and graduated privilege, and to recall and release the unspeakable violence by which this distinction is elided. Finally, a brief Afterthought reflects on the “passing” of multiculturalism, inquiring into the ongoing transformations of imperialism’s racial justice in the aftermath of the Cold War and the election of an African American president.
The remainder of this Overture introduces the book’s central themes, in an extended reflection on the glinting opacity of the epigraph, which the late Ron Takaki cheerily sprinkled through his lectures, interviews, and writings. In turn, each section provides a gloss on a keyword from the book’s title: imperialism’s racial justice, black Pacific, strange fruit, and fugitives.
spreading gospel
Over the past fifteen years, scholarship across ethnic studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies has critiqued the appropriation of the grammar and lexicon of antiracism by U.S. imperialism, from the consolidation of an official multiculturalism in the first Iraq war and its deployments in the so-called War on Terror, to its historical precedents in Cold War racial liberalism. With the post–Cold War dissolution of a Third Worldist idea predicated on the continuity of antiracism and anti-imperialism, it became necessary to rethink the relation between imperialism and racial justice, within a broader account of the dramatic shifts and mundane continuities of national and global racial orders after the disavowal of segregation and colonialism.
Yet imperialism’s reliance on a language of racial justice is nothing new. If you aim to identify what is distinctive or peculiar to a post–World War II or post–civil rights racial regime, you should know that the phenomenon of an imperialism enunciated as the expansion of racial justice, in word and deed, is no recent innovation. In this book, I trace these concerns to a period when terms of racial justice are close enough to seem familiar, even as the more genteel forms of white supremacism were hegemonic, and American exceptionalism found triumphal expression in overseas territorial colonialism. Because the post–World War II U.S. racial order claims the formal equality of races (against white supremacism) and the formal independence of nations (against colonialism) as the foundation of its disavowal of racism, which it thereby represents as the very exemplar of injustice, it seems odd that the language of racial uplift that once motivated an entire spectrum of black political movements was deployed, in the name of Anglo-Saxon superiority, to justify the conquest of the Philippines.
While lingering in this sense of historical disorientation might be instructive, a few brief hypotheses on race, imperialism, and justice should suffice to proceed. First, if the term “racism” refers at once to structured relations of inequality and to patterns of attitude, thought, and representation, then the latter must serve to uphold and extend the former—which is to say, racism must be understood as always a justification of its own material conditions. This means, curiously enough, that racism must always present itself as the proper form of racial justice, its culmination or terminal phase, beyond which lies chaos or decay. So if some of the more insidious recent forms of racist ideology claim the legacy of civil rights, in the name of “color-blindness,” this is nothing new, but a feature common to previous racisms—only the historical terms of what is promised as racial justice have changed.
Second, imperialisms are always in competition, a claim that holds at least on contingent empirical grounds in recent eras, if not definitionally. The late nineteenth-century rise of U.S. global power involved the incitement of animosity toward Spanish decadence and cultivation of racial fraternity with England, even as it aimed finally to supplant its European predecessors. Such competition is never entirely friendly, but neither is it entirely unfriendly—it served both U.S. and Spanish purposes to stage the conclusion of the 1898 war in the Philippines as an exchange between equals, with Filipinos excluded. Ultimately, imperialisms seek to be universal and to fully and finally monopolize the very terms of universality—an impossible task. Yet because their power cannot be total, because their dominion cannot be coextensive with the universe, imperialisms must always pursue expansion—preemptively countering the threat of encroachment by some other expansionist force, real or imagined, out to universalize dominion on alien grounds. Imperialisms cannot be satisfied with any victory because their aspiration to total power is insatiable; as such, they will invent an enemy if none can be found.
Third, imperialism, in its various manifestations, is necessarily a multiracial, multiracialist project. Imperialism is, among other things, the desire to rule over difference. It seeks to extend its dominion across peoples and territories thereby defined as other, a process necessarily grounded in coercion rather than consent; yet it must always seek to legitimize that extension, however violent, as the arrival of justice. Put differently, racial justice is imperialism’s gospel, the good news it is compelled to express in and as violence. The claim to do justice to difference provides imperialism with its moral authority, political legitimacy, and ideological engine. Writing amid the din of war in 2003, Edward Said asserted, “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort” (xxi). Exceptionalism, in other words, is a formal characteristic of every imperialism’s claim to justice, a kind of hallmark, in what is merely one of the phenomenon’s lesser paradoxes.
That the racialized population imperialism would rule must be constructed as incapable, or not yet capable, of giving their consent does not cancel this requirement for justification. Rather, justice emerges, first and foremost, as a terrain of struggle between competing imperialisms, and between the imperial subjects who constitute, at least in principle, a transimperial community of judgment. This figurative gathering is positioned above and before the possible engineering of a colonized subject capable—again, in principle—of provisional membership in that hierarchical community. On such terms, it may be easier to understand how an annihilating violence may be one form of this justice. Yet even then, the imperative of expansion guides violence in the direction of inclusion. Just as those racializing processes typically understood as inclusion’s opposite actually prove to be modes of incorporation—for example, Jim Crow segregation and Oriental exclusion, in practice, bound unfree subjects within heavily restricted and regulated socioeconomic locations—so, too, should processes of inclusion be understood as necessitating a differentiating and refining violence.
Readers who seek to refashion and reactivate the allied projects of antiracism and anti-imperialism, rather than merely perform their critical autopsy, may find these propositions disabling. To think of contemporary U.S. imperialism’s deployment of diversity-talk as an appropriation requires imagining a chain of appropriations and counterappropriations stretching back to the onset of European imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade, and positing that the conception of racial justice properly originates with the agents of conquest. Such a model may itself be too simplistic, in seeking to secure a transhistorical autonomy of legitimate and illegitimate conceptions of justice—even if, in local practice, it makes sense to oppose the pragmatic compromises of a liberatory movement to the disingenuous propagandizing of an oppressive regime. Nonetheless, I contend that imperialism’s racial justice should be approached as an animating contradiction, logically necessary but unpredictably volatile. No mere alibi, it must be taken seriously even—especially—if you hope to reject it.
What readers of any political inclination may find most difficult to accept is that imperialism’s claims to justice are not immediately and unambiguously debarred by its reliance on forms of excessive, repetitive, and spectacular violence. Even so, it may be acknowledged that civilizing missions past and present have at times been indistinguishable in practice from overwhelming violence. If such violence proceeds from intentions and premises reflexively represented as benevolent, innocent, and idealistic, this paradox may be explained away as betrayal, corruption, or human frailty, or dismissed as deception or bad faith. Across a political spectrum, histories of imperial violence become separable from theories of racial justice. Against this common sense, I contend that violence is the vehicle of imperialism’s racial justice, the very means of its actualization, and that the practical identity between the two is experienced as a quotidian reality. How, then, does their separation come to be taken for granted?
To approach this question as a problem of ideology or epistemology may not sufficiently express how deeply the operations of race