Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

( 114 ) Black Rights/White Wrongs

How do we correct this situation? In this chapter, I want to make some
suggestions toward the development of a possible long- term theoretical
strategy for remedying this deficiency. My recommendation is that we
(a)  retrieve and elaborate, as an alternative, more accurate global socio-
political paradigm, the concept of white supremacy; (b)  develop an analy-
sis of a specifically racial form of exploitation, in its manifold dimensions;
(c)  uncover and follow the trail of what W.  E. B.  Du Bois called the “pay-
off ” of whiteness;^5 and then (d) locate normative demands for racial justice
within this superior descriptive conceptual framework.^6

“WHITE SUPREMACY” AS AN ALTERNATIVE

PARADIGM

Major political battles are in part ideological battles, struggles over rival
understandings of the socio- political order and conflicting framings of the
crucial issues. Normative debates about right and wrong, justice and injus-
tice, typically involve not merely value disputes but competing narratives of
what has happened in the past and what is happening right now, alternative
descriptive frameworks and interpretations. The ignoring of race as a global
issue in American socio- political theory— I distinguish “global” from, say,
“local” discussions of race in sub- sections of a field such as the sociology
of race relations, urban politics, or affirmative action debates in applied
ethics— is made possible by a certain conception of the American polity
and social order. With appropriate disciplinary adjustments for the particu-
lar subject in question (whether sociology or political science or political
philosophy), this picture provides the common overarching framework
of debate in the field. The United States is conceptualized as basically an
egalitarian (if a bit flawed) liberal democracy free of the hierarchical social
structures of the Old World.
This profoundly misleading picture is Eurocentric in at least two inter-
esting ways: (a) it focuses on the Euro- American population, those we call
“whites,” and takes their experience as representative, as the raw material
from which to construct theoretical generalizations; (b)  it draws on a set
of theoretical paradigms drawn from European socio- political theory—
the classic writings of the great figures in European sociology and modern
political thought, centered on class as the primary social division, and either
not recognizing race as an emergent structure in its own right or biologiz-
ing it. The New World is being intellectually grasped with the tools of the
Old World and with reference to the Old World’s transplanted population.
So the possibility that the experience of expropriated reds, enslaved blacks,
annexed browns, and excluded yellows may be sufficiently different as to

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