Materializing Race

A Lecture by
Charles W. Mills
John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

"Materializing Race"
given Friday, April 9, 2010
before Cal State Fullerton's
40th Annual Philosophy Symposium

Video produced by Universtiy Extended Education-Distance Education

OK guys, so my title in case it's a bit puzzling, I am not saying we should materialize race, I am saying race is a ready material and then the question is how does one theorize this, and how does one theorize this in a framework where it makes sense to say some things are material and some things are not.

So this is an attempt to sort of explain if race is material in the first place, how could it be material, and then how that would be related to materialism of all the crimes.

OK, the metaphysics of race is by now a familiar topic in philosophy. Philosophers interested can everyone hear, yeah? OK. Philosophers interested in subject of race found themselves presented with two main alternatives: traditional — read racist — old fashioned, biological conceptions of race, racial naturalism, racial realism, racial essentialism, racial biologism, and a nouveau liberal white color blindness — racial eliminativism — that urges we drop the concept from our vocabulary altogether. Either race was natural or like witches and phlogiston, race did not really exist.

Most theorists—the important exceptions being Anthony Appiah and Neil Mizak—chose to reject both alternatives and sought instead to carve out a metaphysical space for race as neither biological nor nonexistent, but sociopolitically constructed.

Indeed, not a loss primarily because the work of philosophers whose cultural influence is I am afraid quite marginal, the claim that race is constructed has long since become a cliche. But the consensus in radical academia on this point conceives deep theoretical divergences on the nature of this construction.

Is the construction of race meant to demarcate a contrast with a large number of things that are not constructed, or is it that everything is constructed so that race falls on uninterestingly to this category simply by virtue of a major premise?

And what in any case or in its different cases are the constituents, the building blocks, so to speak, of this construction? Are they discourses, prejudices, culture, performance, how might they be related to different theorist's competing views of the workings of sociopolitical causality and the different framings of the role of the body?

Above all my primary focus here, can older, now seemingly outdated and perhaps even discredited categories famously associated with Marxist tradition, categories like materialism, can they illuminate the debate? Does it make sense to think of race as material? If so, how and what insights might this give up into its dynamics? That's the introduction.

So beginning review of the Marxist framework, especially for the younger generation — an audience for whom this is likely to be an obsolete paradigm.

OK, so in the heyday of Marxist influence in the academy, now long passed, materialism was a key term, what is the rise of poststructuralism, it has largely disappeared from sociopolitical theory, except in the work of some feminist theorists such as Linda Martin Alcoff hey coincidence, she's here to whom we will return.

Now though they did not actually use the phrase themselves, this was a later carnage, Marx and Engels basically argued that we should understand society and its members in terms of a social ontology. That this ontology was a materialist one. So the insight was that social structures, specifically class structures, shaped human beings so fundamentally that they created a kind of second nature, transforming them into beings of a particular classed kind.

So an ontology was created, a metaphysics of society and the self which was nonetheless in contrast to traditional metaphysics, historically variant in that a different kind of class society would have shaped people differently. And in the projected classless communist society of the future, a radically new socialist man and socialist woman would be born.

But the possibility of such epochal future transformations was not supposed to undercut the reality that here and now the present classed humans were in indeed deeply molded by their class membership. So the noun or the adjective in the phrase pull up against one another, so both need to be emphasized and the tension maintained.

The ontology is social rather than natural, but it is nonetheless an ontology, with the corresponding implications of that world for deep metaphysical shaping. We are what we are in large measure because
of social forces, which are contingent and could have been different, but with that said, we still are what we are.

Now what distinguishes Marxism as emphasized is a peculiar conception of the social ontology. After all the notions that humans are fundamentally shaped by the social and their socialization is non anthropological and sociological commonplace, and one that is axiomatic for postmodernism.

Marxism famously claims that its sociopolitical outlook is materialist, that most previous sociopolitical thinkers — more saliently their immediate adversaries, Hegel, and the Young Hegelians, apart from Feurbach — were idealists. So though the term was not used by Marx, their theory of history came to be known as "historical materialism".

So materialism for them has at least two senses, though these are not clearly distinguished and in fact they are often conflated or it's assumed that one logically follows from the other.

The first sense is a sense familiar to us from introductory courses in metaphysics: materialism as an ontological position that contrast with other ontological positions such as idealism or dualism.

Materialism, this sense claims that the only things that exist are physical entities. There are no souls, no minds outside of the thinking brain, and no God. Marxism is not unique in affirming such a view, and both Marx and Engels saw themselves as part of an older materialist tradition and philosophy that stretches all the way back to ancient Greece.

In their opinion, Feurbach was unique among the Young Hegelians in being a materialist though in their opinion one who did not follow his premises where they thought they pointed. So that's the first sense, ontological.

The second sense is fuzzier; it's harder to pin down. Let's call it materialism in the sociopolitical sense. Materialism in this sense is not an ontological view in the traditional sense just demarcated. It's a claim or a set of claims about patterns of sociopolitical causality. And as such, it is relevant for claims about social ontology.

Sociopolitical materialism asserting the following three facts: one, the sociopolitical system can be differentiated into different elements; two, some of these elements should be thought of as material and some as ideal; and three, overall patterns of sociopolitical causality are determined by the material elements.

The emphasis on overall, because materialists werenot denying that ideal elements have some causal efficaciousness, but the claim is that in terms of shaping the overall sociopolitical dynamic, the material elements are more important.

So in the same way that ontological materialism espoused an important general truth about the universe, sociopolitical materialism espoused an important general truth about the workings of the social world.

So what were these material elements? Marx and Engels seem to have been working with the following analogy. Materialist was an ontological position affirms a general independence of the world from the mentor, thought this in case of human institutions becomes more complicated.

The universe preexisted us, it preexisted other thinking beings, it preexisted all forms of life. So the universe does not depend on us. Moreover life and the mental eventually come into existence, they do so as functions of physical structure without which they could not survive.

So if this is correct, then dualism is false, idealism is false and the claim that everything is constructed is false. The vast majority of things in the universe are not constructed. Money is constructed, mountains are not constructed. So this ontological asymmetry is then analogized to a causal asymmetry. Materialism as a source of political thesis affirms a differential causal significance of a particular source or sector, which is analogously independent of us, and the idea that certain aspects of the social order have the character they do independent of our will.

And for Marx and Engles that is a level of human technological development and the power relations in which production is organized.

So the techno economics was independent of our will because without access to the means of production we would not be able to survive, and because of this materials necessity the necessity of making a living a power relationship is established in society by virtue of which the owners of the means of production have differential power over the lives of others.

And this asymmetrical significance is metaphorically condensed in the famous metaphor based on the super structure. So the base is supposed for the force and relations of Marxist jargon and in the super structure is supposed to be the state, the political system, core transfer and declare and don't worry it gets better. If you can sort of endure this, it gets better eventually.

So class for Marx and Engles is therefore supposed to be a more foundational category than any other social group membership. Class is a material part of the base, and the state the legal system, morality, all of that is ideal.

Finally, the material is not restricted to a base and they force the relation of production. Nature itself is also material because nature is also independent of us.

But the claim Marx and Engles make is that you cannot assimilate historical materialism to naturalistic materialism because human beings are distinguished from other animals not by virtue of being created by God and set above the rest of humanity a world view that Marx and Ingles would obviously have rejected but by virtue of having natural capacities, the capacity as human being to significantly alter the natural world and react back upon it so that natural causality is increasingly mediated through the social.

So Marx and Engles thought that theories of geographical determinism, theories of bad logical determinism, are false, because they don't take account of the way in which natural variables are modified and then changed by the social sector.

OK, that's purpose. You're still here. That's great. Let's get to race.

So, what is all of this, you ask in fact, have been asking for a long time, I'm sure what is all of this have to do with race and embodiment, the theme of our conference? So the question I'm asking is how would those who are sympathetic to Marxism, materialism and, a political economy approach to race. So these are ancient categories, political economy. I'm not talking about Foucault and Derrida. In our discourse, we are talking about old fashioned political economy.

How would those sympathetic to Marxism approach race within such a framework and say is it possible that orthodox Marxist representation of race is mistaken and is not that class is only thin that's material but race could be material, too.

So at this point I would like to introduce as a reference point the work of Linda Martin Alcoff, a participant in our conference. In her recent book, "Visible Identities," Alcoff stakes out a theoretical position with which I'm in fundamental sympathy. And in a sense what I'm trying to do here is to develop and extrapolate what I take to be her line of argument. Not of course that I expect you to necessarily to agree with me in all the claims I'm going to make. For Linda, too, is trying to recuperate materialism for race and gender identities.

So in the book we find her rejecting orthodox Marxism's dismissal of identity politics while simultaneously affirming the importance of Marxist class categories and the need to recognize that, "Capitalism was a racial and gender system from it's inception, so that the real challenge that power must address is a need to articulate its precise relation to class."

She's hostile, as virtually all feminist philosophers are, to a naturalism about gender while simultaneously as significantly fewer do, warning that "poststructuralism threatens to deconstruct the feminist object, as well as the female subject, and rejecting Judith Butler's view that all is cordial and performs."

She repudiates, along with virtually everybody else, a class reductivist or naturalist materialism, while simultaneously, along with a small number of us, being emphatic in the need to reconstruct a new materialism that is not theoretically handicapped in these ways. Which in the case of gender would be "an analysis that maintains the central important of the material reality of the sexed body. In some gender is both positional and material."

So Linda is in agreement with classical Marxism and hostile to poststructural feminism on the importance of the material ideal distinction while rejecting classical Marxism's restriction materiality to class.
Unlike those theorists who would say that materialism is either false, since the parties discourse that determines everything, or meaningless since it's binary opposition, idealism versus materialism is an artifact of a conceptual framework that needs to be transcended and abandoned, Linda warns us that materialism is meaningful and true.

So the question I want to ask then is what about race? Linda self counters the materialists counter theorization of identity politics in her book and articles also call identity metaphysics is focused more on gender than on race.

But she does say in her chapter on mixed race that, "any materialist counter to self must take race into account." So clearly she endorses such a project in principle, but the question then is what do the distinction of material constructivism look like? How do we theorize the social constructs of race in the theory which prioritizes material determinants at this crucial shaping factors. And relatedly, how should we understand the materiality of race, if it is indeed material, l in relation to these other materialities.

OK, so that's our preface and let's now go into that attempt to do it. So first of all to preempt some misunderstandings, as we just emphasized, it's not an argument for race in a naturalistic sense. It's not that kind of materialism. So we're not saying that race represents natural biological limitations, evolutionary laws and is material in that sense, that's traditional racist theory.

We're rejecting that. It's not that kind of materialism that's in a Marxist framework that would count as unhistorical materialism. That's naturalist materialism, where there's an emphasis on the idea is that you want that materialism that is sensitive to history.

So once blackness would not be a transhistorical fact. It's not the case that you're blackness endures over time and has these effects as a sort of natural relation to you and other human beings. Blackness is a source of historical contingent fact, rather than one that's an eternal throughout history.

So the whole point of the Marxist critique is that our embodied experience is intimately related to the larger social body of the body politic, and this of course in a indecipherable 16:25 not that particular vocabulary but the idea of inter corporeality embodies the materiality that leads to other bodies and so forth.

Marx was not concerned about race except of course from occasional racist comments about niggers, but his discussion about alienation makes it clear that our relation to ourselves or relation to the world is determined by class society. We think of the early manuscripts, the 1844 manuscripts and the concepts there, alienation from your product, from others from our species, from the world.

That's not intrinsic to the human condition, as such. That's not a manifestation simply of externalization of activity in the world, because then one unavoidable feature of all societies. What Marx is emphatic on is that this is a consequence of emergence of class society as the result of which you are a relation of domination to what he called the ruling class.

So this obviously provides us an overall theoretical orientation. If you want to theorize race as material we need to see race somehow the same way. But we are disadvantaged. We are disadvantage to look at the Marxist text, because Marx himself did not recognize white supremacy as a system in itself. He recognized class domination as a system in itself. He did not recognize racial domination as a system.

So if we look at one of the most famous treatments of black embodiment in the literature, Fanon's "White Skin, Black Mask" which has already been cited here, what does he emphasize in his introduction?

He says he does not come with timeless truths. He is diagnosing a phenomenon of a particular historical specificity, a note to the history of colonialism and the quote is, "the architecture of this world is rooted in the temporal."

So this reason that the black body has a significance it does, is because of a particular sequence of historical events by virtue of which the black body becomes located in a larger body politic within which raised a significance, as against a previous body politic did not. And the conventional judgment, which in most theories of race agree upon, is that race is a product of modernity.

You do not have race in the ancient world. You do not have race in the medieval world. Race is a modern phenomenon. So blackness is then he doesn't use these words, Blackness is of social ontology, and the question then is can we use the work of Fanon and other people in this sort of tradition that leads up to critical race theory to sort of see how you could conceive of race in material terms.

OK, why doesn't Marxism want to recognize race as material? I suggest it could be seen as a particular, a distinctively Marxist version, of the overall position of racial eliminativism. So there's mainstream liberal racial eliminativism. I suggest there is also a Marxist variant thereof.

Marxists would concede that racism exists, but would deny that race itself is a social reality. What races really are, are related to the metaphysics of class. For example they are subordinated national minorities. They are sole proletariatized sections of the working class. They are not ontological entities in themselves.

So in terms of the same orthodox Marxist metaphor, based on super structure, race is located at the super structural level. At the level of the base, what you have are classes and then the role of racism as an ideology is to rationalize super exploitation. So all class societies are sort of structured by exploitation. In the case of race, you have super exploitation.

You're not talking about exploitation of the white working class, not talking about wage labor. We're talking for example about slave labor. You are talking about in a pre modern kinds of production, which are nonetheless articulated to modern relations of production. So you have relations exploitation different from the kind of exploitation of the white working class and subject.

But the material base that's composed of classes and class fractions. And that same text by Fanon, we have his famous critique of Sartre. Because he says Sartre is sort of assimilating the history of race to this larger Hegelian/ Marxist dialectic. So there's this in a somewhat misleading reduction, thesis and antithesis, and that's where racism comes out. So there's racism, there's what he called anti racist racism and negritute. And then you transcend the whole thing in this sort of glorious socialist revolution.

So the problem with the Marxist categories is that they point us in the right direction, that body has related to the body politic, but by the depriving us of the overall theoretical framework at a recognizer of a social structure in itself, that basically block our understanding. So the only system that is recognized is capitalism as class society.

So the material is exhausted by class. The main kind of social group, classes, class relations of production as a material girder of this structure. Class exploitation is central and class interests as a material interest, the struggle over which is a main historical dynamic.

And the claim would be you cannot conceptualize race this way. Why? Because the white working class are basically just victims of capital ideology ociety. So the represent has been misled by Bourgeois idealogy in the service of capitalist interest into thinking of themselves as white, but their true class interests are in terms of realizing this non racial socialist order. They are not recognized as having racial interests.

Class interests are recognized. It is denied that they could have racial interests. Class exploitation is recognized. Racial exploitation is not recognized. So overall you get a particular model of society which is structured around class and which sort of limits race, as I said, to the ideological level to the level of racism. Super structure stuff, not stuff at the material level.

So what do you need to do in response? If on the one hand you are sympathetic to a Marxist approach, in terms of political economy, on the other hand you are frustrated by official Marxism, clearly the thing to do is to recognize white supremacy as a system in itself analogous to class domination, structured by exploitative relations between races and thereby constituting racial interests.

So you then recognize that races are real and that the white working class do have racial interests as well as class interests. These interests are multidimensional. Social status, differential political input, cultural hegemony, semantic normativity. But at their core, arguably material interests.

And again, this is anathema. This is heretical in orthodox Marxist framework, because clearly the white working class their only material interests are class interests, how could they have material racial interests?

And the great advantage of the huge amount of work produced in critical race theory and critical white studies over the past 20 years or so is that you now have a literature on race and hegemony and wealth which is far more theoretical and sophisticated than the previous body of work.

And a crucial text is a book that I'm sure many of you know, by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, "Black Wealth, White Wealth," which came out in 1995. And they argue that a mistake people are making all along in looking at prospects for racial equality were focusing narrow mindedly differences in median household incomes.

So you look at the median white household, you look at the median black household. You say for example the medium black household is making 50%, let's say in the 1940s and then they gradually inch upwards, 60%, 70% and they are making progress, blah, blah, blah. And what you need to look at is not just income. You need to look at wealth.

If you look at wealth, you find a far more illuminating metric for long term prognosis of the prospect of racial equality. Why? Because it's a capitalist country. The same thing that Marx has recognized, it applies to race. In a capitalist country, wealth is crucial. In a world we're all kinds of privileged white people, professionals have been laid off working at McDonalds, you suddenly recognize that wealth is crucial at all levels.

Wealth provides a cushion against medical catastrophe, can be used to start a small business, can be used to make a down payment on a mortgage, can be transmitted as an inheritance to your kids to give them a head start in life. And the differentials in wealth between white and black households, they dwarf income differentials.

The median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median black household. And you might think, well, OK, even if that's true, that's because it's been skewed by the multimillions of the white elite at the top. Not true.

If you look at 2004 statistics, if you look at the bottom quintile, that's the bottom fifth of the white population, and the bottom quintile of the black population, the median white household, white quintile at the bottom, black household at the bottom, the difference in wealth 400 times. The bottom fifth of the white population median has 400 times the wealth of the bottom fifth of the black population.

So it's not just a difference, the middle class and upper class levels the difference in racial is not in absolute numbers of course, but the difference in racial is actually largest in the working class level.

So what's the point of the critique? The critique is not that class is not material. It's not that the white working class are not exploited. The critique is that capitalism as it develops in the modern world is generally racialized. So that kind of pure abstract capitalism, or the capitalism of Britain that Marx was analyzing, it was a racial system to which he hardly...

Let's talk about the Irish and there's some fleeting remarks about colonialism in India and slavery but basically the racial dimension of capitalism was not faced. So that white supremacy as a system of advantages and disadvantage interlocks with capitalism from the start. That means that white workers are both the victims of capitalist exploitation and they are the beneficiaries of racial exploitation.

So the materiality of race can be cashed out, and this of course is appropriate metaphor here, in terms of differential probabilities of material advantage and disadvantage for whites and people of color.
Segregation, racial division of labor, job and housing discrimination, all these factors mean that a white worker has a better chance in society of getting ahead than a person of color. So it means that on this straightforward level, race is material in terms of differential probabilities of material success.

You have to put it in terms of probability because it's certainly not the case that every white worker is rich. Obviously that's completely false. You're basically are talking about expectations and life chances. And that's material in terms of what links up with the possibilities of wealth and possibilities of living a good life for yourself and your children and so forth.

OK, so there's race as material in that sense. So let's now turn to another sense. That sense is relatively uncontroversial. This sense will be more controversial. So again let's return to Linda's world. In a section of chapter six of her book called "Sex like Race," she points out a crucial difference between race and sex. There is not racial entity or physiological structure corresponding the variable of reproductive role.

And here I quote, "Gender identities and some variation seem to be, unlike race, is historically ubiquitous, hardly recent and based on a set of biological features with more morphological substance than bear logical significance on physical attributes such as skin color, shape of the nose or eyes or hair type."

So gender is far older than race. Gender is embedded in the history of the species much more deeply than race. So Linda observes, "In regard to race, it makes much more sense to look at the global political economy and the history of colonialism for an understanding of why and how skin shades gained such ontological significance in recent centuries."

So she talks about political economy. She also talks about ontological significance, and the question then is how do you start to focus on the distinctive political economy of race and link that to these broader materialities of gender and class?

Here is the approach I'm going to take. So again, for the not that they identify themselves as such but the older among us. It's not old, but older in the audience, some people here at least will remember socialist feminism.

Hands up? No, I won't ask that embarrassing question.

OK, so some people I won't ask them to identify themselves remember socialized feminists. So this was before the rise of poststructuralism, when Marxism was still seen as a live option.

So what does socialist feminism say? It's says that Marxist feminism is not simply social feminism. Marxist feminism is the sort of orthodox and Engelsian feminist theory Engele has his famous book, "Private Property and the State," all kinds of deficiencies, Nonetheless give him credit, major political thinker, one of the very few in the history of the Western tradition to write anything on gender. So I'm going to give him credit for writing that book.

So Marxist feminists were identified as those who accept the orthodox Engelsian analysis, and they were also what was called "radical feminists," who said that there's a whole lot of gender subordination which is not captured by these categories, in terms of rape, pornography, prostitution, so forth.

Socialist feminists said let's bring these two bodies to theory together. So you reinforce the strengths of both and you correct for the weaknesses and what you will do, you try to theorize gender as material. So in that same sense that class is supposed to part of the relations of production, gender is part of the relations of reproduction.

So the materiality of class and herein is the fact that we need to appropriate the word survive, the materiality of gender and the fact that you need reproduction for human race to survive. Women are the ones capable of having children. This doesn't mean that women are the ones who should raise the children, but this is a biological fact about women, the biologically material fact upon which sociopolitical material is then built.

So male power then means that you then get the agenda system organized around subordination of women, rationalized by the claim the since women are the ones that have the children they are the ones who should raise the children.

OK. So you then get what socialist feminists call a dual systems theory. And that theory that you need to theorize capitalism as capitalist patriarchy. So patriarchy is male domination and the particular kind of male domination in the modern period intersects with capitalism. So it's a system of both class and gender.

From my perspective obviously this is great stuff. But it needs supplemented. You can't talk about the dual system, you need to talk about a triple system. You need to incorporate race into these interlocking systems.

The problem then is, as Linda's quote points out, what is it in race that corresponds to the biological specificity in these other materialities? In the case of class, it's the material fact that as material beings we need to eat to survive. We need to appropriate nature. If somebody else owns the means of production, we can't access them without that person. Then we're in a power relation with respect to that.

In the case of gender, that's due to the fact that half of the human race that has the genitalia that enables them to be the ones to bear the children. So you then get a system of patriarchy and erected on that fact. In the case of race, there's nothing inherent about skin color, facial features, hair texture that is linked up with the body in such a way as a class materiality is, as a gender materiality is.

So in other words, even without class ideology it would still be the case that we need to eat to survive. That's not a Bourgeois fact. That's a fact. As material beings we need to eat to survive. It matters in all sorts of ways. Even without gender ideology it would be the case that women are the ones who bear the children. That's not an artifact of sex, that's a biological fact about the human species.

There's nothing in race that corresponds to that. It's not the case that you can say even without race this ideology blah, blah, blah.

Racial biological differentiation is superficial. There's nothing in it that has a deep significance of the human need to eat, get set to survive, or the fact that women are the ones to have kids.

So the challenge that is then posed is what could it be that could make race material given that there's nothing in the raced body that corresponds to this. And that's why you can see the orthodox Marxist challenge has its plausibility.

The orthodox Marxist will say, look, there is nothing to play the role of the relations of reproduction in the case of race. If you want to talk about slave labor, then you can just talk about that as in a particular kind of labor formation so there's a free wage labor. There's slave wage labor. Those are class categories.

If you want to talk about black workers not getting a fair chance at jobs in the capitalist markets after emancipation, that's so proletariat sections of the working class. Those aren't racial categories. Those are class categories. The claim would be that to the extent that race exists it's just class in a different skin.

So the challenge then if you want to say, well, it's orthodox Marxist you are wrong, what could you point to, to say this is how race is material?

So my argument is going to be that we can develop the category of personhood in such a way that its material dimension is revealed and that relations of personhood/sub personhood could play the role for race or these other kinds of material factors and would sort of complement the relations of production of orthodox Marxism, the relations of reproduction of socialist feminism. You would also have in addition to those two, relations of personhood/sub personhood.

On the face of it, it's a unpromising category. The whole discourse of persons is an ethical discourse. It's classically associated in the modern period with Kantism. It's not the traditional political economy.
And in fact many people have interpreted Marxism as basically an amoralist or anti moralist body of theory.

So how could you bring together such divergent theoretical foundations?

Here's my claim. We should see person as a category that is both ethical and political economics. It is ethical in that it expresses the moral standing of human beings, and aliens of course, and the rights, freedoms and duties they should have. But it is also political economic in that the norms for its application are not determined by the intrinsic features of human beings, but by their social recognition or non recognition.

In other words, even if all humans are persons apart from the unusual problem case like brain dead they would not be recognized as such unless they have a certain status within the political economy.

So the problem with this sort of orthodox mainstream philosophical narrative is that it fails to sort of make front and center how racially restricted the category of personhood was. It focused on the Western experience, and it talks about populations who are class divided but nonetheless recognized as human, who are gender divided but nonetheless recognized as human, and it doesn't want to acknowledge the extent to which whiteness was a prerequisite for personhood.

So that apart from these divisions within the human population, there's a subhuman population, and that's a population of people of color. They're not even within the sort of theoretical arena that these categories are focusing on.

So the advent of modernity removes the formal class barriers between Europeans, the barriers between lord and lady and serf, and replaces those with a new kind of barrier race which is no longer acknowledged as such. And it then means that people of color count as sub persons, and as such it means that you then have the triple system we're talking about.

You have relations of production and relations of reproduction. And they rest on a base of relations of personhood and sub personhood in which the European population, not merely within Europe but the countries European settled, are then positioned above a subhuman population of people of color whose personhood is not recognized.

It then means that race, I would argue, is material in that it is because of racial membership that you are then entitled to or debarred from normal human treatment. So the categories of capitalist and worker, the categories of male and female, are in a sense secondary to more fundamental categories, categories which appear natural but are in fact the categories of a particular political economy which says the human race is coextensive with the white race, and those outside the boundaries of the white race are not really fully human.

So it would mean that we would now have a principled rather than ad hoc theoretical foundation for linking race to political economy and rethinking orthodox Marxist political economy, which only recognizes class. So that could seem theoretically promising, but nonetheless the same challenge still arises.

Look, what is a material fact about the subordinated races that corresponds to the material fact of human dependence on production? Or the fact of in a dependence of the reproduction of the human race, only that women's capacity to bear children? What is there in race that matches up to that?

So what our claim is that you then have to say the materiality of race cannot be conceptualized in quite the same way as these other materialities.

OK. At all times we are constrained by the facts of natural necessity and human reproductive capacities. It's not the case that race constrains us in the same way. But once the decision is taken by Europeans to bring race into existence, race then takes on a life of its own and a materiality of its own.

What it then means is that, since race is seen as a demarcator of the human and the less then human, it means that you get a category which is central to the structuring of the modern white life world.

And it's not merely a category at the ideological level, it's a category that is manifested in social institutions, by social practices, by segregation, by in a particular population's been located here rather than there. And bodies in this world now acquire an immense racialized significance insofar as the markers on these bodies bespeak their membership in the ranks of the fully human or outside the ranks of the fully human.

So race, which is originally not material, is distinguished from class and gender in being a materiality that is brought into existence at a particular time period. So there's a fundamental difference between the materiality of race and these other materialities. That's one crucial difference, and the other crucial difference is in where this materiality adheres.

So here I'm going to quote again from Linda, who is drawing here on Merleau Ponty: "The perceptual practices involved in racialization are then tacit, almost hidden from view, and thus almost immune from critical reflection.

"This account would explain both why racializing attributions are nearly impossible to discern and why they are resistant to alteration or erasure. Our experience of habitual perception is so attenuated as to skip the stage of conscious interpretation and intent."

They are similar, but drawing on a different tradition: The American pragmatist tradition rather than the French phenomenological tradition. Shannon Sullivan, in a recent book "Revealing Whiteness," talks about the role of unconscious habit in making race, where she categorizes habit as "an organism's subconscious predisposition to transact with its physical, social, political, and natural worlds."

The result is raced predispositions, racial habits whose consequence is that the world embodies us. The world inhabits us. So "white privilege is then not just in the head. It is in the nose that smells, in the back, the neck, and other muscles that imperceptibly tighten with anxiety. A person's psychological disposition toward the world can be found throughout her body."

The social entourage of a racialized body politic becomes incarnated in the bodies of its members, fleshed out in their reactive behaviors, incorporated in their perceptions and conceptions.

Socialized from birth to discern race, the marker of full and diminished personhood will learn to apprehend the world through a grid whose architecture has been shaped by blueprints still functioning independent of a will and conscious intent and resistant to a self conscious redrawing. So this is where the materiality comes in.

It's voluntary. It's not as if it had been made. But once it has been made, it then embeds itself. It then becomes resistant. And this resistance to sort of our will is how the materiality of race manifests itself.

So Marx wrote that in class society the human senses become inhuman, reflecting the alienation of the social order. A historical material then sensitized to race would recognize similarly how material structures of white domination are created by human causality, now in rarified and coercive ways blind the vision of the white eye.

Racial demarcators trigger responses of which we are not even aware, shaping our views and processes completed in fractions of a second and largely immune to intervention at the conscious level.

Our bodies, material, have learned to see other bodies, also material, through a socially originating but now materially embedded apparatus originally established hundreds of years ago to differentiate full persons from those seen as less than full persons and which continues to influence us today.

Race is indeed material. If this analysis is plausible, it shows not just how historical materialism would need to be rethought but how complex materiality is as a category, and how its different class, gender, race incarnations would have to be related to one another for any comprehensive anatomy of our individual and social bodies.

Thank you.