Theorizing the Structural Location of Blackness
By Charisse Burden-Stelly
In my forthcoming book project, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, I argue that Blackness is a “structural location” peculiar to the intersection of capitalist exploitation and anti-Black racialization. Here, Blackness is something that exceeds the category of race, that is not reducible to class, and that does not fit the specifications of caste. [1] Born out of racial slavery, Blackness describes an economic relationship that also denotes an inferiorized condition, a disempowered status, and a subordinated emplacement in society. Blackness is value minus worth. Through an array of political economic functions—including accumulation, disaccumulation, exchange, use value, and the absorption of capital risk—Blackness exists as a capacious category of surplus value extraction. At the same time, Blackness is also the quintessential condition of disposability, expendability, and abject precarity.
More than the idea that value and race are relatively isomorphic or that value and race configure privilege, [2] the aporia of “value minus worth” describes how Blackness sutures oppression and exploitation such that it is a constant source of profit and extraction precisely through its devaluation.
The source of this aporia is racial enslavement and the concomitant “badge of slavery.” As Hubert Harrison explained, Blacks were enslaved and kidnapped from Africa to be ruthlessly exploited, and their social status was fixed by their facticity as chattel. Because it is the case that every group that lives by exploiting another despises the dispossessed group, and that contempt is directly proportional to the degree of exploitation, enslaved Africans and their descendants are not only sources of extreme surplus value extraction, but also subjects of ongoing discourses and practices that render them constitutively lowly and worthless. [3]
Likewise, because enslaved Africans were investments and instruments of production essential to turning profits for the plantocracy, extreme violence and cruelty were essential techniques of obfuscating their humanity in order to compel them to produce profit without benefit and upon which their unfreedom was predicated. The aporia of “value minus worth” is summed up by the fact that the immense value of enslaved Africans invited maximum cruelty as a function of force and coercion, rather than preventing it. [4]
[Claudia Jones]
Image Source: Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 2011.
Techniques of obfuscation are essential to maintaining this irresolvable contradiction endemic in the structural location of Blackness—a technique that distinguishes a capitalist racist society from a caste system. The latter, according to the radical Black political sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox in “The Modern Caste School of Race Relations,” does not require the “policy of guarding against any development of an overt expression of indispensability of Negroes within the social organization. Whatever their de facto importance, they must never appear as an integral part of the society” (224). This reliance on the immense value produced by Blacks and simultaneous denial of their indispensability engenders “a sense of worthlessness and unwantedness” among Blacks and an unwarranted attitude—with real material consequences—of superiority and entitlement to Black production and productivity.
Related to this is the obfuscation of oppression with the valence of inferiority. Though the oppressed masses would have, for example, higher rates of sickness and death, a lower quality of education, and a higher rate of incarceration, this was a marker of oppression, not inferiority, not least because “the basic integrity of the masses will be untouched. Their aspirations for decency, humanity, justice—for them and of them—will be present.” [5] This obfuscation, in turn, transforms Black aspirations, and accompanying struggles, into markers of backwardness, unbelonging, and forms of subversion because they threaten the racial and economic order.
Whereas in the context of U.S. capitalist political economy, race demarcates a social status, [6] structural location of Blackness describes a material relationship sustained through a combination of political, economic, and discursive processes that, when challenged, threaten to upend the total organization of U.S. society. Likewise, while structural location has a class basis insofar as it exists within a capitalist society with an exploitative and antagonistic relationship between capital and labor, it is not reducible to a class relationship because race has generally served as a source of cross-class collaboration between whites—or as Du Bois described it, “democratic despotism”—not least through the ideology of white supremacy. [7]
The structural location of Blackness also facilities cross-class solidarity among Black people over and against interracial class solidarity at the same time that it encompasses intra-racial class conflict that reifies and intensifies the superexploitation of Black workers. In other words, the structural location of Blackness facilitated the development of a dependent Black bourgeoisie that oppresses its subordinates even as this class experiences dispossession—albeit at a different intensity.
Finally, the structural location of Blackness is an essential source of “superprofit” [8] wherein manifold discursive configurations make it possible to preserve and legitimate racial hierarchy through white alliances across class such that capitalists and workers can find solidarity through their commitments to white supremacy and Black subjection. [9] Thus, as the Black Communist theorist Claudia Jones argued in Ben Davis, Fighter for Freedom: “The entire history of the Negro people has been one of radical solution to” a structural location manifested starkly in “a sorely oppressed status… TO BELIEVE IN NEGRO FREEDOM MEANS TO BE RADICAL” (37, 39).
Notes
[1] For a critique of the misapplication of caste to the United States, see Charisse Burden-Stelly. “Caste Does Not Explain Race.” Boston Review, December 15, 2020.
[2] See Lindon Barrett. Blackness and Value: Seeing Double. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 1.
[3] See Hubert Harrison, “Socialism and the Negro.” International Socialist Review (1912): 72.
[4] See Herbert Aptheker. The Negro People in America: A Critique of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. New York: International Publishers, 1946, 45.
[5] Ibid, 63-63.
[6] See Clarence Munford. Production Relations, Class, and Black Liberation: A Marxist Perspective in Afro-American Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1978, 60.
[7] See W.E.B. Du Bois. “The African Roots of War.” The Atlantic 115 (May 1915): 709.
[8] Superprofit can be understood as the amount of surplus value extracted by the ruling class through the superexploitation of workers in oppressed nations, including African Americans in the US domestic colony.
[9] See Siddhant Issar. “Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism.” Race & Class 63-1 (2021): 37.
References
Cox, Oliver Cromwell. “The Modern Caste School of Race Relations.” Social Forces 21-2 (1942): 218–226.
Jones, Claudia. Ben Davis, Fighter for Freedom. New York: National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership, 1954.
Cover Photo Credit: Kara Walker, “no world” (2010).
Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. She is the co-author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (ABC-CLIO, 2019) and the co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022) and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State (University of Mississippi Press, 2022). Burden-Stelly’s singled-authored book, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, will be published with University of Chicago Press in 2023. She is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Research and Political Education Team.