A Conversation with Howard Winant

BY ANDREA LAM

NORTON SOCIOLOGY

Q: With many researchers, their biography has shaped or influenced their research interests. Is that the case for you? What initially drew you to the study of race and racism? My parents were New York liberal Jews, refugees from nazism.In the 50s and 60s the civil rights movement came to us, so to speak, in the form of picket lines and court cases, in the northern cities and even in the suburbs.I was active in the movement as a youth.The movement was extremely attractive and sensible. It meant more democracy.Equality, community, and justice were all rolled into it.It felt great to be an activist.Also the specter of fascism remained real, and McCarthyism, I think, looked pretty fascist to my parents. Black people were my first teachers in the movement.Later on I worked in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.Radicals, democrats, Latin American marxists educated me as well. Q: In your influential book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, which you co-authored with Michael Omi, you and Omi developed racial formation theory, which views race as a socially constructed form of identity. What are your thoughts on racial formation in the 21st century? Have you observed any significant developments or changes? Racial politics are always in transition.They are unstable as well.What is emancipatory at one moment may be despotic at another. Race is both broad and deep, politically speaking, because it involves a web of relationships running from the very micro to the very macro.Race occupies a crossroads where identity meets social structure.It is present everywhere, from intrapsychic and interpersonal relationships all the way up through world-systemic relationships: those of nation-states, wars, global capitalism, revolution..., Today in the US (and elsewhere too) the racial formation process is trapped between the past and the future. As Gramsci says, the old has died but the new cannot be born... Q: In recent years, youve written about the changing nature of public discourses and rhetorics on race leading up to and during the Obama administration. What are your thoughts on how these discourses have developed in the lead-up to the upcoming 2012 election? The public racial discourse centers on the colorblind concept, something quintessentially ideological, hugely contradictory.The basic concept is that race should be disavowed: we should move beyond race.Meanwhile we are just as preoccupied with race as ever; maybe more. Obama is a symbol of the progress of racial politics.But this progress is so tenuous that its symbol apparently cannot wake up and lead.It (he) must remain iconic.Above all, he must not appear as an angry black man, because that will scare whitey.

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I worked for his election in 2008 and analyzed it in the DU BOIS REVIEW.But I think he made big mistakes early on. Its still hard to understand what led Obama to choose to be so ordinary a politician. Indeed there are now questions about whether he is black enough. No one is questioning if he is white enough, are they? Q: Since its inception in 2009, youve been the director of the University of California Center for New Racial Studies (UCCNRS), which is a multidisciplinary research network of UC scholars working towards innovative and collaborative research focused on advancing social and racial justice. Can you talk a bit about some of the work that UCCNRS has done so far and some of your goals for the future, like this academic years focus on Race/Gender/Class Intersectionality? We are a new center, barely one year old. The UCCNRS was formally launched on 7/1/2010.We are on all ten UC campuses. We support research on race and we build networks of race scholars. Its sort of like community organizing: there are many neighborhoods: faculty and students (grad students are super-important to us), disciplinary, pluralist/inclusive, class-/gender-/sex-based groups, community-oriented groups..., these are some of our neighborhoods.There turn out to be about 1000 ladder-ranked faculty in the UC system who work centrally on some aspect of race/racism. And there are thousands of graduate students as well.We are like an army, there are so many of us.But were disconnected, somewhat anomic, trapped in the hierarchical toils of the professoriat.We need to be way more networked. Race/racism are such broad and ubiquitous problems, so deeply connected to modernity itself, that it can seem hard to link together our widely variegated research subjects. What can a historian of Dutch colonialism possibly have in common with a learning-theory psychologist working on stereotype threat and high-stakes testing in the ghetto? Well, a lot, in turns out.For more on whats new about new racial studies? see our website: http://www.uccnrs.ucsb.edu. Q: You frequently speak out against the structural/institutional nature of racism in America, particularly as it negatively shapes the penal system. How do you feel a new racial studies approach could improve such situations? Im disillusioned, but we cant give up.I see several major problems of race and racism: the punishment complex, postracial (colorblind, etc.) ideology, and immigration policy, for starters.These are each crucial components of racial commonsense, as Gramsci would call it.Repression substitutes for opportunity; its a cynically enforced strategy of social control.Colorblindness obscures the racial dimensions of injustice.Nativism is an attempt to protect the white areas of the country (and the world) from the rising tide of color. New racial studies is a disenchanted view of race and racism; it works to reframe the discourse about race and the nation, the continuity of empire, ongoing conflict between racial despotism and racial democracy, and the interconnections between race/class/gender forms of oppression and resistance. We need to call out these contradictions in public: for example, the US state claims to be colorblind, but it NEEDS race to rule.Consider: not only prisons, but also felony disenfranchisement.If ex-felons had been allowed to vote across the country, the only Republican president elected since 1960 would have been Reagan. Q: What are your thoughts on how race and racism are taught today in colleges and universities (both in and out of ethnic studies departments)? Is there a particular direction towards which you would like to see college-level racial and ethnic studies move? Im a big supporter of ethnic studies.The term is a euphemism (for race studies) to some extent.The overall field is holding its own, but also always besieged: by the rightwing , by cutbacks, by the Russell Pearces of the world (AZ state senator).There are crises and debates in ethnic studies: nationalist v. diasporic models of race? Alliances and conflicts across particular departments? Continuity of sexism and racism WITHIN ethnic studies?How to deal with whiteness?Yet people frequently overcome these problems and learn from them. There are lots of good programs out there.

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RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
University of California Center for New Racial Studies www.uccnrs.ucsb.edu/ The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994; 1st ed., 1986). Co-author: Michael Omi

Once again, new racial studies points to a radical pragmatism. An amazing amount of fantastic research and teaching is going on.We need to educate the country, inform people of our findings, break through out-of-date ideas.For example, we need to explore the contradictions of colorblindness: in the mass media, in the political process...Similarly we need both to teach about racial privilege and critique that idea by bringing class back in.What we teach is what people learn, and what they learn is what they know. Q: How do you see the field of sociology developing in the future? The field will have to break with its absurd scientism and recognize that at its core it is ideographic, not nomothetic (see Wallerstein on this).Thus far, for all our limitations, we have avoided the traumatic schisms that have shaken other social scientific disciplines: anthropology and political science especially.The psych department on my campus just renamed itself the department of psychology and brain science: heavens protect us from the social! But sociology is driven by the very social forces it studies.As the US declines in global influence, as US militarism and inequality become more rampant, sociology will have a hard time sustaining its critical edge.Yet that is just what we must do. Q: What would you say to college students who are just starting to take sociology courses or are majoring in sociology? Millss dictum still seems important: to situate your personal life in history, to realize that you live in history. Everyone is already a sociologist; you need to be, just to walk down a city street.But to become conscious of the social relationships in which you are already immersed, to develop the skills to see your life as part of a structure, part of a system... that is a different matter.Because sociology can help you with that, it can help you lead a better life.In a more examined life you will do better work, attain greater satisfaction, and be more active in the pursuit of freedom and justice. This Interview has been condensed and edited.

HOWARD WINANT is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also affiliated with the Black Studies and Chicana/o Studies departments. He founded and directs the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, a MultiCampus Research Program that operates on all ten UC campuses.

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