THE LOGIC OF HUMAN RACISM
ON THE PLASTICITY OF RACISM
The end of racism is the end of racism.
In an analysis of racism Jacques Derrida made in a talk in California in 2003, he briefly expressed the following perhaps tautologous idea: ‘the end of racism is the end of racism’. What does this mean? The words the end of racism is the end of racism may be understood according to the morphological tensions Derrida goes on to describe (‘the plasticity of racism’), and the tendency of those tensions to always become teleological. However respectable the abolitionist desire is (the desire to end racism, the desire for there to be an end to racism, and the way this functions as a complex and necessarily impossible phantasm), one must according to Derrida be sensitive to the racism without name that may be present in the radicality of the abolitionist desire itself. Genus, radix, radical, race.
These are the beginnings not only of an inadmissible concept (‘human racism’) but of an impossible logic of human racism. Such a concept will, by definition, not be allowed in. Worse still, worse than the fact that ‘human racism’ names what is still sometimes called the ‘politically incorrect’, ‘human racism’ will also supposedly be a distraction from the real racism, the racism that counts, the one we all know (American anti-black racism, let’s say). No better than the idea that ‘all lives matter’, the notion of a general ‘human racism’ will be thought of as suspect before it is thought of at all: according to the pre-judgement about ‘human racism’, its concept should be rooted out and cancelled from the word go. American anti-black racism is the only one that matters, for example. African American lives matter, not African black lives, not human lives, and we all know why this is so. (The reason: because Black American lives may stand in, precisely, for what all lives would one day mean, retrieved on the far side of racism. ‘Of course all lives matter, we just want black lives to matter too.’)
But, since ‘human racism’ is in fact unfamiliar by the same logic of dismissal just outlined (what is cancelled before consideration cannot be known), and therefore does not (yet) exist as a concept, how would we have known what to do with it in advance, and how would we have known what comes at the far side, except through a form of prior discrimination? Or, at least, if ‘human racism’ has yet to be named as a concept, how would we have known what conceptual manoeuvre it needs to be met with in advance, if it even needs to be met in advance at all? While we tell ourselves that we are familiar with the racism of human against human, for example in what is called ‘anti-blackness’, the idea of ‘human racism’ qua logico-human racism seems, perhaps, completely unknown. Even though it is dismissed, and precisely because it is dismissed, it appears that it remains to be codified. It may even be that this idea (‘human racism’) reminds us, in its uncoded shock, of what Derrida meant when he said in 2003 that ‘racism is a plastic formation’.
If Derrida is right that ‘racism is a plastic formation’, then racism might be considered in terms of the work of Catherine Malabou, who is the thinker par excellence of plasticity. Malabouian plasticity stems from the stem or the root; it is a fantastic plasticity because it is capable of changing the stakes of change themselves, including the root of things. This is a plasticity, in other words, that might hold open the possibility that any concept (racism included, or pure logic) may change, alter itself, worsen, mutate, improve, perhaps all of these at the same time.
Derrida said that ‘we know that racism is a plastic formation’ at the ‘tRACEs: Race, Deconstruction, and Critical Theory’ conference at the University of California in 2003, a year before he died. Also present at the conference were Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Nahum Chandler. The movement of the trace, the overhaul of the metaphysical tradition that is also (but not only, and not entirely) the root of the tradition of American anti- anti-black racism, the gaming of trace and race over time: all of this was already to some extent in place in 2003 (and not just in the title of the conference), if not of course well before, and may be found in contemporary scenes and in any presently conceivable (future) logics of racism’s defaults and changes.
But what does it mean for racism to be a plastic formation? What might ‘human racism’ now name, precisely insofar as a plastic racism struggles to restrict itself to a single (ethnic, national, international) zone? Why does it sometimes seem difficult to envision racism beyond a certain Africo-Americo-centric enclave (or Judaico-American enclave) and tradition of theorising, and, as it were, of importing these on a worldwide scale? Why, in other words, does the United States and its ongoing Anglo-effects have a kind of cosmo-academic monopoly, no doubt played on by the Chinese in ways that might be logically examined, over the thinking and thought of racism and race themselves?
The word ‘formation’ (racism’s ‘plastic formation’) already suggests a morphology, as if we were speaking of a root, at the root, a root that may change. Genus, radix, radical, race. The root of the word ‘race’ is the root itself, the human race, the radix. Race is always radical, then, but the radical, if it is split, is not always racial (or radical) enough. Is just this the root of the problem? Is the root itself the problem? Is this the ‘formation’? Is logic only ever, and merely, too ‘pure’?
A double threat also arises here, a double change, a split between the plasticity of racism and the elasticity of racism. Racism may be capable of change (‘abolition’), but it may also be capable of change as sublimation of change (merely taking on other forms). An example of the elasticity of racism might be the myth of a ‘post-racial’ US (‘Obama’). This mythogram might be extended as follows: plasticity of racism (‘Obama’); elasticity of racism (‘Trump’). But also, whether we like it or not, we have the possibility: elasticity of racism (‘Obama’); plasticity of racism (‘Trump’). And, ultimately perhaps, inelasticity of racism. Not to mention, non-plasticity of racism (‘Biden’).
Derrida, among many others, warned us about this morphing from early on, noting at the end of his talk in 2003 the following as a danger and a duty:
Perhaps the word racism will disappear, perhaps there will be the end of race and racism, but what racism is a symptom of will continue, it will continue endlessly in new forms and our duty, if we have a political and meta-political duty, is just to identify these new forms of racism without the name.
Again the plasticity and morphology of racism is key here. One may hold open to and militate for the possibility of ‘abolition’ (‘the end of race and racism’), one may devote one’s life to this excellent work, but none of this will ever end the possibility of racism itself, which is to say the root of it, the fact that it itself may change, the raciality and radicality of race and racism themselves as what survive racism’s own logic of uprooting and hold the human together, as concept, as well as logic too. No end to racism, not now. No racism, not now, never. The human itself is inherently racist; such is this never seen thing: human racism.
THE WORSENING OF RACISM, OR, UNIVERSAL LOGIC OF RACISM
Derrida’s distinction here is between symptom and racism as such. And racism qua racism might be taken to be what Derrida elsewhere calls the violence (or transcendental violence) of theoretico-juridical decisions present at the root, splitting the root, making of racism at the outset something that morphs and which is never quite itself. One option, therefore, is that racism will, now, only get worse (irreversible species split) and that radical thinking (of abolition, even when that abolition is a construction) is too much of a match with racism to be any match for it at all. Abolitionist thinking is too racial, too close to the root, too keen to uproot even when it says that it isn’t, to do anything about it — it itself, being racism, as such.
And so Derrida’s choice is to emphasise another duty, a care for the morphology and shape of racism to come, an extreme vigilance about the fact that racism will persist, perhaps even most strongly there where it is not named or there where it is understood to be in the process of being abolished or changed. Derrida further notes that racism
may take metonymic forms in an endless way, and so who could really be sure that no racism has ever touched him, that even after the end of the so-called declared ‘racism’ there would be no more racism waiting for us.
A strange but really quite ‘radical’ consequence of this is the hyper-teleological idea mentioned to begin with that Derrida briefly expresses as follows: ‘the end of racism is the end of racism’. The end of racism is the end of racism.
The desire to end racism is also a racial desire in the sense that it is a desire to root out or uproot what is there, what is disliked, to get rid of it. It doesn’t take an etymologist to see this contradiction, and we need to be clear that it is not a mere play of words. The end of racism (racism’s abolition) would be the end of racism (the telos or aim of racism) and yet the aim of racism, the racist aim, would always also be the aim of racism’s abolition. The final disappearance of racism (its end) would also be the final disappearance of racism (its desired end, the most racist desire). Logically speaking, this double bind is not the abstract avoidance of the actual instance of racism in the present but rather its material-abstract embrace in the moment of pain and torsion that is the exact and living logic of racism (and of racism’s racism, and logic’s racism, and so on) itself. The root of the problem is that the root cannot be rooted out.
Racism itself never is, and so can always be — changed.
In other words, the most anti-racist impulse, if we hold to this language, is the exasperation of that impulse itself (to be anti-) just short of its abolitionist phantasm of puritanical completion. We might say that ‘human racism’, if there is some, begins to define itself here — here where the practical logic of logic and the schematic praxis of praxis are found in the same root and stem, taking place radically, exchanged in original confusion at the root of a non-point. Human racism may be seen as the delivery system for this pre-morpho-teleological cruelty of judgment and logic that is the human itself, and its blind relation to itself. Such a racism would have never seen itself, and perhaps it would never have seen its own face! Human racism would name ‘our’ inability to see the complexity of the logics of racism that keep ‘us’ in thrall (to it), that keep us entertained by the atrocities of individual historical racisms. ‘American Racism’, as we have said, is merely an ontological import.
When Malabou describes plasticity, she often resorts to the language of danger. Plasticity is dangerous to the extent that its changeability, if taken to the limit, may always remove or totally change itself (remove its own possibility). For the human to recognise its own racism, against itself, would be for it to recognise itself as its own worst enemy. The human, in seeing human racism, would want to end the human, and yet would then find itself racist again, as if in a second life, by ignoring its own end. In filling in the form left over by the profoundly human (and yet inhuman) logic of the ending of all racism, ‘the human’ would end by being scarcely human at all. Anti-racism, at the root, at the morphological level, may be said to simply be the perpetuation of racism at its very worst and in its most long-term form. However scandalous or impossible this sounds as a logical set-up, we affirm that it describes our actual and universal, and universally racist, predicament in the present.
BASED GOD HOMO-RACISM
What is left, then? Is it possible to start again? At what root or place? Or is it the case that even and especially this possibility, the possibility of there always being another possibility, another beginning, at root, is only or always racially radical? If the radical other beginning is always racial (‘Heidegger’), how dare we begin again? Dare we ‘begin’ again?
It may be the case that all radical efforts in the present are limited at root and stem, which is to say by failing to define their own conception, concept and condition, and therefore are subject perhaps to no change. Perhaps these efforts refuse to give not so much a confession of universal and infinite ‘complicity’ but the ratio and origin of their concepts. Everyone thinks they know what this and these other things mean, and that if we don’t change the thing at the root, then we don’t change the world at all. But what if the root, the radix, is the last thing that is radical? What if the radical is and always was racist? What if the radical is now, and had always been, not radical at any type of root?
When Derrida says that racism ‘may take metonymic forms in an endless way, and so who could really be sure that no racism has ever touched him’, he is asking the question of personal confession. Discourses on and around racism often, but not always, focus on, root themselves down in, the style of hetero-accusation and a certain victimologisation. The form given is the heteronormativity of the form ‘you are racist’, ‘they are racist’, and not the form, hardly ever this allo-normative form, ‘I myself, perhaps, am racist’. Derrida addresses this type of avowal at the very start of his talk, suspending for us the following set of questions:
Who would confess today ‘I am a racist’? We know that people are behaving as racist but in most cases they do not confess this, they do not say, ‘I am racist’. Who could really be sure that no racism has ever touched them, that even after the end of so called declared racism there is no racism waiting for us?
The statement ‘I am racist’ (which is importantly different to ‘I am a racist’) is unheard-of in the sense that Derrida here seems to mean. Such a meaning, such a way of saying it, is impermissible, and not just for reasons of social pressure. One is, in essence, not allowed to say ‘I am racist’. Or rather, perhaps, one is allowed to say ‘I am a racist’ (taking up a racist identity within an explicit racist community or context), or one is allowed to say ‘I am racist’ in terms of anti-blackness (making an avowal as part of a symbolic moment of reparation and protest), but not ‘I am racist’ where the confession may in fact be of a human and logical racism. Nobody begins there, we might say, we might speculate, and perhaps even if they do, they fail to begin there, and for the logical reasons given — named here as logical racism itself. The discourse of racism, like the discourse of ethics, always begins with the other. And the discourse of anti-racism and abolition rarely begins with the same.
If there is an alternative to hetero-accusation as the form and root of (anti-)racism, if there is a type of auto-accusation that is not masochistic, not a form of unconscious and historical ‘vice-signalling’, and that breaks out of the pallid dialectical exchange that vice- and virtue-signalling fall into, perhaps it would not present itself in the form of a question: it would not be a question asked but instead a question in the form of statement, an avowal.
Here is what @LILBTHEBASEDGOD, for example, said on Twitter on 13 July 2015:
Deep down i am racist and evil and I have a problem I’m tired of judging people I need help this is serious I love you help me — Lil B.
No matter what Based God was feeling and thinking in 2015, it’s important to note that this is not just something everyone is saying all the time, and that it also roughly coincides with statements from Ye in the present about detoxifying himself. The argument goes: if the human being really is racist in ways it can’t see or conceptually make light of (far beyond classical racism), and if the human really is constantly in the gravity well of new types of racism that appear only over time, then certain hyperbolic forms of confession become possible and even necessary. But when Ye speaks on issues in 2022, he has gone further than Based God. Ye has gone further than Based God because he is not asking for help, he is asking to make statements that may lead somewhere. If the human doesn’t actually think the way it thinks, how can we even assume we have begun to get anywhere with the problem of human racism at all? I think everything Ye says is correct as a series of floated statements, as a set of statements that are available to others, that may be exemplary of certain ideas others can take up, and this means that ‘free speech’ is, according to the true logic of human racism here initiated, a universal stake.
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