Question

What is Stuart Hall’s position on race? What is the role of anthropology, religion, and science in relationship to Hall’s position on race? Explain Hall’s “politics without guarantee.”

Answer 1

STUART HALL:

Race is one of the major concepts which organize the great classification systems (including gender and class) which operate in human societies.
Classification seems basic to human thinking. What is the right strategy for an anti-racist politics? Just being "black" does not guarantee that your politics will be correct.
In order to find a politics that will end racism, "You can't just say, well black people are doing such and such and they must be right." I want to discuss an approach to the political.
There are no guarantees. Failure is always possible. You must do "right" because there is no guarantee ethically and theoretically that your position is "right."

- the secrets of the functioning in modern history of racial systems of classification, let me turn to this question of how indeed one sees this functioning around the troubling question of the gross physical differences of color, bone, and hair, which constitute the material substratum, the absolute final common denominator of racial classifying systems.
When all the other refinements have been wiped away, there seems to be a sort of irreducible, ineradicable minimum there, the differences, which are palpable among people, which we call race. Where on earth do they come from, if they are simply as I want to claim, discursive? Broadly speaking, as I understand it there is really three options here. First, we can hold that the differences of a physiological kind or nature really do provide
the basis for classifying human races into families, and once they can be proved to do so, they can adequately be represented in our systems of thought and language. That’s a kind of realist position, it really is there, and all we have to do is reflect what is out there in the world, adequately in the systems of language and knowledge, which we use to conduct investigations into its effects.

Well, a second possibility is to hold what is sometimes called the purely textual or linguistic position. Race here, is autonomous of any system reference, it can only be tested, not against the actual word of human diversity, but within the play of the text, within the play of the differences that we construct in our own language.

- Classification systems have a history and racial categorization has a history.

However, race has a reality. We can see it. Since the Renaissance, race is a signifier of great importance.

1. religious justification- Encounters during the age of exploration raised the first religious question regarding race Who were those beings? Sepulveda vs. Las Casas However, first they looked to religion,
which was the arbiter of truth and knowledge at the time, to justify the classificatory system. it failed. They asked, "What is the nature of these 'people' in the New World?'" Are these real people?
2. anthropological justification- It failed James Clifford helps it fail.
3. scientific justification- People looked for the sanction for race in science. It finally fails without a doubt after genetics proves race does not exist. You can't see genetics. It is a wonderfully secret code which only a small number of people have at their disposal.

- the importance of understanding the relationship among race, genetics and health; and the need to take genetic ancestry into account when diagnosing and treating certain conditions.
Informal analysis of the data did not reveal any noticeable differences in perspectives between subfields.

Comparing our results directly with those of Lieberman and Reynolds (1978), we see a sizable shift in agreement with the statement “No races exist now or ever did.”
while only a minority of respondents (17%) agreed with that statement in 1978, a majority of respondents (53%) agreed with that statement in 2013. Agreement with this statement is consistent across subfields.
Given the academic and public discourses on genetic ancestry testing and concerns about its potential reification of race, a separate analysis was performed to determine whether familiarity
with genetic ancestry testing (i.e., a combined testing item that is the sum of the three items—having obtained a genetic ancestry test, interest in getting one, or used genetic ancestry inference
in research—with possible scores 0, 1, 2, and 3) was correlated with levels of agreement with the statements about race. Familiarity with genetic ancestry testing was significantly correlated with 43 of the 53 statements (81%), While a closer examination of perspectives of biological anthropologists not affiliated with AAA or attending AAA meetings is needed, our data suggest biological anthropologists and particularly those with familiarity with genetic ancestry testing might be more willing to acknowledge that race is not understood as a biologically‐defined category but, rather, as a socially‐defined category and as a lived experience of structural and institutional racism can have important effects on health.

- We observed consensus that there are no human biological races and recognition that race exists but as lived social experiences that can have important effects on health.
As such, anthropologists agree that it is important to understand the relationships among race, genetics, and health.

- The data also revealed a correlation between familiarity with genetic ancestry testing (gauged as personal or professional experience with or interest in genetic ancestry testing) and perspectives on race; however, causal connections are not decipherable with data available. In addition, the data confirm the persistence of privilege effects on perspectives of race: while the four varying groups of privilege examined share similar perspectives on the arbitrariness of boundaries and transmission of racial characteristics, perspectives on the existence of human races and variation conforming to discrete categories differ between groups of privilege, with overdogs (here, white males and white females) generally more likely to be splitters rather than lumpers compared to underdogs (here, non‐white males and non‐white females).
This distinction has serious power and equity implications given the distribution of privileged splitter perspectives across the subfields and their influence on the direction of research programs, funding allocations,
training, and public understandings of race. These findings reinforce previous calls for anthropology to be more cognizant of the privileged spaces within its study and practice, to be vigilant in its efforts
to eliminate racial biases, to become more inclusive, and to promote solidarity within the discipline as well as outside of it.

- Hall's key early theorizations in an exploration of the articulation of race and religion in the South African context. Taking as a starting point Hall's seminal reflections on ‘Race, Articulation and Societies
Structured in Dominance’ (1980), which took apartheid South Africa as its focus, and ‘Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’ (1986), Goldberg extends (and contests) Hall's account of articulation
to explore the specific racial formation of ‘modern apartheid’ and its ‘afterlife’. Where Hall's focus was primarily on the complex articulation of race and class, Goldberg's challenge is to explore the articulation
of race and religion as a form of what he terms ‘political theology’, centred on the sacralization of race. The focus here is on the role of religious ideology and institutions in the formation of apartheid's structures,
in its resistance and its traces in the new South African nation. Goldberg's provocations to Hall are especially timely given the latter's own reflections on the role of faith in the current conjuncture – Hall comments wryly to
Back ‘This is a new phase and it's a phase particularly difficult for people on the left because of religion … and because we've never understood religion, and because our secular sociological selves thought it was going to go away. 
So culture has taken its revenge on our failure to understand history’ (Hall's interview, this issue).

- In his contribution, Michael Keith explores the shifts in Hall's thinking on race through the lens of ‘the city’. Although Hall himself has never written directly on the notion of ‘the city’ or urban social theory,
Keith argues that ideas of ‘the urban’ are central to Hall's conceptualization of the racial and multicultural landscape as a space of freedom and sequestration – the city provides what Keith terms both the horizon of the
political imaginary and the stage of political action. Through three key moments in his writing in the past three decades – Policing the Crisis, Keith examines the ambivalences, challenges and tensions in Hall's imagination of ‘the city’ as a theoretical and empirical space of difference, and uses these insights in a provocative exploration of the contemporary cosmopolitan cityscape of London. For Keith, London captures and exemplifies the contrasts and incommensurabilities of a space shot through with material, political and ethical imperatives and contradictions, embracing the new and the global alongside trenchant geographies of inequality and local intolerance. In his later work, Keith notes, Hall speaks ‘to the political imperative to understand the city's contradictory cartographies’.

- Keith's paper is important too in exploring some of the continuities and shifts between Hall's earlier and more recent writing on ‘race’, through the turn to culture and identity.
It is perhaps unsurprising, given the impact of Hall's work on identity, ‘new ethnicities’ and diaspora in the past 20 years, that the bulk of the papers in this issue address these concerns, although in very different ways and settings. The next three contributions, by Brett St Louis, David Parker and Miri Song, and Yasmeen Narayan, all engage with the implications of Hall's work for understanding identity in Britain in the contemporary landscape – 20 years after Hall's original paradigm-shattering ‘new ethnicities’ intervention. Brett St Louis’ paper engages theoretically with the moral and political imperatives of Hall's crucial intervention in ‘new ethnicities’. Taking up Hall's pronouncements on the tension between the ‘impossibility’ and ‘necessity’ of identity formation,
St Louis’ paper explores the consequences of thinking identity in the current moment through the productive and ambivalent tensions inherent in this dichotomy. St Louis places his discussion in the context of the current challenges for identity – in particular around the emergence of religious-cultural identities in London's East End (also the site of Keith's cosmopolitan city), through a critical
re-reading of the Dench, Gavron and Young (2005) book The New East End. He argues persuasively that while identity as a ‘necessity’ poses a series of potential traps, it also can be mobilized as a ‘vehicular
idea’ when bound to a broader progressive politics, ‘urging us to think, calling us to account and asking us to act accordingly’.

- Religion. The anthropological study of religion attends to religious life via the study of everyday practices. Anthropologists thus recognize that religious life is a thoroughly social practice, and yet identifiable
as transformative and sometimes mysterious subject of investigation.

- There are no guarantees. Failure is always possible. You must do "right" because there is no guarantee ethically and theoretically that your position is "right."

- Hall's academic writing on race reflects and defines these transitions in both his personal identity and the broader social, political and cultural context in which they unfold.
It is important to recognize, of course, that one of Hall's most significant achievements has been to insist on the internality of race in all social processes and, in turn, to see race as a lens through which broader structures can be explored, rather than a ‘thing’ in and of itself (Lewis 2000, Grossberg 2007). Grossberg quotes Hall, ‘I have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory.
I have always worked on the whole social formation which is racialized’ (2007, p. 101). However, and with these caveats in mind, one can broadly identify three phases in Hall's writing on race: the early engagement with the new immigrant ‘West Indian’ communities and the emerging ‘second generation’; the turn to theory during his time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; and the ‘cultural turn’ from the mid-1980s, which has two distinct, but interconnected themes – the shift in black cultural politics in Britain and debates around ‘new ethnicities’; and the theorization of post-coloniality and diaspora, in particular in relation to the Caribbean.

- Contrary to popular accounts, Hall's intellectual encounter with the newly arrived ‘West Indian’ community precedes his seminal intervention in Policing the Crisis by over a decade, and takes shape during his time
with the New Left. Hall himself has commented that during this formative period, ‘I always had problems in that period about the pronoun “we”, I did have a diasporic “take” on my position in the New Left. Even if I was not then writing about the diaspora, or writing about black politics. I looked at the British political scene very much as somebody who had a different formation’.
Hall has argued that his interest in ‘race’ at this period was refracted through his, and others, predominant focus on class, and that ‘the black cause, the politics that arises from race is not an autonomous arena to which you could relate until … the mid 60s’ (see Hall's interview, this issue). However, as Grossberg has persuasively argued, Hall's ‘career has been consistently involved with questions of race and racism’, from the New-Left critique of Marxism through the lens of imperialism and anti-colonial struggle to the early publications such as ‘Black Britons’.

- In 1967 in The Young Englanders and again in 1970 in ‘Black Britons’, Hall began to explore the experiences of the newly arrived settlers. His focus, one which was to define his work (though in different ways)
in later years, was on black young people and their place within a post-colonial nation; on the mutual exchange and understandings of immigrant and host. In The Young Englanders, Hall writes:

Race is a collective concept. Essentially, race relations are relations between groups of people rather than individuals; relationships in which the personal exchanges between individuals are mediated through and
affected by the whole body of stereotyped attitudes and beliefs which lie between one group and another.
Already the young immigrant is trying to span the gap between Britain and home. There is the identity which
belongs to the part of him that is West Indian, or Pakistani or Indian. there is also the identity of ‘the young Englander’ toward which every new experience beckons. somehow he must learn to reconcile his two identities and make them one. But many of the avenues into wider society are closed to him. The route back is closed. But so too is the route forward.

It is interesting, and a little surprising, to read here the traces of the then dominant ‘race relations’ paradigm, and the notion of black youth as stranded ‘between two cultures’ (perhaps suffused with a hint of Dubois’
‘double consciousness’). However, it is also possible to see the beginnings of Hall's later focus on issues of representation, on practices of racist exclusion, and his insistence on the right/necessity to belong to the new nation.
His focus too is on the strategies of resistance and agency employed by young black people themselves:

- the young immigrants I have met in the last year or two are falling back on their own reserves. There is a pride and independence among these youngsters which is a tribute to their resilience, their capacity to survive, their determination to respect and honour not only themselves but also their families, home countries, culture, prowess and achievements.

- As Lewis has argued, this early work establishes the parameters of Hall's thinking that were to remain consistent in his later writing on race – the focus on the ‘conjunctural’ and the ‘contingent’.
The former focuses on the intersection of social, cultural, economic and political social relations (Lewis 2000, Grossberg 2007) within particular historical (and spatial, see Keith, this issue) locations,
the latter on processes of identity construction and creativity.

- This turn to culture and identity, which in some ways hearkens back to Hall's earliest concerns around the role of subjectivity, agency and resistance, has often been seen as a break in his thought, or articulated (as by Sivanandan 1990) as a betrayal of the struggle against racism – as being too celebratory, too postmodern and apolitical (Mills 2007)(see St Louis, this issue, for a discussion of the politics of Hall's work). This phase in Hall's thinking nevertheless maps an important shift in the ways in which black identity and politics is thought and done, one which reflects the breakdown in a unified black political identity from the mid-1980s onwards (Hall 2000b), and saw the emergence of new black subjectivities in film, photography, art, music and literature. Hall has described this shift as the move from ‘Identity Politics One’ (1991), the war of manoeuvre, to ‘the politics of difference’, a war of position; or from ‘the relations of representation’ to ‘the politics of representation’ (1992).