriﬁces we make to the gods of collective social reproduction.
There is an interiority to the thingness of the corpse, an animation still, and
wrestling with the realities of race in a self-consciously post–Du Boisian and
post-postracial moment entails taking that internality seriously. It means
talking with the dead, channeling them, and not sorely underestimating
their social eﬀectivity. These dead walk, talk, struggle, and strain. In so

A Little Black Magic 401
doing, they also chain us to the scene of our past crimes. If we’ve killed race,
yet it still moves, real analysis might take more than social deconstruction—
the analytical equivalent of feebly petitioning the dead corpse that chokes us
with an incredulous last-breath protest: ‘ But you’re dead. You’re supposed
to be dead. You’re not real. This can’t be re—ugh.’’
To escape the clutches of our own cultural creations, we need new in-
cantations, new charms and southern amulets, new spells for countering
the powerful magics of pseudoscience and social constructionism. Racial
Americana is a small attempt to create this alternative magic, and the pieces
in this volume represent various paths along that variegated and mysti-
cal roadway, alternative tactics for breaking death’s ironclad choke hold.
This counterspell will demand all the writerly weapons at our disposal—
poetry, ﬁction, collage, memoir, essay, research report, philosophical trea-
tise, and even the deeply felt anecdote—to cobble together a rendering of
place, power, and history that can take race seriously without accepting it
at face value.
Fine, race is not real, but that only makes it more powerful, more diﬃcult
to deny. Therefore, our critical goal is not simply to expose race’s enabling
ﬁctions; we must also ﬁnd ways to rewrite them—with new plot twists and
heroes and dramatic narrative cliﬀhangers. It is not enough to cry ‘ ﬁction’
in a crowded classroom, not if the ﬁction in question still resonates for stu-
dents as profoundly true-to-life. Our task is a bit more performative than
that. It entails teasing out ﬁction’s productive force, ﬁnding where its power
lies, and determining what keeps bringing our dead things back to palpable
life. Racial Americana oﬀers a group of social critics and scholars trying
to rethink race while unthinking it in the selfsame instant. That is a spe-
cial kind of magic indeed—contradictory, paradoxical, self-deconstructed.
Only in America! But this is a racial America that’s all around the world,
an imperialist zombie that might just be circulating the kernels of its own
global undoing with every new escape from its coﬃn.
Notes
Three groups at Duke University provided ﬁnancial support for the four-color printing in
this issue: the Department of Cultural Anthropology, the Program in African and African
American Studies, and the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International
Studies. We gratefully acknowledge their generosity.
1 I am thinking of Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, Race: The Reality of Human Diﬀerences
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004).

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2 Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 145.
3 Ulick Varange, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (Sausalito, CA: Noontide,
1948), 300.
4 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 327.
5 For a discussion of Foucauldian biopolitics and its links to questions of sovereignty and
the nation-state, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Also, for a speciﬁc look at the nanopolitics
of race, see Gilroy, Against Race. For an argument speciﬁcally organized around biopoli-
tics’ ties to state racisms, see Michel Foucault, ‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
6 For a discussion of biopolitics that marks time with the nanopolitical, see Adriana Pe-
tryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2002).
7 See Achille Mbembe, ‘ Necropolitics,’ Public Culture 15.1 (2003).
8 See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985).
9 See Stuart Hall, ‘ The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,’ in The Media
Reader, ed. M. Alvarado and J. Thompson (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 532.
10 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 216.
11 See Hortense Spillers, ‘ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’ Dia-
critics 17.2 (1987): 64–81.
12 See Kamari Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, Globalization and Race: Transformations in
the Cultural Production of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
13 Here, I am thinking of the long line of antiessentialist race work, from the older eﬀorts
of people like Frederick Douglass and Franz Boas to the recent research by Stephen Jay
Gould and Richard Lewontin—as well as more recent scientiﬁc ﬁndings by Ning Yu and
Alan Templeton.
14 Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Perennial Library, 1990).