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Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism
Charles W. Mills
Black Rights/ White Wrongs
The Critique of Racial Liberalism
Charles W. Mills
1
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Toward a deracialized liberalism
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.
—Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail”
A white moderate … is a cat who wants to lynch you from a low tree.
—Dick Gregory
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
PART I—Racial Liberalism: Epistemology, Personhood, Property
1. New Left Project Interview with Charles Mills 3
2. Occupy Liberalism! 10
3. Racial Liberalism 28
4. White Ignorance 49
5. “Ideal Theory” as Ideology 72
6. Kant’s Untermenschen 91
7. Racial Exploitation 113
PART II—Racial Liberalism: Rawls and Rawlsianism
8. Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls 139
9. Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice? 161
10. The Whiteness of Political Philosophy 181 Epilogue (as Prologue): Toward a Black Radical Liberalism 201
Notes 217
References 245
Index 261
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of the chapters in this book have benefited from being presented in earlier incarnations as papers at campus colloquia and at conferences over the period 2002–15. The chronological order of these presentations is as follows: at “The Moral Legacy of Slavery: Repairing Injustice” conference, Bowling Green State University (2002); at the annual Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy (2002); at a conference organized by the Chicago Political Theory Group (2002); on an American Philosophical Association (APA) Central Division annual meeting symposium panel, “Race, Gender, and Public Life” (2003); at the Race and Politics Workshop, UCLA Department of Political Science (2003); at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) (2003); in the “Just Globalization” lecture series, Lehigh University (2003); as a lecture at Colby College (2003); at the “Women Philosophers, Sidelined Challenges, and Professional Philosophy” special session, APA Eastern Division annual meeting (2003); as a lecture as Visiting Eminent Scholar, University of Alabama at Huntsville (2004); as an opening keynote address at the “Ethics and Epistemologies of Ignorance” conference, Pennsylvania State University (2004); at the American Political Science Association annual meeting (2007); at “The Social Contract Revisited: The Modern Welfare State” workshop, Oxford University (2007); at the annual meeting of SPEP (2007); at the APA Eastern Division annual meeting (2007); as the opening keynote address at the annual Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable (2008); as one of the keynote addresses at the “Examining Whiteness: White Privilege and Racism in America” conference, Allegheny College (2008); in the “Diaspora Talk Series: Theory, Politics, and History,” University of Texas at Austin (2008); at the Spindel Conference, “Race, Racism, and Liberalism in the 21st Century,” University of Memphis (2008); at the Graduate School of Education, University of California Berkeley (2008); as the opening plenary address at the annual conference of the British Political Studies Association (2009); in the “Justice” series, University of Mary Washington (2009); at “Critical Refusals: The
( x ) Acknowledgments
Fourth Biennial Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society,” University of Pennsylvania (2011); on an APA Eastern Division annual meeting panel, “Philosophers Respond to Occupy Wall Street” (2011); at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association (2012); on an APA Eastern Division annual meeting panel, “African-American Political Theory” (2014); as the Kneller Lecture at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society (2015); at the conference “Race in 21st Century America: Race and Democracy,” James Madison College, Michigan State University (2015); and as the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies public lecture in celebration of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent, Leeds University (2015).
I have greatly benefited from the feedback, encouragement, and criticisms I received over this time from various people, whether as organizers of the campus colloquia and conferences to which I was invited to give presentations, or as critics, commentators, and editors. I would like to mention in particular Linda Martín Alcoff, Kal Alston, Elizabeth Anderson, Marcus Arvan, Alison Bailey, Lawrie Balfour, Bruce Baum, Robert Bernasconi, Eduardo Bonilla- Silva, Bernard Boxill, Harry Brighouse, Bill Bywater, Cheshire Calhoun, Brad Cokelet, David Copp, Harvey Cormier, Derrick Darby, Peggy DesAutels, Eduardo M. Duarte, Samuel Fleischacker, Tyrone Forman, Paul Gomberg, Robert Gooding-Williams, Barnor Hesse, Thomas Hill, Nancy Holmstrom, Juliet Hooker, the late Richard Iton, Chike Jeffers, Desmond King, Ruth Kinna, Pauline Kleingeld, Janet Kourany, Anthony Laden, Andy Lamas, Bill Lawson, Zeus Leonardo, Amanda Lewis, Moya Lloyd, Robert Louden, David Lyons, Michael T. Martin, Diana Meyers, Tom Mills, Carole Pateman, John Pittman, Raymond Rocco, Salman Sayyid, Richard Schmitt, Tommie Shelby, Falguni Sheth, Shu-mei Shih, Anna Marie Smith, Stephen Steinberg, Curtis Stokes, Shannon Sullivan, Shirley Tate, Winston C. Thompson, Lynda Tredway, Nancy Tuana, Jack “Chip” Turner, Jennifer Uleman, Andrew Valls, Harry van der Linden, Craig Vasey, Timothy Waligrow, Margaret Urban Walker, Kristin Waters, Bill Wilkerson, Yolonda Wilson, Alison Wylie, George Yancy, Marilyn Yaquinto, and Naomi Zack. Special thanks to Tyler Zimmer for the impressive computer graphics he did for the epilogue, “Toward a Black Radical Liberalism.”
Over the course of this same period I have changed institutions twice, moving first from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to Northwestern University and then to my present position at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am deeply grateful for the research support I have received from all three institutions: first as a Distinguished Professor at UIC (2004–7), then as a John Evans Professor of Moral and
Acknowledgments ( xi )
Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern (2007–16), and now (2016–) as a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center. Bill Hart and Peter Hylton, as successive chairs of the UIC Philosophy Department, and Ken Seeskin and Sandy Goldberg, as successive chairs of the Northwestern Philosophy Department, were consistently supportive of my research during the years I worked on these papers and the later book manuscript, as were Charlotte Jackson and Valerie Brown (UIC) and Crystal Foster (Northwestern), office staff, and I want to express my appreciation for their help. However, after more than a quarter- century in Chicago, I have decided to embark on what I hope will be an exciting new phase of my life and philosophical career. In this connection, I wish to thank in particular then-Provost Louise Lennihan and Philosophy Department chair Iakovos Vasiliou for their vigorous 2015 recruitment effort to convince me to come to the CUNY Grad Center, and I look forward to the academic and personal challenges of my new home in what the locals assure me is the center of the known universe.
Finally, my appreciation to the two anonymous referees for Oxford University Press, whose conscientiously detailed criticisms and suggestions significantly contributed to the streamlining and improvement of the original manuscript, and to editor Kathleen Weaver for her keen editorial eye, valuable guidance on rewriting sections of the introduction and epilogue, and energetic push to get the project moving again after a long hiatus.
The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following chapters:
“New Left Project Interview with Charles Mills” first appeared as “New Left Project: Racism and the Political Economy of Domination,” by Charles W. Mills, interviewed by Tom Mills, first posted on the New Left Project website April 12, 2012. (The New Left Project ran from 2010 to 2015.)
“Occupy Liberalism!” first appeared as “Occupy Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism (And Why They’re All Wrong),” in Radical Philosophy Review 15, no. 2 (2012), in a “Discussion: Liberalism and Radicalism,” with responses by Nancy Holmstrom and Richard Schmitt, and my reply to them.
“Racial Liberalism” first appeared in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 123, no. 5 (October 2008), Special Topic: Comparative Racialization, coordinated by Shu-mei Shih.
“White Ignorance” first appeared in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana.
“ ‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” first appeared in Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), edited by Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker.
“Kant’s Untermenschen” first appeared in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), edited by Andrew Valls.
“Racial Exploitation” first appeared in a slightly different version as “Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness” in America’s Unpaid Debt: Slavery and Racial Justice, Bowling Green State University Department of Ethnic Studies Working Papers Series on Historical Systems, Peoples and Cultures, nos. 14–16 (May 2003), edited by Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto. More recently, it was reprinted in abridged form as “Racial Exploitation and the Payoff of Whiteness” in Monique Deveaux and Vida Panitch, eds., Exploitation: From Practice to Theory (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).
“Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls” first appeared in the Southern Journal of Philosophy 47 (2009) Supplement: Race, Racism, and Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bill E. Lawson.
“Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice?” first appeared as “Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice? A Critique of Tommie Shelby” in Critical Philosophy of Race 1, no. 1 (2013).
“The Whiteness of Political Philosophy” first appeared as “Philosophy Raced, Philosophy Erased” in Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), edited by George Yancy.
Finally, a shorter version of the epilogue, “Toward a Black Radical Liberalism,” was posted online on the PEA (“Philosophy, Ethics, and Academia”) Soup discussion blog on February 23, 2015. Thanks to Brad Cokelet for the invitation.
INTRODUCTION
If any political ideology is centrally—perhaps almost definitionally— associated with modernity, it is liberalism. In all of its iterations—from its original contractarian formulation through its later utilitarian variants to its revised post-Rawlsian contractarian rebirth—liberalism was and is supposed to be emancipatory. Liberalism was the incarnation of the rationalism and egalitarianism of the emerging bright new world that was going to sweep away the darkness and irrational social hierarchies of the ancien régime. But as the Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo has argued in his recently translated Liberalism: A Counter-History, 1 liberalism’s actual record is far more checkered. Not merely has it been complicit with continuing discriminatory practices of the past (as with gender) but it has been vigorously active in installing nouveaux régimes of imperial racial rule with a body count far greater than the anciens régimes of class.
Thus Losurdo urges a revisionist historiography that would forsake uncritical adulation for an objective recounting of the documented history. If you add together what he calls the various “exclusion clauses” of liberalism’s most celebrated manifestos, treatises, and declarations of human rights, you get a litany of oppressions rather than a list of emancipations. Even on paper, the white male working class does not get some of the rights we associate with modernity until the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and in the case of white women and people of color, the wait has been even longer (and in some cases continues still). It is only possible to present this narrative as a triumphalist one because of the systematic erasure of these histories, and the tight focus on a small subset of the “political” population (the polis proper, so to speak): propertied white males. The most famous documents of liberal modernity are primarily about this group’s liberation, not anybody else’s.
So how should this story really be told? The route taken by most philosophers purifies and Platonizes liberalism into an ideal Form of itself, and then—ignoring the exclusions that in fact deprive the majority of the population of entitlement to equal liberal status—produces a conceptual
history in this elevated realm that never touches down to the hard ground of reality. Liberalism as it should have been is represented as liberalism as it actually was. This is not merely bad intellectual history but is also a poor strategy for realizing the promise of liberalism. The real-life political struggles that were historically necessary to overcome liberalism’s particularisms are erased by a myth of implicit potential inclusion. Better, in my opinion, to recognize these exclusions as theoretically central, admit their shaping of liberalism’s array of rights and freedoms, and then confront the critics’ case for discrediting liberalism altogether with the defense’s arguments for how it can nonetheless be reclaimed and redeemed.
Orthodox Marxism, varieties of radical feminism and black nationalism, dominant strains of post-structuralist and post-colonial theory, exemplify the path of a principled rejection of liberalism. Essentially irredeemable in the eyes of these opponents, liberalism is to be transcended by a higher communal, post-bourgeois, sororal and decolonial social order, even if the details are too often more gestured at than worked out. By contrast, social democracy and feminist liberalism argue for a radical rethinking of liberalism that—recognizing its deficiencies—still seeks to reclaim it as a liberatory political philosophy. Rejecting mainstream liberalism’s classically individualistic social ontology for an ontology of class and gender, challenging its cramped schedule of rights for a normative empowerment of the class- and gender-subordinated, these political projects affirm a more expansive vision that would take us beyond bourgeois liberalism (not a pleonasm, for this analysis) and patriarchal liberalism. Liberalism’s historic complicity with ruling class and male power does not, they contend, preclude retrieving it.2
Class theory and feminism are well established in the disciplines of political theory and political philosophy. But the recognition and critical theorization of what I am here calling—by analogy with bourgeois and patriarchal liberalism—racial liberalism is much more undeveloped in these circles.3 This collection of essays is my attempt to assemble work that brings out, from various angles, some of the key features of racial liberalism, thus expanding the parameters of the debate. Part I comprises my critiques of different dimensions of racial liberalism, Part II my critiques of Rawls, Rawlsianism, and “white” liberal political philosophy for their non-existent or at best problematic attempts to deal with race and justice. So my hope is that the framework will constitute a useful contribution to debates about liberalism in general and the theorization of race in ethics, political philosophy, and political theory in particular.
But first I must address a possible objection. One might argue that— however useful the concept—the term that I have chosen is unhelpfully ambiguous, since in the 1950s, for example, to be a racial liberal in the United
States meant being someone who opposed segregation and endorsed black civil rights. Why not just say directly and unequivocally: “racist liberalism”? The reason is that I want a phrase broad enough to encompass both overtly racist liberalism, where people of color are explicitly conceptualized as racial inferiors, and the no longer overtly racist, “color-blind” liberalism of today. In the latter variety of liberalism, illicit white racial advantage is still being secured, but now primarily through the evasions in the theory’s key assumptions rather than the derogation of nonwhites. (Compare the second-wave feminist argument that the arbitrary public sphere/private sphere distinction continues to reproduce gender hierarchy, even in a putatively post-sexist period in which men and women are now supposedly treated as equals.)4 Since most contemporary white liberals would disavow any explicitly racist sentiments, it is important to convey to them that the liberalism they are endorsing is still racialized, even if it ostensibly repudiates any racist representations of people of color.
For me, then, racial liberalism (analogous to patriarchal liberalism) is a liberalism in which key terms have been written by race and the discursive logic shaped accordingly. This position expresses my commitment to what has been called the “symbiotic” view of racism, which sees race as historically penetrating into liberalism’s descriptive and normative apparatus so as to produce a more-or-less consistent racialized ideology, albeit one that evolves over time, rather than seeing race as being externally and “anomalously” related to it.5 Unlike my post- structuralist and post-colonial colleagues, however, I see this penetration as contingent, not a matter of a pre-ordained logic of liberalism itself, but a consequence of the mandates for European liberal theorists of establishing and maintaining imperial and colonial rule abroad, and nonwhite racial subordination at home.6 Hence the hope of redeeming liberalism by selfconsciously taking this history into account: recognizing the historic racialization of liberalism so as better to deracialize it thereby producing a color-conscious, racially reflexive, anti-racist liberalism on the alert for its own inherited racial distortions.7 Abstract Platonized liberalism erases actual liberalism’s racist history, a blinding white Form that, in pretending a colorlessness that it did not and does not achieve, obfuscates more than it illuminates. The problem is not abstraction as such but a problematic mode of idealizing abstraction that abstracts away from social oppression, and in that way both conceals its extent and inhibits the development of the conceptual tools necessary for understanding and dealing with its workings.8 Identifying the historically hegemonic varieties of liberalism as racialized and white alerts us to the erasure, the whiting-out, of the past of racial subordination that current, seemingly genuinely inclusive varieties of liberalism now seek to disown.
As the title of this book signifies, then, it is an enterprise based on the inversion of the standard metaphors in which white is right and black is wrong. It urges us to recognize how the historically exclusionary rights of white liberalism (a.k.a. “liberalism”), based on the suppression of equal black rights, have left a legacy of white wrongs. These wrongs have thus been not merely material but also normative and conceptual, wrongs within the apparatus of liberalism itself—as summarized by the two famous judgments about white “moderates” (in context roughly equivalent to “liberals”) made by Martin Luther King Jr. and Dick Gregory that I have used as my epigraphs. Hence the need for their black righting.
Part I of the book covers the overarching themes of epistemology, personhood, and property, all central to the liberal project, and all, in my opinion, distortionally shaped by race. Liberal enlightenment presumes an objective perception of things as they are and as they should be, factually and morally, for political communities characterized by reciprocally respecting relations among equally recognized persons in agreement on the fair terms for the appropriation of the world. But racial domination interferes with objective cognition, denies equal racial personhood, and generates rationalizations of unjust white acquisition. Thus they are all negatively transformed by the dynamic of racial liberalism.
The opening chapter sets the stage with a 2012 interview I did with Tom Mills (no relation, so far as I know) of the British New Left Project. For the benefit of a transatlantic audience less familiar with critical race theory, I explain the rationale for retaining “race” as a crucial category, suitably transformed, and what I see as its historic link with imperial domination and its relation to the conceptually distinct, if empirically overlapping, systems of gender and class. Racial liberalism is introduced as homologous with the far more familiar “patriarchal liberalism” identified by feminist theory.
Chapter 2, “Occupy Liberalism!,” locates the project within the broader context of the need to transform liberalism for a progressive political agenda. Invoking the slogan of the (then) recent “Occupy!” movement, I argue—against radical orthodoxy—that liberalism has an under-appreciated radical potential that is masked by the long complicity of its hegemonic varieties with plutocratic, patriarchal, and white-supremacist structures of power. But this complicity, I argue, is a function of dominant group interests and the successful political projects of the privileged, not the consequence of any ineluctable immanent conceptual dynamic of liberalism as a political ideology. Once we pluralize liberalism into liberalisms (both actual and hypothetical), we should be able to see how many claims about liberalism’s putatively problematic ontology and alleged incapacity to recognize and/or theorize social oppression really depend on the contingent features
of its historically dominant (but not inevitable) incarnations. An emancipatory liberalism can, I contend, be reconstructed that is not theoretically constrained in these unfortunate ways.
With this background established, I go on in chapter 3, “Racial Liberalism,” to make a detailed case for the usefulness of the construct. I point out the global hegemony of liberalism in a post– Cold War world and the triumph in the academy over the last few decades of Rawlsian contractarian liberalism in particular. But in the wide range of political responses to the work of John Rawls, the historic racialization of the contract apparatus and of the dominant varieties of liberalism will rarely be a topic of inquiry. Yet insofar as racism (ostensibly) violates the moral norms of modern political theory in general, liberal theorists across the spectrum, however much they disagree on other issues, should be able to converge on the necessity for purging contemporary liberal theory of its racist ancestry. Contra the exponents of color-blindness, however, I argue that this project can only be accomplished through a color-conscious investigative genealogy and reconstruction. Thus I urge a self-conscious deracializing of liberalism that would begin by recognizing the centrality of a social ontology of race to the modern world and the acknowledgment of a corresponding history of racial exploitation that needs to be registered in liberal categories and addressed as a matter of liberal social justice.
Oppositional bodies of political thought are often preoccupied with epistemological questions, in part for the simple reason that they are trying to explain how a dominant but misleading body of ideas (classist, sexist, racist) continues to perpetuate itself. One wants to understand both how the privileged can continue to deny the unfairness of their privilege and how (perhaps) one was oneself originally taken in by these ideas. I suggest that this pattern of denial and misapprehension can in the case of race be thought of as a “white ignorance,” an elaboration of the concept I introduced in The Racial Contract of an “epistemology of ignorance.”9 Chapter 4, “White Ignorance,” locates white miscognition as a structural phenomenon rather than a matter of individual white myopias. It is the result (not unavoidably, but as a strong psychological tendency) of racial location. Because of racial privilege, an inherited racialized set of concepts and beliefs, differential racial experience, and racial group interest, whites tend to get certain kinds of things wrong. As such, the chapter can be seen as a contribution from critical philosophy of race to the new “social” epistemology that has emerged in recent decades, a welcome turn away from the solipsistic Cartesian meditations that have typically characterized modern epistemology.
Chapter 5, “ ‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” takes a critical look at what could be called the epistemology of normative theory, specifically the normative
apparatus of “ideal theory” liberalism. Like chapter 2, it also adopts a broader perspective, reminding us that a focus on race should not exclude a concern with gender and class privilege also, all of which are indeed always in the modern world in intersection and interaction with one another. First written as a contribution to a feminist collection on moral psychology, it was then reprinted in a special symposium of the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, stimulating widespread discussion. The chapter expressed a frustration I and many others at the time (as it turned out) had begun to feel with “ideal theory” in ethics and political philosophy, most notably, of course, though not exclusively, in the work of Rawls. “Ideal theory” is not just normative theory, which by definition is a prerequisite for ethics and political philosophy, but the normative theory of a perfectly just society. The rationale was that developing such a perspective was crucial to doing non-ideal justice theory properly later on. But to many of us at the time it became increasingly questionable whether this “later on” was ever going to arrive, and that in reality ideal theory—whatever its original motivation— was functioning as a way of avoiding the hard facts of class, gender, and racial oppression; how they shape the human agents enmeshed in these relations of domination; and what our normative priorities should be. So the essay was an early effort in what has since become a growing wave of criticism of ideal theory, and I would like to think that it made at least a small contribution to getting things going.
No Western Enlightenment philosopher can equal the standing of Immanuel Kant, the luminary par excellence of eighteenth-century thought, with stellar accomplishments not merely in ethics and political philosophy, but in metaphysics and aesthetics also. Yet Kant, the pre-eminent theorist of personhood, whose work through his appropriation by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas has become central to normative political philosophy as well as ethics, has also a more dubious accomplishment to his (dis)credit: being one of the founders—or (for some theorists) the founder—of modern “scientific” racism. As such, he wonderfully illustrates the combination of light and darkness in the “white” Enlightenment’s racial liberalism. Until recently, when the challenge from scholars of race made some response unavoidable, mainstream white political philosophers and ethicists had for the most part scrupulously avoided any mention of his racist writings in anthropology and physical geography. Now the dominant line of argument is that they are embarrassing and should of course be condemned, but they form no part of his philosophy. In chapter 6, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” I challenge this conceptual segregation and ask whether it would not be more theoretically fruitful to explore the possible presence in Kant’s work of a philosophical anthropology of persons and sub-persons, thereby inevitably raising questions about the standard
interpretations of the prescriptions of his ethics, political philosophy, and teleology.
The seeming demise of Marxism—though as I write this introduction in 2016, the worsening conditions of plutocracy, not merely in the United States but globally, must surely be fostering a rethinking10 has taken “exploitation” off the table as a subject for moral analysis. Exploitation is assumed to be necessarily tied to the labor theory of value, long repudiated not merely by mainstream economists but by even most contemporary Marxists. But a concept of exploitation can easily be developed that is straightforwardly condemnable by respectable liberal criteria: exploitation as the “using” of people for illicit benefit and unjust enrichment. Marx famously contrasted the transparent exploitation of slave and feudal societies with the more opaque exploitation of capitalism, which, resting as it did on “free” wage-labor and voluntary consent, generally needed theoretical work to uncover. But racial exploitation in modernity was originally as transparently exploitative as (or even more transparently exploitative than) exploitation in pre-modern systems. Racial chattel slavery, aboriginal expropriation, colonial forced labor, and so forth are paradigms of nonconsensual coercive systems directed by liberal polities at home and abroad. Yet they have not received the attention they deserve in liberal descriptive and normative theory for what they say about the actual architecture of the liberal state and its supervision of the wrongful transfer of wealth and opportunities from people of color to whites. In chapter 7, “Racial Exploitation,” I argue for a revival of the concept of exploitation in philosophical discourse that could be brought into fruitful engagement with the by now large body of literature in sociology and economics on racial differentials in wealth and how they serve to perpetuate racial inequality.
Part II of the book focuses on Rawls, Rawlsianism, and white political philosophy more generally. My claim is that most of this work either exemplifies the racial liberalism I am critiquing or adopts strategies for addressing and correcting it that are, in my opinion, going to be inadequate.
Chapter 8, “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls,” examines the writings of the person generally regarded (certainly in Anglo-American analytic philosophical circles) as the most important American political philosopher of the twentieth century, and, for some, the most important political philosopher, period, of the twentieth century. I try to bring out the absurdity of the leading American philosopher of justice having nothing substantive to say over his working lifetime about what has historically been the most salient form of American injustice, racial domination. Moreover, by analyzing the underpinnings of Rawlsian ideal theory, I try to make the stronger case not merely that Rawls and Rawlsians have not addressed the issue of racism, but that the apparatus itself hinders them from doing so adequately,
not merely contingently but also structurally. In the conclusion, I point the reader to my own work in my 2007 book with Carole Pateman, Contract and Domination, where I argue that retrieving the Rawlsian apparatus for racial justice and non-ideal theory will require radical changes in it.11
The natural follow-up is a look at the work of Tommie Shelby, since he— as a black philosopher at Harvard, Rawls’s home institution for most of his career—is the most prominent African American representative of the position that, contra my claims, Rawls’s apparatus as is can indeed be used to tackle racial injustice. In chapter 9, “Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice?,” I do a detailed analysis of one of Shelby’s articles and explain why I think his attempted appropriation of Rawls (an extension to race of Rawls’s “fair equality of opportunity” principle) cannot work. I should emphasize here that I do not, of course, see Shelby as himself an exponent of racial liberalism but rather as a philosopher trying, as I am, to correct it. But my contention is that the racial liberalism that for me Rawls represents is more deeply embedded in the apparatus and thus requires more conceptual rethinking and reworking of that apparatus than Shelby recognizes.
Chapter 10, “The Whiteness of Political Philosophy,” takes a retrospective look at the evolution (and non-evolution) of the field in the many years since my graduation. Commissioned by the hyperactive (in a good way) George Yancy for a volume bringing together seventeen black and Hispanic/Latino philosophers to reflect on their experiences in the profession, it offers both an account of how much progress has been made in recent decades in Africana philosophy and race as legitimate philosophical areas of research, and how far we still have to go. Though there has been a burgeoning of literature in the discipline, the low demographic numbers of black philosophers and people of color generally, and the radicalness of the challenge race poses to conventional ways of doing philosophy, somewhat temper one’s optimism about its future. Using a well-known companion to political philosophy as a representative target, I point out how “white” its conceptual framework and underlying assumptions are, paying virtually no attention to the large body of work in post-colonial theory and critical race theory not just in philosophy but across many other disciplines.
Finally, in an epilogue that is simultaneously a prologue (in gesturing toward what I intend to be a future project), I sketch the contours of what I am calling a “black radical liberalism.” Taxonomies of Africana political thought have traditionally opposed black radicalism and black liberalism, the latter seen as necessarily committed to mainstream white norms and assumptions, even if adjusted somewhat for racial difference. But in keeping with the overall line of argument of this book, I make a case here for a different variety of black liberalism, one radicalized by taking seriously (in a way that mainstream black liberalism does not) the shaping of the modern
world by white supremacy. Black radical liberalism as an emancipatory ideology will of course have to be supplemented and modified by the experience of other racially subordinated communities. But given the centrality of African slavery and subsequent anti-black oppression to the making of modernity, it represents a crucial step toward the comprehensive theorization and reconstruction of the deracialized, color-conscious liberalism for which I am calling.
The promise of liberalism was famously the granting of equal rights to all individuals, destroying the old social hierarchies and establishing a new social order where everybody, as an individual, could flourish, free of “estate” membership. But the reality turned out to be the preservation, albeit on a new theoretical foundation, of old hierarchies of gender and the establishment of new hierarchies of race. Thus the struggle to realize the liberal ideal for everybody and not just a privileged minority still continues today, centuries later. If this struggle is ever to be successful, a prerequisite must be the acknowledgment of the extent to which dominant varieties of liberalism have developed so as to be complicit with rather than in opposition to social oppression. I hope that by formally identifying the ideological phenomenon of “racial liberalism” as a subject for research and critique, this book will contribute both to its analysis and its eventual dismantling, as theory and as practice.
PART I
Racial Liberalism
Epistemology, Personhood, Property
CHAPTER 1
New Left Project Interview with Charles Mills
1. The concept of “race” as an objective category has long been discredited by anthropology and biology, yet the social sciences show that racial disadvantage persists. How do you understand the concept of race and racism?
On this side of the Atlantic, a lot of work has been done over the past twenty years in critical race theory to develop what could be called a “successor concept” of race. In other words, we’ve inherited a concept that was central to the justification of imperialism, colonialism, African slavery, Jim Crow, apartheid, the “color bar,” and the “color line.” And the question then is, What should anti-racist theorists and activists seeking to dismantle the legacy of these systems and practices do with it?
One obvious option is eliminativism—drop the concept from one’s vocabulary and discourse altogether. On this line of analysis, “race” should be seen as comparable to “phlogiston”—a term designating an element within combustible substances supposedly released during the process of combustion. The French chemist Lavoisier showed that combustion does not actually take place by this process, and that in fact phlogiston does not exist. So “phlogiston” as a concept is scientifically refuted, is doing no work for us, and should just be dropped.
But contrast that with “witch.” Witches in the sense of evil women with supernatural powers don’t actually exist either, so those unfortunate women burned at the stake for this sin were not really witches. But the term is retained in contemporary usage, not just to refer to characters in fantasy novels or films (the White Witch of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia novels) but also to indicate a believer in the Wiccan religion. “Witch” has been reconceived.
Now “race” is arguably more like “witch” than “phlogiston” in that many social and political theorists have contended it can still do useful work for us. So for these theorists (anti-eliminativists), it is better to retain the term. “Race” is redefined so that it is purged of its unscientific and morally pernicious associations. Instead of seeing race biologically, and as part of a natural hierarchy, one reconceptualizes it so it refers to one’s structural location in a racialized social system, thereby generating a successor concept. People are “raced” according to particular rules—we shift from a noun to a verb, from a pre-existing “natural” state to an active social process—and these ascribed racial identities then tendentially shape their moral standing, civic status, social world, and life chances. In that sense, race obviously does exist, and we can talk about “whites” being privileged and “nonwhites” being disadvantaged by particular racial systems without implying any biological referent.
“Racism” has been given various competing definitions and attributed competing areas of application. I would distinguish between racism in the ideational sense (a complex of ideas, beliefs, values) and racism in the socio-institutional sense (institutions, practices, social systems). For the first sense, I would favor this definition: racism is the belief that (i) humanity can be divided into discrete races, and (ii) these races are hierarchically arranged, with some races superior to others. The second sense would then refer to institutions, practices, and social systems that illicitly privilege some races at the expense of others, where racial membership (directly or indirectly) explains this privileging.
2. If the earlier, more overt, forms of racism (asserting the inherent inferiority of non-whites) were rooted in the political economy of chattel slavery and colonialism, what are the politico-economic factors behind racism today? In other words, what continues to drive racism?
In a phrase, I would say it’s the political economy of racialized capitalism: the legacy of these systems (chattel slavery, colonialism) both globally (as North- South domination) and in particular nations (the former colonizing powers, the former colonies, the former white settler states). Whiteover-nonwhite racism is not, of course, the only variety—one also has to take into account intra-Asian and intra-African racism, as well as Latin American variants where racial antagonisms affect relations between AfroLatins and indigenous peoples. But obviously on a global scale, white domination has been the most important kind, and some of the latter examples are themselves influenced by the colonial history, as with the Belgian shaping of Tutsi-Hutu relations in Rwanda. So this inherited system of structural advantage and disadvantage, which was heavily racialized, continues
to affect life chances today, thereby reproducing “race” and racial identities as crucial social categories. Where whites are a significant population, they are generally privileged by their racial membership (I say more about this under #6, below), and their resistance to giving up this privilege manifests itself in racial ideologies of various kinds. So racism is most illuminatingly seen in this social and historical context—as an ever-evolving ideology linked with group domination and illicit advantage—rather than in the framework of individual “prejudice” favored by mainstream social theory.
3. Before we get onto the idea of “racial liberalism,” could you first outline what you mean by liberalism?
By liberalism I mean the ideology that arises in Europe in the seventeentheighteenth centuries in opposition to feudal absolutism, predicated on the equal rights of morally equal individuals, and having as its key figures such political thinkers as John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. Obviously, as even this brief list indicates, there are many different strains within liberalism: contractarian versus utilitarian versions, property-and-self-ownership-based versus personhood-based versions, right-wing laissez-faire liberalism versus left-wing social-democratic liberalism. But in theory all these different variants are supposed to be committed to the flourishing of the individual.
What I call “racial liberalism” is then a liberalism in which—independent of which particular version we’re considering—key terms have been rewritten by race so as to generate a different set of rules for members of different “races,” R1s and R2s, because (historically) the R2s don’t meet the criteria of the capacity for attaining individuality. So I am following the example of second-wave feminist liberals from the 1970s onward and arguing that we need to see liberalism as structurally shaped in its development by group privilege—in this case, white racial privilege. “Racial liberalism” as a theoretical construct is then supposed to be analogous to “patriarchal liberalism.”
4. There is little overt racism in political theory today. In what way is liberal political theory still compromised by the issue of race?
Again, the feminist model and theoretical precedent is very useful here. Women active in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s who went into the academy and into political theory came to the realization that the “maleness” of the work of the central canonical figures ran deeper than stigmatizing references to women, though these were offensive enough. Overtly sexist patriarchal liberalism explicitly represents women as lesser creatures
not deserving of equal rights, appropriately to be subjected to male authority, not permitted to vote or own property, having their legal identity subsumed into their husbands’ under the doctrine of coverture, and so on. But the point second-wave feminists made was that even now, when formal gender equality has been attained and sexism is officially repudiated, liberalism remains patriarchal in its conceptualization of the official polity, its view of the individual, its division of society into public and private spheres, its exclusion of the family from the ambit of justice, and so forth. So for substantive as against merely nominal gender inclusiveness, what is necessary is a rethinking of inherited political categories from the perspective of women, a rethinking guided by the desire to achieve genuine gender inclusivity in the cartography of the political and thus facilitate the struggle for genuine gender equity in the polity itself.
You can see how this line of argument can be adopted and translated for race. My similar claim would be that liberal political theory is so shaped by the history of white domination, both national and global, that, analogously, it tacitly takes as its representative political figure the white (male) subject. The parallel is not perfect, since male domination/patriarchy already exists at the dawn of modernity, whereas European domination/ white supremacy does not. So you don’t get the same taken-for-grantedness of the rightness of European rule that you get for male rule—it’s more contested. Jennifer Pitts’s A Turn to Empire, for example, is subtitled The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, 1 and her point is to demarcate a transition from an early liberalism with significant anti-racist and anti-imperialist elements to a later liberalism more uniformly racist and imperialist. But the dominant variety does, of course, eventually become a liberalism that assumes the superiority of Europe as the global civilization, and the identity of Europeans as the appropriate agents of the civilizing process. John Locke invests in African slavery and justifies aboriginal expropriation; Immanuel Kant turns out to be one of the pioneering theorists of modern “scientific” racism; Georg Hegel’s World Spirit animates the (very material and non-spiritual) colonial enterprise; and John Stuart Mill, employee of the British East India Company, denies the capacity of barbarian races in their “nonage” to rule themselves.
The way in which contemporary liberalism is still compromised by race is, in my opinion, in the failure to rethink itself in the light of this history. Liberalism needs to be reconceptualized as ideologically central to the imperial project; both colonial and imperial domination need to be recognized as political systems in themselves (so, as with the gender critique, the boundaries of the polity would be redrawn); liberalism’s official ontology needs to officially admit races as social existents (they’re already tacitly there); and above all, in normative political theory (the
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CHAPTER II
LIFE OF A PLANT
“We cannot pass a blade of grass unheeded by the way, For it whispers to our thoughts and we its silent voice obey.”
J. E. Carpenter
The growth and development of a plant, though such a common thing, is full of very real wonder and mystery. It takes only a little observation to discover the various stages in the process, but how they are brought about and by what laws they are governed, not even the most astute investigators can always say.
To the lay mind, the statement that the plants depend upon the soil for their nourishment is quite self-evident, yet it is extremely inaccurate. It is now quite certain that the vegetable world relies upon the air for its largest and most important food supply The great mass of carbon which is the chief constituent of all plant structure is drawn almost exclusively from the atmosphere. While it is true that many vital elements are obtained from the earth, all green plants manufacture the greater part of their solid material out of the carbon dioxide of the air. Of what the plants do obtain from the soil, water makes up the largest bulk. The bread and meat of the plant world is carbon dioxide; the drink is soil water in which is dissolved certain essential salts and condiments.
A chemical analysis of a Green Pea will show approximately 46.5% of carbon, 4.2% of nitrogen and 3.1% of all other elements, exclusive of the hydrogen and oxygen which make up the water permeating all tissue.
This is truly a startling fact. Instead of belonging to the earth, the plants then belong primarily to the air. The air is their natural habitat; the earth serves to give them a fixed place in the world and provide them with flavoured water to drink.
Plants are born from seeds, the joint product of two previous individuals; they live by eating and drinking; they marry and in turn rear families of their own. It is our purpose in this chapter to show, in a very definite way, that this is not mere figurative language but a common-sense statement of fact.
The cycle of plant life can be illustrated by any dicotyledonous, herbaceous annual. If one is so inclined he may hark back to his high school days and plant a few Beans in a box as a practical illustration of the facts stated here.
The first action of the planted Bean is to absorb water to a prodigious amount, and so wake the quiescent life forces which may have been slumbering within it for years. It is a law of animal and vegetable life that all vital processes must be performed in solution. Without water, life is dead or somnolent.
When Nature made the Bean, she left a small opening or window in its skin-wall called the micropyle. Through this opening of the water-swollen seed, now issue two pale sprouts. One is long and pointed; it is the radicle or incipient root. The other is stubbier and is tipped by a cluster of folded, yellow-green leaves; it is the plumule or incipient stem. With unerring exactness, the radicle grows down into the soil and the plumule feels its way up into the air
By this time, the seed has burst its walls and split into two halves, which indicates that it belongs to the dicotyledonous group of plants. As the seedling continues to grow, these cotyledons begin to shrink and shrivel. The plant is living on their substance until it can begin to make its own. In the case of the Bean, the stem lifts the emaciated cotyledons up into the air, where they act as leaves until the tiny green things at the stem’s tip have expanded into those important organs.
When the first leaves have fully opened and the spent cotyledons have dropped off as mere empty shells, the independent life of the plant may be said to have begun. We are now in a position to examine its methods of living.
Examining the root, we find that by this time it has expanded into many branches. Each tip is a tiny mouth through which the plant drinks the all-important water and mineral salts. Root tips exercise great ingenuity; they feel their way underground, touching here, recoiling there, and searching out the elements necessary to the plant’s economy with wonderful sagacity.
The actual absorption is done by minute filaments or hairs which take in water and its dissolved contents by osmotic action. They secrete a digestive fluid which renders certain minerals soluble, and by a strange intelligence, select the kind and amount of material they take in. In certain groups of plants, notably the Legumes, colonies of Bacteria take the place of root hairs, and by a reciprocal action, provide the plant with the nitrogenous elements which it craves.
The principal food of most vital importance taken in by the roots is nitrogen. Nitrogen is one of the basic elements of protoplasm, the life fluid of the living cell. Where there is life, there is nitrogen. Sulphur, phosphorous, silica, iron and other elements are also needed in small quantities.
The root hairs are constructed so as to allow fluids to pass in but not out. The continual absorption of water results in a mechanical pressure which automatically forces the sap up through the stem to all parts of the plant. The process is aided by the evaporation of water from the leaves, through the partial vacuum created by them at the top of the system. Pushed from below and pulled from above, the sap of a tree, for instance, moves with a propulsive power greater than the blood pressure of the strongest animal.
Above the roots and the stem of the developing plant are the branches. Their function is too well known to need much comment. They raise the leaves up into the air and the light. They act as conduits for ascending and descending sap. They give the plant strength and rigidity. Each main stem is a clever bit of plant engineering, so built as to withstand all kinds of heavy strains and stresses.
The leaves of our seedling are extremely important parts of its anatomy. Pluck them off and it will die in a few hours. They are
mouths, stomachs and lungs all in one. Their surfaces are broad and flat, in order that they may catch and devour every particle of carbon dioxide which comes their way. To us, carbon dioxide is a negligible part of the atmosphere, but out of this intangible product of combustion, arising from fires, breathed out by animals and expelled by volcanoes and hot springs, the tallest tree builds its greatest structure. Is it any wonder that it takes so long!
In the inner tissue of each leaf is a substance called chlorophyll. It is the material which gives leaves their green colour. It is one of the most important substances in plantdom. Under the influence of sunlight, this chlorophyll takes the carbon dioxide of the air, and, with water and certain minerals, makes starch, the raw material of plant construction. This process, called photosynthesis, goes on while the sun shines, and stops with the approach of darkness. The necessity of plenty of light cannot be overestimated.
In the manufacture of starch, oxygen occurs as a by-product. As the plant has no use for this element, it is breathed out from the surface of the leaves. From the standpoint of man, this makes plants atmospheric purifiers. At night, when the making of starch is suspended, there is often a superabundance of carbon dioxide within plant structures. It is this gas which is now exhaled, though in very small amounts. Some authorities maintain that the excess of carbon dioxide is contained in water absorbed by the roots. In the daytime this is welcomed as additional starch material, but at night there is no use for it.
Another substance which is always present in excess of plant needs is water. It is essential as a tissue builder and also as a carrier of nourishment. Its continual evaporation from the leaf surfaces furnishes one of the sources of motive power for the circulatory system. The rate of evaporation is controlled by the stomata, little pores or mouths which have contractible lips. In the Lilac there are as many as one hundred and twenty thousand stomata to the square inch. They are nearly always located on the under surface of the leaves.
Certain plants like the Cacti seem to be able to get along without leaves, but thick, fleshy sections of stem perform all their functions. The Fungi and other parasites differ from most plants in that they have no chlorophyll for starch-making but live on the already elaborated tissue of living or dead neighbors.
When our seedling grows old enough, it marries and has a family. Among the higher plants, the sexes are quite distinct. There are such things as male plants and such things as female plants, but more often both sexes occur in the same individual and frequently in the same flowers. The Hop, Nettle, and Date Palm are one-sex plants. Maize has flowers of different sexes on the same stem.
Flowers are the reproductive organs. In the blossom of the Bean, the stamens are the male organs and the pistil is the female organ. The stamens produce dust-like pollen which is conveyed by the wind to the pistil of some other flower. Pollen grains deposited on the stigma of the pistil are held there by a sticky secretion until they can grow a long tube which travels down the style, eventually reaching and fertilizing the tiny ovules or eggs.
The ovules then develop into seeds and the pistil grows into a pod, on both of which the parent plant bends all its energies to give a good start in the world.
The cycle is now complete. We have another Bean and are back to where we started, ready for some other fellow to plant the new Bean and perform the experiment all over again.
This is the story in brief, but there are many other details. The different plants have invented and perfected all kinds of devices to secure the effective propagation of the race. The Hazel and the Grasses hang their stamens out in the wind in order that it may blow their pollen to some other plant, which is waiting with feathered pistil to catch it. Most garden plants depend on the insects to act as pollen carriers and display gorgeous flower-petals and nectar pits with which to attract them. Many plants aim to prevent self-fertilization by having the stamens and the pistil come to maturity at different times.
The plants go to great lengths to secure an advantageous distribution of their offspring. The nature of a plant is to live by growing. When it has reached a prescribed height, it must continue the process by producing new individuals to carry on the cycle. It gives its children a start in the world by providing them with wings, bladders, feathers, spikes, thorns, sticky secretions, submarines, boats, and kites, according to the method of travel they are to use. Sometimes the matured pistil or fruit is dispersed entire. Sometimes it opens and shoots the seeds out. The Violet and Oxalis act like veritable guns, so vigorously do they expel their seeds. There are seed-capsules, like those of the Primrose and Xanthium Spinosum, which open at the top so that only a high and efficient wind can dislodge the seeds.
The problem of food storage is an important one in plantdom. Annuals die when they have flowered and produced seed. Perennials wither but persist for a number of seasons and sometimes many years. Those whose stems or trunks are permanent withdraw their starch and chlorophyll into their cambium layer where it is safe from freezing. Those which die down to the ground each fall store up food material in underground stems and roots in sufficient amount to get a good start the following season. The Potato is an enlargement of the underground stem, but Carrots, Beets, and Turnips are bulbous roots. Hyacinths, Tulips, Daffodils, Snowdrops, Crocuses, and Buttercups all store food material in bulbs. Practically all wild flowers which come up early in the spring, feed upon the nutriment manufactured during the previous season.
Buds represent the foliage of the coming season. Each fall, trees and bushes prepare for next year’s growth by putting forth miniature shoots and leaves folded up in warm brown overcoats. At spring’s urgent call, the buds have merely to cast aside their coverings and step out into the warm sunlight. These buds really make a tree a community of individuals, because each one is capable of reproducing everything that has occurred on the plant up to that point. This is the principle on which grafting is carried on.
The most wonderful thing in all plant structure is the plant cell. There are anywhere from six thousand to twelve thousand of these
living units to the square inch. In their restless, moving protoplasm lies the mystery of life—the directing energy which controls the plant’s activities and makes it a conscious, intelligent organism.
IF THIS AGED CEDAR COULD TELL ITS LIFE’S STORY, WE WOULD FIND IT FULL OF ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE
CHAPTER III
M P
“Race after race of leaves and men Bloom, wither and are gone; As winds and water rise and fall So life and death roll on.”
We are so in the habit of thinking of plants as fixed and static things that it rarely occurs to us that they migrate over the earth’s surface quite as extensively as do men or animals.
While it is probably true that vegetation originated simultaneously at different points on the globe’s surface, not much observation is necessary to indicate that it does not always stay where it is put. Plants are peculiar and native to certain lands in a very definite way, but their love of adventure often carries them to the far corners of the earth. They are the most energetic and effective colonizers in existence. The complete history of plantdom would include the stories of invasions, conquests and revolutions quite as stirring as anything in human annals.
If it is absorbing to follow the racial movements of man, ancient and modern, it is equally fascinating for a lover of plants to investigate their migratory habits. We have exact records of many of their travels and can make interesting conjectures about the rest.
To a layman, the present distribution of plants may seem chaotic. He reads that certain families are natives of Europe and Australia, or North America and Africa and are absent from all intervening countries. The Alpine species Primulas and Saxifrages are common to both the Arctic and the Antarctic. There are fifty-eight European and New Zealand species which are identical. The British Grass Poa Annua is also found in the Andes of Brazil. Through what thousands of years of change and evolution have these things come about! Yet
the results are no more complex than was the filling of America with its mixed and conglomerate human population.
In a general way, there is a measure of fixity to plant distribution. Certain plants have elected the tropics as their home; and only under the greatest stress of circumstance can they be induced to go elsewhere.
Tropical heat and moisture make for luxuriance of vegetation. There is a much greater variety there than in the North. Woody Vines climb the tallest trunks, where they intermingle their leaves and blossoms with those of their host. Gorgeous Air Plants beautify and perfume the forest. Stately Palms wave magnificent bouquets of pendulous fronds.
As we travel away from the equator, the vegetation takes on a simpler aspect. There are more annuals and more herbs. The number of Ferns, Grasses, and catkin-bearing Trees, like the Alder and the Birch, increase. The limited growing seasons make for a more restricted accumulation of tissue. Such tropic plants as have braved the rigours of the colder climates have dwindled much in size. The Castor Oil Tree becomes a humble annual (Ricinus Communis) only three to eight feet in height. Other tropical trees become so small that temperate zone folk tread them under foot.
When we get into the polar regions, all the plants take on a stunted and dwarfed appearance and, in some cases, retire almost entirely under ground. The number of genera and species is much reduced. The Oak, Walnut, Chestnut and Elm are replaced by the hardy conifers. At the point where vegetation becomes almost extinct are dwarf Birches, Willows and polar Blackberries (Rubus Arcticus). The simple Mosses and Lichens mark the last lingering evidences of life.
A curious feature of plant life in the polar regions is the rapid growth which it often exhibits. The summer of the Far North is short but it is one day of intense and blinding light. The sun shines continually throughout each twenty-four hours. By virtue of its stimulating power, plants are able to perform in a few weeks
processes of development which take months under ordinary conditions.
It is illuminating to take a single country in a more favoured climate and, as far as possible, trace its plant history. The British Isles, because of their limited area, are a convenient field of study. An investigation of their settlement by plants gives us many hints about prehistoric climatic and geographical changes.
Geologists generally believe that the British Isles were once joined to the mainland of Europe. It was at this time that they were settled by vegetation. Some of this plant life came from Spain and some from southwest France; there was also a Germanic group. The floating ice of the glacial period brought over hardy visitors from the Scandinavian peninsula. A few plant immigrants arrived from North America and landed on the west coast of Ireland.
St. Helena is an isolated volcanic mass built up seventeen thousand feet from the bed of the ocean. It therefore has its own peculiar vegetation, a portion of which is believed to have been evolved on the spot from the one-celled state. According to Sir Joseph Hooker, forty out of fifty flowering plants and ten out of twenty-six Ferns “with scarcely an exception cannot be regarded as very close specific allies of any other plants at all.” Sixteen of the Ferns are common to Africa, India or America and were probably carried there by the wind. Ocean currents also brought other species from Africa.
In 1883, a most interesting thing occurred on the Asiatic island of Krakatoa. A violent volcanic eruption wiped every vestige of life off its surface. When the flow of lava ceased and the earth cooled once more, Krakatoa was to all intents and purposes a volcanic island newly risen from the sea. It presented the exact analogy of a recently created bit of land waiting to be settled by the plants. In 1883, it was as barren as the face of the moon. In 1888, a Mr. Hemsley described its appearance as follows:—
“The first phase of the new vegetation, was a thin film of microscopic fresh-water Algae, forming a green, slimy coating, such as may often be seen on damp rocks, and furnishing a hygroscopic
condition, in the absence of which it is doubtful whether the Ferns by which they were followed could have established themselves. Both Algae and Ferns are reproduced from microscopic spores, which are readily conveyed long distances by winds. Eleven species of Ferns were found, all of very wide distribution, and some of them had already become common the fourth year after the eruption. Scattered here and there among the Ferns were isolated individuals of flowering plants, belonging to such kinds as have succulent seedvessels eaten by birds, or such as have a light, feathery seed-vessel like the Dandelion and a host of others, and are wafted from place to place by the winds.
“On the seashore there were young plants and seeds (or seedvessels containing seeds) of upwards of a dozen other herbs, shrubs and trees, all of them common on coral islands, and all known to have seeds capable of bearing long immersion in sea water without injury. Among the established seedlings were those of several large trees, and a Convolvulus that grows on almost all tropical coasts, often forming runners one hundred yards in length. There were Cocoanuts also, though none had germinated.”
The farther such an island is from the land, the longer will vegetation take to get established. Darwin found that the isolated islands of Keeling, after thousands of years of existence, contained only twenty kinds of flowering plants.
Although plants have no legs they are not devoid of mobility. When man uses the propulsive power of steam to travel by, he shows no greater ingenuity than do plants in their use of special devices of locomotion.
Species like the Tumble Weed (Amarantus Albus) pull up stakes, and, consigning themselves to the swift autumn winds, race across country at great speed, scattering seeds as they go. The Utriculariae or Bladderworts are true sailors and float about on inland streams like little ships. The Duckweeds and Wolffias also have aquatic habits.
However, most plants prefer to travel in embryo. In the form of small and microscopic seeds the force of gravity has little influence
on them, and they can journey for long and incredible distances.
To this end practically every seed in existence is provided with some apparatus or appendage designed to help it make its way in the world. The Elm, the Linden, and the Ash bear winged seeds, which are so efficient in riding the breeze that they are really miniature aeroplanes. The double wings of the Maple are very much like those of an insect. The seeds are released from their container in such manner as to acquire a whirling motion as they fall.
The progeny of the Willow is provided with long projecting hairs which curl together to form a tiny balloon. Feathery attachments called pappus enable the children of the Dandelion, the Thistle and the Fire Weed to go on long jaunts of exploration.
The seed-pods of the Sycamore are great rollers. Even ordinary nuts and fruits may be blown to considerable distances by the strong winds of autumn. The many edible seeds and fruits are carried gratis by birds and animals. The Mistletoe, for instance, is distributed entirely by them.
Walnuts, Butternuts, and Acorns bear water travel well, as do certain of the hard seeds. The Arrowhead (Sagittaria) has a selfmade water-wing on which its offspring float.
Plant seeds, which like to travel on animals, all provide themselves with grappling irons in the shape of sharp hooks, spurs and spines with which they cling to their carriers. Everybody in the northern United States knows of the avidity with which the Cockle-bur clings to any passing object. The Touch-me-not (Impatiens), the Wistaria, and a host of others, actually shoot their seeds from their pods as from a gun.
Every vagrant breeze, every purling brook, every deep river, every ocean current, is a highway of travel in plantdom. The birds, the beasts, the insects, and not least, man himself, are involuntary vehicles on which our vegetable friends tour the world. The spores of Mosses, Lichens, Fungi and other cryptogams are so light that they find no difficulty in mounting into the air and traveling across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans at will.
The complete record of plant conquests would fill many volumes. Their operations have extended into every land and have had influence on the world’s history. It very often happens that plant invaders become so quickly and thoroughly naturalized in a strange country that they go a long way toward supplanting the original inhabitants in a very short time.
It was Darwin who first noticed the extensive conquests of the Cardoon Artichoke (Cynara Cardunculus) in South America. In one section, these prickly plants covered an area of several hundred square miles, having entirely superceded the aborigines.
It is well known that the most troublesome of the American weeds are of British origin. On the other hand, the American water weed Anacharis blocks up small English streams. The grass called Stipa Tortilis has captured the steppes of southern Russia. The love of change seems to be an inherent tendency in plantdom. The Pigweed and the Morning Glory have come north from the tropics. The Canada Thistle, originally a foreigner in North America, has spread all over Canada and New England. The American Erigeron Canadense has emigrated to all parts of the world. The flora of Scandinavia, like its people, are aggressive colonizers. More than one hundred and fifty species have reached New Zealand alone and nearly as many have established themselves in the eastern United States.
Some plants seem to be able to adapt themselves to any climate and therefore are born explorers, but the greater number are too fastidious regarding conditions of soil, heat, light and moisture to thrive well everywhere. It is a noticeable fact that the most successful plant invaders usually come in the wake of human colonizers and stick to the sphere of man’s influence. For example, the Butter-and-Eggs (Linaria Linaria) has followed the railroad tracks almost entirely over the tropical and semi-tropical world. Sometimes, however, hardy plants advance into the primeval jungle, there to give battle to its lusty inhabitants.
On the whole, annuals have a better chance than perennials to gain a foothold in a new country. Every spring the weeds, grasses,
and common flowering plants have to start all over again from a seed beginning. The spores of newcomers, therefore, have almost an equal chance with the established inhabitants. On the other hand, the bodies of perennials occupy the land in close-packed ranks all the year, ready to dispute every inch of ground with an aggressor. It is very hard for new plants to gain entrance into a well-grown forest.
Man has been of tremendous aid in the distribution of plants over the earth’s surface. Either consciously or unconsciously he takes his plants with him wherever he goes.
It was the Emperor Chang-Chien who carried the Bean, Cucumber, Lucerne, Saffron, Walnut, Pea, Spinach and Watermelon from Asia to China about 200 B. C. The period of Roman conquest was a great epoch in the history of plant migrations. The Peach and the Apricot first became prominent as fruits at that time. Roman generals introduced the Pear, Peach, Cherry, Mulberry, Walnut and many ornamental shrubs into England.
From an obscure native of Bengal, the Sugar Cane has become an important plant of wide distribution. Coffee, a wild berry of Arabia, is now the chief crop of whole countries in the West Indies and South America. The yellow Maize of America has become a citizen of the world. The weak and humble Wheat is the sole possessor of thousands of square miles of land in America, Russia and elsewhere.
All this has been wrought by man’s efforts. When it is to his interest, he fights the battles of plantdom, and because of his superior knowledge and equipment is of tremendous service. Sometimes, however, he gives aid to his plant friends through motives that are quite unselfish. A romantic story is related of a French naval officer named Declieux who once elected to carry a Coffee Plant to the Colony of Martinique. The supply of water ran low during the voyage, and, rather than see the plant die, the man shared his daily glass with it, at considerate discomfort to himself.
Until man becomes all-wise, he will continue to make mistakes; and not least of these will be in connection with his investigations into the mysteries of Nature. It has happened more than once that he
has introduced some new plant into an old land, or vice versa, and lived to thoroughly regret his action.
Sometime in 1890, a generously inclined individual threw a Water Hyacinth into the St. Johns River in Florida. In the space of a few short years, that single plant had multiplied so prodigiously as to seriously impede navigation, lumbering and fishing.
Jack London tells of a similiar thing that happened in Hawaii: “In the United States, in greenhouses and old-fashioned gardens, grows a potted flowering shrub called Lantana; in India dwells a very noisy and quarrelsome bird known as the Myna. Both were introduced into Hawaii—the bird to feed upon the cut-worm of a certain moth; the flower to gladden with old associations the heart of a flower-loving missionary. But the land loved the Lantana. From a small flower that grew in a pot, the Lantana took to itself feet and walked out of the pot into the missionary’s garden. Here it flourished and increased mightily in size and constitution. From over the garden wall came the love call of all Hawaii, and the Lantana responded to the call, climbed over the wall, and went a-roving and a-loving in the wild woods.
“And just as the Lantana had taken to itself feet, by the seduction of its seed it added to itself the wings of the Myna, which distributed its seed over every island in the group. From a delicate, handmanicured, potted plant of the greenhouse, it shot up into a tough, and belligerent swashbuckler a fathom tall, that marched in serried ranks over the landscape, crushing beneath it and choking to death all the sweet native grasses, shrubs and flowers. In the lower forests, it became jungle, in the open, it became jungle only more so. It was practically impenetrable to man. The cattlemen wailed and vainly fought with it. It grew faster and spread faster than they could grub it out.”
Then ensued a battle royal between man and plant. The man called to his aid hosts of insect mercenaries. “Some of these predacious enemies of the Lantana ate and sucked and sapped. Others made incubators out of the stems, tunnelled and undermined the flower-clusters, hatched maggots in the hearts of the seeds, or
covered the leaves with suffocating fungoid growths. Thus simultaneously attacked in front and rear and flank, above and below, inside and out, the all-conquering swashbuckler recoiled. Today, the battle is almost over, and what remains of the Lantana is putting up a sickly and losing fight. Unfortunately, one of the mercenaries has mutinied. This is the accidently introduced Mani Blight, which is now waging unholy war upon garden flowers and ornamental plants, and against which some other army of mercenaries must be turned.”
Such unfortunate occurrences are sure to become more and more infrequent as plant emigration and immigration finds itself under increasingly drastic governmental regulation.
The Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction Service of the United States Department of Agriculture makes a scientific examination of all plants brought into the United States for propagation purposes. It rids them of objectionable Bacteria and insect pests and refuses them admittance entirely if its experts decide that the newcomers will be harmful or injurious in any way.
The agents of the Service are constantly scouring the far corners of the earth for new and rare plants. In the twenty-four years of its existence it has introduced from abroad some fifty thousand specimens of seeds and plant cuttings. Some of the successful immigrants have been Feterita (from Egypt), Sudan Grass, Bamboo and Alfalfa. New Zealand has yielded new types of Potatoes. Dwarf Almonds and strange Cherries and Apricots have come from Turkestan. All these have proven of commercial importance, as has Durum Russian Wheat, credited with opening up new areas in the Northwest, and the Navel Orange from Brazil which has created for itself a California industry covering thirty thousand acres and valued at fifteen million dollars per annum.
Painstaking and scientific methods are best when man attempts to aid Nature in her evolutionary processes, especially when they are in connection with the migration and distribution of plants.
CHAPTER IV
C P W
“... which links by a fraternal tie
The meanest of His creatures with the high.”
Lamartine
The first and greatest problem for every terrestrial creature is to live. The chief means of doing so is to eat. Therefore, the relation of being to being and species to species is dominated by the necessity for food. Among man this fact is somewhat masked and obscured, but in the rest of the world it is entirely plain and obvious. Again and again on every hand, we see that plant, animal, and man all maintain their life impulses by consuming the tissue of their fellows.
In view of this fundamental fact, we can afford to look with some degree of charity upon that class of plants which are termed parasites. These interesting creatures are merely carrying out in a very direct and apparent way a principle which permeates all domains of life. A Tiger kills its prey; an Ox devours unoffending Grass; the parasitic Dodder robs some healthy neighbour of part of its juices.
The word “parasite” originally referred to a member of a college of priests who had their meals in common. Later, it came to mean living at another’s expense, as large numbers of people did in classical times. When one realizes that there are twenty-five hundred species of parasitical seed plants, he hesitates to brand them all as thieves and degenerates. Taking into consideration plants which depend upon the soil fungi for part of their sustenance, we should have to call half the seed plants in the world “parasites.” On a basis of strict accountability, it would also be necessary to classify all fruits as “parasites” as they draw nourishment from the parent boughs and give no return.
The fact is there are very few plants which are not more or less dependent upon some living fellow creature for their food supply. Sometimes the relation is strictly reciprocal; sometimes the advantage appears to greatly favour one or the other of the participants. In other cases the occurrence arises accidently through chance proximity, without a conscious pact or deliberate contract.
Edward Step in his illuminating book Messmates sums up the matter admirably: “Two friends in good health, each able to earn his own living, agree for the sake of companionship to live together, but each defraying the cost of his own necessities and luxuries. This is a case of mutualism. Two other friends also agree to share quarters and have a common table; but one may be infirm and wealthy whilst the other is strong and comparatively poor. The infirm one offers to pay two-thirds of their common expenses if the other will contribute one third, plus his protection, cheerful companionship or other valuable help. This is a commensalism. The pair are messmates, each contributing to hotch-potch according to his ability or endowment, each affording what the other lacks, and both, therefore, benefitting from the partnership.”
It must be admitted that there are cases of plant companionship in which, to all human perception, the material benefits seem directly one-sided, but who can conclusively deny that the nourishmentgiving partner may not receive some psychic or spiritual benefit from the union? The Orchids and many other tree-parasites bear flowers of exquisite beauty. Can we be quite sure that the trees do not like to adorn themselves with gorgeous ornaments of this kind? Such a desire would be quite natural.
Plants which are low and weak in the scale of evolution are very prone to enter into symbiotic relations. The Lichens are compound organisms in which green Algal cells live between fungous threads. The Fungus sucks up the water and mineral salts from the soil and the Alga combines them with carbon dioxide from the air to form palatable food for both. Such plant-partners have been observed to live together amiably for twenty-five years or more.
The Fungi and all plants which are “pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead with a spirit of life had been animated” have no chlorophyll, the mysterious green substance which is necessary for the production of starch. They must either make alliances with plants which possess this vital elixir or live on decaying matter which contains elaborated food material. Many choose the latter course, but a goodly number, especially those of primitive structure, have entered into profitable partnerships.
The minute one-celled plants called Zoochlorella or Zooxanthella have chosen the fresh water sponge Ephydatia Fluviatilis for their messmates. Sometimes they live with the Hydra called Viridis and impart to it a bright green colour.
There are whole regiments of microscopic parasites which thrive on living plant tissue and cause spots and rust to appear on Apples, Peaches, Pears and other fruits and number among their cohorts Rose-blight, Wheat-rust, and various Mildews. The larger messmate does not receive very much benefit from the relation, in this instance, except when the minute guests serve to cover a cut or an abrasion with a protective mantle, just as Mildew shields cheese or jelly from decay.
Cases where Fungi render very valuable services to larger plants are exemplified by the Monotropa or Indian Pipe. This pallid scavenger grows on the decaying vegetable matter of the woods. It toils not, neither does it make plant starch, but it is able to produce pretty, ghostly flowers and white scale-like leaves. On its roots thrive species of Fungi which perform the part of root hairs and in return receive nourishment from their host. Certain authorities claim that the Fungi get the better of the bargain, as the Monotropa has been known to maintain its health without them in laboratories. But the fact is the relation does exist with undisputed benefit to both parties.
Beech Drops germinate in contact with roots of the Beech tree, attach themselves there and raise yellow, seared stems covered with scales instead of leaves but bearing perfect flowers. The BroomRapes get their nourishment from the roots of Tobacco and Hemp in the same way.
Prominent among the larger parasitic plants is the Dodder or Devil’s Thread. This vine derives all its sustenance from other plants and, as far as can be determined, gives no material return. From this standpoint, the Dodder is a robber pure and simple, a degenerate outcast from the community of decent plants. From the viewpoint of this chapter, it is possible to believe that the host of the Dodder derives some spiritual or hidden material benefit from the union which makes it distinctly worth while. If such were not the case, it would seem that, through ages of evolutionary development, such plants as Flax would have devised means to escape the Dodder’s clutches.
The Dodder inhabits low ground and pokes an inquiring head above the surface each spring much like any self-sustaining plant. However, it is not long before it attaches itself to some lusty neighbour by root-like suckers, which pierce the stem and extract the nourishing juices. If the supply seems adequate, the Dodder winds its yellow, yarn-like tendrils about the host and allows the roots which connect it to the earth to wither. Its absorbing tubercles look like caterpillar feet; their cells form a perfect graft with the host and gradually disperse through its body. If other plants are near enough, the Devil’s Thread will reach out and tap their food supplies also. A single Dodder has been known to draw nourishment from five or six other plants of different families at the same time, thus indicating that it must have digestive machinery enough to appropriate these varying saps to its own uses. The Dodder has no chlorophyll and therefore no leaves but bears pretty little bell-like flowers which later produce seed.
In the tropical jungles are many parasites of brilliant aspect, which, having no leaves or root hairs, germinate directly on supporting plants and apply suckers to the tissues of their hosts. When seen from the ground, their short stems make them seem all flower, and often very handsome ones. The Rafflesia Arnoldi of Sumatra is a notable example.
Man cannot help condemning such plant practices. Yet all Nature is a struggle for existence. Does it not require some courage and
