How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as
a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social
phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods
of our struggles against racism?
Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held
that true social justice points toward a raceless future--that racial
categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for
social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of
race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that
inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound
up in a "politics of purity"--an understanding of human agency, and
reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and
unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of
whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a
constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories.
Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the
development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that
races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being
but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real)
processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays
out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who
occasionally united with black slaves to fight white supremacy--and did
so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they
capitulated to white supremacy.
Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a
"creolizing subjectivity" that would place such ambiguity at the center
of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously
the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and
ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our
capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and
negotiation of the meaning and significance of those very categories.
