32 RüdigerKunow
In racistthoughtand practice,these surface "biological" featuresare
then understood as signifiers of "hidden" but powerful "innate" traits of
behavior, morality, intelligence, etc. As the prodigal child of
Enlightenmentrationalism,"race"initsmodernsensecomesintouseat
a moment when the celebrated ideal of a commonality of all human
beings involved the silencing or "forgetting" of those deemed not quite
human enough. Race—emerging at the "point of rupture" of
Enlightenment universalism (Buck-Morss 133)—has since then
generated a plethora of essentially post-Hegelian narratives of uneven
development in terms of the allegedly inferior personality, intelligence,
culture, of racialized people. These narratives in their turn have
produced and justified noxious, even deadly, social and cultural
conditions.
Racism and racist "words that wound" stand at the center of U.S.-
American culture and society (Matsuda qtd. in Montes and Butler 304;
Morrison xii; Goldberg passim), and as Toni Morrison has famously
argued, "[t]hrough significant and underscored omissions, startling
contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts... a real or fabricated
Africanist presence was crucial to [the] sense of Americanness" (6,
cf.12). And so, the "socially governed relationship with race" (7) has in
the course of U.S.-American history produced highly divisive and
affectively charged practices. In all these practices, the biology of
humanbeingshasbeenplayinganimportantrole.Historically—andnot
onlyhistorically—ithasrenderedthebodyahighlyvisible,primarysite
onwhichthehistoryofexclusionandviolenceisenacted.
But even as biological markers may be principal signifiers of race,
they "cannot and do not do the actual work of racial differentiation and
distinction" (Holt 10). Being aware of the unavoidable but incomplete
role of such markers, African American thinkers such as Fredrick
Douglass or W. E. B. DuBois have from very early on consistently
rejected the idea of race itself and racial "naturalism," as did
anthropologists such as Franz Boas. In our own time, race has
encountered extensive scientific and philosophical contestations, among
dark skin pigmentation, control every aspect of the town's life, and set up a
system of discrimination directed against African Americans with lighter skin
and also women. For an extended discussion of this aspect cf. among others
Davidson,esp.367-71.