Author: The FAR Platform

Before subsiding in the 1960s, lynching at the hands of white people in the United States would claim the lives of several thousand African Americans.

I became interested in this subject in the 1990s while writing my dissertation, a two-volume study of the race, class, and punishment in American history. After graduate school, I worked with the Tuskegee archives to produce a machine-readable file of the lynching records (which the archivist told me had never been done, which surprised me) and published two academic articles on the subject, one using the Tuskegee data. The first article, appearing in the pages of the Journal of Black Studies in May 2004, was a review essay upon which the present blog entry leans heavy (I am not going to quote myself, as these are my words). The second was an empirical study of lynching and execution in the United States, appearing in Crime, Law, & Social Change in 2006. In that article I challenged the notion that lynching was “self-help” in the underdeveloped southern United States.

My work on this in the opening decade of the twenty-first century was inspired by two publications on lynching that compel Americans to revisit this peculiar form of collective murder and ponder its significance for the sociological and moral understanding of racial violence. The first of these publications is a disturbing collection of lynching photographs by James Allen and associates, Without Sanctuary, published in 2000. The impact of this documentary is visceral. Perhaps more disturbing than the torn and burned bodies of the victims is the countenance on the perpetrators’ faces. Their collective visage is haunting. When I received my copy, in my final year of graduate school (in 2000), I retreated to the only room in my tiny apartment that had a lock on the door—the bathroom—for fear my young son would ask me what I was looking at. The book sickened me. I hid the book away and did not look at it for a long time.

The second publication, Philip Dray’s 2002 At the Hands of Persons Unknown, is a comprehensive accounting of the history of lynching in America. There are no pictures. Yet, the story Dray tells is no less unsettling: a tale of ordinary Americans perpetrating, in ritualized installments, the mass murder of other Americans because they were of a different race. The title of Dray’s book is taken from the typical coroner’s verdict concerning the cause of death in a lynching. This verdict is apt, according to Dray, because “no persons had committed a crime.” The crime was instead “an expression of the community’s will.”

To be sure, the decisions and deeds of individuals in collective action express common sentiment. Yet, the decision to participate in collective action—or collective inaction—is made by individuals. Individuals are responsible for the consequence of their actions. The juxtaposition of the images in Without Sanctuary and Dray’s choice of a book title raised basic albeit unacknowledged problems with the history of racial violence in America. Since the individuals in those frightful photographs are not “persons unknown,” I wondered, why have they remained unnamed for all these years? So I started writing my thoughts about the role of agency and responsibility in explanation. What you will read here are my conclusions about that matter.

* * *

While Without Sanctuary and Persons Unknown raise questions about motive and responsibility, most studies of lynching have pursued different questions, seeking explanation in the phenomenon’s statistical variation in conjunction with macrosocial patterns. These were the works I encountered while writing my dissertation chapter on this period. Researchers focus on demographics, for example the proportion of blacks relative to whites. The crucial pieces: Jay Corzine, James Creech, and Lin Corzine’s “Black Concentration and Lynching in the South: Testing Blalock’s Power-Threat Hypothesis” (Social Forces, 1983) and E. M. Beck, James L. Massey, and Stewart E. Tolnay’s “The Gallows, The Mob, The Vote: Lethal Sanctioning of Blacks in North Carolina and Georgia, 1882-1930,” (Law and Society Review, 1989). The logic of this line of argument is indebted to Hubert Blalock and Peter M. Blau, for example Blalock’s Towards a Theory of Minority Group Relations (1967), and Blau’s Inequality and Heterogeneity (1977).

Researchers also focuse on macroeconomic forces, such as fluctuations in cotton prices, to explain variation in lynching in the United States, for example, Susan Olzak’s “The Political Context of Competition: Lynching and Urban Racial Violence 1882-1914” (Social Forces, 1990) and her expansive The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (1992). Also notable: E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay’s “The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930” (American Sociological Review, 1990) and the Corzines and Creech’s “The Tenant Labor Market and Lynching in the South: A Test of Split Labor Market Theory” (Sociological Inquiry, 1988). An early treatment is found in Arthur Raper’s The Tragedy of Lynching (1933). Finally, Lincoln Quillian’s “Group Threat ands Regional Change in Attitudes toward African-Americans,” published in the American Journal of Sociology (1996), provides a compelling theoretical explanation, the approach for which he developed earlier in his “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population, Competition, and Anti-Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” published in the  American Sociological Review in 1995.

Beck and Tolnay’s outstanding 1995 book A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynching, 1882-1930 (and several articles) is exemplary of the positivistic approach. In their work, the authors show that periods of material prosperity ceteris paribus tended to reduce the frequency of lynching, whereas economic depression functioned to increase lynching. They theorize that this was because economic pressures reduced the number of available jobs and increased competition for work. Whereas the white planter class had an interest in exploiting cheap black labor, the existence of a free black labor force threatened white labor—white planters hiring blacks over whites led to whites employing violent tactics to close the labor market to blacks. Lynching was one mechanism used by white labor to intimidate black labor. Found the foundation of this argument see Joel Williamson’s The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (1984).

The positivistic approach is attractive because linear formulation of causal relations and the assumption of an abstract rational actor are suitable for hypothesis testing using aggregated statistics. Indeed, the findings of such studies are impressive. When demand for cotton declined in the early 1890s, lynching did indeed peak. After the 1890s, when cotton prices rose, there was the predicted decline in lynching. (For caution see John Reed, Gail E. Doss, and Jeanne S. Hulbert’s “Too Good to be False: An Essay in the Folklore of Social Science” in Sociological Inquiry, 1987.) After WWI, when the cotton economy declined dramatically, another wave of racial violence occurred (the re-birth of the Ku Klux Klan is associated with this calamity). Population pressures exacerbated the problem. Rapid population growth in the South produced a surplus of laborers, increasing (at least the perception of) job competition between races and pushing racial tensions to greater heights. Out-migration of blacks is associated with the decline of lynching in the 1930s. Beck and Tolnay theorize that this relieved the perceived need to use lynching as a tool to exclude blacks from the white labor market. 

Festival specifies elements of lengthier historical studies on changes in punishment during this period (such as Edward L. Ayers’ Vengeance and Justice, published in 1984). The book shows why there are more killings in one region compared to another and why there were more killings in one year compared to another. However, explaining variation is not the same thing as identifying generative forces. Beck and Tolnay theorize that lynching occurs in the conjuncture of several forces: racist ideology, competition over scarce resources (such as jobs), a permissive government, and various catalysts, such as labor market instability and a high profile crime. For Beck and Tolnay, racism gives ordinary people permission to commit murder.

This approach helps explain why those whites who were, because of the split-labor arrangements of a caste society, far more likely to be in direct competition with members of the lynch mob and their supporters did not lynch each other. But several question remain unanswered. Does racial ideology only provide a technique of neutralizing legal and moral prohibitions against torture and murder? Or might racism also be a positive motive to lynch? Is lynching only about intimating blacks to force them to leave communities and markets? Why did those persons who desired to murder blacks select lynching as the means of closing the labor market (if that’s what they were indeed doing)? And what explains the murder of women and children? With whom were they in competition? Or is lynching also or even more about the affirmation of whiteness?

These and other questions indicate gaps in our understanding of lynching that can only be filled by exploring the cognition of southern whites, by pursuing evidence of motive and making a determination of responsibility. Motive, the reason in back of action, is part of the causal process when we grant human agency. Motives need not be clear to the person who carries out the action. One may claim that he participated in a lynching to avenge a crime perpetrated by the executed. The claim is not false. But it does not tell us why a black man was lynched. Responsibility means that a person is able to answer for an action taken (his conduct) or a failure to act (his obligation). It conveys a moral and legal accountability. To say somebody or something is responsible for a criminal action is saying that someone or something caused a crime to occur. Questions of motive and responsibility do not lie outside the ambit of objective social science. The fig leaf of neutrality should not apply. Putting the matter more simply: how will we know the cause of lynching if we do not explore the mind of the white supremacist? 

* * *

Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a book about mass murder published in the twilight of history’s bloodiest century, stands in contrast to three paths of scholarships in the field of Holocaust studies. Along the first path, what some call the “intentionalist” school, scholars theorize that the cause of the Second World War was an elite racist dream imposed upon a sensible and civilized but hapless German citizenry. For this view, see Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship (1968) and Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (1975). Genocide was a means to make the fatherland Judenrein (“Jew-free”). Proponents of this view reference statements and writings of prominent Nazis that presage the elimination, in one way or another, of the European Jewry. Ordinary Germans, duped by charismatic leaders and deft propaganda, were ignorant of the extermination program.

Scholars on the second path explain the Shoah as the outcome of impersonal macroeconomic forces. With the world in the throes of global recession, the German state and bourgeoisie, driven by capitalist imperative and having come late to the imperialist plunder of the world, used fascism and territorial expansion (Lebensraum or “living space”) to rebuild the national economy. (For a contrary view see Eberhart Jackal’s 1972 Hitler’s Weltanschauung: A Blueprint for Power.) Later, as an afterthought emerging from the contingencies of world war, an extermination policy developed. The policy of genocide was not premeditated but emergent. This interpretation corresponds to the so-called “functionalist” or “structuralist” school, which examines institutions rather than ideas and human agency. See, for example, Karl Schleunes’ The Twisted Road to Auschwitz (1970), Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (1989), Christopher Browning’s The Path to Genocide (1995). (There is a range here, with Browning’s functionalism moderate compared to Mayer’s work.)

For those on the third path, represented most plainly by Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, the insidious nature of the hyper-rational bureaucratic state lies behind genocide. See Arendt’s 1977 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, as well as her 1971 The Origins of Totalitarianism.) Mass murder in the twentieth century was a consequence of the dehumanizing effects of high modernity—rationality taken to its logical conclusion. At the social psychological level, Milgram confirmed Arendt’s assumptions in a series of experiments that showed how ordinary people obey authority even when the task is unpleasant. Eichmann was a bureaucrat following orders. He was one among many. Diffused personal responsibility gave each perpetrator a way to deflect guilt. The executioner who dropped Zyklon B into the showers blamed his commander. The commander blamed the executioner. (See John Conroy’s 2000 Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture.)

These three paths reduce to two basic accounts of the crime. In one, the Shoah was, as the intentionalist claim, men attempting to realize their goal of a racially sanitized world. In the other, as functionalists see it, genocide was the work of marionettes animated by the reflexes of an anonymous and impersonal puppet master. In neither of these explanations do ordinary Germans—if proponents acknowledge ordinary Germans at all—willingly perpetrate the worst mass murder in history. Moreover, scholars are resistant to the idea that National Socialism was a national project appealing to the average German citizen. This is especially true for those whose political sympathies are with the working class, such as the orthodox Marxist. See, for example, Tim Mason’s Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class (1995). So sensitive were pro-worker thinkers that, according to Daniel Burston in The Legacy of Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer refused to publish Erich Fromm’s 1929 study of pro-fascist sympathies among German workers, The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study, for fear that it would smear the proletariat.

The ordinary German is the focus in Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners. He roots the Holocaust in the culture of anti-Semitism. The majority of Germans shared a hatred for Jews and other non-Germans. Race hatred and race pride motivated the gassings and the shootings. Nazis neither duped nor coerced Germans into mass murder. Embracing their ethnic identity, they were “willing executioners.” Explanations that do not consider motive are theoretically inadequate, according to Goldhagen. To be sure, ascension of the Nazis and macroeconomic instability created the conjunctural moment wherein latent eliminationist anti-Semitism could manifest. Moreover, the rational-bureaucratic state of modernity provided the infrastructure for the mass production of death, as Zygmunt Bauman famously pointed out in the pages of The British Journal of Sociology. However, opportunity and means do not by themselves explain murder. Any complete explanation for the Holocaust must come to terms with the thoughts and actions of ordinary Germans. What is unique in Goldhagen’s approach is the way in which individual responsibility becomes grounds not only for establishing guilt, but also for explaining behavior.

Treating perpetrators as essentially empty vessels and underplaying their wrongdoing is not merely the result of overly objectivistic approaches to the subject of genocide. Holocaust scholars appear to have a hard time acknowledging racism in German culture and the role racists played in genocide. Some scholars, such as Arendt, even dismiss the centrality of anti-Semitism. In Arendt’s view, apolitical bureaucrats perpetrated the Holocaust. The motives of perpetrators, as well as the identity of their victims, yield little useful knowledge from this standpoint. Collective violence is a reflex of the modern state. Evil is banal. We must therefore turn our attention to the hyper-rational ordering of the German state. Other accounts admit anti-Semitism but fail to give it significant causal weight in mass murder (Mayer’s work, for instance). (In this respect, the corpus of lynching studies differs markedly from Holocaust studies.)

Goldhagen sees in conventional explanations a common feature. “They either ignore, deny, or radically minimize the importance of Nazi and perhaps the perpetrators’ ideology, moral values, and conception of the victims, for engendering the perpetrators’ willingness to kill,” he writes. “They do not conceive of the actors as human agents, as people with wills, but as beings moved solely by external forces or by transhistorical and invariant psychological propensities, such as the slavish following of narrow ‘self-interest’.”

Traditional explanations, first, fail to reckon sufficiently “the extraordinary nature of the deed: the mass killing of people.” In his survey of the literature, Goldhagen finds that when slaughters and gassings are recorded, they are rarely analyzed. Without coming to terms with the “the phenomenological horror of the genocidal killings,” the mind of the perpetrators cannot be fully understood and thus a complete explanation for the Holocaust is not possible. Second, “none of the conventional explanations deems the identity of the victims to have mattered.” Goldhagen emphasizes that the identity of the victims—how Germans perceived identity—is a causal factor in genocide. Indeed, he regards the view that the perpetrators were neutral regarding Jews as a “psychological impossibility.” These failings indicate questions in need of answering: Why do ordinary individuals perpetrate mass murder? How do ordinary individuals go about killing others? The question central to the problem Goldhagen confronts is this: Why are some individuals selected to be victims and others not?

Given how the Nazis dehumanized their victims, it is ironic that the perpetrators are in conventional explanations themselves dehumanized. Their dehumanization lies along different planes of course: Jews (and others) were dehumanized by the perpetrators denying that they were human beings worthy of sympathy; on the other plane the perpetrators are dehumanized by excusing their responsibility for perpetrating crimes that reach into the deepest recesses of moral degradation.

The immediate reaction of many in the academic community to Willing Executioners illustrates widespread reluctance to implicate ordinary Germans or German national culture in genocide. Reviewers of Goldhagen’s book quickly mobilized to find the link between “the specific national German tradition” and genocide “not tenable,” and to exculpate Germans of murder, as the matter was put by George Kren in The American Historical Review. Kristen Monroe, the author of The Heart of Altruism, a book about German rescuers of Jews, is exemplary of this approach. In American Political Science she admonishes Goldhagen for producing a “blanket indictment of the German people.” She especially condemns Goldhagen’s ignorance of those Germans who risked their lives to save Jews. Monroe contends that neither the perpetrators nor the rescuers “constitute the most representative sample of the German people.”

Monroe’s comparison effectively treats those Germans who were neither perpetrators nor rescuers as non-agents and not responsible for what happened. Suppose we were to draw a representative sample of Germans and find that most were not among the rescuers. Even if they were not perpetrators, does not their inaction make them complicit in genocide, especially since the overwhelming evidence indicates that Germans knew their neighbors and relatives were murdering Jews? This points to another difference between the bodies of Holocaust and lynching scholarships namely, unlike Monroe, Beck and Tolnay recognize the responsibility of “non-actors” in the mass murder of blacks.

The claim of Monroe’s polemic is false; Goldhagen recognizes that not every German desired to swim with the currents of their day. However, he stresses, this is no reason to deny that the perpetrators and their supporters were German. He writes: “The perpetrators were Germans as much as the soldiers in Vietnam were Americans, even if not all people in either country supported their nation’s efforts.” The premise of Monroe’s work, however, is compelling. Arguments from identity are troubling. At the same time, not all identities are the same; their differences make it more or less difficult to assign responsibility to them.

For categories such as race and sex, it’s not possible to hold everybody who is, for example, white and male, responsible for the actions of a concrete individual who lies at that intersection. There is no substance to these categories that provide motive for action. A white man can be ideologically and morally anything. Ethnicity is a plausible target in the sense that it comes with norms, traditions, and values that may make individuals who belong to them more likely than individuals from other ethnic groups to either perpetrate heinous acts or fail to oppose them when they can. Ethnicity is at least a source of motive. On the other hand, nationality in the civic sense is difficult to process in the same way. Many of my parents’ generation marched against the Vietnam War. In what way could they be held responsible for the actions of their government in Southeast Asia? Many of them did, of course, support the Democratic Party. But this gets us into another area: ideology. Political and religious ideologies are the most obvious sources of motives for action. For example, the extent to which individuals are devoted to the ideas and practices of Islam is predictive of actions that are harmful to people. What is more, Islam as a ruling ideology creates social and cultural structures that are systematically oppressive to some members of those societies.

* * *

Dray’s narratives in Persons Unknown suggest what Goldhagen asks us to do in Willing Executioners, namely grasp the shared consciousness that guides ordinary people to perpetrate extraordinary crimes. It is through the murderous events recounted in detail and the description of the larger culture of white supremacy in Dray’s book that we gain a better understanding of what motivated the perpetrator’s actions. The reluctance of those in positions of power to stem the tide of murder and their inaction facilitating the perpetuation of those atrocities is highlighted, supporting a claim central to Beck and Tolnay’s theory in Festival.

This matter of malign neglect by authorities must not be overlooked. In a detailed criticism of Edward Ayers’ 1985 Vengeance and Justice, a book wherein the argument is made that lynching was not a political act, Drew Faust writes, “Underlying the entire lynching phenomenon was a tacit political decision not to use the power of the state to halt these outrages.” The cooperation of whites from politicians and law enforcement at the state level to through the subaltern ranks of ordinary white southerners reveals the importance of grasping the collective consciousness of the South. Without Sanctuary forces us to consider such matters with its onslaught of photographic proof of murder. We look into the perpetrators’ faces and see their smiles, their complacency, dissociative countenance, and bloodlust. We witness them operating publicly, posing for pictures, without fear of punishment. We know that they know they have permission to murder. 

Among the most striking pieces of evidence for racial hatred as the cause of lynching is the character of the perpetrators’ manner of killing. “The story of a lynching,” writes Litwack in Without Sanctuary, “is the story of slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive forms of torture and mutilation.” Such cruelty shows us that racism represents more than a dehumanizing ideology that neutralized conscience. It was not enough for the perpetrators to simply execute their victim—the killers had to murder them in the most excessive and public way. Afterwards, instead of shame and guilt, the perpetrators expressed pride in their actions, taking trophies, fragments of the corpse, selling body parts as souvenirs, proudly displaying the photographs they had taken in local shop windows. There were postcards made of the pictures of lynched blacks, delivered by United States postal workers, captioned, “I was at the barbecue last night.” 

An outstanding feature of racial lynching in the U.S. South is that it follows slavery and the absence of controls on the white population. “The demise of slavery, ironically, meant the collapse of an institutional check on violence against Black people,” Manning Marable writes in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Freedom from some white people left blacks vulnerable to brutality by potentially all white people. This phenomenon was likewise observed in Europe. During the eastward expansion of German hegemony, “spontaneous” collective violence occurred when the Nazis disabled the local police. It seems as though what prevented various ethnic groupings from beating Jews to death in the streets and in their beds was the presence of local law enforcement securing the social order. When the Nazis invaded and destabilized the legal order, they unchained latent exterminationist anti-Semitism and incredible acts of brutality followed. Like the Holocaust, the brutality of lynching and its acceptance by the white community indicates racial hatred and racial interests as the primary causal forces in lynching. But it is in those spaces left uncontrolled by authorities that many of the atrocities of the Holocaust parallel the atrocities of the Lynch mob. It is here that we see the power of ethnicity and ideology—and not the commands of the Nazi state—in providing motive for action.

These facts highlight the problem with research that attempts to link lynching to abstract social forces: Quantifying racial violence serves to downplay or omit the motivational side of the racist character of the perpetrators’ actions, which may in turn disguise the cultural sources of collective murder. Such approaches reduce complex human actions to abstract rational actors animated by invisible market forces. The procedure evacuates an essential truth, namely that whites were guided to murder blacks not because cotton prices rose or fell, but because they shared the cultural values of white supremacy and anti-black racism. Whether they were suffering from a skinny paycheck, or benefiting from the depression in cotton prices in some fashion, they willingly, even eagerly, participated in murdering humans. And for those who consider the role of racism in lynching (Beck and Tolnay, for example), the role of racism must not be interpreted one-sidedly as an ideology that gives individuals permission to kill, that is as a technique of neutralization. Racism must also be reckoned as a cultural and moral force making people want to kill. 

A growing understanding among black intellectuals that white supremacy—affirmation of identity and hatred of blacks—in the late nineteenth century was the cause of lynching is illustrated in the first chapter of Persons Unknown. Dray relays an account of intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois’ walk to The Atlanta Constitution on April 24, 1899, to meet with editor Joel Chandler Harris (the author of Uncle Remus stories). Du Bois’ purpose in meeting with Harris was to discuss Du Bois’ study of lynching. Current events made this purpose all the more urgent. A black man named Sam Hose stood accused of murder and rape and the immediate indication was that his lynching was inevitable. The press stoked the fires of racial violence. Some papers even called for Hose’s lynching. Georgia governor Allen D. Candler, an outspoken advocate of lynching, practically endorsed the idea of murdering Hose when he characterized Hose’s deeds as “the most diabolical in the annals of crime.”

As Du Bois’ walked to the Constitution offices, he received news that Hose had been “barbecued” and that a grocery on the very street upon which he was walking had Hose’s knuckles for sale in the window. 

The lynching of Hose, like so many instances of lynching, had been a spectacular affair, involving slow dismemberment of the victim before burning him alive at the stake. News of Hose’s capture had traveled fast and people everywhere clamored to get to the town of Newman where the lynching was to take place. Atlanta and West Point Railroads offered a special excursion train there. After the train tickets sold out, citizens leapt onto the train, climbing into its windows and clinging to its exterior. The railroad quickly arranged for a second “special,” which filled in the same manner at the first. Thousands congregated in the small town of Newman. Many who were too late to see the actual lynching converged upon the makeshift scaffold, taking trophies—fingers, pieces of wood, fragments of the chains that had held Hose to the tree. The Constitution reported that people were walking around town carrying bones.

All this transpired as Du Bois walked to the Constitution offices and the enormity of news he was receiving forced him to recognition of how unimportant were his efforts that day. Overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation, he turned around and walked back home.

Dray summarizes Du Bois’ conclusion: “Du Bois had been inclined to believe that blacks were mistreated by a minority of coarser whites, and that if the majority of decent white people could be made aware of the injustice of black life in America they would—out of compassion, a sense of justice, even patriotism—act to alleviate the problem. But the manner and spectacle of Hose’s death—the eleven days of hysterical, incendiary newspaper articles, the almost complete lack of responsible intervention from high officials, the crowds running pell-mell from houses of God so as not to miss seeing a human being turned into a heap of ashes, and ultimately, a set of knuckles on display in a grocery store—showed him that lynching was not some twisted aberration in Southern life, but a symptom of a much larger malady. Lynching was simply the most sensational manifestation of an animosity for black people that resided at a deeper level among whites than he had previously thought. It was ingrained in all of white society, its objective nothing less than the continued subordination of blacks at any cost.”

For whatever other reasons whites lynched blacks, it seems certain they did so to affirm their racial superiority. Civil war and reconstruction disrupted the racial order and made racial boundaries ambiguous. Mass murder was a weapon of redemption in a struggle to restore white power. Indeed, racial thinking of this sort is the necessary condition for the periodic waves of ethnic mass murder that have for centuries marked the capitalist world system. At times latent, kept simmering by the culture of white supremacy. At others times, especially during moments of political and economic crisis, fanned into a conflagration.

* * *

The failure of jurisdictions in the United States to prosecute whites who murdered blacks is a testament to the depth of racism in that country. What US citizen has ever been imprisoned or executed for lynching a black person? The 1997 execution of Henry Hayes in Alabama for the 1981 murder of Michael Donald was not for lynching. If and when the murderers of James Byrd of Texas in 1998 are executed, it will not be for lynching. These were “nigger hunts.” However, that Hayes was the first white man to be executed for killing a black man in Alabama since 1913 punctuates the point. The last time Texas executed a white person for killing a black person was in 1854. This was the only such instance.

Because these acts of lynching were murder—the illegal and intentional killing of human beings—persons who perpetrated them are criminally culpable. Failure of authorities to pursue the perpetrators of blacks, hundreds, if not thousands of which are still alive is tacit approval of the motive for lynching. In Germany, where a handful of the perpetrators of genocide were finally judged, many more escaped the stigma of prosecution largely thanks to the resistance of the German judiciary. In his 1998 American Historical Review article “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,” Omer Bartov shows that “denazification applied a narrow definition of perpetrators, thereby making for a highly inclusive definition of victimhood.” Postwar propagandists depicted “the war as a site of near universal victimhood.” Under the cover of peace and reconciliation, perpetrators and bystanders were either dismissed for their ignorance or turned into automata.

As in the Holocaust, there are likely people still alive who participated in lynching. Why has law enforcement failed to track down and hold members of the lynch mobs responsible for their crimes? Those white faces in Without Sanctuary belong to real flesh-and-blood people. The man in foreground standing beneath the body of R. C. Williams in photograph 88 is somebody’s father, brother, or uncle. That lynching occurred in 1938. Maybe none of Williams’ killers are alive. But they can be named. Might we find their faces in school yearbooks? What was their standing in the community? Did they brag about the time they castrated and murdered Mr. Williams? Do their children know that their parents and grandparents were murderers? The importance of the mystery of these faces becomes even more compelling after learning so many of the victims’ names in various accounts of lynching yet learning nothing about the names of the perpetrators. We know that a mob of whites lynched Sam Hose, but we don’t know the names of those who lynched him.

The desire in the United States to distinguish between whites (well-meaning and naive) on the one hand, and racists (hateful and backward), on the other, is born of the desire to erase the history of anti-black prejudice from collective consciousness. The memory of an America is so deeply racist that it would sanction, even encourage, mob violence is more disturbing to most Americans than the actual killings themselves. The form of argument exemplified by Monroe’s criticism of Goldhagen, whatever her intentions, approaches those arguments that exonerate Southern whites of complicity in violence against blacks who, while not members of the Ku Klux Klan, did little or nothing to improve the conditions of African-Americans, let alone intervene in serial mass murder. Such apologia is transparent in the attempt to draw a distinction between white supremacy and southern heritage, seen for instance in the defense of the confederate flag. This distinction can be accomplished with no more legitimacy than attempts to separate the swastika from National Socialism.

More than this, the desire to differentiate Germans from Nazis during the Nazi period is effectively an attempt to remove from the history of ordinary Germany the subterranean values of anti-Semitism—the values that the Nazis unchained. This is one of the byproducts of insufficiently accounting for, or refusing to recognize culture and motive in collective violence. This problem is widespread in the Holocaust literature (much more so than in the lynching literature). Here, neglecting human agency and ideological conviction of ordinary people puts historical and social scientific explanations in the service of a political desire to reckon hundreds of thousands, if not millions of murderers among the Nazis’ victims. Such interpretations function to diminish and, in some accounts, absolve, responsibility for murder.

* * *

Tapping the collective cognition of a people is a historical-sociological endeavor—the unity of intentionalist and structuralist approaches. The expressions and actions of perpetrators, the identity of their victims, are ultimately the products of social-historical structure and process. Theory must root the collective will in the societal, cultural, and historical contexts in which people are socialized and live out their lives. It is here that human beings learn morality, with all its contradictions, and find themselves in situations that call for the expression of this or that value. We must recognize that people commit murder willingly, not because of “human nature,” but because of their socialization in the dominant ideologies and institution of this sociocultural milieu. Grounds for the decision to murder must be part of the explanation. At the same time, individuals must be held responsible for their decisions. Embedded in the same society are the values of love, non-violence and tolerance. Individuals can refuse to transgress these values.

Quantitative studies, such as Tolnay and Beck’s Festival of Violence, however empirically sound and relevant for their domain, are methodologically constrained in answering important historical, cultural, and phenomenological questions. We must turn to qualitative approaches. Yet, Persons Unknown, as important as it is, is a work of historical narrative. As such, it is undertheorized. Without Sanctuary, its significance unquestionable, is a documentary in need of analysis. Both are descriptions in words and pictures, not works of critical sociological analysis. As powerful as the facts they present are, facts do not speak for themselves. 

Willing Executioners is flawed in several other ways. The author neglects the other victims whose identity provoked Germans. He downplays the role non-Germans played in perpetrating genocide (for admittedly analytical reasons). He too readily dismisses condemnatory attitudes on the part of the perpetrators, something John Weiss avoids in Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (1996), for instance, the disproportionate employment of Austrians employed in the agencies of death inferring that they were more enthusiastic about killing Jews than Germans. (Christopher Browning’s work is replete with instances of Germans attempting to diminish their responsibility.) 

Nevertheless, despite their weaknesses, Persons Unknown, Without Sanctuary, and Willing Executioners succeed in drawing our attention to shared cognition as a necessary element of collective behavior. They shift our attention away from explanation by impersonal structural forces towards the problem of sociological accounts of motive and social action. In grasping the motivational force behind murder, we turn to the larger social-historical forces that produce shared consciousness and collective conscience. Perhaps it need not be said that no single work can provide all the answers. Studies such as Beck and Tolnay’s Festival of Violence address important aspects of the phenomenon of lynching in the United States. Without Sanctuary and Persons Unknown move us to consider other aspects, especially those aspects of the southern mind that escape quantification.

A version of this essay was published some twenty years ago in New Interventions 9 (2, 1999): 11-15. The journal is out of print, so I am sharing the essay here. Perhaps, in the light of history, I will revisit and interrogate the arguments presented here in a future essay. As with any analysis of on-going conflict, conclusions are based on what one can know at the time.

Bombs are falling on Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia. NATO has turned up the heat on Slobodan Milosevic. In truth, NATO is attacking the people of Belgrade. The West is disregarding human lives by targeting a heavily populated area and degrading the infrastructure of a major city. The immediate effects are catastrophic for Yugoslavians. The long-term effect may be the destruction of their country.

In belligerent tones, President Clinton is telling the world that the Yugoslav President Milosevic will pay “a very high price” for his actions in Kosovo, actions being characterized by the Western media as “genocide.” Propagandists have cast Milosevic as the third coming of Hitler (Saddam Hussein was the second coming). As in the Gulf War and with Saddam Hussein, the US has personalized the Balkan conflict and, as with the Iraqi people, receding into the background are the people of Yugoslavia. 

Well, that is not exactly true. The ethnic Albanians who live in the Kosovo region of Yugoslavia are receiving plenty of attention in the Western media.

And for good reason. Since NATO launched its air war over Yugoslavia, some 300,000 ethnic Albanians have fled the province of Kosovo, according to reports by Western authorities. Two hundred thousand are on their way to the border. Western and Albanian sources report that Serbian paramilitary units have been moving from town to town, forcing ethnic Albanians out of their homes, herding them onto trains and trucks, or forcing them to march to the borders of Albania and Macedonia. These sources report the killing of Kosovan men by Serbian death squads.

The images being shown on the television of trains and trucks bloated with women and children are striking. The scene is eerily reminiscent of a tragedy occurring some 50 years ago, when men and older boys, separated from wives and children, were marched off to concentration camps or to die over mass graves. Officials in the West are predicting that if the present rate of expulsion continues, the Kosovo region could be “cleansed” of ethnic Albanians within 10 to 20 days.

What happened? President Clinton told the people of the US and the world that NATO intervention in Yugoslavia was necessary to prevent the outflow of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo into countries to the south of Yugoslavia. The US and NATO had to act immediately, we were told, to prevent the conflict from bursting the seams of Yugoslavia. Clinton warned of an imminent chain reaction, of falling dominoes leading inexorably to World War III. After all, the US leader told us, this is where two world wars began.

Of course, we were not told that it would be the US and the West who would topple the first domino. NATO self-fulfilled the prophecy of a wider conflict. The air campaign has immediately spread the civil war beyond the Yugoslav borders. The enlargement of the conflict has occurred not only because the air strikes have triggered the migration of Kosovo Albanians, a consequence Western propagandists have tried to rationalize, but because the West is organizing violence in Yugoslavia. With the inevitable insertion of military forces on the ground, there will be a full-scale war. Although to a Serb in Belgrade, it is already full-scale war.

The West has successfully transformed a low-level civil war into an international military campaign, and caused an enormous refugee crisis. We are left to wonder whether this was their intention. To answer the question posed by this essay, the Kosovo crisis must ultimately be projected against the background of the history and structure of the capitalist world economy, and the network of geopolitical relations and interests operating the state and military machinery attendant to maintaining and expanding capitalism.

Capitalist globalization and the struggle against world socialism constitute the foundation for the present struggle and the ultimate rationale for NATO. While framed as a defensive posture against world socialism, the American presence in Europe has been as an aggressor in the struggle to advance world capitalism. NATO and the global political and military umbrella of which it is a component have been an integral component of the capitalist globalizing project, by containing world socialism, by putting down nationalist movements in the periphery, and by incorporating into the global economic system those territories formerly controlled by the Soviet Bloc. The alliance with fascists has been a key part of this project. Since the early twentieth century, fascism has been intrinsic to the logic of capitalist development in Europe. After the Second World War, the logic of fascism was globalized, although it has remained a logic subordinate to liberalism—the ugly face of capitalism.

I begin by discussing the policy foreground. There is much confusion here, especially in the way the Western media has cast the struggle. I then discuss three factors that have led to the US involvement in the Balkans: first, the need to justify NATO; second, the global capitalist imperative; and third, the nefarious alliance between Washington and Balkan fascists.

What this essay will show is that despite claims of atrocities being carried out by Serbian paramilitary units operating in Kosovo, the West has neither legitimate justification nor moral authority for organizing war in the Balkans. Indeed, what the US has been doing over in the Balkans has made matters worse for the people of Yugoslavia, Serbs, and Kosovans alike. What is more, NATO action in the Balkans represents a larger strategy to secure the Balkans for global capitalism, and this involves destroying Yugoslavia. NATO is building for itself the rationale—future NATO actions will be based on this precedent—for transgressing national boundaries and putting down any group which threatens the goals of the international bourgeoisie. 

* * *

The Policy Foreground: Saving Ethnic Albanians

In the foreground, we have to straighten out the account of the chain of events immediately leading to the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. Not surprisingly, the USA and NATO contrived the situation they used to justify the Kosovo intervention.

The event that ostensibly concerned the West was Yugoslav state repression of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the Kosovo province of Yugoslavia. The KLA, operating internally to Yugoslavia, had been carrying out terrorist campaigns against the Yugoslav state. In response, Yugoslav police and the military cracked down on the KLA.

The professed long-range goal of the KLA is to unite ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania into a greater Albania. The struggle to regain the autonomy Kosovans lost with the fall of the larger state of Yugoslavia in the wake of the Cold War was viewed by Kosovan elites as a step towards Kosovan independence, which would then lay the foundation for the larger Albanian state. This position of relative autonomy within Yugoslavia was supported by the USA and Europeans powers. Serbia, threatened by the larger goal of succession by Kosovo Albanians, rejected this position, and took the KLA problem as an internal matter. 

Whether one agrees with the aims of the KLA, it is entirely rational given the logic of nation-states for the Yugoslav state to carry out measures to preserve its existence against insurgents and to stabilize territories under its control. Moreover, given the aims of the KLA, concessions to the Kosovan leadership threaten the long-term survival of Yugoslavia.

The conflict escalated until the US and chief European powers believed the struggle had reached a level justifying injecting themselves into the situation as mediators. They drafted a peace agreement, and demanded that both parties sign the treaty, which called for a truce. The demand was backed up by the threat of military force. To show their commitment to peace, NATO began massing troops in the region. 

This is what the West calls “diplomacy.” It appeared to some observers, however, that the West was setting up a “solution,” that whereupon its predictable failure, the West would be “forced” to intervene militarily.

When both sides—predictably—rejected the agreement, the United States approached the Kosovan leaders and asked them unilaterally to accept the agreement with the promise that NATO would begin bombing Yugoslavia. Under these conditions, the Kosovan leaders quickly accepted the truce. NATO promptly attacked Yugoslavia.

* * *

The Policy Background: Finding a Purpose for NATO

One of the primary goals of the United States has been to maintain its leadership in Europe. This is accomplished by strengthening NATO. Part of the strategy has been to include Central and Eastern European nations in the alliance.

More important is finding a purpose for the NATO alliance in the wake of the end of the Soviet threat. NATO was originally organised to protect the West and the capitalist world economy from the threat of world socialism. With the end of the Cold War, NATO lost its original rationale—at least its ideological one. It has now become a pressing concern of elites to find a new rationale to justify the existence of the military umbrella. It has been the long-standing position of the Clinton administration that NATO is a vital asset to the cause of peace in the Balkans. 

Their position emerged during the crisis in Bosnia. In testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee (US Senate) in 1995, then Secretary of State Warren Christopher stated that “there will be no peace accord in Bosnia unless NATO and the US head the implementation in a peace accord.” Judging from the actions of NATO, the position holds for Kosovo.

The Clinton administration and Western propagandists have advanced this position by preying on the widespread belief amongst Americans and Europeans that the people of Balkans are simply incapable of governing their affairs. It needs to be remembered that the belief itself has been accomplished through the ethnicization of class and nationalist struggles over resources and territories. This is a classic propaganda strategy.

Propagandists characterize the struggle in the Balkans as “tribal conflict.” The people of the Balkans are characterized as “primitives” held in thrall of “irrational” religious, racialist, and ultranationalist interests that have dispossessed them of the capacity for reason. Their “backward” aspirations must be subdued, and they must “for their own good” be brought into the “community of nations” (although, of course, each under their own ethnic state). In the case of the Balkans, the rhetoric has been reinforced by the  propagation of an apocalyptic vision where “racial hatred” lets loose a hell on Earth. 

In the past, Washington’s solution to the problems of “backwardness” has been to advocate “modernization,” that is, spreading “democracy” (capitalism) to the infected region. Following this logic, the peoples of the Balkans must be “civilized.” This is a solution that can only be carried out by the most civilized people in the world: the leading countries of NATO.

One of the usual ways Western Europeans and the United States civilize people is by killing them. Witness the bombing of Belgrade.

* * *

Deep Background: Entrenching Global Capitalism

Following the Second World War, it was the goal of the United States to achieve global leadership. Through the political and military hegemony the US accomplished, capitalist elites transnationalized the capitalist mode of production. The people of the world now stand upon the threshold of global society, and this society is a thoroughly capitalist one.

The backdrop of the struggle is therefore global capitalism and the fall of the socialist world system. The fall of socialism opened up vast regions formerly under the control and influence of the Soviet regime for reincorporation into peripheral zones subordinate to the capitalist world economic core. Since the break-up of the socialist world system, transnational corporations have taken an interest in Central and Eastern Europe, including even Russia. They have already injected into the region labor-intensive, low-wage industries. Regional elites have worked with the globalizers to make the region attractive to investors, for example, by privatizing industries formerly owned by the people.

The US has facilitated capitalist development by supporting and implementing a neoliberal project throughout the territories formerly controlled by socialist regimes. This has involved the introduction of World Bank and IMF promoted economic policies involving domestic reorganization of the entire regional economy. These policies have caused widespread misery amongst people who once enjoyed a relatively high standard of living under socialism. The region is being set up to become the European equivalent of the Maquiladora, with export processing zones proliferating the countryside of the once multiethnic socialist state. Once the region is politically stabilized, there is little doubt that capital will flood the region.

Capitalist globalization and the struggle against world socialism constitute the foundation for the present struggle and the ultimate rationale for NATO. The American presence in Europe has been as an aggressor in the struggle to entrench global capitalism. NATO and the global military umbrella of which it is a component have been an integral component of the capitalist globalizing project by forcibly incorporating into the global economic system those territories formerly controlled by the Soviet Union.

* * *

An Ideological Element: Washington and the Fascist Alliance

To a Serb, stealth bombers over Belgrade must look like yet one more chapter in the biography of her people. For hundreds of years, wave after wave of empire builders, from the East and from the West, have taken turns beating down Serbs. The land of Kosovo is holy ground for Serbs because it was there they were defeated by the Ottoman Empire. The Serbs celebrate defeat the way the US celebrates victory. This is because defeat is all the Serbs have ever known. 

If you are a Serb, it is quite likely that you will have an older relative who will tell you about the last time the empire-builders sought to annihilate the Serbian people. Back then, during the Second World War, some 750 000 people in Yugoslavia, mostly Serbs, but also Jews and Gypsies, were murdered by the Croatian Ustashi. It must seem to Serbs today, watching Belgrade burn, that the present intervention of the West is a continuation of the fascism that burned their grandparents.

Serbs who accuse the West of fascism are not imagining things. Fascist, racist, and ultranationalist forces have played and continue to playa central role in organizing the destruction of Yugoslavia. After all, the recent history of the Balkan conflict clear testifies to this fact.

What is the connection between Washington and fascism, racism, and ultranationalism in the Balkans?  The fascist alliance in the Republican Party is the various ethnic clubs who call themselves “heritage groups.” They constitute the National Republican Heritage Groups Council (NRHGC). They make up fascist wing of the Republican National Committee. There are no black or Jewish ethnic groups in the NRHGC. There are Bulgarian, Cossack, Romanian, Byelorussia, Slovak and Croatian clubs. The NRHGC had a direct line to power during the 1980s and early 1990s in the Reagan and Bush administrations, playing a key role in fashioning US policy in the Balkans. One of their principal goals was the destruction of Yugoslavia, especially the Serbs.

Playing the central role in the NRHGC concerning US policy in Yugoslavia have been, of course, the Croatian Republicans. Croats have been the enemy of the Serbs for a long time. The Croatian Ustashi allied with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In 1941, Germany conspired with the Croatians to declare Croat independence from Yugoslavia. There began immediately mass exterminations of Orthodox Serbs. 

During the 1980s, the COP openly observed and celebrated the “Croatian Day of Independence.” See, for example, the 1984 Guide to Nationality Observances published by the National Republican Heritage Groups Council of the Republican National Committee, signed by then chairman of the RNC, Frank J Fahrenkopf, Jr. Official Republican Party literature, their propagandists clearly aware of the untidiness of the Nazi-Croat alliance, notes the “unfortunate association” of the Croat Ustashi with the Nazi Party of Germany. What the RNC glosses over is how the German Nazis were horrified witnessing the cruelty of the Croat Ustashi The Ustashi liquidated whole Serbian villages with no mercy. Ovens at Jasenovac burned Serbs alive.

Clinton took over this foreign policy orientation. Indeed, when a renegade contingent of naive and freshman Republicans were set to pull the funding from the Yugoslav military operation several days ago, Clinton called the GOP leadership into the White House and reminded them of Washington’s commitments in the Balkans. Republicans emerged from their meeting, quickly shelved the Republican proposal, and turned immediately to voting for and approving air strikes in Yugoslavia. 

With the Serbs having just confronted the heirs of the Ustashi dream of independence in the recent Balkan civil war, history is not just a story of the past for Yugoslavia. History is now. And, year-by-year, day-by-day, history is dissolving Yugoslavia.

* * *

Yugoslavia’s Final Chapter?

The USA and Europe have been carrying out a program to create and strengthen zones of influence in Central and Eastern Europe. It is these efforts, based on economic and political objectives, that have produced conditions favorable to the rise of inter-ethnic struggles. These inter-ethnic struggles have been fostered and often even instigated by the West. The long-standing goal of European powers has meant that a peaceful resolution to the break-up of Yugoslavia was to be avoided, and, indeed, that differences and conflicts in that region are to be heightened and focused.

One of the principal strategies for transnationalizing the bourgeois order has been the process of Americanization, of enculturating the world with the tenets of Americanism, and entrenching the capitalist mode of production everywhere. NATO, a key player in the imperialist war on workers and peasants in that region, represents Americanism in Europe. For years, NATO stood on the fault line of world-historical systems, with capitalism on one side and socialism on the other—the West versus the East. NATO secured the holding pattern that world capitalism had to assume while state socialism exhausted itself in perpetual war readiness and economic isolation.

Any state organizing to stand apart or appearing to stand apart by demanding some autonomy from the global economic order, if that state represents a strategic asset to the globalizers, is a direct threat to Americanism, of capitalism in its global phase of development. Threats to Americanism threaten US interests. The United States has worked tirelessly to undermine any agreement that pushes it out of the Balkans or diminishes the its leadership position in Europe. The US has seen to it that conflict in the Balkans and interethnic atrocities continue. Warmongering is inherent in the strategy being pursued.

Since the establishment of American political-military hegemony, capitalism has globalized and world socialism has fallen. Western Europe remains the conduit through which American hegemony is channelled. Against this backdrop, the final chapter of Yugoslavia has all but been written. Today, we are seeing the final strokes being penned. Yugoslavia, her history in her present, may soon find herself part of a distant past.

The phrase “war on drugs” designates the aggressive prohibition and criminalization of certain substances with the explicit goal of reducing the prevalence of use by the population as a whole or some segment thereof, thus improving the public health and worker productivity. By transforming the targets of control into enemies of the national community and moral order, the “war” metaphor functions to legitimize government tactics the public might otherwise see as conflicting with civil liberties and human rights (analogs: “war on crime” and “war on terrorism”). The consequences of the drug war are many, among them overcrowding in prisons, felony labels, international criminal syndicates, and community and neighborhood disintegration.

The precise definition or meaning of the word “drug” depends on context. The standard medical definition is any substance, such as a medicine, that produces physiological changes in the body. Some such substances are associated with changes in the user’s cognitive and/or emotional state, hence the common verb form of the word meaning to administer a substance producing insensibility or stupor. Medical definitions thus refer to relative benefit and harm, as well as the psychoactive character of substances. Neither harm-reduction nor psychoactivity is enough to provoke prohibition. What is a drug in the context of the drug war rests more on the question of legality; an illicit drug is a product of state action, media-driven panic, and moral entrepreneurial spirit, a social construction publicly appealing to public health and safety.

Accounts of the history of the drug war usually associate the use of the metaphor with the presidency of Richard Nixon, manifest in the passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970and the subsequent creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973. However, the superstructure of drug control is the result of legislation and policy initiatives unfolding over many decades. Moreover, the war rhetoric itself has a long history, appearing in articles published as early as the 1920s in such major US newspapers as The New York Times.

Before 1883, there were no federal drug laws in the United States. Drugs were widely available to the public without significant official consequence. Hemp grew freely throughout the nation with some local laws regulating cannabis as early as the 1860s. Bayer, the makers of aspirin, sold heroin over the counter until 1913. By that time aspirin had became the popular non-addictive alternative and Bayer was phasing out the production and distribution of heroin. Famously, cocaine was a component of the recipe for the beverage Coca-Cola until around 1900 (although the actual amount of the drug contained in the recipe, contained naturally in the leaves of the coca plant, is often exaggerated). 

The Progressive Era would see the emergence of widespread drug and alcohol prohibition initiatives. In 1906, the United States Congress passed the Food and Drug Act requiring the labeling of pharmaceuticals. In 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, imposing a strict regulatory regime on importation, production, and distribution of opiates(any substance produced from alkaloids derived or synthesized from opium poppy), as well ascocaine.  The law was in part the result of an international conference on the problems of narcotics conducted at The Hague in 1911, which produced the International Opium Convention of 1912, the world’s first multi-nation drug control treaty.

In 1920, the US federal government would ban the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. This ushered in the period known as Prohibition. Amid a welter of unintended consequences and widespread public protest, the federal government repealed the federal ban in 1933, deeming it a noble albeit failed experiment. The lesson was not generalized and the government intensified control of narcotics production, distribution, and consumption.

During a radio address in 1835, President Franklin Roosevelt announced the expansion of the Geneva Narcotic Limitation Act, an international effort to combat the narcotics trade that became effective in 1933, and the existence of a Uniform State Narcotic Law pending before several state legislatures. The intent of these measures was to combat what the president described as “the ravages of the narcotic drug evil.” In 1937, Harry Anslinger, Commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, succeeded in persuading Congress to pass the Marihuana Tax Act, a bill he authored, which effectively criminalized the production and distribution of cannabis. These measures signaled that, while political elites admitted alcohol prohibition a failure worthy of policy reversal, they intended to aggressively pursue war on other drugs.

The Boggs Act of 1951 and the Narcotics Control Act of 1956 represented major steps in the consolidation of the drug control effort. In his first term, President Dwight Eisenhower announced a major public commitment by the White House to pursue a war on drugs, appointing a special cabinet committee and enjoining them to “omit no practical step to minimize and stamp out narcotic addiction.” In 1961, the international community negotiated the Single Convention of Narcotic Drug treaty, a renewal and refinement of the 1931 Convention, empowering the Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the World Health Organization to determine drug schedules that would guide global enforcement of drug prohibition. These steps would lay the basis for subsequence US law. 

The emergence of crime control regime during the 1960s drove the drug war to new heights. Congress passed the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1967 and followed that legislation the following year with the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. Appealing to war rhetoric in his 1968 State of the Union address, President Johnson announced that crime control would be a crucial element of a second elected term of office and articulated a significantly expanded drug control component. He promised “stricter penalties for those who traffic in LSD and other dangerous drugs” and called for more vigorous enforcement drug laws by increasing the number of Federal drug and narcotics control officials.

Richard Nixon continued Johnson’s wars. In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled key provisions of the Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutional, a decision that moved Congress to quickly replace it and other legislation with the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which Nixon promptly signed. The new law established the classification system known as the Schedule, which contains five ranked categories of controlled substances, each determined by a set of criteria that includes the abuse or addiction potential of the drug, as well as consideration of the medicinal acceptability of the drug. The Schedule remains the law of the land. In his second term, Nixon merged the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, and other drug control agencies into one powerful office. Today, the DEA has a global reach, including support from the US Department of Defense.

The intensification of the drug war during the 1960s was part of a government effort to expand the policing apparatus and carceral function of the state in the face of widespread youth-based anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and countercultural movements. Mass mediated depictions of the youth counterculture as a force undermining conventional values of obedience to authority and the Protestant work ethic preyed on mainstream and conservative sensibilities, public nerves frayed by the persistence of the Cold War and the struggles for civil rights. Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s Magazine: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people…. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” Ehrlichman specified: “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” He added, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”  

In the wake of the Watergate scandal and military defeat in Southeast Asia, and with the waning of the organized youth counterculture, drug war intensity diminished in the second half of the 1970s. A significant decline across all age groups in the consumption of illicit drugs, as well as tobacco and alcohol, coincided with this period. The drawdown in the drug war was short lived, however. Another wave of anti-drug legislation marked the 1980s amid a period of major economic and domestic policy changes. In 1984, Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act and the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act. Congress followed the passage of these acts with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created mandatory minimum sentences for possession and life sentences for drug dealers. Congress expanded the law in 1988 and in 1994.Until that point, anti-drug policy focused the attention of law enforcement on large-scale drug operations, while allowing the medical and social services community to focus on the treatment of drug users. The new policy emphasized harassing users and minor peddlers with “get tough” laws emphasizing mandatory minimum sentencing. Within a decade of these changes, federal spending on the drug war experienced growth twenty-fold.

Today, the US drug war represents a vast international system of surveillance, policing, and carceral controls amounting to tens of billions of dollars in public spending by the federal and state governments. Nearly two million persons are arrested each year in the United States for drug offenses, around 800,000 of these are for cannabis. Arrests for drugs are more common than arrests for any other criminal offense. Leaving aside admissions due to predicate felony laws and drug-related crimes, roughly half of those in federal prisons and one-fifth of those in state prisons are incarcerated for drug offenses (in contrast, less than five percent of state prison admissions in the mid-1970s were for drugs). Approximately a quarter of Americans on probation and a third of those on parole are drug offenders. With a total prison population in the United States of approximately 2.3 million persons, and more than 7 million under some form of significant correctional control (including persons on probation and parole), these proportions translate into hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted every year by state pursuit and apprehension of drug buyers and sellers.

The drug war has long carried a disparate effect on particular minority groups and, at times, policymakers have appeared to design policy to operate in a racially-conscious manner. Officials used an 1875 ordinance in San Francisco to control opium dens to harass the Chinese community. Chinese immigrants, a crucial labor source in building the United States railroad system in the Western part of the nation following the Civil War, had become surplus labor at the end of the construction boom. The justification for the control of opium use appealed to the virtue of white women. Restriction of other drugs followed similar patterns. Support for the war on narcotics and cocaine in the 1910s was fueled by media depictions of poor blacks as “dope fiends” driven to murder and insanity. Officials accused Mexicans of bringing cannabis into the United States, signaling that prohibition would prove a useful tool to control migrant labor. In 1930s, the campaign against cannabis held forth that the drug inspired the jazz and swing musicof black performers that was alleged to corrupt white youth. Recent history indicates continuity in racially-disparate effects and policies. Some ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses are black or Latino. Although blacks constitute only 13 percent of the US population, and are no more likely to use illicit drugs than other racial groupings, they represent more than a third of those arrested for drug possession, more than half of those convicted for drug offenses, and just under three-quarters of those sentenced to prison for drug offenses. 

The notorious contemporary example of racial disparity in drug laws is seen in the cocaine sentencing law passed during the Reagan Administration. There are different methods of delivering cocaine into the human system. One method is to combine cocaine with baking soda to create a rock-like substance that can be smoked. This form of cocaine acquired the name “crack” because of the crackling sound that occurs when heated. Although many users of cocaine prepare the drug in a manner that allows it to be smoked, users living in impoverished inner city areas, disproportionately African American, are more likely to purchase cocaine already prepared as crack. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established for crack cocaine convictions a penalty 100 times greater than that for powdered cocaine. First-time trafficking of at least five grams of crack triggered a minimum mandatory sentence of five years, whereas the trigger for the same penalty required 500 grams of powder cocaine. By 1997, African Americans were accounting for more than 80 percent of the defendants convicted of crack cocaine offenses. This percentage was unchanged in 2009. In 2010, after years of public protest and official recommendations to reduce the disparity, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the ratio to approximately 18:1. He did not eliminate the disparity.

What explains the phenomenon of drug prohibition? David Musto, in his 2002 Drugs in America: A documentary History, contends that patterns of drug criminalization follow cyclical patterns of state and public tolerance and intolerance. Michael Tonry, in Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America, published in 1996, echoes Musto’s contention, explaining that there are periods where traditional American notions of personal sovereignty allow people to make their own choices about substance use. During these periods, drug use is considered only mildly, if at all, deviant. At other times, the public mood swings towards intolerance, where drug use is widely seen as deviant and those defending drug use risk moral disapproval or stigmatization. Tonry describes these periods of intolerance as “puritanical periods of uncompromising prohibition.”

However, these swings between tolerance and intolerance themselves require an explanation. As does the secular trend in expanding comprehensiveness. George Rushe and Otto Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure, published in the 1930s, is instructive. They find that swings between the repressive and rehabilitative attitudes of Western penology are explained by the cyclical nature of capitalist mode of production and the growth of the capitalist state. French philosopher Michel Foucault’s landmark 1975 work Discipline and Punish elaborated the political-ideological side of Rusche and Kirchheimer’s thesis. Historical analysis indicates that the emergence and trajectory of drug prohibition roots in part in the development of industrial structure of the capitalist system, evidenced for example in the fact that the burden of drug prohibition falls more heavily on the working class than on other segments of the population. Drug prohibition serves a productive function. (I discuss the intersection of social class and racial caste in this essay: “Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Class: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History.” This model applies as well to the drug war.)

In the 1920s, political theorist Antonio Gramsci linked patterns of drug controls to the rise of Fordism and of Taylorism, which sought to increase efficiency of industrial production through careful control over the lives of the proletariat. Gramsci rejected the simplistic explanation that Puritanism was at work in these phenomena. “Those who deride the initiatives and see them merely as a hypocritical manifestation of ‘Puritanism’ will never be able to understand the importance, the significance, and the objective import of the American phenomenon,” he writes, “which is also the biggest collective effort to create, with unprecedented speed and a consciousness of purpose unique in history, a new type of worker and of man.” Since the industrialist could not impose this control upon society-at-large, the organized community of capitalists called on the state to perform its class function. Historians of this period corroborate Gramsci’s observations. British historian E. P. Thompson, in his 1967 article “Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” observes that the transition to industrial society “entailed a severe restructuring of working habits—new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these incentives could build effectively.” Herbert Gutman, in Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, published in 1977, arrived at similar conclusions. 

In the current period, there has been a renewed interest in criminal justice reform and a desire to roll back, at least to some degree, drug prohibition. Trauma-addiction science has suggested a public health approach rather than a police-carceral one. The shift is most noticeable in cannabis legalization (and decriminalization) and greater empathy for victims of opioid addition. However, there is a political economy factor at work in the shift in policy thinking. The economy is in the midst of a long secular expansion. Unemployment is lower today than at any time in the last 50 years. Wages are starting to rise. One way to address the labor shortage is to tap the industrial reserve army that has heretofore been contained by the state carceral function. The capitalist need for labor, which includes enlarging the pool of competing workers to put downward pressure on wages, appears to be softening the hearts of politicians. At the present moment, drug offenders seem to be the least controversial prisoners to bring into the workforce.

Working from the Marxist materialist conception of history (see “The Marxist Theory of History” and “Historical Materialism and the Struggle for Freedom”), Marxists approach the subject of crime and deviance in two basic and interconnected ways.

In the first, scholars theorize that the categories of deviant behavior that draw official sanction are products of the superstructural imperative to secure and entrench exclusive property and related forms of oppressive social relations and, more specifically, manage labor markets. Because the character of the superstructure reflects the interests of the ruling class, it is these that shape the deviance making process and the content of the categories used to control individuals and groups. Moreover, since the societal structure changes over time, the character of the deviance making enterprise and its products is temporally variable. These ideas express the dialectical theorization of societal development.

In the second, Marxists focus on the criminogenic character of class-based social structures, theorizing in particular that the discontents of capitalism, a system marked by alienation, immiseration, inequality, and injustice, produce the criminogenic conditions requiring the criminal law and necessitating its aggressive enforcement. Oftentimes one finds this view in Marxist penology alongside the analysis of control structures. However, it deemphasizes critical theory of coercive control.

The historical record supports the theory that economic imperative and the attendant political character of a given concrete mode of production shape the control machinery and its deviant categories. At the stage of primitive communism, where there is neither social class nor state and law, one finds scant evidence indicating the existence of formal and coercive social control machinery. Instead, control of deviance appears as informal and not particularly punitive. Moreover, there is little crime and violence in evidence (even when crime is defined beyond the principle of legality). The emergence of the state and law coincides with the appearance of social class and patriarchal relations, which are associated with the arrival of large-scale agriculture. At this point, social control as an institutional force appears. Each successive stage of development in segmentation leads to greater inequality in wealth and power; with each stage, the formal control machinery becomes more extensive and elaborate.

Capitalism represents the highest stage of exploitative relations and therefore achieves the highest level of coercive and ideological control. It is in this context that sophisticated police and carceral structures appear, accompanied by a scientifically framed intellectual system, principally the disciplines of criminology and penology. Other historically unique control systems also emerge, such as the mental health industry, with its own intellectual (or ideological) justifications in tow, taking the forms of psychiatry and psychology.

Noting that this machinery is far more extensive than past arrangements, Marxists theorize that the chronically alienated state of the working class and the problem of managing the fallout from the periodic crises associated with capitalism require an extraordinary control apparatus operating at the boundaries of the structure of work place rules. The latter concern especially flows from Marx’s theory of the general law of capitalist accumulation, presented in Capital I, wherein rising organic composition of capital, defined as the ratio of variable capital to constant capital, swells the ranks of the unemployed, or industrial reserve army.

In the 1990s, Michael Lynch and associates tested hypotheses derived from this theory, positing a relationship between the rate of surplus value and the size and scope of the police and carceral functions in the United States. Their research provides compelling empirical support for the theory.

The interest in the relationship between wage labor and carceral control is a longstanding one in the Marxist literature on crime and deviance. Perhaps the paradigm of modern Marxist penology is Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s landmark Punishment and Social Structure, based on Rusche’s seminal article “Labor Market and Penal Sanction.” Rusche posits a relationship between labor supply and rates, types, and intensities of punishments. Harsh physical punishments are associated with economic downturns, a relationship that, he theorizes, is a function of the concomitant rise in surplus laborers; since one’s labor is attached to one’s person, the less valuable one’s labor, the less valuable one’s person. In contrast, rehabilitation and prison labor, publicly appealed to as enlightened reform, take priority during periods of economic expansion. Again, supply-and-demand plays the crucial role: the need for labor shrinks the supply of labor thereby making each laborer more valuable. Stripped of complexities, the pendulum swing between repression and reform is a function of the rhythms of capitalism. 

Punishment and Social Structure expands on this idea and, inspired by Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation in Capital I, explores the history of carceral control. Rusche and Kirchheimer compare the capitalist epoch with the epoch it superseded. There was no centralized state or bureaucracy under feudalism. Conflicts were, for the most part, resolved privately. Moreover, social arrangements were not such to require repressive public control. As a consequence, punishments were not severe. However, by the latter middle ages, private criminal law yielded to greater levels of state control and punishment. Capitalism required the destruction of relations protecting labor under the feudal system: the lord was dispossessed of political and economic power, the master craftsmen of the guilds transformed into an unattached skilled proletarian, and serf and peasant forced off the land via enclosure for use as cheap labor. This was achieved in part through measures criminalizing guilds and unions with the charge of conspiracy, as well as statutes and ordinances expanding the scope of foraging, poaching, trespassing, and vagrancy laws. Theft naturally increased with manufacturing, as objects once owned by those who made them became the property of those who owned the land and means of production. Subsequent works by several scholars, including William Chambliss and Christopher Adamson, have sustained Rusche and Kirchheimer’s thesis.

In the area of legal theory, Evgeny Pashukanis demonstrates that the criminal law (and law in general) embodies an ideology that functions to perpetuate the rule of the bourgeoisie. For example, the principle of equal treatment obscures the reality of class inequality and exploitation by projecting an image of the law with the outward appearance of neutrality and universality. Bourgeois morality becomes common morality, a superstructure concealing the true operation of criminal justice as an apparatus managing the working class for the sake of reproducing the unequal division of property. A leading modern exponent of this view is Jeffrey Reiman, who, in The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, argues that, whereas the pretense to universalism legitimizes the use of force by government, the state’s failure to manifest equal justice makes its coercion analogous to criminal violence. He concludes criminal justice is really a criminal justice system. 

The second way Marxists approach the subject of crime and deviance is to focus on the criminogenic conditions generated by the capitalist mode of production. This emphasis emerges early in the development of Marxist theory. Engels, in The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, argues that the degrading working conditions prevailing under industrial capitalism demoralize the proletariat, leading to a loss of social control among workers and their children. The discontents of capitalism provide workers with the temptation to engage in deviant behavior and wear down their moral capacity to withstand temptation. Capitalism thus generates the social conditions that turn some members of the working class into criminals. Engels characterizes crime among the working class as a form of “primitive rebellion,” the “earliest, crudest, and least fruitful kind,” which, because of its expression at an individual level, is not only suppressed by the state but also condemned by the working class. For this reason, Engels and Marx are skeptical that working class criminals could be of much use to their revolutionary goals. They write in the Communist Manifesto that the conditions of capitalist society make more probable that working class rogues will play “the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” Marx and Engels describe street criminals as “lumpenproletariat,” “social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.”

Marxists do not see the street criminal as the only criminogenic consequence of capitalism. Engels theorizes that capitalism encourages crime among the bourgeoisie, as well, and, further, observes that the character of crime control is shaped by class location. In a passage that anticipates the work of Edwin Sutherland, Engels writes, “Murder has been committed if society knows perfectly well that thousands of workers cannot avoid being sacrificed so long as [capitalist] conditions are allowed to continue.” Willem Bonger, credited with the first full Marxist criminological work of the twentieth century, echoes Engels’ argument, theorizing that the tendency of capitalism to reduce everything to a cash nexus, pitting worker against worker in unforgivingly competitive markets, and promoting egoism over altruism constitutes a criminogenic milieu. This allows Bonger to account for crime across the class structure. 

A critique emerged in the late 1970s wherein proponents, most notably Jock Young, took issue with “left idealism,” identified as the tendency to treat the criminal as something of a working class hero. The left idealist, so goes the critique, romanticizes the working class criminal, depicting the rogue as a revolutionary, a portrayal that stands in stark contrast to that painted by Marx and Engels. In one notable example, David Greenberg characterizes the proletarian criminal as the “vanguard of the revolution.” This view of crime, according to the “left realist,” rationalizes the behavior of the proletarian who turns to crime, explicitly justifying behavior harmful to working class interests. Given that most victims of street crime are proletarian, if Marxists criminologists are to represent the interests of the working class, then they must take the problem of working class crime seriously. The arguments of the left realists were influential in the United Kingdom during the 1990s, where they played a role in the development of New Labor’s crime control policies. However, Young himself was critical of these policies as New Labor jettisoned class analysis and shifted the blame to the victims of capitalism. 

What of Marxism as a transformational political project? A piece of the project manifests today in the revolutionary act of overthrowing bourgeois definitions of crime. Developing her own conception of crime, the politically committed Marxist indicts the capitalism and associated problems of alienation, imperialism, poverty, racism, and sexism. For example, Julia and Herman Schwendinger argue that the capitalist mode of production represents the systematic violation of human rights as understood from the radical democratic and egalitarian standpoint, or, using Erich Fromm’s distinction, “positive liberty.” The Schwendiners distinguish between personal rights necessary for continued personal existence, such as the right to clean water and nutritious foods, and those necessary for dignified human existence, for example the right to democratic freedoms, an education, housing standards, etc. Marxists judge capitalism incapable of meeting the terms of these rights, as it rests on the exploitation of human labor and the unequal division of the fruits of that labor. 

It is in the rejection of bourgeois definitions of crime and the redefining of criminal conceptions along radical egalitarian lines that Marxists most clearly differentiate their project from that of the conflict theorist. Seeing crime and deviance as social problems resulting from inadequate social institutions and the struggle over cultural values and partisanship inhering in a pluralist society, public issues that can in turn be addressed with a more equitable distribution of income and engaged citizenry, conflict theory is ultimately reformist in character.

The conflict social scientist’s failing is that he does not begin with a critique of the material foundation of the social order. His conception of power is rather more idealist; it is the struggle over social power that generates conflict. In contrast, the historical materialist sees conflict as emanating from the mode of material life, with class antagonisms and the property arrangements serving as fuel. Power emanates from the prevailing socioeconomic arrangement.

Criminogenesis in both its senses is ultimately the manifestation of the underlying class struggle that pervades capitalist societies: the criminal justice apparatus is, by design and by historical development, a structure to secure bourgeois rule over the proletarian masses; the impoverished and conflict-ridden conditions generated by capitalism imperil the working family, while, at the same time, encourage the pursuit of profit at the expense of the public good. The Marxist critique strikes at the roots of modern capitalist society, an unjust system that humankind cannot reform, but must instead abolish. 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels conceived the materialist conception of history, or, more simply, historical materialism, in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the confusion of idealist philosophy and as a critique of liberal political economy. They revised and refined the theory throughout their lives.

Keeping to that critical spirit, Marxist historians, philosophers, revolutionaries, and scientists elaborated the theory in the decades that followed. The theory remains a major intellectual and political force in many, if not most, contemporary societies, and continues to undergo revision and elaboration.

In light of this history, one could argue that there is not one but multiple Marxist theories. Nonetheless, there are elementary assumptions and concepts running through the various schools and permutations that differentiate Marxism from other critical theoretical standpoints and, more broadly, the conflict perspective.

The application of Marxist theory to crime and deviance studies is likewise manifold; yet here, too, there is an intellectual core that shapes theoretical and political work in similar ways.

This essay sketches the foundation of Marxist theory and, in broad strokes, surveys the crime and deviance literature employing this approach, in particular what often goes under the label “radical” or “critical” criminology.

From the standpoint of historical materialism, a human being is understood as a thing that is realized through social action, principally acts embedded in and surrounding the production of material life. Human essence lies at the intersection of the totality of social relations in which individuals emerge as social beings. Dialectically, individuals collectively objectivate society through social action and, in turn, realize their humanity in the process. However, in segmented societies, especially those marked by social class, individuals become alienated from their essential activities, the objects they bring into existence (their labor product), and from others and themselves.

For Marxists, the fundamental problem in history to explain and overcome is the fact that the majority has lost control over the act of creating the world and the world it created, a condition that denies its “species-being,” that is, the power of self-activity and self-actualization. This problem focuses both Marxist theory and political practice. Indeed, the political demand this approach entails is inseparable from the theory that explains it, which Marx envisioned in his youth as an epistemological position transcending the “is-ought” dichotomy that limits positivist thinking and liberal politics, both related expressions of bourgeois, or capitalist, idealism.

The solution to the problem of alienation, Marxists contend, is the achievement of substantive freedom for all member of society, which requires popular control over society’s productive forces, a state of affairs requiring—and justifying—the revolutionary transformation of the existing conditions. Once in power, the proletariat, or working class, is positioned to collectively shape the direction of history for the benefit of the population.

Thus, socialist revolution lays the foundation for a more just social order and a more complete human being. Crucially, this standpoint conceptualizes freedom not in liberal terms of limited political democracy, which is necessarily constrained by the capitalist imperative to accumulate property and usurp wealth, what Erich Fromm calls “negative liberty,” but in the radical terms of economic democracy, or socialism—with communism, a stateless and classless social order of self-actualizing individuals, envisioned as the final goal.

The concrete character of work, the objects on which work is performed, and the instruments produced by and used in that work constitute the labor process that moves history forward. Objects of labor may be things found in nature or things already worked up by prior labor activity. Some of these objects become instruments of labor, such as tools and machines that concentrate a worker’s activity on an object. The objects and instruments make up the means of production. Taken together, objects, instruments, and human labor power comprise the forces of production, constituting the practical and technological basis of a given social formation.

Underpinning this conceptualization of production is the labor theory of value, which is a foundational concept in both classical liberal political economy and the Marxist critique of this intellectual system. Marx incorporates into his theory of capitalist production the distinction between, on the one hand, use value, which is value imputed from biological needs and historically-conditioned wants, and, on the other hand, exchange value, which represent the quantum of labor contained in a commodity (i.e. the amount of labor required to produce the useful object).

Marx demonstrates in Capital, Volume I, that human labor is the sole source of exchange value. This is one of the major contributions to science. But, for Marx, it is also politically significant. It follows from his discovery that, since workers produce that value, they are naturally entitled to that value. Moreover, since the labor process in necessarily a collective one, that entitlement is social in character. Thus in demonstrating the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx not only makes a major contribution to the field of political economy, but also identifies the material underpinning of the struggle for social justice.

The question of ownership and control over the labor process raises the matter of the character of the social relations in which the production forces embed. Marxists define the social relations of production primarily in terms of property relations and the authority that attaches to them. Social class is paramount, defined as an individual’s relationship to the means of production, a position that she shares with other individuals bound by the same or similar relations.

Taken together, the forces and the social relations of production comprise the mode of production, what Georg Hegel calls “civil society.” In Marx’s popular base-superstructure metaphor, civil society is often referred to as the foundation, or “base” of society. Contradictions within the base, which exist in many forms, including class antagonisms, are theorized to drive the engine of social transformation. Upon the base arises a “superstructure,” or political society, comprised of state, law, and ideology, which function to protect the prevailing property relations either by force, if need be, or, more efficiently, through ideas that legitimize the prevailing relations by embodying notions of right and wrong, good and bad.

Political power and ideas are theorized to root in the material control of the forces of production, expressed by Marx and Engels in the famous dictum: “The ideas of the ruling classare in everyepoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” The character of the superstructure ultimately reflects, albeit not always in an immediately discernable way, the interests of the dominant economic class. Ultimately, the conditions under which people produce their material life stamp an entire society with a particular class consciousness. 

Marxists conceptualize history as series of revolutionary transformations in modes of production, classified as stages, which include primitive communism, ancient society, feudalism, and capitalism. Under primitive communism, typified by gatherer-and-hunter societies, there are no social classes. The forces of production are collectively controlled and the community shared the social product based on need. With the appearance of large-scale agricultural production, occurring roughly five to seven thousand years ago, and with it the generation of substantial social surplus, it becomes possible for some families to live without working. Over time, the means of production are divorced from the laboring masses and concentrated in the hands of a nonproductive class, which forces the majority into subservience. The families freed from labor become a ruling class who, served by functionaries (managers, intellectuals), steer segmentally organized modes of production to their favor. This state of affairs is characteristic of all social formations up to the present, each successive stage of development in segmentation leading to greater inequality between those who produce the social surplus and those who appropriate it.

To illustrate how contradictions internal to production modes fuel the transformational moments that impel history through its stages, consider that periodic crises of overproduction, or of realization, which take the form of commercial calamities growing progressively worse over time, mark the capitalist mode of production. The contradiction exists by virtue of the fact that capitalist firms strive to maximize surplus value by rationalizing production through automation, bureaucratic organization, and mechanization, as well as through wage suppression, which in turn displaces, impoverishes, and marginalizes workers. The immiseration of workers in turn undercuts the opportunity for capitalists to realize surplus as profit in the market.

Thus what constitutes rational behavior at the level of the firm becomes irrational at the level of the system. The bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, strives to overcome the irrationality in various ways: the destruction of productive forces through war, the conquest of new markets through imperialism, the exploitation of old markets, state intervention in the economy, and promotion of finance capital. Thus overcoming crises explains the evolution of capitalism. However, while adaptation may temporarily lift the economy from a slump, it sets the stage for deeper crises in the future and, eventually, the total collapse of the system, thereby creating a revolutionary moment.

By the mid-1960s, powerful elites in the United States were interpreting the social upheavals that disturbed the late-1950s and early-1960s Cold War consensus not as a moment of legitimate dissent and needed reform but as a threat to the American way of life (such as they saw it). For many politicians and pundits, the struggle for civil rights had become a problem of law and order, a deviation from the established pattern of social relations. The shift from a strategy of piecemeal legal challenges undermining segregation to mass protest and direct action demanding social equality had run into a politically ascendant new conservatism—“Middle America” or the “Silent Majority” in political clichés.

White backlash to black progress revealed as national sentiment the obstinacy of racial animosity that had long marked southern attitudes. Even progressive white liberal support for the goals of the civil rights movement flagged, as a majority of citizens reported to pollsters that the pace of civil rights was too quick and the scope of change too far-reaching. The refusal of American mainstream to embrace fundamental change in race relations pushed a segment of the African American community to the political far left. On the front pages of the newspapers and in evening television news broadcasts images of urban rebellions, prison riots, and the presence of National Guard troops replaced images of sit-ins and protest marches and soaring speeches.

No organization epitomized the radicalism associated with this period more than the Black Panther Party, a militant, predominantly African American organization demanding not only equality for black Americas, but calling for the abolition of capitalism.

The core idea amplifying the politics of the radical African American movement was “Black Power,” what civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. characterized as a predictable reaction of black youth to the reluctance of white power to make substantive concessions to the demands of the oppressed. The slogan was first used by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and Willie Ricks (Mukasa Dada), leaders in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee, as a conscious replacement for the nonviolent civil rights slogan “Freedom Now!” The black power slogan, represented by a clinched fist raised in defiance, was seared into public consciousness when Tommie Smith and John Carlos, standing upon the winners’ podium after receiving their medals at the 1968 Summer Olympics, lowered their heads and raised the salute.

In this context, the Black Panthers emerged as the leading symbol of black resistance to the white establishment and capitalist oppression. With their Cuban-revolutionary inspired black berets, black leather jackets, black turtleneck or light blue dress shirts, sunglasses, and conspicuous visual presence, which typically involved open display of weapons, as well as law books in tow, the group provided a readily accessible identity to disaffected black youth in America’s inner-city urban communities.

The Panthers captured the imagination of not only the urban black masses who were dealing with police brutality and poverty on a chronic basis, but also white youth associated with the New Left. In particular, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) came to see the Black Power movement as the revolutionary vanguard of an era marked by rebellion against traditional authority. From the perspective of the white establishment, the Panthers represented the frightening possibility that black Americans, and by extension other disaffected groups, could organize urban communities to meet autonomous and self-determined ends, which proponents and opponents alike believed would undermine white control over property and political power globally.

The fact that the Panthers, in following insurgent movements in Africa and Asia, developed a distinct socialist worldview, and that this worldview was shared by predominantly white youth organizations such as the SDS, made the suppression of the Black Power movement necessary from the point of view of state elites. In turn, the intensification of state repression of the Black Panthers tracked the movement of the party from Black Nationalism through revolutionary nationalism into Marxist-Leninism. Maoism also played a significant role. Less than six months before Nixon made his official visit to China in 1972, Huey Newton visited China in late September 1971. “Everything I saw in China demonstrated that the People’s Republic is a free and liberated territory with a socialist government,” he said. “To see a classless society in operation is unforgettable.” As Chao Ren writes in “Concrete Analysis of Concrete Conditions,” “Huey Newton’s visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1971 further confirmed and consolidated his acceptance of Maoist revolutionary doctrines.” Ren writes that “Maoist thought, especially Maoist philosophy [became] a guiding principle of the struggles of the Black Panther Party, which empowered the Panthers to pursue freedom and liberation.”

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, along with David Hilliard and others, formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California in the fall of 1966, dropping the term “self-defense” from the name the following year, albeit not the concept from the overall philosophy. Newton and Seale met one another in Donald Warden’s Afro-American Association, but resigned due to it pro-capitalist orientation. Inspired by Malcolm X’s Black Nationalist philosophy, Newton and Seale took up a radical critique of the prevailing social order. Newton viewed himself as Malcolm’s heir and the Black Panther Party as a continuation of the legacy of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), founded in 1964, which pushed for exclusive black control over the community. The party adopted the black panther symbol that Carmichael and SNCC had used for the Loundes County Freedom party in 1966. In 1967, the party would draft Carmichael and name him Field Marshal to the party and, later, Prime Minister.

Max Stanford (Muhammad Ahmad) of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), founded in Philadelphia in 1963, also impressed Newton and Seale. Allied with Malcolm X, RAM openly called for Marxist revolution. RAM had originated the slogan “by any means necessary,” famously espoused by Malcolm X. Intellectually, the Panthers were captivated by the ethno-Marxist work of Frantz Fanon, whose 1961 Wretched of the Earth concerned the struggle against colonial rule in Algeria. Fanon advocated violence not simply as legitimate action in the struggle for liberation but as a necessary step in overcoming the psychic complex of black inferiority, which was the result of centuries of demeaning white European colonization. Bobby Seale described the Black Panther Party as addressing itself to “the 400 year old crying demands” of African Americans who suffered at the hands of “the greedy, vicious capitalistic ruling class of America.” Following Malcolm X, the party called for a United Nations-supervised plebiscite, comprised of only black colonial subjects, to determine black national destiny. 

Early in its ideological development, the Panther critique of US capitalism did not represent a wholesale rejection of the normative framework of white-dominated society. Party demands appealed to the rights articulated in the country’s founding documents, as well as the legal and moral responsibility of white America to make whole the black community it had exploited and oppressed. The party cited the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution in asserting the rights to keep and bear arms and to face juries of their peers in criminal proceedings. The party’s 10-point program demanded changes in the criminal justice system, including the freeing of all black men from prison, exemption from military service, an end to policy brutality, full employment and other means to provide for an autonomous economic existence. The Panthers understood White America’s obligation in terms of reparations, citing the promise of “forty acres and two mules” as “restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people.” 

The party’s emphasis on collective self-defense most concretely expressed the Panthers’ conception of political sovereignty for the black community. Newton and Seale cited the principle of black self-defense espoused in the book Negroes with Guns by Robert Williams. Williams had been the president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and formed the Black Armed Guard in the late 1950s to defend the black community against the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. In promoting the use of violence in defense of the black community, Williams represented a significant departure from the reformist character of the traditional civil rights movement.

Adapting this principle to their situation of inner city life, where white supremacy was more immediately represented by law enforcement, the Black Panthers organized community members to monitor the actions of the police in black neighborhoods by making sure that the rules of due process were followed and aggressively intervening in cases of official misconduct. Panthers would show up at police actions in their neighborhoods carrying the California Penal Code and firearms. They provocatively referred to this strategy as “patrolling the pigs,” whom they characterized as military forces occupying the ghetto. 

The Panthers became the definitive image of the armed black revolutionary in the minds of Americans when thirty Panthers carrying rifles entered the state capitol in Sacramento in May of 1967 to oppose a bill, the Mulford Act, criminalizing unconcealed weapons.

Order, discipline, organization, and purpose soon made the party the most popular and most notorious of the black militant groups operating in the United States. The party established several dozen chapters in cities across the United States. In addition to suppressing policy brutality, they oversaw the creation and administration of community development projects which providing a variety of social services to the community, including free breakfast programs for school children, alternative education for children that public schools had labeled uneducable, forums to bring residents together around persistent social problems, and free health clinics. 

As the struggle advanced, the party changed its views on the question of Black Nationalism. Newton associated the phenomenon of ethnic nationalism—what he often derided as “pork chop nationalism”—with reactionary politics. Newton identified “two evils” in the struggle for freedom: capitalism and racism. At the same time, Newton continued to believe that the black community, because of its intimate experience with oppression, enjoyed a privileged understanding of the situation; he continued to believe that oppressed blacks constituted the revolutionary vanguard. Nonetheless, the Panthers expanded the concept of Black Power to include blacks and other oppressed groups.

The Panthers signaled the change in philosophy by forging an alliance with the predominantly white California-based Peace and Freedom party. This shift in party philosophy intensified a growing rift between the Panthers and Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, as Carmichael was adamant about pushing a strict all-black policy. In 1969, Carmichael would resign from the party in protest over the coalition.

The evolution of the Panthers towards a Marxist-Leninist/Maoist conception of struggle came in part from the intellectual development of the party cadre, but was also the product of confrontation with the state. Citing evidence that the US government was ignoring the constitution and pursuing what the party described as fascistic tactics in the campaign to suppress them, the Panthers were compelled to abandon their earlier appeal to the Bill of Rights. In a major speech in 1969, David Hilliard argued that the founders never meant for the rights articulated in the founding documents to apply to black people. White capitalists had constructed a slave oligarchy and they had designed the law to maintain that racist classist structure. Within a year of Hilliard’s speech, the Panthers were calling for a constitutional convention. By 1972, the party had removed all references to constitutional guarantees.

The Black Panther Party cultivated several important leaders. Former Malcolm X devotee and prison activist Eldridge Cleaver became the Panthers’ information minister soon after the formation of the party. Cleaver, a writer for Ramparts, a New Left journal, became one of the more important intellectuals of the group, which now coalesced in a political salon known as Black House in San Francisco. Cleaver’s wife, Kathleen, became the first women to assume a leadership role in the Party’s inner circle. Eldridge Cleaver’s role grew after the fall 1967 arrest of Newton on murder charges stemming from incident with Oakland police in which one officer was killed and another wounded (Newton’s subsequent conviction and imprisonment kicked off the iconic “Free Huey” movement). Cleaver was the voice of the party during its high profile feud with Carmichael and SNCC. Cleaver explained that the Panthers adhered to the principle of proletarian internationalism, which implied solidarity with all people struggling against capitalism. Marxist-Leninist principles had successfully liberated oppressed populations and avoided the fate of those motivated by ethnic nationalism, which had rapidly deteriorated into tyrannies. As a demonstration of interracial solidarity, Cleaver became the party’s candidate for President of the United States in the national election of 1968 for the Peace and Freedom Party. That same year, Oakland police wounded Cleaver and killed Panther Bobby Hutton in a gunfight. The Panthers wounded two officers. The state charged Cleaver with attempted murder. Cleaver fled to Cuba, for a while leading the party’s international wing.

Fred Hampton joined the party in 1968. On the strength of his intellect and remarkable organizing prowess, he rapidly rose through the ranks to become leader of the Chicago chapter. Success drew the attention of authorities who were particularly troubled by his efforts to organize a coalition between the party and Chicago’s street gangs. The FBI was concerned that this would swell the numbers of the national revolutionary movement. Hampton’s success in engineering a truce testified to the efficacy of the Panther’s class-based education. When the Panthers and SNCC split, Hampton took over the Illinois state party. Among his other accomplishments was a free breakfast program for schoolchildren. Hampton was set to become a member of the party’s central committee when, on December 4, 1969, he was assassinated, alongside fellow Panther Mark Clark, by Chicago police in an attack coordinated by the FBI and ordered by Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan.

The criminalization of the Panthers began almost immediately after Newton and Seale formed the party. Initially, Panther interventions in police stops in Oakland caught law enforcement off guard. Over time, however, the police developed a strategy for countering party tactics. The first phase focused on harassment of party members. Officers would follow, detain, and arrest Panthers on a daily basis. The Panthers responded with a more aggressive and public posture. Joined by the federal government, police action moved from harassment to repression, expanding coordinated operations to others cities where the Panthers had established a presence. In 1969, the ACLU condemned what it described as serious civil liberties violations perpetrated by the police, documenting a pattern of punitive harassment and interference with the constitution right of Panther members to make political speeches and distribute political literature. Unable to prove a federal government conspiracy, the ACLU nonetheless accused federal officials for facilitating these actions.

Investigations later exposed a conspiracy, organized at the highest levels of the state bureaucracy, to destroy the Black Panther Party. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence program, better known by its acronym COINTELPRO, was comprised of five large-scale programs aimed at neutralizing what the agency perceived as threats to the internal security of the United States. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and information made public during federal government oversight hearings conducted by United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, popularly known as the Church Committee, revealed a particular interest in what the FBI called “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups.” Several groups fell under this label, but the Black Panthers preoccupied COINTELPRO during the years between 1967 and 1971. Tactics of the FBI included disseminating misinformation, deploying agent provocateurs, assisting local police in conducting raids on Panther headquarters, and framing members of the Black Panther Party for unsolved crimes. COINTELPRO activities heighted Panther’s suspicions that those in other black power groups, and some in their own ranks, did not have the best interests of the movement at heart. This served to weaken party solidarity.

The party’s decline was almost as swift as its rise. Government repression proved effective in neutralizing the Black Panther Party as a mass-based revolutionary organization. Charles Carry, defense attorney for Huey Newton, claimed that in the two-year period between 1967 and 1969 twenty-eight Panthers were killed, hundreds arrested, and dozens had spent time in jails and prisons. There were other forces pressing against the party, as well. Many of the issues that fueled the protest movements of the 1960s were dissipating. The Nixon administration was extracting the United States from its aggressive war in Southeast Asia. The Great Society programs were ameliorating the worst conditions of the inner city. Civil rights legislation and policies, such as Affirmative Action, promised upward mobility for members of the black community. 

The party continued in the 1970s, but with declining numbers. Criticizing Cleaver for instilling in the movement premature revolutionary urgency, Newton reorganized the party to focus on the immediate and practical problems of ghetto life. Newton tempered his anticapitalist rhetoric, as well, promoting black business leaders who worked with the community to improve the conditions of the people. From 1974-1977, while Newton was in a fugitive in Cuba, the party was led by Elaine Brown, who increased the role of women in the party and forged relationships with influential figures in Oakland’s political establishment. Newton returned and reassumed leadership, but the party went into sharp decline due to infighting and Newton’s increasingly self-destructive behavior. The party was effectively defunct by the 1980s. One consequence of the demise of the Black Panther Party was the shattering of the truce the Panthers had negotiated among street gangs. With inner city conditions rapidly deteriorating amid the mounting crisis of late capitalism, gang violence escalated over the next two decades.

In 1989, a member of the Black Guerilla Family shot and killed Newton. Eldridge Cleaver underwent an ideological transformation in the 1980s, becoming a conservative Republican and running for various political offices. He died in 1998. Bobby Seale continues his work as a community activist, leading the youth education program R.E.A.C.H. Elaine Brown is involved in numerous progressive causes, more notably prison reform. David Hilliard is active as a lecturer raising awareness of the situation in the black community. Kathleen Cleaver is currently a senior lecturer at Yale University. 

My areas of emphases in graduate school were criminology and political economy. But the graduate program at UT also had an emphasis in environmental sociology and, on the recommendation of peers, I took a course from Sherry Cable, a noted expert in the field. 

I soon saw at work in the facts of resource extraction and environmental degradation Edwin Sutherland’s concept of “analogous social injury.” Analogous social injury was Sutherland’s principle for detecting opportunities for enlarging the criminal law: if some action taken by a corporate or government agent has an analog to interpersonal behavior the criminal law has long identified as an offense, then that action suggests itself as a candidate for analogous legal control. That is, to be regarded as criminal. Sutherland wrote a book about it, White Collar Crime, published in 1949. In it, he argued that the powerful and the rich are able to shape law and consciousness in ways that reproduce their power and privilege. The publishing company seemed to prove his point when they censored his book before releasing it to the public.

I thought analogous social injury would make a good seminar paper. But a paper showing that environmental destruction for personal gain is analogous to criminality would surely fall short of the word count associated with the assignment. That’s so obvious, I thought. So, I set out to explain how environmentally-destructive business practices manage to avoid the criminal label. Leaning heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of “hegemony” and “the organic intellectual”—concepts capturing the method of control through the control of ideas and intellectuals—I showed how capitalists are able to hide the truth and change the conversation about environmental destruction. I also became more aware of the seriousness of the problem confronting us, of the problem of global climate change. 

Professor Cable encouraged me to submit my paper to an academic journal, which I did, only to have the editor, after a round of supportive reviews, refuse publish it. Trying to understand what had happened, I discovered that this editor, an industrial sociologist, had received funding from polluting corporations. I considered filing an ethics complaint with the American Sociological Association but seeing how I was a graduate student who couldn’t afford to burn bridges, I sucked it up and sent the paper off to another journal instead. They published it (after another round of reviews) and it went on to win the 2002 Sociological Spectrum Award for Best Article. More gratifying than this was the article’s impact. My approach played a role in shifting academic work in this area from the too often sterile and passive sociology of collective behavior and social movements to a more radical political sociology of state corporate power. 

That paper, “Advancing Accumulation and Managing its Discontents: The US Antienvironmental Countermovement,” documented the multilayered and well-coordinated structure of corporate-funded foundations and think tanks, faux-academic science mills, fake grassroots movements, what the industry calls “Astroturf,” corporate attorneys and lobbyists, and major media outlets that lay behind the manufacture of an illusion, namely that the earth is fine and really indestructible; that, if it isn’t, the innovative dynamic of the free market will, in promethean fashion, generate technology allowing humanity to repair it; and, in the meantime, the corporations heard the public loud and clear and are cleaning up their act by providing environmentally-sound commodities and services—“greenwashing.”

It wasn’t long before attention to my article, and a subsequent conference paper, provocatively titled “Paper Mills and Science Mills: The Battle for the Fox River,” inspired the antienvironmental countermovement to illustrate in real time one of my main points: polluting corporations, working through local agents, send up flak to delegitimize those who expose their tactics. They learned I was coming up for tenure and sought to prevent it. They got to the chancellor. After receiving phone calls from “concerned citizens,” he came down on me for having referenced a public service announcement warning pregnant and lactating women about eating the fish caught in the Fox river—the concentration of PCBs, a carcinogenic agent used in processing carbon-less paper, had made the fish unsafe for consumption. The industry was in the midst of an effort to blame the problem on what it’s propagandists called “non-source point pollution”—meaning that no one really knows who caused the problem—and manufacturing consensus around a plan called “natural attenuation”—meaning, if we don’t do anything, the PCBs will wash out into the bay in a hundred years or so. 

With a colleague, Laurel Phoenix, I published two more articles using this approach to show the persistence of this structure during the Bush administration. Laurel and I recently discussed applying the model to the Obama and Trump presidencies. A cursory look at the facts indicates that we would replicate our findings—that there is a concerted industry effort to conceal and obscure climate change through misdirection and delegitimation. 

We have to admit the problem of global climate change—it is real and catastrophic. The fact that humanity is facing what environmentalists call “overshoot and collapse” has been established not only by the bulk of scientific work over the last several decades but is well-known by forest rangers and wildlife officers, as well as hunters and fishers. Even the average citizen can see something is amiss. Armadillos are now common in my home state of Tennessee. They’ve become standard roadkill alongside the Opossum. Armadillos have been sighted as far north as Chicago. They carry the wasting disease leprosy. There are coyotes, too. And homeowners along the East Coast are seeing the value of their properties plummet as sea levels rise, many unable to dump their homes because buyers know what’s coming. 

We must also identify the culprit: The capitalist mode of production—what Allan Schnaiberg call the “treadmill of production”—is exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. Extractive and polluting corporations are so committed to the imperative of profit maximization—and lives of extravagance, opulence, and leisure—that they’re prepared to sacrifice the future of their own children and grandchildren. They have constructed a vast propaganda apparatus—a fog machine—to ensure this happens: the antienvironmental countermovement. 

What is to be done? Many suggest regulating corporations. I hesitate to disagree. But there is a downside to this strategy that most folks don’t talk about. It’s not only that it is not enough. Without a larger comprehensive framework, it may be helping plunders and polluters. For years, environmental groups have invoked the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA) to stop mountain top removal, a problem I’m quite familiar with having roots in East Tennessee. Environmental groups demand that the mining companies follow the law. But minding companiesare following the law.The Army Corps of Engineers, in adherence to the law, has approved 99 percent of all corporate permit applications under the CWA and in accordance with the SMCRA. 

As Richard Grossman, of the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy, notes, in a 2002 open letter to Joan Mulhern of Earthjustice on Earth Day, “Both laws [have] enabled polluting and ruling corporations to legalize their destructions; to block the public from using democratic processes to stop corporate assaults upon life, liberty and property; from advocating people’s visions and agendas.” He continues: “These laws have channeled people (including dedicated lawyers) into endless regulatory and juridical struggles over definitions and minutiae, struggles which conceded corporations’ right to govern communities and devour the Earth. These laws have diverted passionate and creative minds away from strategies and tactics that empower local jurisdictions to prevent their eviscerations by absentee corporations and politicians for hire.” 

“There were people who understood that there could never be sane strip-mining in Appalachia’s ridges and hollows,” Grossman writes. “Alas, Washington DC environmental groups joined with corporate lobbyists and politicians to establish rules under which coal corporations could strip-mine for ever and ever. They betrayed the folks from the ridges and hollows whom Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM) had brought together over the previous decade in a valiant effort to ban strip-mining.” 

I remember SOCM, how they boycotted the legislation written in their name that enabled extractive corporations to continue blasting off the tops of our Cumberland Mountains. I remember watching Jimmy Carter, in a well-publicized bill signing, deceive the public into thinking that our mountains would be saved.

Noting the difference between progressivism, which works within a legal structure that accepts the legitimacy of corporate rule, and populism, which desires to see corporations—if not abolished—returned to their previous status subordinated to democratic rule, Grossman laments the opportunity lost: “If the quarter century investment in SMCRA or CWA had gone instead to challenging corporations’ ability to use law (and the Constitution, and our governments) against people, communities, mountains, rivers and species, and into asserting the people’s authority to govern, there’d be no mountain top removal today.” 

Grossman warns in his letter: “Before young activists and lawyers throw themselves into another twenty-five years of trying to make corporate rights laws work to people’s and the Earth’s advantage, wouldn’t it make sense to explore the nation’s experience with regulatory laws? With corporations? With the Constitution?” 

That was more than 17 years ago. We have only eight more years to go before activists and lawyers will have thrown themselves into another twenty-five years of trying to regulate corporations to save the environment. But capitalism is unsustainable. It cannot save the environment. We have to change our approach—shift the emphasis from reformism to radicalism. The threat is that dire. Our future lies in reclaiming the republic from corporate power and establishing a democratic socialist order where economic decisions are made not for the sake of a privileged few who cannot see beyond avarice and egoism, but for the good of humanity and the planet and all the beautiful and precious things that live on it.

I was born in Tennessee to a Church of Christ minister and his wife. My mother was the daughter of a Church of Christ minister. My early world was the Christian church. I sat in the pews and listened to the sermons. I love my parents dearly.

I never took to Christianity. I did not have it in me to believe. I read the scriptures and was appalled. I soon came to understand that I was an atheist. Such is the ubiquity of religious belief that there is a label for those who do not have one.

Life as an atheist was at times difficult. Especially when staking out space as a disbeliever. Ostracization was the main weapon believers used against me. As a human being, not having friends stings, so it was effective in limiting my irreligious speech. I looked for those who disbelieved like me, but either there were few of them or they were clever enough to disguise their lack of faith. Most of the time I kept a low profile.

I wasn’t the only one who was bullied for standing outside prevailing norms. I watched homosexual friends and relatives endure persecution—when they weren’t hiding who they were. I watched women subordinated and children beaten by men guided by the Lord’s loving hand. I developed empathy for those shamed, oppressed, and persecuted by Christian belief.

I want to emphasize that these observations are not the reasons I am an atheist. I have had many condescending remarks thrown at me over the years that my experience with a type Christianity is the reason that I express the sentiments I do. That isn’t all Christianity, I am told, and then pitied for having experienced the wrong sort. My atheism is cast as rebellion against bad faith. My upbringing—in the rational Protestant faith—was more loving and understanding than what children experience in other Christian communities. The problem isn’t with the brand of Christianity I experienced. The problem is with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

When I became a sociologist in the 1990s, I entered a world of neo-Marxism, post-colonialism, and anti-racism. I was taught to see Muslims as victims of Western imperialism, a global structure of domination imposing on the planet the white Christian worldview. My empathy for persons persecuted by religion was transferred to the alleged plight of the Muslim. 

I was the victim of misdirection. I did not consider what it must be like for somebody like me living in an Islamic society. My consciousness had become hijacked by a project portraying the Christian West as the source of the world’s problems, a standpoint that heroized the Muslim as “the other” and conferred upon him epistemic privilege.

On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by Muslim terrorists. More terrorist attacks followed. The desire to know why they attacked us led me to study the history and practice of Islam. And I started waking up. Soon I discovered disbelievers like me, homosexuals like my friends and relatives, and women and children subordinated, beaten by the men in their lives. 

I righted my empathy and demanded more of myself. Proceeded with integrity and objectivity. I rejected double standards and resolved to apply the same criteria to Islam that I apply to Christianity. If Islamic doctrine turned out to be worse than Christian doctrine, then I would be honest about that. So, to be honest, it is.

Waking up I recognized that I was more than an atheist. I had in my sociological studies learned that religion, its myth and rituals, are invention. There is no transcendent religious truth. Science confirms this. But in reclaiming my empathy I came to understand that I’m an antitheist. The past makes clear: religion is neither a benevolent nor benign presence in our lives. It is, therefore, the responsibly of moral persons to speak against it whatever form it takes.

If I cut Islam slack, I would betray reason and experience.  

Kenan Malik, in the foreword to his 2008 book Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate, writes “that, for all the vitriol directed at [James] Watson [the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix structure punished for suggesting in an interview with the Sunday Times that blacks were cognitively inferior], racial talk today is as likely to come out of the mouths of liberal antiracists as of reactionary racial scientists.” “The affirmation of difference, which once was at the heart of racial science,” he continues, “has become a key plank of the antiracist outlook.” (For a lengthy discussion of Malik’s work see my “Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration.”)

In the battle against racism in the twentieth century, liberals either denied racial differences altogether or at least rejected the doctrine of racial hierarchy. Humans are, they argued, all the same beneath the skin, their outer appearance no indication of patterns of behavioral tendencies, cognitive ability, or cultural and societal potential. It followed that organizing society along racial lines enjoyed no rational justification. More than this, it was wrong and harmful. But in the post-civil rights era there emerged on the left a movement that sought to commandeer the language of racial difference and use it as a cudgel with which to attack the liberal and secular values of Western society. “The paradoxical result,” Malik writes, “has been to transform racial thinking into a liberal dogma. Out of the withered seeds of racial science have flower the politics of identity. Strange fruit, indeed.”  

How did this happen? “Where radicals once championed scientific rationalism and Enlightenment universalism, now they are more likely to decry both as part of a ‘Eurocentric’ project,” a move facilitated by the corruption of philosophy and science by postmodern ideas that had found purchase in the academy. “Over the past three decades,” Malik, writes, “postmodern theory has made the link between the physical subjugation of the Third World through colonialism and the intellectual subordination of non-Western ideas, history and values.” This has led to the development of “cultural racism” As French philosopher Étienne Balibar announces in his essay “Racists and Anti-racists,” “we have passed from biological racism to cultural racism.” (See the last section of my essay “Smearing Amy Wax and the Fallacy of Cultural Racism” for a detailed analysis.)

“All knowledge systems, including those of modern science,” writes philosopher Sandra Harding, one of the most influential postmodern thinkers of our time, “are local ones.” The dominance of Western science across the planet is “not because of the greater purported rationality of Westerns or the purported commitment of their sciences to the pursuit of disinterested truth,” she contends, but “because of the military, economic and political power of European cultures.” (One might ask how the West came by this power.) Harding casts science as “politics by other means.” For thinkers of her ilk, the content of Western civilization—liberalism, rationalism, secularism—is an imposition on the rest of the world; its ideas have not won because they are better but because those who espouse them—white Christian men—are imperialist.

The postmodern epistemology expounded by scholars such as Balibar and Harding have produced regressive effects on developing countries and various communities in developed ones. As historian Meera Nanda observes: “postmodernism in modernizing societies like India serves to kill the promise of modernity even before it has struck roots.” The influence of postmodern ideas “has totally discredited the necessity of, and even the possibility of, questioning the inherited metaphysical systems, which for centuries have shackled human imagination and social freedoms in those parts of the world that has not yet had their modern-day enlightenments.” (Perhaps an irony in all this is that postmodernism, like modernism, is a Western idea.)

Antiracism is pitched as the policy or practice of opposing racism and promoting racial tolerance. That’s the standard dictionary definition, anyway. However, in conception and practice, this is not how antiracism operates. Antiracism is a manifestation of racial thinking and is not only inadequate for combating racism but is one a major form racism takes today—racism defined as a system that essentializes cultural differences in human populations in racial terms. I no longer describe myself as an antiracist because I reject the racial thinking that inheres in the practice. It is wrong to say that every member of race of people possesses something for what should be two obvious reasons: (1) there is no such thing as race and (2) because collective and intergenerational guilt are theological constructs. The contemporary practice of antiracism is therefore irrational. This blog entry explains that position.

* * *

Antiracism finds its origin in the progressive political-ideological strategy of combating racism by replacing the concept of race with the concept of culture in explaining human behavioral and cognitive variation and establishing cultural relativism as a political and scientific worldview.

The first part of this is welcome. The claim that race explains differences in human populations is the essence of racism. The scientific consensus is that race is not a meaningful biological construct. What the evidence shows is that differences in human populations (and this includes the distribution of phenotypic features used to identify racial types) is the product of migration, cultural forces, and social organization. Moreover, cultural relativism is a sound methodological stance for studying cultural differences and similarities. The careful researcher should make efforts to ensure his own cultural standpoint does not interfere with practice rooted in objective epistemology (I reject the postmodern claim that there can be no such thing).

However, cultural relativism makes for awful for moral and political standpoint, as it rationalizes actions and attitudes that are exploitative, false, oppressive, and unhealthy as appropriate to the culture under consideration. This error is, to some extent, the consequence of functionalist thinking in anthropology. But it also expresses postcolonialist desire and anti-West loathing, the character of which is postmodernist (and post-Marxist). In effect, cultural relativism obviates individualism and human rights. All those things that define modernity—democracy and universal suffrage, diversity of opinion, freedom to produce and access knowledge, gender equality, individual liberty, sexual emancipation—are treated as a particular point of view, a perspective that hails from an imperialist civilization. There is nothing in these things enjoying universal appeal, the argument goes.  

The ethic of cultural relativism stands in place of what one might on the face of it consider an authentic antiracist standpoint, namely an anti-ideological practice opposing the tradition of racializing populations, by which is meant the system of beliefs positing that Homo sapiens is meaningfully organized as biological types called “races.” In conception and in practice, what is called “antiracism” is the policy or practice of opposing criticism of non-European cultures and promoting tolerance and even acceptance of nonwestern norms and values. But race and culture are different things, with the former conceived as a constellation of traits obtained via biological heredity, the latter describing an observable system of assumptions, beliefs, norms, and values learned via socialization that inhere in an institution or a society. By confusing the concepts, antiracism confuses its audience. It becomes ideological.

If the premise of racism is accepted, then individuals are born as members of a given race. In this way, race is caste; one is eternally tagged by what Erving Goffman called “tribal stigma.” For racists, the reality of race explains cultural variation. For many of those who reject racism, even if they recognize race as a social construct (which clearly it is), they understand that no person is born with culture or a religion. Culture is acquired after one is born. An American whose great-grandparents immigrated from Japan and whose ancestors only married others of Japanese ancestry, would carry around with him American culture. He would not, unless he were a Nipponophile (and even then, whether his sensibilities could be said to reflect the emic is doubtful), carry around Japanese culture. Japanese culture is not encoded on one’s genes. At the very least, if humans are born with some innate cultural sensibilities, as the evolutionary psychologist might suppose, those sensibilities are not racially differentiated. There’s no evidence for this.  

Race and culture are plainly different because, granting for the sake of argument an objective reality of biological race, or at least admitting to the common-sense recognition of racial types, a culture may be—and cultures often are—multiracial in character. However, things tend to end badly for those civilization without a unifying culture. Historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, “Ancient Greece’s numerous enemies eventually overran the 1,500 city-states because the Greeks were never able to sublimate their parochial, tribal, and ethnic differences to unify under a common Hellenism.” He cites numerous other examples. His point is not that multiracialism presents a problem for stable and prosperous societies, but rather that multiculturalism does. At the heart of multiculturalism lurks a repudiation of the necessity of a common culture for unifying a people around a common social purpose. In contrast to ancient Greece, Rome “managed to weld together millions of quite different Mediterranean, European, and African tribes and peoples through the shared ideas of Roman citizenship (civis Romanus sum) and equality under the law. That reality endured for some 500 years.”

Of course, what has always been true is that culture is produced everywhere by individuals of the same species. A society can only be described as multiracial when races are presupposed. One would think that the idea that cultural differences are racial differences, that races are entitled to separate cultural systems because of phenotypic affinity, is what antiracism was devised to counter. Instead, assuming notions advanced by Horace Kallen in the early twentieth century, antiracism promotes the Balkanization of society—that is a society splintered into hostile and uncooperative groups along lines of ethnicity and religion, to use a common definition—and recast the notion that an overarching nationalist consciousness as racist.

Étienne Balibar is a useful example of a proponent of the view that nationalist consciousness is racist. Why is it racist? Because, he argues, it is exclusionary. He denies that one can speak of an absolute universalism; universalism is always inscribed in a civilization, of which there are plainly several. He claims that “modern racism is [the] dark face of the republican nation, and one which incessantly returns, thanks to the conflicts over globalization.” He cites France and the principle of laïcité, or state secularism, noting that, in France, a “nation increasingly uncertain as to what its values and its objectives are, laïcité less and less appears as a guarantee of freedom and equality between citizens, and has instead set to work as an exclusionary discourse.”

But this misses the point of the work of civic nationalism. It is not exclusionary of individuals but of norms and values that undermine modernity, that deny the universalism of human rights. “A diverse America requires constant reminders of e pluribus unum and the need for assimilation and integration,” writes Hanson. “The idea of Americanism is an undeniably brutal bargain in which we all give up primary allegiance to our tribes in order to become fellow Americans redefined by shared ideas rather than mere appearance.”

This is what antiracism rejects, namely the emancipation of the individuals from the imposition of racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Instead, the antiracist, in defining the Muslim as a race, expects she will wear the hijab as a skin color in order to mark racial difference (see Muslims are Not a Race). It only seems confusing to read Balibar defining universalism in its basic form as “a value that designates the possibility of being equal without necessarily being the same, and thus of being citizens without having to be culturally identical” until one understands that race and culture are conflated in his thinking. At the same time, he claims the following: “The universal does not bring people together, it divides them. Violence is a constant possibility.” Not only Balibar want to find universalism in multiculturalism, he blames violence on opposition to such a formulation. (Read Verso’s full interview with Balibar here.)

Modern-day accusations of racism leveled by antiracists therefore include in their scope not only those persons who believe they are biologically or genetically superior to others or they are some way essentially or intrinsically racially better than members of other races (one cannot rule out idealist claims of racial difference), but also cover those who believe that certain ways of life are superior or better than other ways of life. This is why Balibar wonders, “How could [Immanuel] Kant be both the theorist of unconditional respect for the human person, and the theorist of cultural inequality among races?” “This,” he claims, “is where the deepest contradiction—the enigma, even—lies.” When one criticizes Islam, and therefore Muslims, since Muslims are those culture-bearers bringing Islam, one risks being accused of racism. But what does religion have to do with race? How does it contradict unconditional respect for the human person to note cultural inequality? What is race stuck in there? I am not here defending Kant, but noting the problem of the point on its face. Balibar assumes at every step of his case that race and culture are intrinsically linked.

In his Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, first published in 2003, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identifies what he refers to as “central frames of color-blind racism.” Two of these frames bear directly on the present discussion.

The first is the frame of “abstract liberalism,” involving ideas associated with political and economic liberalism, that is the values of equal treatment under the law and personal or individual liberty. Bonilla-Silva cites as an example of the “new racism” the objection to preferential treatment as a violation of the principle of opportunity. He argues that opposition to preferential treatment ignores the fact that people of color are severely underrepresented in good jobs, schools, and universities. Rather than explain the causes of minority underrepresentation, which may or may not have something to do with racism, Bonilla-Silva assumes racial inequality is the consequence of racism, and, to remedy this situation, people of color should be given preference in admission and hiring, and those who object to positive discrimination are racists even if they no make racists arguments. I expect that the reader will see that Bonilla-Silva has made no argument here. He has merely told us that he wants to call people who are critical of preferential treatment “racists” because he supports preferential treatment. He tells us why at the end of the interview below.

The second frame is “cultural racism,” which “relies on culturally based arguments such as ‘Mexicans do not put much emphasis on education’ or ‘blacks have too many babies’ to explain the standing of minorities in society.” One might therefore think that these stereotypes are not examples of racism. Bonilla-Silva concedes that only white supremacists root such prejudices in biology. However, according to Bonilla-Silva, “biological views have been replaced by cultural ones.” To illustrate, he quotes a male subject named George interviewed in Katherine Newman’s Declining Fortunes (1994). George says that he believes in morality, ethics, hard work—“all the old values.” What George doesn’t believe in are handouts. He criticizes the welfare system for creating dependency on the government. Newman observes that “George does not see himself as racist. Publicly he would subscribe to the principle everyone in society deserves a fair shake,” an observation which Bonilla-Silva uses to punctuate the title of his book: “Color-blind racism is racism without racists!” But, since culture is not race, why would criticizing welfare be racist? Neither Newman nor Bonilla-Silva present evidence that George is racist. Rather they are making criticism of welfare an act of racism. But most welfare recipients are white.

Bonilla-Silva says in the interview I shared above that, as a social scientist, his role is not to “provide the path to the promised land.” At the same time, as a person of color, he “has a stake in improving our position.” Yet there are people of color, for example Glenn Loury of the Watson Institute at Brown University, who cites research that shows that black and Hispanic youth who aspire to scholastic excellence are accused by their peers of “acting white” and that this social pressure reinforces a culture of underachievement, reproducing the conditions with which blacks are more likely to be associated. Anthropologists Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu identified this phenomenon in the Urban Journal in 1986. They documented an “oppositional culture” in which black youth dismissed academically oriented behavior as “white.” In the late 1990s, Harvard economist, Ron Ferguson, found a similar anti-intellectual culture in another setting. Columbia’s John McWhorter contrasts African American youth culture with that of immigrants (including blacks from the Caribbean and Africa), and notes that the latter “haven’t sabotaged themselves through victimology.” These are all persons of color. From Bonilla-Silva’s standpoint, what do they have a stake in?

Harvard’s Ronald Fryer, in his 2006 article “Acting White,” while finding fault with the previous explanations nevertheless concludes that “the prevalence of acting white in schools with racially mixed student bodies suggests that social pressures could go a long way toward explaining the large racial and ethnic gaps in SAT scores, the underperformance of minorities in suburban schools, and the lack of adequate representation of blacks and Hispanics in elite colleges and universities.” He argues that there is a need for new identities in communities of color. “As long as distressed communities provide minorities with their identities, the social costs of breaking free will remain high” he writes. “To increase the likelihood that more can do so, society must find ways for these high achievers to thrive in settings where adverse social pressures are less intense. The integrated school, by itself, apparently cannot achieve that end.”

These claims are racist in Bonilla-Silva’s formula (or are they only racist when white scholars make them?). The problem is not merely that Bonilla-Silva is wrong. His arguments perpetuates the situation of inequality. If policymakers don’t recognize the problem and address it properly for fear of being smeared as racist, then society fates a proportion of minority youth to habits that, at least in part, perpetuate racial inequality in America—which Bonilla-Silva is right to complain about. Wouldn’t failure to honestly confront a problem in communities of color be a better example of racism than the one Bonilla-Silva puts forward?

There is no objective truth to claims that race has a biological reality. These claims result from ideology. Ideologies are cultural products. All ideologies, indeed all cultural products, are subject to vigorous interrogation—if humanist principle is observed. In a society where cultural criticism is permitted, thinkers will criticize those aspects of Western culture that produced and reproduce modes of racial thinking, as well as modes of sexist and heterosexist thinking. Or they will interrogate subcultures that systematically disadvantage minorities, independent of what the majority thinks or does. Thinkers should also be able to criticize those aspects of Islamic culture that, for instance, produce and continue to reproduce patriarchal attitudes. And so on. (See Racisms: Terminological Inflation for Ideological Ends.)

If one is convinced that the criticism of nonwestern culture or minority subcultures is racist, then those feminists who endeavor to root out patriarchal attitudes wherever they’re detected risk being labeled as racist and marginalized. This marginalization comes at cost for women and girls who live under the structure of patriarchy in the Islam world, a structure that denies them equal rights, personal freedom, and other rights and liberties associated with modernity. The same is true for black youth when criticisms of “acting white” are suppressed by accusations of racism. These are not exercises in exclusion, but the work of emancipation.

Since culture cannot be a result of race (rather racism is the result of culture), it makes no sense to describe cultural criticism as racist when there is not racism moving it. To be sure, there are people who criticize culture with the assumption that racial difference explains it. But, as we have established, those people are racists. That is what the term racism meant to capture. Absent that it is just cultural criticism. Bonilla-Silva’s argument is vacuous even if consequential.

If by “white” we mean something other than race, then criticizing white culture—or celebrating white culture, for that matter—would not be racist. But why would anyone describe the culture of the West as “white” if there is no such thing as a white race? Racism is the belief that the human population is meaningfully organized into racial groups and, moreover, that these groupings explain behavioral tendencies, cognitive ability, cultural accomplishment, and moral aptitude. If criticism of culture does not contain this belief it is by definition something other than racism. The idea of “white” and “black” cultures, if it is to mean anything racial, assumes as reality what science has proven false.

* * *

Antiracism in practice tacitly accepts a core premise of racism: it associates culture with a race and places these in an explanatory framework. It claims that western culture is the culture of white people and that, for this reason, there is something wrong with it.

Antiracists could say that racism as an element in a culture is a bad practice and should be eliminated without condemning the culture in which it is found. Racism is, after all, an aberration in a culture committed to the value of individualism. The more Westerners realize the ideals of the Enlightenment, the more peripheral the irrationalisms of race (and religion) become. One could declare an entire culture is racist or in some way harmful to people. But the antiracist wishes to say a great deal more than this. He wishes to say that all white people are racist because they are white and that the culture they produce is inherently racist for this reason. (What would be the solution to this problem if true?) Rightwing racism has a version of this logic: all white people belong to a tribe (whether they know it or not) and white culture is the product of the white race and it’s good for this reason.

This is the consequence of essentializing culture and religion in identitarian movements left and right: both standpoints root in racial thinking. The difference one would as least hope for is that, for the left, racial thinking would be seen as a bad thing. It used to be. But for today’s left, race identitarianism enthusiastically commits the crime it condemns: it hypostatizes race and places it at the center of its politics.

Consider the rhetoric of race privilege. When antiracists accuse people of possessing “white privilege,” the standard formula holding that “all white people” are privileged in some way that disadvantages members of nonwhite races, they are essentializing race. The assumption is that there is such a thing as the white race, and that intrinsic to it is race privilege. We know race privilege is intrinsic to the white race because every white person possesses it. It comes with their skin color. It is a feature of having been born white. If I, as a white person, deny being privileged in this way, then I am guilty of denying something I possess by virtue of my race. I am doubling down on my racism. I cannot get better if I do not admit that I am sick.

It’s all very circular and very racist. I am criticized and often condemned for my skin color. For many, hatred towards me on the grounds of my whiteness is at least understandable. But it’s not. It irrational. It’s exactly like supposing a black man is inferior to those who are not black because he is black. We have no evidence for this claim beyond racial identity. Privilege is assumed to be an actual and universal thing without requiring any evidence presented beyond the mere fact that I am “white,” which proves I am privileged. It’s as if there is still a rule in effect that directs blacks through a side door and up the stairs to the balcony of the movie theater so that whites do not have to mingle with them. But the United States abolished privileges on the basis of race in the 1960s. We’re taught to overlook the significance of the fact that, today, it is illegal—or should be illegal, anyway—to discriminate against persons on the basis of their perceived race.

But this last part is not exactly correct. Race is still considered in admissions to educational institutions, as well as in hiring in the public sector and at many business firms. You may not find many people who still believe in the old racism, but you will find plenty of persons who believe in this new idea of racism that makes it appropriate to decide matters based on racial classifications that work in a “progressive” direction. Members of the “white race” are, like members of the “black race,” human beings, each proven members of the same species. Yet race must necessarily be imagined as real in order to make the claim that one is privileged (or otherwise) by virtue of it.

The natural scientist tells us that race is not a thing (unless he is a racist). The social scientist says, “Not so fast.” Today, he accepts demands for racially segregated spaces, programs, and benefits, as if the United States did not more than half a century ago declare that the doctrine “separate but equal” is anything but equal. Progressives talk about the need of some people—white people—to pay reparations for a crime they did not commit (see my essay “For the Good of Your Soul”). These demands require coding people on the basis of selected and superficial phenotypic characteristics in order to discriminate against them on that basis. One may decry, “Isn’t this racism?” But one will be told that it is in fact racist to say, depending on the race in question, that recognition of racial types and differential treatment on the basis of race is racism. That’s the straitjacket into which Bonilla-Silva wishes to put critics of discrimination.

The antiracist sends conflicting messages. He promotes racial consciousness, and then insist that only some races have a right to organize their politics around it. He tells people they suffer from implicit race bias because they recognize race, but then criticizes them if they behave as if they don’t see race. He tells people to treat people as individuals but then accuses them of racism if they say they don’t see race. The critical race theorist, such as Bonilla-Silva, calls this “colorblind racism.” The antiracist claims that racism is an invisible structure that works its evil subtly and only by recognizing race and making decisions on that basis, with a certain selective logic, can we counter its effects.

In an act of extraordinary reification, the antiracist treats individuals as concrete representations of abstract groups, which are defined into empirical existence with statistical measures, aggregated data selectively touted when beneficial while rejected when not according to whom it benefits. Data showing that whites-as-a-group are better off than blacks-as-a-group is proof of the justification for positive discrimination. Data showing blacks-as-a-group commit more violent crime than whites-as-a-group cannot be accepted as grounds for policy formation because only individuals should be judged for their actions. (See Demographics and People.) Are we supposed to treat people as individuals or as racial types? It depends on abstract notions of power and direction in the cosmology of intergenerational guilt. And, of course, racial typing is also desired when organizations need to act as if persons with particular constellations of phenotypic features can stand in for abstract racial or ethnic group and thus should be admitted, displayed, or hired for this reason.

Antiracism does the work of racism. It determines worth based on race and other abstractions. It is rightwing racism’s leftwing mirror image, which is why we’re taught at a young age that there is no such thing as “reverse racism.” Which is in a way true. There is only racism.

This is how religion works. You are not supposed to examine its assumptions or true aims. Faith is a reflex. Angels, demons, heaven, hell, sin, salvation—these things are assumed as given. Naturally you will want to organize society around them if they are real. When you actually examine them, religion falls apart. They are not real things, but myths designed to control you. It is an absurd exercise to debate the reality of different sorts of demons when there is no such thing as one. Yet this is what happens. A rational person asks himself, why am I believing in unreal things? But people believe that race is real, so you have to operate on that basis, we are told. You may not see it, but others do. Should I suffer anything on account that people still believe in sin? How is that a remotely reasonable demand? One hundred years ago people believed that race was real. Some people believed it was a repugnant way to organize society, but they grew up in a culture that told them it was real. But then they examined the construct and found that it is not an actual thing. It only persists because people insist on keeping it alive. Why should that be my problem?

The ideas that we accept fictions or organize our lives around untruths because some people still believe them makes no rational sense. Why are those of us who have moved on pulled into such orbits? I’m an atheist. It’s not my religion. I’m not a congregant in the church of racial identity. Why should I be taxed for this or expected to seek salvation from the sin its moral entrepreneurs say I possess by virtue of my existence? There should be in a free society no gravitational force in such abstractions.

This much the postmodernist gets right: it is because of power that individuals are compelled to submit to the tyranny of fictions. Even though we now know race is not real, those who control our institutions, who organize our society—who make our law and form our politics—force us to submit to the fiction of race. We could move on from it. But those who demand we keep the damn thing going put their power where their desire is. We are compelled to participate in a delusion because there are real punishments for refusing to do so. It’s like challenging a witchfynder during an Inquisition. That makes you a witch.  

My father is not an American Christian because of his race. He is an American Christian because he was born in a particular country in a particular culture. That is what makes him white, too. Had he been born somewhere else or in a different we would be describing him differently. He would be committed to different things. But whatever time and place he may exist in, he will always be Homo sapiens. That is the enduring truth. That is what makes humanism universal. Racism is wrong because it considers individuals on the basis of an abstract condition they were born into; it treats a cultural category as a natural one. There are no good or bad races apart from racist ideology. But cultures and religions are objectively not good for people. Some cultures and religions cut off body parts, subordinate women and girls, and persecute homosexuals.

If you are a postmodern type and chalk up these sorts of things to cultural and moral relativism, then this talk of human freedom and rights is lost on you. But if you recognize that each person is a member of a single species that comes with needs like every other animal species, then cultures are on the basis of their functioning and results either in whole or in part praiseworthy or blameworthy. But if culture is essentialized, treated as if it were race or gender, then the observer who reports what he sees can appear bigoted. But on what grounds is it rational to assume that all cultures are equal?

* * *

I have written numerous entries on this subject from various starting points. In this entry, I lay out the main argument for why criticism of culture and religion absent an appeal to biology (explicitly or implicitly) is not racism, exposing the agendas of “cultural racism” and “new racism” as resting on a false premise. These agendas, projects of leftwing identitarianism, interfere with the necessary liberal and secular practice of cultural and irreligious critique, as well as function to undermine the defense of human rights and western civilization.

Applied to categories of living things, the term “race” first appears in the late sixteenth century referring to breeding stocks of animals and plants. Human selection of desired traits created races of dogs (and other animals). People cultivated races of corn, some sweet, others bitter. By the seventeenth century the term had become a basic concept in the developing science of evolutionary biology. During this time it came to be applied also to people. Why not? They’re animals, after all. In time, talk of races of dogs and of corn died out. Today we hear instead about breed and varieties. But language referring the races of people carries on.

The terms “racism” and “racialism” appear in the first decade of the twentieth century to refer to the ideology that applies the concept of race to people. Thus, to be a “racist” or a “racialist” is to believe that the human species can be meaningful organized into races—sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes even more—and that race explains variation in the behavioral proclivity, cognitive ability, cultural production, and moral aptitude of different groups of people grouped by selected phenotypic characteristics (skin color, hair texture, and so on). The core idea is that people of a given race think and behave in expected ways because they are evolved (or God made them) to think and behave in those ways.

The doctrine of the hierarchy of races lost its position in mainstream science following the revelation of Nazi atrocities at the end of WWII. However, my 1969 The World Book Encyclopedia still included a section on “The Three Great Stocks of Man” (see above). The entry maintains that modern science “does not support the claim that some races are biologically superior or inferior to others” and, moreover, “civilizations of any race may be advanced or retarded, and the people within them may have greater or smaller opportunities for contact and personal development [but that] there is no scientific evidence to prove this has anything to do with inborn abilities or aptitudes.” Nonetheless, the biology of race stands out in the entry, the rejection of the doctrine of “separate but equal” notwithstanding.

The practice of presupposing race as a biological entity faded over the next several decades. Physical anthropology mortally wounded racism in the 1960s. Modern genetics research nearly finished it off in the 1990s. It is now a marginal belief. (See “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation.”) Racism’s destruction was not a disinterested affair, the concept having long been a repugnant notion for many, transparently an ideological attempt to make something grand or disreputable out of ancestry. Unfortunately, racism has not completely died out. Charles Murray, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson are examples of notable contemporary racists. But such people are thankfully rare.

However, interest in racism on the left is anything but rare. Because racism is such a heinous doctrine, affixing that label to an institution, an opinion, or a person can effectively delegitimize that institution, opinion, or person. Noting this usefulness, the left has repurposed the term to smear those with whom they disagree as “racist” even when the target of abuse is not. How is this possible? Because racism, we are told, now extends to culture, not the racist notion that culture is a projection of genetics (that is already part of racism), but to Enlightenment criticism of nonwestern culture and minority subculture. (See “Smearing Amy Wax and the Fallacy of Cultural Racism.”) Students are taught this in elementary school as soon as they’ve reached the age where they can be effectively programmed with rudimentary abstractions. And, since religion is part of culture, why not take the next step and claim that irreligious criticism is racist? And so the charge of racism is now leveled at the critics of Islam, even though Muslims are not a race (see “Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They Were?”). The left calls this practice “antiracism.”

So absurd is the application of racism to cultural and irreligious criticism that does not appeal to biology that it is reasonable to suppose there must be an agenda in back of the practice. Suppressing the work of liberal and secular activists is more than a side effect of misguided thinking (although the thinking here is certainly misguided). The progressive left and the culture industry is consciously taking a term indicating an heinous ideology—that there are biological distinct races and that this fact explains culturally variable attitudes, behaviors, and culture—and enlarging it to encompass cultural and irreligious criticism in order to undermine defense of western culture. The new definition even includes criticism of the new definition; denying that criticizing culture and religion is racist is an element in the “new racism.”

An authoritarian feature of leftwing identitarianism is the desire to subject the Enlightenment demand to pursue a ruthless criticism of ideology to restrictions enforced by severe social sanction, including disciplinary action, mob action, and reputational damage. Attacking the humanist in this way is designed to produce a chilling effect that suppresses rational critique in the greater society. Any attempt by the antiracist to appeal to the same humanist tradition to justify his work is rationalization because he is not pursuing ruthless criticism for sake of freedom and reason but endeavoring to stifle criticism by delegitimizing the critic. The expansion of the term “racism” to cover things not germane to it is plainly ideological work, the point of which is to confuse meaning in order to deceive audiences. Exposing this tactic does not intend to deceive but to enlighten.

A crude but useful example of this is Ben Affleck’s meltdown on the Bill Maher show in the presence of Sam Harris (who is a racist but not for the argument he is making here) illustrates the problem quite well. Although Affleck is not a scholar or even an intellectual, his objection to rational criticism of Islam is no less sophisticated than what passes for scholarly discourse in today’s universities.

We don’t have a name for people who criticize culture because there is nothing wrong with criticizing culture. Knowing that, and not wanting to lose a good smear, the antiracist expands the term racism to include culture. But selectively. You can criticize western culture without being called a racist because the antiracist defines racism in such a way that it does not include western culture. The antiracist throws in religion, as well. Except, of course, Christianity. It is not racist to criticize Christianity because that is the prevailing religion in western culture. But it is racist is to criticize Islam.

Defining racism in this arbitrary way allows the antiracist to smear a person as racist without appearing as if he has betrayed the humanist and liberal value of openness he claims to possess. Ben Affleck gives us the perfect illustration of this mindset. “Of course, we do,” he say when Sam Harris says, “Ben, we have to be able to criticize bad ideas.” “No liberal doesn’t want to criticize bad ideas,” Affleck agrees. But he says this while characterizing criticism of Islam as “gross and racist.” Thus the ideology of antiracism produces what George Orwell calls in Nineteen Eighty-Four “doublethink,” the ability to accept contradictory beliefs simultaneously, which Orwell sees as a result of political indoctrination. Believing criticism of Islam is racist selectively negates the belief that bad ideas need criticizing.

There is little doubt that Affleck hears racism in Harris’ words. That he is operating on an emotional level is betrayed by his flushing. He is angered by criticisms of Islam. But to characterize Harris’ argument as racist is self-evidently fallacious since Muslims are not a race. Muslims are devotees to a political-religion ideology. Describing Muslims as a race is analogous to describing Christians or Nazis as a race. But irrational thinking is not concerning to the Antiracists who is working from the following principle: “I will define racism in a way that will make your nonracist arguments racist.” Even denying that he is right to do this becomes evidence of your racism. More than this, the antiracist defines racism in a way that makes his racist argument nonracist. Any open letter that begins with “Dear black people,” written by a white person with critical content to follow, will be deemed racist. But an open letter that begins with “Dear white people” will not be racist because white people cannot be the targets of racism. White people are, by definition, racist. That they take issue with that fact proves it.