One of the reasons it is always enlightening to read reviews of one’s work is that others always find ideas or arguments that one may have insufficiently emphasized. This is absolutely the case with Charles Mills’s generous review of Theorizing Race in the Americas. In it, Mills points out that the antiracist, anticolonial transnational political projects formulated by Du Bois and Vasconcelos in the 1920s are examples of “cosmpolitanisms from below” or cosmpolitanisms in color that attempt to grapple with the problem of global white supremacy. As such, they present an important corrective to the ostensibly color-blind, but in fact still Eurocentric, accounts of cosmopolitanism in contemporary political theory and philosophy, which would benefit from juxtaposing their Kantian-derived approaches with this early-twentieth-century archive of cosmopolitan thinking directly concerned with countering global white racial power.
Mills raises two fundamental questions about contemporary racial politics in his review and asks what lessons can be derived for the present from engaging with past hemispheric racial thought. His first question is about the tremendously important issue of how to foment antiracist change in an era of fake news, increasing distrust of scientific expertise, and populist disdain for elites. In this context, Mills asks whether Du Bois’s turn away from strictly scientific argumentation to aesthetics can serve as a model. I do not think that the lesson we should draw from Du Bois’s experiments with genre is that black art or art in general is more likely to transform racial attitudes. For reasons that I have explored elsewhere, I believe that many accounts of white ethical transformation—whether prompted by art’s ability to reach affective registers or by forms of protest that nevertheless convey acquiescence/democratic sacrifice—tend to underestimate the complex politics of performance and reception at play in moments of racial encounter. Consider, for example, the controversial responses of many white attendees to Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx exhibit, which was meant to evoke the horrors of the slave trade. In my view, the more useful lessons of Du Bois’s and Vasconcelos’s mestizo futurisms have to do with their substantive content, such as (to name one) the suggestion that because white supremacy is global, antiracist political projects that cannot envision the links between the national and the transnational will ultimately be insufficient.
This brings me to Mills’s second question, which is whether the effect of demographic changes in the United States that are making the country more mixed and less white will lead to “a genuinely democratic multiracial polity.” This expectation—which has been central to excessively optimistic arguments about how Latinos are transforming U.S. racial politics—is clearly falsified by the history of Latin America, where the prevalence of mixture and multiracial populations did not preclude racial domination. This hopeful view of mixture as a sort of antiracist inoculant that can cure the racist ills of the body politic reflects the enduring power of certain racial ideas, given their iconic formulation by the thinkers analyzed in Theorizing Race, in this case Vasconcelos. Yet, as I show in the book, even Vasconcelos recognized in his later writings that what was necessary instead was for Latin Americans to recognize the global workings of white supremacy and for them to embrace specifically antiracist political subjectivities. It is thus past time for us to abandon the futile expectation that demographic change in and of itself can/will dismantle white supremacy. In different ways and to varying degrees, the thinkers examined in Theorizing Race ask us to decolonize our imaginations in the service of envisioning a postracist future. We should heed that call.
