Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Critical American Studies) by Roderick A. Ferguson

Author:Roderick A. Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2013-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

An American Dilemma and the American Creed: Evoking the Nonheteronormative

The imperatives of a war economy positioned against the rise of fascism in Germany were shaped by and resulted in the international hegemony of liberal ideology.19 As part of this hegemonic operation, American capital solicited African Americans as workers in wartime industry, inspiring black southerners to migrate north. As capital turned its eye toward African Americans, concentrating blacks in the industrialized North, this liberal ethos became the context for addressing African American inequality and racial domination: the Democratic party courted the African American vote, emphasizing the gains that blacks had won under the New Deal. Eleanor Roosevelt waged a personal campaign against lynching and racial discrimination. As chapter 1 illustrated through the rise of the Chicago School of Sociology, a new liberal social science was emerging. This liberal social science addressed culture rather than biology as the site of human difference,20 using this new orientation to challenge “scientific racism and rejecting notions of innate black inferiority.”21 Gunnar Myrdal’s classic text An American Dilemma was part of this challenge. But by rejecting biology as the domain of difference in favor of culture, Myrdal—rather than neutralizing racism—merely articulated racial knowledge through enunciations of African American cultural difference:

Negroes have been segregated, and they have developed, or there have been provided for them, separate institutions in many spheres of life, as, for instance, in religion and education. Segregation and discrimination have also in other ways hampered assimilation. Particularly they have steered acculturation so that Negroes have acquired the norms of lower class people in America. . . .

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