In Floya Anthias and Cathie Lloyd,eds., Rethinking Anti-racisms: From Theory to Practice (New York: Routledge, 2002); also in Tikkun (Jan.-Feb., 2002).

The Modern World Racial System

Howard Winant

INTRODUCTION

As the world lurches forward into the 21st century, there is widespread confusion and anxiety about the political significance, and even the meaning, of race. In this essay I argue that far from becoming less politically central, race defines and organizes the world’s future, as it has done for centuries. I challenge the idea that the world, or the national societies I briefly consider in comparative light, is moving “beyond race.” I suggest that the future of democracy itself depends on the outcomes of racial politics and policies, as they develop both in various national societies and in the world at large. This means that the future of democracy also depends on the concept of race, the meaning that is attached to race. Contemporary threats to human rights and social well-being -- including the resurgent dangers of fascism, increasing impoverishment, and massive social polarization -- cannot be managed or even understood without paying new and better attention to issues of race. Thus this article is a preliminary effort to provide a set of conceptual tools that can facilitate this task.

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The present moment is unique in the history of race. Starting after WWII and culminating in the 1960s, there was a global shift, a “break,” in the worldwide racial system that had endured for centuries. The shift occurred because many challenges to the old forms of racial hierarchy converged after the war: anti-colonialism, anti-apartheid, worldwide revulsion at fascism, and perhaps most important, the U.S. civil rights movement and U.S.-U.S.S.R competition in the world’s South, all called white supremacy into question to an extent unparalleled in modern history. These events and conflicts linked anti-racism to democratic political development more strongly than ever before.

The rise of a worldwide, anti-racist, democratizing tendency, from the late 1940s on, was but the first phase, the initiation of the shift or “break” in the old world racial system. A second phase was to come after several decades of fierce struggles: this was the containment of the anti-racist challenge, which had largely occurred by about 1970. Thus, despite all the political reforms and cultural transformations wrought by social movements and democratic politics around the world, despite the real amelioration of the most degrading features of the old world racial system, the centuries-old and deeply entrenched system of racial inequality and injustice was hardly eliminated. Rather, in a postwar social order faced with an unprecedented set of democratic and egalitarian demands, racism had to be adapted. Thus a new racial politics developed, a reformed variety that was able to concede much to racially-based democratic and egalitarian movements, yet that could still maintain a certain continuity with the legacies of imperial rule, conquest, enslavement, etc.

So, all around the world, a centuries-old pattern of white supremacy has been more fiercely contested, more thoroughly challenged, in our lifetimes, than has ever occurred before. As a result, for the first time in modern history, there is widespread, indeed worldwide, support for what had until recently been a “dream,” Dr. King’s dream let us say, of racial equality.

Yet white supremacy is hardly dead. It has proven itself capable of absorbing and adapting much of the “dream,” repackaging itself as “colorblind,” non-racialist, and meritocratic. Paradoxically, in this reformed version racial inequality can live on, still battening on all sorts of stereotypes and fears, still resorting to exclusionism and scapegoating when politically necessary, still invoking the supposed superiority of “mainstream” (aka white) values, and cheerfully maintaining that equality has been largely achieved. It is rather ironic that this new, “colorblind” racial system may be more effective in containing the challenges posed over the past few decades by movements for racial justice than any intransigent, overtly racist “backlash” could possibly have been.

Although the reformed and officially nonracial version of white supremacy has succeeded in curtailing progress toward the “dream” in many dubious battles -- over immigration and citizenship, income redistribution and poverty, and above all in respect to the compensatory programs commonly called “affirmative action” -- nonracialism has hardly won the day. It has certainly not eliminated the movement for racial justice that spawned it. Rather, the racial politics that results from this synthesis of challenge and incorporation, racial conflict and racial reform, has proved neither stable nor certain. It is a strange brew, often appearing more inclusive, more pluralistic than ever before, yet also filled with threats: of “ethnic cleansing,” resurgent neofascism, and perhaps equally insidious, a renewed racial complacency.

The global racial situation, then, is fluid, contradictory, contentious. No longer unabashedly white supremacist, for the most part the world is, so to speak, abashedly white supremacist. The conflicts generated by the powerful movements for racial justice that succeeded WWII have been contained, but not resolved. Thus no new world racial system has yet been created; instead the problems of the old system have come to a head, and the outlines of what will succeed it can be at least be glimpsed, if not securely foreseen.

What does such a glimpse, however preliminary, reveal? The new world racial system will struggle to adapt the rhetoric of egalitarian social movements to the exigencies of a post-imperial, post-cold war, post-apartheid reality. To some extent this system has succeeded in reinventing itself along non-racist lines; in fact, its capacity to redefine itself as “beyond race” is in many ways a crucial index of its stability. Yet there is also a widespread recognition that the reforms undertaken in the 1950s and 60s have ossified, that they have not gone far enough, that indeed they may be providing a kind of “cover” for a reassertion of white privilege, white rule, “northern” cultural norms, all under the banner of “post-racial” societies, now officially “colorblind” and “pluralist.”

THE MODERN WORLD RACIAL SYSTEM

This global racial system we have now is obviously not the first one we have ever had. The racial dimensions of modernity itself have been widely acknowledged. The Enlightenment’s recognition of a unified, intelligible world, the construction of an international economy, the rise of democracy and popular sovereignty, and the emergence of a global culture, were all deeply racialized processes. To understand how race was fundamental to the construction of modernity is of more than historical interest: it also explains much about the present. Notably, it demolishes the commonly-held belief that racism is largely a thing of the past, the idea that after the bad old days of white supremacism and colonial rule, there has occurred in our own time a belated resolution to the “race problem.”

Before addressing the present, let us recall that past. What are the origins of the world racial system? How have the enigmatic specters of racial difference and racial inequality been loosed on the world?

The Origins of Race and Racism: Indeed the early modern history of race is full of precedents for the horrors of our own age. The tension between slavery on the one hand, and nascent democracy on the other, structured the lengthy transition to the modern world. Resistance against slavery contributed crucially to the broader redefinition of political rights for which early advocates of democracy yearned and fought. Indeed the violence and genocide of earlier racial phenomena prefigured contemporary atrocities like the Holocaust, "ethnic cleansing," and totalitarianism.

How racial was nascent capitalism? Were the politics and cultural groundwork of modernity premised on racial distinctions? Did the generally limited democracy of the "North" (or the "West") consist in part of an application of the principles of colonial rule to the "mother countries"? In what ways did early forms of resistance to racialized forms of rule -- as seen in abolitionism and slave revolts for example -- dynamize the worldwide impetus toward democratization? In what ways did antiracism itself become an archetypal democratic movement? Did the resistance to slavery, which grew into antiracism, ultimately do more than fighting for the human, social, cultural, and political rights of racially subordinated groups? Was it not also crucial in permitting the acquisition of those same rights by whites? In other words, is the modern, inclusive form of democracy, to which we have become accustomed, itself the product of global struggles against racism?

The abolition of African slavery was the great rehearsal for the “break” with white supremacy that took place in our own time. Abolition was made possible by three momentous social changes: the triumph of industrial capitalism, the upsurge of democratic movements, and the mobilization of slaves themselves in search of freedom. Abolition was not completed with the triumph of the Union in the American Civil War and the passage of the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution. Only when Brazil, the last country to free its slaves, did so in 1888, did the first crucial battle in the centuries-long war against white supremacy draw to a close.

But abolition left many emancipatory tasks unfinished. New forms of racial inequality succeeded slavery. Even after slavery had been ended, democracy was still partial. Racialization continued to define the mechanisms of authoritarian rule and to distribute resources on a global scale. Racial thought and practices associated subordinated status almost irrevocably with distinct types of human bodies. This ranking of human society by race still enabled and justified world-systemic rule. Generalized processes of racial stratification continued to support enormous and oppressive systems of commercial agriculture and mining. Thus until the mid-20th century the unfulfilled dreams of human rights and equality were still tied up with the logic of race.

The "Break": Although there was always resistance to racist rule, it was only in the period after World War II that opposition to racial stratification and racial exclusion once again became major political conflicts. Civil rights and antiracist movements, as well as nationalist and indigenous ones, fiercely contested the racial limitations on democracy. These movements challenged the conditions under which racialized labor was available for exploitation in the former colonies as well as the metropoles. They extended the antifascist legacy of WWII and articulated comprehensively with the geopolitical conflicts of the Cold War. They rendered old forms of political exclusion problematic, and revealed a panoply of mainstream cultural icons -- artistic, linguistic, scientific, even philosophical -- to be deeply conflictual. They drew on the experience of millions who had undergone military mobilization followed by an embittering return to a segregated or colonized homeland. Such movements recognized anew their international character, as massive postwar labor demand sparked international migration from the world’s South to its North, from areas of peasant agriculture to industrial areas. These enormous transformations manifested themselves in a vast demand to complete the work begun a century before with slavery’s abolition. They sparked the worldwide “break” with the tradition of white supremacy.

As the tumultuous 1960s drew to a close, the descendants of slaves and ex-colonials had forced at least the partial dismantling of most official forms of discrimination and empire. But with these developments -- the enactment of a new series of civil rights laws, decolonization, and the adoption of cultural policies of a universalistic character -- the global racial system entered a new period of instability and tension. The immediate result of the “break” was an uneven series of racial reforms that had the general effect of ameliorating racial injustice and inequality, but also worked to contain social protest. Thus the widespread demands of the racially subordinated and their supporters were at best answered in a limited fashion; in this way a new period of racial instability and uncertainty was inaugurated.

SOME NATIONAL CASES

The “break” was a worldwide phenomenon, but it obviously took very different forms in particular national settings. Racial conditions are generally understood to vary dramatically in distinct political, economic, and cultural contexts. In this essay I comment, necesarily briefly, on four national case studies: the United States, South Africa, Brazil, and the European Union (considered as a whole). Examined in greater detail in other work now available in book form (Winant 2001), these cases were chosen because they are crucial variants, important laboratories, where new racial dynamics are being developed.

Throughout these comparative case studies, I argue that the post-WWII “break” is a global backdrop, an economic, political, and cultural context in which national racial conflicts are being worked out.

THE UNITED STATES

How permanent is the "color line"? The activities of the civil rights movement and related antiracist initiatives achieved substantial, if partial, democratic reforms in earlier postwar decades. These innovations continue to coexist, however, with a weighty legacy of white supremacy whose origins lie in the colonial and slavery era. How do these two currents combine and conflict today?

Massive migration, both internal and international, has reshaped the US population, both numerically and geographically. A multipolar racial pattern has largely supplanted the old racial system, which was usually (and somewhat erroneously) viewed as a bipolar white-black hierarchy. In the contemporarary U.S., new varieties of inter-minority competition, as well as new awareness of the international “embeddedness” of racial identity, have greater prominence. Racial stratification varies substantially by class, region, and indeed among groups, although comprehensive racial inequality certainly endures. Racial reform policies are under attack in many spheres of social policy and law, where the claim is forcefully made that the demands of the civil rights movement have largely been met, and that the U.S. has entered a “post-racial” stage of its history.

The racial "break" in the United States was a partial democratization, produced by the moderate coalition that dominated the political landscape in the post-WWII years. The partial victory of the civil rights movement was achieved by a synthesis of mass mobilization on the one hand, and a tactical alliance with U.S. national interests on the other. This alliance was brokered by racial “moderates”: political centrists largely affiliated with the Democratic Party, who perceived the need to ameliorate racial conflict and end outright racial dictatorship, but who also understood and feared the radical potential of the black movement.

There was a price to be paid for civil rights reform. It could take place only in a suitably deradicalized fashion, only if its key provisions were articulated (legislatively, juridically) in terms compatible with the core values of US politics and culture: individualism, equality, competition, opportunity and the accessibility of “the American dream,” etc. This price was to be paid by the movement’s radicals: revolutionaries, socialists, and political nationalists (black, brown, red, yellow, and white), who were required to forego their vision of major social transformation or to face marginalization, repression, or death if they would not.

The radical vision was an alternative “dream,” Dr. King’s dream let us call it, a dream in which racial justice played the central part. To be “free at last” meant something deeper than symbolic reforms and palliation of the worst excesses of white supremacy. It meant substantive social reorganization that would be manifested in egalitarian economic and democratizing political consequences. It meant something like social democracy, human rights, social citizenship for blacks and other “minorities.”

But it was precisely here that the “moderate” custodians of racial reform drew their boundary line, both in practical terms and in theoretical ones (Steinberg 1995, Singh 1998). To strike down officially sanctioned racial inequality was permissible; to create racial equality through positive state action was not. The danger of redistribution -- of acceding to demands to make substantive redress for the unjustified expropriation and restriction of black economic and political resources, both historically and in the present -- was to be avoided at all costs.

Civil rights reform thus became the agenda of the political center, which moved “from domination to hegemony” (Winant 1994). The key component of modern political rule, of “hegemony” as theorized by Gramsci most profoundly, is the capacity to incorporate opposition. By adopting many of the movement’s demands, by developing a comprehensive and coherent program of “racial democracy” that hewed to a centrist political logic and reinforced key dimensions of US nationalist ideology, racial “moderates” were able to define a new racial “common sense.” Thus they divided the movement, reasserted a certain stability, and defused a great deal of political opposition. This was accomplished not all at once, but over a prolonged period from about the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s.

This partial reconfiguration of the US racial order, based on real concessions and leaving major issues unresolved, notably the endurance of significant patterns of inequality and discrimination. But the reform that did occur was sufficient to reduce the political challenge posed by antiracist movements in the US. Certainly it has been more successful than the intransigent strategy of diehard segregationists -- based in the the slogan of "massive resistance" to even minimal integration -- would have been.

Yet the fundamental problems of racial injustice and inequality, of white supremacy, of course remain: moderated perhaps, but hardly resolved.

So in the U.S. context, race not only retains its significance as a social structural phenomenon, but also continues to define North American identities and life chances, well after the supposed triumph of the "civil rights revolution." Indeed “the American dilemma” may be more problematic than ever as the 21st century commences. For achieving this “moderate” agenda has required that the civil rights vision be drawn and quartered, beginning in the late 1960s and with ever-greater success in the following two decades.

The tugging and hauling, the escalating contestation over the meaning of race, has resulted in ever more disrupted and contradictory notions of racial identity. The significance of race ("declining" or increasing?), the interpretation of racial equality ("colorblind" or color-conscious?), the institutionalization of racial justice ("reverse discrimination" or affirmative action?), and the very categories -- black, white, Latino/Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American -- employed to classify racial groups ... all these were called into question as they emerged from the civil rights "victory" of the mid-1960s.

Not by any stretch of the imagination can this situation justify the claim that racial injustice has largely been surpassed in a post-civil rights era. Yet such views have become the new national "common sense" in respect to race, acquiring not only elite and academic spokespeople, but also widespread mass adherence, especially among whites. As a result, the already limited racial reform policies (“affirmative action”) and the relatively powerless state agencies charged with enforcing civil rights laws (EEOC) developed in the 1960s are undegoing new and severe attack. The argument is now made that the demands of the civil rights movement have largely been met, and that the US has entered a "post-racial" stage of its history. Advocates of such positions -- usually classified as “neoconservative” (but sometimes also found on the left) -- ceaselessly instruct racially-defined minorities to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps," and in callous distortion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s message, exhort them to accept the "content of their character" (rather than "the color of their skin") as the basic social value of the country (Steele 1990; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997).

In an egregious recent example, the Supreme Court has moved in the Sandoval Case to repeal even the inadequate civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Here as elsewhere, by adding a purpose or “intent to discriminate” requirement to anti-discrimination law, the Court makes it almost impossible to get relief from discrimination. As critical legal theorist David Kairys has argued, this amounts to creating different equality rules for whites and nonwhites, because where whites get harmed the Court doesn’t care about intent or purpose.

After the dust had settled from the titanic confrontation between the movement’s radical propensities and the “establishment’s” tremendous capacity for incorporative “moderate” reform, a great deal remained unresolved. The ambiguous and contradictory racial conditions in the US today result from decades-long attempts simultaneously to ameliorate racial opposition and to placate the ancien regime raciale. The unending reiteration of these opposite gestures, these contradictory practices, itself testifies to the limitations of democracy and the continuing significance of race in the US.

SOUTH AFRICA

In the mid-1990s, South Africa -- the most explicitly racialized society in the late twentieth century -- entered a difficult but promising transition. The apartheid state had of course been committed to a racialized framework of citizenship, civic inclusion, and law in general; the post-apartheid constitution incorporates the principle of nonracialism originally articulated in the ANC-based Freedom Charter of 1955. Yet the country still bears the terrible burden of apartheid's sequelae: persistent racial inequality persists across every level of society. The legacy of segregated residential areas, combined with a highly racialized distribution of resources of every sort, combine to urge moderation on political leadership. White fears must be placated in order to sustain the country's economic base and minimize capital flight. Whites continue to hold controlling positions throughout the economy; the handful of blacks who have made their way into the corporate and state elites understand very well the price the country would pay for a radical turn in policy.

Yet this is a state committed to racial equality, and to promoting black advancement, individually and collectively. Can the post-apartheid state stabilize the process of political, social,and economic integration of the black majority? Can it maintain an official nonracialism in the face of such comprehensive racial inequality? How can the vast majority of citizens -- excluded until so recently not only from access to land, education, clean water, decent shelter, debarred from Africa's wealthiest economy, and denied the most elementary civic and political rights -- garner the economic access they so desperately need, without reinforcing white paranoia and fear? How can the post-apartheid state facilitate the reform of racial attitudes and practices, challenging inequality, supremacism, and the legacy of racial separatism without engendering white flight and subversion?

Both the anti-apartheid movement and the new government's policies were shaped by global concerns as well as by local ones. Internal political debates reflect changing global discussions around race and politics. Just as the South African Black Consciousness Movement drew on the speeches of Malcolm X and Aimé Cesaire in its understanding of racial oppression, just as the anti-apartheid movement used international anti-racist sentiment to build momentum for sanctions on the old regime, so too the current government is both guided and constrained by international pressures and issues.

Moreover, internal politics too bring international resources to bear: through the post-war era, the anti-apartheid movement drew much of its resources and ideas from an international anti-racist movement, largely linked to an international trend to support decolonization. Since the 1994 election, however, international constraints have limited the sphere of action of the new democratic government. Critics of affirmative action policies, for example, emphasize the danger of undermining efficiency in the name of redistribution, much as critics of redistributive policies deploy neoliberal economic arguments to reject nationalization; in each case, they invoke international discourses that are non-racial in form, yet have racial implications in practice. The South African state continues to face a considerable challenge from both left and right: will it be possible to reconstruct South Africa by building not only a democracy but a greater degree of consensus, of citizenship and belonging? To what degree can a policy of “class compromise” forestall the dangers of social upheaval and capital flight (Webster and Adler 1999).

Understanding these processes requires viewing South African racial debates in global perspective, and exploring the ways in which local actors seek to change the terms of engagement as they restructure national politics. The 1994 elections changed the racial character of the state, although many white civil servants remain in place; affirmative action policies, to which the ANC-led government is committed, could reorganize racial distribution of incomes, if not wealth. Yet in the context of a global debate over affirmative action, and in the face of the threat of the flight of white capital and skills, the process of reform has been far slower than many South Africans, white and black, expected. This dilemma remains unresolved: how can democratic nonracial institutions be constructed in a society where most attributes of socioeconomic position and identity remain highly racialized?

BRAZIL

Brazil presents significant parallels, both historical and contemporary, to other American nations, including the U.S. These similarities include Brazil's history of slavery and black inequality, its displacement and neglect of a large indigenous population, its intermittent and ambiguous commitment to immigration, its incomplete democracy, and its vast and increasingly urban underclass (disproportionately black). Brazilian racial dynamics have traditionally received little attention, either from scholars or policy makers, despite the fact that the country has the second largest black population in the world (after Nigeria). Its post-emancipation adoption of a policy of "whitening," which was to be achieved by concerted recruitment of European immigrants, owed much to the U.S. example, and also drew on 19th century French racial theorizing (Skidmore 1993 [1964]).

Amazingly, the "myth of racial democracy" still flourishes in Brazil, even though it has been amply demonstrated to be little more than a figleaf covering widespread racial inequality, injustice, and prejudice (Hasenbalg and Silva 1992, Hanchard 1994, Andrews 1991). The Brazilian racial system, with its "color continuum" (as opposed to the more familiar "color line" of North America), tends to dilute democratic demands. Indeed, Brazilian racial dynamics have made it difficult to promote policies that might address racial inequality. Public discourse resolutely discourages any attempt to define inequality along racial lines; the current President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is the first even to broach the subject seriously, although vociferous denials both official and informal persist. If politicians do point out racial inequalities, they challenge the myth of racial democracy, and are subject to charges that they are themselves provoking racial discrimination by stressing difference.

Reliable research on racial stratification and racial attitudes in Brazil remains scarce (Telles 1992, 1994; Twine 1997; Datafolha 1995). A whole range of political questions thus remains mysterious. Consider the example of voting rights: illiterates could not vote until 1985, but there is no reliable data on the proportion of illiterates who were black -- and thus the extent to which black Brazilians have been disenfranchised through this century remains uncertain, though it is undoubtedly large.

The emergence of the Movimento Negro Unificado as a force to be reckoned with -- though by no means as strong as the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement -- represents a new development. The MNU used the 1988 centennial of the abolition of Brazilian slavery, as well as the 1990-91 census, to dramatize persistent racial inequalities. As in South Africa, this phase of the black movement takes its reference points partly from international antiracist struggles, often drawing on examples, symbols, and images from the civil rights and antiapartheid movements.

In the 1990s, a range of racial reforms have been proposed in Brazil -- largely in response to the increasingly visible movimento negro. To enact these reforms, to prompt the state to adopt anti-racist policies, however, will require far greater support for change than presently exists. The political dilemma is familiar: blacks need organized allies: in the party system, among other impoverished and disenfranchised groups, and on the international scene. Yet in order to mobilize, they must also begin to assert a racialized political identity, or there will be little collective support for racial reforms. How can blacks address this dualistic, if not contradictory, situation? How can Afro-Brazilians assert claims on the basis of group solidarity, without simultaneously undermining the fragile democratic consensus that has begun to emerge across many constituencies? How can democratic institutions be built alongside policies designed to address racial inequalities, without undermining a vision of common citizenship and equality?

THE EUROPEAN UNION

The last few decades have established that indeed, "the empire strikes back." Racially plural societies are in place throughout Europe, especially in former imperial powers like the U.K., the Netherlands, France, and Spain, but also in Germany, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, and to some extent in the East. The influx of substantial numbers of nonwhites during the postcolonial period has deeply altered a dynamic in which the racial system and the imperial order had been one, and in which the "other" was by and large kept outside the walls of the "mother country." As a stroll around London, Frankfurt, Paris, or Madrid quickly reveals, those days are now gone forever. Yet the response to the new situation too often takes repressive and anti-democratic forms, focusing attention on the "immigrant problem" (or the "Islamic problem"), seeking not only to shut the gates to Maghrebines or sub-Saharan Africans, Turks or Slavs (including Balkan refugees), but often also to define those "others" who are already present as enemies of the national culture and threats to the "ordinary German" (or English, or French, etc.) way of life. This rationale for racial exclusion and restriction in Europe has been analyzed as “differentialist”: its distinction from the meritocratic logic of discrimination in the US has been linked to a generally lower European interest in issues of individual equality, and a relatively greater concern with the integrity of national cultures (Taguieff 1983[1999], Wieviorka 1995).

Thus the particular racial issue that must be confronted in Europe is the newly heterogeneous situation, the multiplication of group identities. Currently antidemocratic tendencies are widely visible: new right and neofascist groups are widespread. At both the state and regional levels the agenda of restriction is gaining adherence, jeopardizing mobility of employment or residence, and sometimes stigmatizing religious or other cultural practices. Conflicts over immigration and citizenship have taken on new intensity, with crucial implications for the character of democracy.

The dynamics of integration raise a wide range of questions about future European racial logics. Conflicting principles of citizenship -- jus sanguinis vs. jus soli -- are deeply imbedded in the distinct European national makeups, and their resolution in a common cultural/political framework will not come easily (Brubaker 1992). Relations with ex-colonies vary, raising serious questions not only of immigrant access and economic ties between the old empires and the new Europe, but also giving rise to serious anxieties about “security”and “terrorism.” Popular anti-racist sentiments stimulated the formation of many multiculturalist and pluralist organizations particularly in the early 1980s. But over the past decade they have largely ceased to function as mass mobilization initiatives in support of democracy. So, while the slogan “Touche pas mon pôte” (“Hands off my buddy”) no longer summons tens of thousands into the street in defense of the democratic rights of racially-defined minorities, the transition to racial pluralism is still very much underway.

TOWARD NEW RACIAL DYNAMICS

To understand the changing significance of race in the aftermath of the 20th century, the century whose central malady was diagnosed by Du Bois as “the problem of the color-line,” requires us to reconsider where the racialized world came from, and where it is going. In the settings studied, the “break” that began with movement activity after WWII , and that was contained from the late 1960s onward by political reforms, has not been consolidated. Just as earlier stages of modern racial history failed to resolve many issues, so too does the present epoch. At the end of the century the world as a whole, and our national cases as well, are far from overcoming the tenacious legacies of colonial rule, apartheid, and segregation. All still experience continuing confusion, anxiety, and contention about race. Yet the legacies of epochal struggles for freedom, democracy, and human rights persist as well. To evaluate the transition to a new world racial system in comparative and historical perspective requires keeping in view the continuing tension that characterizes the present.

Despite the enormous vicissitudes that demarcate and distinguish national conditions, historical developments, roles in the international market, political tendencies, and cultural norms, racial differences often operate as they did in centuries past: as a way of restricting the political influence, not just of racially subordinated groups, but of all those at the bottom end of the system of social stratification. In the contemporary era, racial beliefs and practices have become far more contradictory and complex. The “old world racial system” has not disappeared, but it has been seriously challenged and changed. The legacy of democratic, racially oriented movements such as the US civil rights movement, anti-apartheid struggles, SOS-Racisme in France, the Movimento Negro Unificado in Brazil, and anti-colonialist initiatives throughout the world's South, is thus a force to reckoned with. My aim in this essay has been to trace the parameters of this situation.

It is impossible to address worldwide dilemmas of race and racism by ignoring or "transcending" these themes, for example by adopting so-called "colorblind" policies. In the past the centrality of race deeply determined the economic, political, and cultural configuration of the modern world; although recent decades have seen a tremendous efflorescence of movements for racial equality and justice, the legacies of centuries of racial oppression have not been overcome. Nor is a vision of racial justice fully worked out. Certainly the idea that such justice has already been largely achieved -- as seen in the "colorblind" paradigm in the US, the “non-racialist” rhetoric of the South African Freedom Charter, the Brazilian rhetoric of “racial democracy,” the emerging “racial differentialism” of the European Union -- remains problematic.

What would a more credible vision entail? The pressing task today is not to jettison the concept of race, but instead to come to terms with it as a form of flexible human variety.

What does this mean in respect to racism? Racism has been a crucial component of modenity, a key pillar of the global capitalist system, for 500 years. So it remains today. Yet it has been changed, damaged, and forced to reorganize by the massive social movements which have taken place in recent decades. In the past these movements were international in scope and influence. They were deeply linked to democratizing and egalitarian trends, such as labor politics and feminism. They were able both to mobilize around the injustices and exclusion experienced by racially subordinated groups, and simultaneously to sustain alliances across racial lines. This is background; such experiences cannot simply recur. Still, the massive mobilizations which created the global “break” that followed WW II have certainly reshaped our world. Were these movements fated to be the last popular ursurges, the last egalitarian challenges to ehite supremacy, to racial hierarchy? Surely not. In the countries I have discussed, and in transnational antiracist networks as well, these earlier precedents still wield their influence. They still spark new attempts to challenge racism.

At the same time, new political and intellectual leaders have come onto various national stages in recent years, arguing that the worst racial injustices (of the US, Brazil, South Africa, etc.) are now firmly relegated to the past, and that the problem of racism can now be viewed as essentially solved. So why maintain affirmative action policies? Why direct resources toward immigrants, victims of segregation and apartheid, the (disproportionately dark-skinned) poor? Don’t we already have equality now?

Will race ever be “transcended”? Will the world ever “get beyond” race? Probably not. But the entire world still has a chance of overcoming the stratification, the hierarchy, the taken-for-granted injustice and inhumanity that so often accompanies the “race concept.” Like religion or language, race can be accepted as part of the spectrum of the human condition, while it is simultaneously and categorically resisted as a means of stratifying national or global societies. Nothing is more essential in the effort to reinforce democratic commitments, not to mention global survival and prosperity, as we enter a new millennium.

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