Table Of ContentTHE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COLORBLINDNESS: NEOLIBERALISM AND
THE REPRODUCTION OF RACIAL INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy at George Mason University
By
Phillip A. Hutchison
Master of Arts
University of California, Los Angeles, 2002
Director: Paul Smith, Professor
Cultural Studies
Fall Semester 2010
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
Copyright: 2010 Phillip A. Hutchison
All Rights Reserved
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iv
Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1
Literature Review............................................................................................................. 30
Chapter 1 .......................................................................................................................... 69
Chapter 2 .......................................................................................................................... 94
Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................ 138
Chapter 4 ........................................................................................................................ 169
Chapter 5 ........................................................................................................................ 213
Chapter 6 ........................................................................................................................ 253
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 289
Endnotes ........................................................................................................................ 306
Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 342
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ABSTRACT
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COLORBLINDNESS: NEOLIBERALISM AND
THE REPRODUCTION OF RACIAL INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES
Phillip A. Hutchison, Ph.D.
George Mason University, 2010
Dissertation Director: Paul Smith
This dissertation traces the complex and contentious career of “colorblindness” from its
inception to its present-day function as an ideal reproducer of racial inequality. The
study closely analyzes the discursive instability inherent within colorblindness, and it
begins by demonstrating that this concept originated as a radical weapon designed to
upend racial antipathy and inequity at its core. Albion Tourgee, a white antiracist lawyer,
first coined “color-blind justice” in the course of his judicial career. As counsel for
Homer Plessy in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, Tourgee applied his colorblind
metaphor as he challenged the constitutionality of Jim Crow segregation. I contend that
in his famous dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan appropriated this metaphor from
Tourgee, arguing that colorblindness would function to keep whites the master race “for
all time.” I then discuss how, during the civil rights movement, white conservatives
recovered Harlan's interpretation of colorblindness as they sought to maintain white
privilege in the context of Jim Crow segregation’s demise. The bulk and remainder of
the dissertation then scrutinizes this Harlan-inflected colorblindness of the post-civil
rights era. I posit that contemporary race-neutrality is best named “neoliberal
colorblindness”; this term signals the mutually reinforcing relationship between
neoliberalism and colorblindness, asserting that race-neutrality effectively perpetuates
racial inequality as it operates in a neoliberal climate stressing privatization and
penality—both of which receive extended examination in this dissertation. The study
concludes by returning to colorblindness’s interpretational malleability and considers
how we might resurrect Tourgee's notion of color-blind justice in light of Harlan’s
appropriation of him. Doing so requires that we take close stock of the myriad obstacles
standing in the way—obstacles tempered by the hegemony of neoliberalism.
INTRODUCTION
Dual Entries
This dissertation represents an extended cogitation upon the ideology of colorblindness,
its complex history, and its contemporary manifestations. I am interested in investigating
the relationship between colorblind discourse and racial inequality in our current
neoliberal conjuncture. This study contributes to the literature through its presentation of
heretofore unmined approaches and insights regarding colorblindness and the influence it
wields upon today’s racial order. To frame my thoughts for the introduction to follow, I
offer and analyze two vignettes that illustrate colorblindness in action—the first fiction,
the other fact. While this pair scarcely exhausts the manifold expressions of
colorblindness, both examples typify its form and reach in our post-civil rights moment.
The Chappelle’s Show sketch “The Monsters in: ‘The System Is Not Designed for
Us’,” part of the aborted third season of the show, chronicles the (mis)adventures of a trio
of black men who live in contemporary New York. These men also happen to be
monsters: Frankenstein (played by Charlie Murphy), the Wolfman (Dave Chappelle), and
the Mummy (Donnell Rawlings.) The sketch briefly highlights each of them as they
transact in their world, confronting societal prejudice on multiple levels. The Mummy’s
experiences provide a succinct menu of the complex issues Chappelle addresses in this
sketch.
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The Mummy’s scene depicts him traveling from home to his probation officer,
located several miles away. Being a mummy, he walks slowly, and he quickly realizes
that only a taxi ride will prevent him from arriving tardily yet again. The first cab he
hails passes him, picking up a young white man instead. The Mummy stands in front of
the next cab to force the driver (a male who appears to be of South Asian descent) to
stop. Their interaction is worth detailing here:
CAB DRIVER: No Brooklyn! [the audience roars with laughter]
THE MUMMY: I’m not going to Brooklyn! [laughter continues unabated]
CAB DRIVER: I’m off-duty!
THE MUMMY: You’re not off-duty! Your sign is on! Come on!
CAB DRIVER: [hesitates for a split-second] No mummies! I…I don’t trust mummies.
THE MUMMY: You know, this ain’t got shit to do with me being a mummy—just be real with it,
son….Yo, just be real with it….1
The cab driver maneuvers his way around the Mummy, splashing him with muddy water
as he passes by (turning his white gauze black.) The Mummy ultimately arrives several
hours late to his meeting with the probation officer.
This brief outtake from “The Monsters” sketch points us to multiple lessons.
Race is written all over the Mummy’s interactions—the tortured relationship between
young black men and the taxi service in New York is notorious. Yet the second taxi
driver performed rhetorical cartwheels to circumvent any intimation that race had
permeated his thinking and conditioned his actions. “The Monsters” teaches us that
despite professed colorblindness, racial thinking lurks just underneath the surface
(indeed, the Mummy’s final comment was his vain attempt to exteriorize the racial
content of the driver’s demeanor); our post-civil rights “politically correct” society
provides us profound incentives to deny the racial inflections of our thoughts and actions
(to say nothing of its illegality in the context of cab drivers and their fares.) His final plea
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“I don’t trust mummies” directly points us to an answer as to why Chappelle depicted the
three black men as monsters: they function as metaphors for all the excuses Americans
find to displace their racially influenced thoughts and deeds. While a flimsy pretext, such
colorblind maneuvers have proven effective; as we shall see, however, this scene from
“The Monsters” showcases but an infinitesimal slice of the myriad uses of colorblindness
in thought and action.
The sketch effectively details the influences and effects of colorblindness within
interpersonal interactions. But subtitling the sketch “The System Is Not Designed for Us”
points up that of which Chappelle is well aware: that “colorblindness” transcends the
interpersonal. My second of these dual entries shifts to a real-life instance of
colorblindness in the institutional realm.
The 1987 Supreme Court case McCleskey v. Kemp featured an appeal to have
Warren McCleskey’s death penalty sentence downgraded to life in prison. McCleskey, a
black man from Georgia, had been convicted of killing a white man. McCleskey’s
defense team used the well-known Baldus Study in their arguments. The Baldus Study
was a detailed analysis of death penalty cases in Georgia from 1973-1978. Among other
findings, David Baldus and his team found that, after controlling for myriad variables,
killers of white men were 4.3 times more likely to receive the death penalty than killers
of black men. McCleskey’s defense team contended that such patterns represented racial
bias in the court system.
The court rejected this argument, claiming that a defense of racial bias would only
be admissible if McCleskey could supply evidence that he had been personally
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discriminated against somewhere in the chain from his arrest to his death penalty
conviction. (Importantly, they did not challenge the conclusions of the Baldus Study.)
Since McCleskey was unable to produce any evidence of individual racist intent on the
part of the arresting officers, the judges, or the juries, he was executed in 1991.
By relegating “racism” to only its individual, interpersonal manifestations, the
McCleskey case highlights the institutional implementation of colorblindness upon the
polity in the post-civil rights era. Vijay Prashad’s pronouncement of the court’s
conclusion ties together the issues: “The name McCleskey now refers to both the
recognition by the state that racism exists in the criminal justice system and the refusal of
the state to allow it to enter the clemency of the mandarins.”2
To be sure, “The Monsters” and McCleskey v. Kemp represent narrow instances of
colorblindness in action, and I will provide further perspectives in a moment. But it
behooves us to rise to the most general level and inquire, What exactly is
“colorblindness”? Broadly conceived, in the post-civil rights era, colorblindness is an
interpretive framework by which racial inequality is defended, maintained, and created
anew. As the current conjuncture’s dominant racial ideology, colorblindness proves
indispensable to the perpetuation and reproduction of white racial advantage. This being
the case, my central argument is that what colorblindness “blinds” Americans to is not
color, not racism, but the ideological and material legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and
its manifold effects upon the current conjuncture. Furthermore, colorblindness interacts
with the political economy of neoliberalism—indeed, as we shall see, colorblindness is
especially suited to thrive in a neoliberal milieu. And in classic dialectical fashion,
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