Reconstructing the “Problem” of Race

• Date: 01 December 2008
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912908324588
• Author: Edmund Fong
• Published date: 01 December 2008
• Subject Matter: Mini Symposium: American Political Development through the Lens of Race

660

Political Research Quarterly

Volume 61 Number 4

December 2008 660-670

© 2008 University of Utah

10.1177/1065912908324588

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Reconstructing the “Problem” of Race

Edmund Fong

University of Utah, Salt Lake City

How should the “problem” of race be conceptualized? This essay attempts to widen our understanding of the prob-

lem of race in American political discourse by examining its productive function in grounding the meaning of

American liberalism. By tracing this relationship in W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Woodrow Wilson’s

1913 Gettysburg Reunion Speech, Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, and Rogers M. Smith’s Civic

Ideals, the author argues that as long as race is conceived as the negative referent of American liberal identity, the

problem of race will continue to obscure the possibilities for transformative change.

Keywords: politics; history; race; ethnicity; politics

Between me and the other world there is ever an

unasked question...

—W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

When W. E. B. DuBois began The Souls of Black

Folk with the question he suspects most would ask of

him—“How does it feel to be a problem?”—he was

already signaling a problem of ascription, of both his

own and of the reader.1Conveyed through looks of

curiosity or even compassion, that question carried its

imprint without being asked or answered. We know

from Foucault to ask something of the networks in

which problems are located—the power/knowledge

relations, the discourses that circulate around such

problems, providing their grids of intelligibility,

seeking to propel themselves in their solutions or, in

Foucault’s phrase, their tactics. Loath to engage in a

confessional mode, he would rather have us

genealogically explore the roots of our own ques-

tions, take pause in the answers we would give,

unravel and de-familiarize our own inevitable presen-

tism. The task was less to solve or repudiate our

investments in the problems resonant in political dis-

course than to reassess the constituting power of

those investments both for what they enabled and for

what they obscured and foreclosed. Few would doubt

that the problem of race remains a persistent invest-

ment in American political discourse; fewer still

would doubt its productive role over the course of

American history. But if we follow Foucault’s train of

questioning, what then would it mean to reconstruct

the problem of race in American political history?

What sorts of larger discursive entanglements and

possibilities has the problem of race productively

marked?

Fortunately, many scholars have increasingly

explored this question, charting its institutional roots

and consequences, exploring its imaginative attach-

ments and resonances.2My work on the discourse of

multiculturalism in the United States has led me to

explore the special place the problem of race exhibits

in animating many of its central debates. Whether in

affirming the value of individual autonomy, parsing

the limits of toleration, constituting the differential

bases of social cohesion, or even simply performing the

spectacles and dramas that brand the social imaginary—

the problem of race or at least something of its signi-

fying inheritance haunts the terms of analysis. Race

calls forth associative chains of the nightmare of

history; the intractability of power and inequality; the

divisiveness of personal desire; the insufficiency of

governmental power or, conversely, its tyrannical

reach; above all, perhaps, the lack of self-control and

imaginative freedom.3The associations of race

always call forth networks of effects. Indeed, it is the

profundity of these associations that continue to pro-

pel discourses about the terms of the national future,

the terms of immigrant incorporation, and the limits

and possibilities of governmental and institutional

engagement in a variety of domains.

Yet beside these excavations into the profundity and

centrality of racial discourse within the archives of

Edmund Fong, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University

of Utah; e-mail: edmund.fong@utah.edu