Race Rebels by Robin Kelley

Author:Robin Kelley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Afterword

Race Rebels hit the bookstores at an inauspicious moment. The hardback edition first appeared in November of 1994, just two weeks after the Republican sweep of Congress, when the Right stood triumphant and the American Left hobbled along weak, divided, and demoralized. Not surprisingly, few reviewers—even sympathetic ones—had much interest in working-class history, politics, and culture. And the fact that Race Rebels appeared in the shadow of a more infamous Free Press book—Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s highly controversial best-seller, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life—certainly did not help matters. The struggle simply to overturn fairly ancient arguments about race and intelligence rendered my own intervention into debates about African American life fairly innocuous. To make matters worse, this was also the season when Californians voted for Proposition 187, which denied basic services (health care, education, etc.) to Latino immigrants, and the University of California Regents decided to abandon its affirmative action policy.

Precisely because Race Rebels appeared at such a low point in the history of race and liberal/left politics, some readers reacted negatively to what they perceived as naive optimism. (How a book that is as much about losing battles as it is about winning very small victories can be characterized as overly optimistic is a mystery to me.) Many sympathetic readers, on the other hand, desperately wanted Race Rebels to be a how-to book, a guide to radical organizing in the twenty-first century. Via e-mail and phone conversations, at conferences, speaking engagements, and book signings, readers often said things like, “How are we supposed to turn these everyday forms of resistance into an effective political movement?” or “What does this cultural politics stuff amount to?” Thus, instead of seeing the range of black working-class responses as strategies born of specific contexts, such as wartime urban America or the South in the Age of Jim Crow, some of my critics and even my defenders mistakenly treated these stories of working-class struggle as superior modes of resistance for all times and all places. A few readers came to the bizarre conclusion that I rejected organized social movements altogether. Actually, I wrote this book precisely because I believe social movements to be necessary and effective. But to be effective, social movements must develop their own leaders and build agendas around people’s actual needs and grievances, irrespective of whether or not they fit the logic of a particular analytical framework.1 “Infra-politics” is not used here as some kind of alternative to organized social movements. I use it as a measure of power relations and a way to gauge the grievances of working people who might not have other avenues through which to voice their concerns.

As I had to explain many, many times, Race Rebels was not written as a handbook or blueprint for revolution. On the contrary, I wanted to find out what black working people chose to do to survive and fight back under the specific circumstances of their own time and place. I set out to

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