The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Ladelle McWhorter's new book claims to be a specific analysis of two aspects of oppression in Anglo-America—racism and sexuality. In fact the book is much more. It is a powerful fact-based philosophical epic of oppression in Anglo-America along its two central axes—racism and sexuality. This epic traces the current climate of malaise and anxious surveillance around the family and its alleged enemies back to the invention of state racism in colonial Virginia. The book's Foucauldian-informed narrative techniques produce a sweeping tale that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of progressive philosophy: the grand pronouncements of a Marx or a Freud, on the one [End Page 373] hand, and a substance-thin, method-thick academic scholasticism, on the other. And the book works.

The final chapter, "(Counter) Remembering Racism," lays out in clear terms the intended political effect of the book's genealogical analysis: "to enable and equip opposition to and struggle against the coercion of unitary, formal, scientific, and theoretical discourses that tell us racism is either a natural aspect of human evolution or just another pathology that can be handled by moral educators and social scientific and clinical experts" (297). The beauty of the book's approach is that it tracks the ironies in our struggles for social justice through historical narrative and renders this history philosophical. As this analysis demonstrates, "the ways we have been taught to conceive of and talk about and fight against racism are not only not effective in eliminating it and the suffering it causes . . . , but are, in fact, part of the racist power apparatus that produces the very suffering" (297). The problem is not just the classically moral one—that even given the best of intentions, the consequences of our actions can go wrong. The problem is, one might say, postmoral: disciplinary practices of the educated elite set up targets for scrutiny and correction that appear to critique white supremacy, while these corrective practices in fact serve to strengthen its discursive net.

Neither moral righteousness nor scientific progress frees us from racism or sexual oppression if moral and scientific discourses serve as constitutive forces of the project of purification, and McWhorter believes that they often do. She draws her argument from Foucault's posthumously published lectures, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978, which are focused not on race or sex per se but on the abnormal and which trace the roots of racism and sexual oppression to conceptions of deviance and the impure. The nineteenth-century attention to the moral monster, the sexual predator, and the psychopath highlights nodal points for an apparatus of purification that joins with racism in a grander quest for the normal.

The implications are striking. For one, racism is not first of all a prejudice toward an out-group but the detection of deviants within society. As McWhorter points out, Foucault's seemingly abnormal use of racism—as the targeting of abnormalities, rather than, say, skin color—hits on what racism is in fact really all about: keeping the "White Race" pure. She proceeds to explain both her initial skepticism toward this sweeping and seemingly un-Foucauldian "lumping" of differences and what she comes to [End Page 374] discern as its radical force. The effect, I would say, is to queer racial politics, and it is, I think, quite powerful.

This is not to say that the book imposes a straight Foucauldian framework on the problem of race in America. Against Foucault, McWhorter argues that the disciplinary mechanism of racism emerged long before the invention of biopower. She draws upon the work of American historians to locate the first use of the term race among the Saxons in England as the name for a lineage and a culture, not a morphology or a biology. The English race war of the Saxons against their Norman conquerors carried over to colonial Virginia, where after Bacon's Rebellion, it reemerged as the early...