Reconstructing the “Problem” of Race

How should the "problem" of race be conceptualized? This essay attempts to widen our understanding of the problem of race in American political discourse by examining its productive function in grounding the meaning of American liberalism. By tracing this relationship in W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, Woodrow Wilson's 1913 Gettysburg Reunion Speech, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, and Rogers M. Smith's Civic Ideals, the author argues that as long as race is conceived as the negative referent of American liberal identity, the problem of race will continue to obscure the possibilities for transformative change. Keywords: politics; history; race; ethnicity; politics Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question . . . - W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk When W. E. B. DuBois began The Souls of Black Folk with the question he suspects most would ask of him - "How does it feel to be a problem?" - he was already signaling a problem of ascription, of both his own and of the reader.1 Conveyed through looks of curiosity or even compassion, that question carried its imprint without being asked or answered. We know from Foucault to ask something of the networks in which problems are located - the power/knowledge relations, the discourses that circulate around such problems, providing their grids of intelligibility, seeking to propel themselves in their solutions or, in Foucault's phrase, their tactics. Loath to engage in a confessional mode, he would rather have us genealogically explore the roots of our own questions, take pause in the answers we would give, unravel and de-familiarize our own inevitable presentism. The task was less to solve or repudiate our investments in the problems resonant in political discourse than to reassess fhe constituting power of those investments both for what they enabled and for what they obscured and foreclosed. Few would doubt that the problem of race remains a persistent investment in American political discourse; fewer still would doubt its productive role over the course of American history. But if we follow Foucault's train of questioning, what then would it mean to reconstruct the problem of race in American political history? What sorts of larger discursive entanglements and possibilities has the problem of race productively marked? Fortunately, many scholars have increasingly explored this question, charting its institutional roots and consequences, exploring its imaginative attachments and resonances.2 My work on the discourse of multiculturalism in the United States has led me to explore the special place the problem of race exhibits in animating many of its central debates. Whether in affirming the value of individual autonomy, parsing the limits of toleration, constituting the differential bases of social cohesion, or even simply performing the spectacles and dramas that brand the social imaginary the problem of race or at least something of its signifying inheritance haunts the terms of analysis. Race calls forth associative chains of the nightmare of history; the intractability of power and inequality; the divisiveness of personal desire; the insufficiency of governmental power or, conversely, its tyrannical reach; above all, perhaps, the lack of self-control and imaginative freedom.3 The associations of race always call forth networks of effects. Indeed, it is the profundity of these associations that continue to propel discourses about the terms of the national future, the terms of immigrant incorporation, and the limits and possibilities of governmental and institutional engagement in a variety of domains. Yet beside mese excavations into the profundity and centrality of racial discourse within the archives of American politics, conventional political discourse views the problem of race as marking the persistence of a corrupt, illegitimate, and divisive political vernacular. National unity, the fulfillment of the nation's highest ideals, seems implicitly jeopardized by its presence. …