Race and America’s Long War: An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh

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Race and America’s Long War: An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh
| March 11, 2020
Interview conducted by Rosa Burc & George Souvlis

Can you start by talking about your formative political and academic experiences?
My parents emigrated to the United States from Bombay, India in the late 1960s. My father
had been an engineer working for ESSO, my mother, an elementary school teacher. A
company fellowship gave my dad an opportunity to complete a business degree at Tulane
University in New Orleans. Initially, my parents had no intention of staying in the United
States. Liberalisation of US immigration law, plans to nationalize India’s oil industry,
considerations about economic and educational opportunities for their children changed
their minds. After Tulane, my father took a job at W. R. Grace in New York City, and our
family settled in northern New Jersey. US citizenship was a requirement for becoming a
public-school teacher where we lived, so my mom (who grudgingly naturalized only a few
years ago), stayed at home to care for my me and my older sister (and our brother, who
came along a later).
My parents had scant savings, but after a few years advanced along a path of upward
mobility, affirming a conventional American story of immigrant success. Mine was
outwardly a no less conventional middle-class upbringing in a relatively well off, WASP-
centered town that voted GOP from the top to bottom of the ticket (until 2016 when it
swung for Clinton and elected a Democrat mayor). My father commuted into the city,
worked long hours and devoted himself to ascending the American class ladder. From the
vantage point of growing up in Delhi’s close-knit, Sikh community where he witnessed
the carnage of India’s murderous partition first hand, he shrugged off or refused to see the
petty racist slights that came his way from the suburban country club set. My mother, born
and raised in a farming village in the English midlands dissented from all of it more
vocally, nursing a quiet loathing of all things American.
Neither of my parents viewed the world through a US lens. The child of an Irish Catholic
father, whose brothers had died in the ’16 Easter Rising, my mother was a formative
influence on me. A socialist, she raged against Richard Nixon, cried when George
McGovern got wiped out in the ’72 election, danced a jig when Nixon was impeached.
Both she and my father opposed the Vietnam war, condemned Henry Kissinger’s support
for Pakistan’s generals, and Pinochet’s coup against Salvatore Allende in Chile. I vividly
remember spending childhood summers during these years with my grandparents in the
English countryside, around the wireless listening to unfamiliar names like Nkomo and
Mugabe as incantations of possibility even as they were sounded in official mournful tones

of BBC commentary on the fall of Rhodesia. It was more a feeling than understanding, but
I count these as some of my earliest political memories.
In high school, I gravitated to the punk scene. I saw my first police riot outside the Clash
show that was preemptively canceled at the Bonds casino for fire code violations. When
we weren’t studying, or playing soccer, (which was still mostly an immigrant, outsider
sport), my friends and I wore army fatigues and my father’s old Nehru jackets, scavenged
the vestiges of New York City’s 70s counterculture in record stores and thrift shops and
snuck into late night shows in dive bars from the Jersey shore to the east village. The
Sandinstas were our heroes because they beat the American empire (or so we thought),
though we knew less about them than we did about the Brixton riots and the Red Brigades.
It was cosplay, but it represented a kind of political development all the same. Of course,
we had no idea of the scope of the political reaction that was underway, or that we had
been warming ourselves on the embers of another generation’s dying radicalism.
I attended Harvard in the mid-1980s where I studied Social Studies, a no less vestigial,
radical formation. Founded by ex-New Left intellectuals, including Barrington Moore,
Stanley Hoffman, and Robert Paul Wolff, it prioritised interdisciplinary social sciences
and history, the historical context of social problems and close reading of modern social
theory, with Marx and Weber (with decided emphasis on the superiority of the latter) at
the centre of a year-long seminar, Social Studies 10. Reading Marx for the first time in
college, particularly the 1844 manuscripts, was electrifying for me. In retrospect, I’ve
never been at place so self-assured about its centrality and importance to ruling order. I
knew which side I was on, though whatever rebellious inclinations I had were still captive
my own thwarted desire to really belong to it. Student acquaintances of mine, some of
whom became cherished comrades, saw things more clearly, erecting a shantytown in
Harvard yard to protest the university’s endowment investments in apartheid South Africa,
the formative student protest movement of the time.
Arriving at Yale’s American Studies PhD program at the end of the 1980s, I started to
think more seriously about the relation between theory and practice as the basis of any
future intellectual and political work. More importantly, it was here that I began what
became a lifelong dedication to what poet and theorist Fred Moten has described as ‘black
study’, or a commitment to understanding the singular ‘problematisation of black people’
for/within a modernity that had come to be dominated by the United States, and the
concomitant discovery of the black radical tradition, one of the most durable modern
countercultures, and perhaps the most visionary and expansive oppositional tradition to

grow out of the corrupted US democratic experiment. During these years, I became
involved more directly in organising and movement building through the graduate student
unionization struggle that developed under the tutelage of union locals 34 and 35 of the
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union (HERE). Work as a staff organiser
encompassed most of my time in New Haven, and was an indispensable political
education.
In this formative period, completing my graduate studies, I was lucky to have generous
and influential teachers, friends and interlocutors, including David Montgomery, Michael
Denning, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy, among many others. It was Michael who gave me
my introduction to the thinkers of the Birmingham school, and Stuart Hall in particular,
whom I had the good fortune to meet at after a lecture he delivered to a packed crowd in
Harlem in 1991, “What is this Black in Black Popular Culture.” It was a creative moment
in the post-1970s re-emergence of black music, black studies and critical race theory, with
young intellectuals based in New York like Robin D.G. Kelley (already a full professor at
NYU in his 20s), Bell Hooks and Cornel West (the latter two in their 30s) at the epicenter.
The following year, I moved to Park Slope to write my dissertation, at a time when you
could still rent a studio apartment for $400 a month. Apart from a 10-year stint in Seattle
at the University of Washington, I have lived and worked in NYC ever since.
In your first book, Black is a Country, you construct an alternative history of civil
rights in the twentieth century by focusing on radical visions that were articulated by
intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King Jr. in
the 1960s. Can you tell us what motivated you in this approach and why radical hopes
have been central to the history of black struggle?
Black is a Country grew out of my Ph.D. dissertation, though most of the book was written
during my years in Seattle in dialogue with another remarkable group of scholars and
activists, including Chandan Reddy, Moon Ho Jung, Alys Weinbaum, Jodi Melamed,
Andrew Jones, Michael Honey, and Tyree Scott, founder of LELO (Labor Employment
Law Office). I would add that this work should be read alongside Climin’ Jacob’s Ladder:
The Black Freedom Movement Writings Jack O’Dell, a collaboration with Jack O’Dell,
whom I first met in Vancouver, B.C. in 2003. Both books explore what I, (and other
scholars at the time) argued was a black freedom struggle of longer duration than
conventional histories of the civil rights movement generally posited. The effort to think

anew about periodization raised fundamental questions about the political, economic and
ideological contexts and valences of black social movements, particularly as they were
related to broader contours of US state formation, America’s rise to globalism after WWII,
labour organisation and the prospects of progressive, if not, revolutionary social change.
Specifically, I argued that the modern black freedom movement emerged along with the
reshaping of federal state power under the New Deal – a decisive break with what has been
called the minimal US ‘state of courts and parties’ that accelerated during the prior
‘Progressive era’. The consolidation of New Deal liberalism nationalised black politics in
important ways, beginning a longer process of undermining and de-legitimating a Southern
exceptionalist basis and conception of the US racial order. Black intellectuals and activists,
many of them products of waves of migration out of the US South to urban centres grew
in prominence along with the development of black counter-publics and institutions of
widening scope, including the first modern civil rights and black nationalist organizations,
but no less important, trade unions like A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters – all within in a context intensifying class struggles with significant communist
and socialist influences and trajectories.
The last point is crucial: federal state management of the terms of class struggle, no less
than the internal political and compositional dynamics of left and labour organization,
confronted ethno-racial division (and more bluntly, state and class racisms) as a
fundamental stake. In the 1930s and 1940s, black movement leaders, strategists and
intellectuals engaged in a series of formative debates about race and class-based
organization that were central to, if often poorly understood within the left and labour
movement (broadly construed), but with long term consequences. It is also important to
emphasise (as I do in the book) that black movements were not and have never been
monolithic: intense disagreement unfolded within and between important black political
formations, their representative spokespeople, and class fractions about the primacy of
race-first community, or race-blind labour organisation, disagreements with on-going
relevance to left conversations today.
If the field of class struggle and intra-left argument is one crucial constituent for thinking
about the period of robust intensification of black freedom struggle explored in Black is a
Country, a second is the field of international relations recast by war and emergent
decolonisation struggles around the world. As the great black sociologists St. Claire Drake
and Horace Cayton put it in a masterful study of Chicago, Black Metropolis, black publics
during the war were more ‘international-minded than the rest of the population… a blow

for freedom in Bronzeville finds its echo in Chungking and Moscow, in Paris and Senegal.
A victory for Fascism in the Midwest Metropolis will sound the death knell of doom of
the Common Man everywhere.’ The foundational (racial) exclusion from full citizenship
within the US had long made the international arena a site of black freedom struggle. In
the context of intensifying local struggles against empire and the global circulations
enabled by WWII, anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles merged and fused in important
new ways.
Let’s speak a bit about the concept of ‘American Universalism’. The US has been
described as the world’s exemplary nation-state that is built on the fundaments of
civic nationalism. While the assumption is that national universality integrates racial
particularities, you argue that in the American case the concept of ‘universality’
actually creates and sustains racial division, even to the extent that black
achievements in particular can embody and sanction American national pride. Can
you speak about the ambiguous relationship between racial particularity and
national universality in the American case? What are the underlying paradigms of
national identity in the US?
American universalism has at least two iterations. The first is foundational and synchronic:
American universalism is essentially the expansionist discourse of US nationhood, one
that posits a categorically open relationship to both territory and population. In its
founding iteration, American universalism links together the idea that the United States is
an exemplar within the world at large: ‘the hope of all continents, creeds and races’, as
court historian of post-WWII liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. put it, (echoing Thomas
Paine), but also exceptional unto itself, set a part from, and setting out upon an ‘errand
into (barbarian) wilderness,’ and leaving behind the corrupt, fallen, class -riven nations of
the ‘old’ (European) world.
This story of US nationhood has been told over and over, its primary claims grounded in
claims about religious toleration, later expanded into assertions about fundamental civic
openness (or ‘civic nationalism’), suggesting that membership in the polity has proceeded
without regard to prior status or ascriptive categories, and promising unprecedented
upward economic mobility to settlers. The Constitution is the primary fetish/repository for
these visions, a document that signifies national origins in open/democratic consent (or
political freedom), rather than pre-existing orders of rank, ancestry, blood and

belonging. Of course, apart from a certain openness to newcomers from Europe, such
claims have always been fictive. As early as 1790, US naturalisation law quietly restricted
membership in the polity to ‘free white persons’, while the US Constitution reconciled
slavery, racial alienage and second-class citizenship until at least the mid-1960s. Millions
of African slaves, included without their consent, hundreds of indigenous polities scattered
across a continent slated for extermination or removal, racially suspect denizens and
migrants segregated and deported, limned the murderous internal and external boundaries
of American universalism, with heavy consequences into our own time.
But American universalism is not just a shibboleth, it has also been a site of struggle.
‘Race’ and racial formation — linked most prominently with the enduring black presence
within the body politic – remained the most glaring ‘contradiction’ to what Swedish social
scientist Gunnar Myrdal in the early 1940s called ‘the American creed of liberty and
equality for all’. This formulation of race and racism as contradiction, a kind of ‘original
sin’ in need of correction, cleansing or expiation became central to post-WWII liberal re-
iterations of American universalism, though here again, the imperial and expansionist
kernel remained intact. As the US Justice Department amicus brief in the case Brown v
Board of Education put it at the onset of the cold war, racial inequality was a problem
because it threatened American claims to world leadership and undermined the idea that
America’s (exemplary and exceptional) Constitutional democracy was ‘the most civilised
and secure form of government devised by man.’
Since this mid-century moment, normative expressions of American liberalism (in both
centrist and conservative guises) have sought nothing less than to put ‘race’ under erasure,
to which the notion of ‘colorblindnesss’, the preferred metaphor of the juridi cal right,
attests. Of course, visible racial difference only grew as a contentious element within US
politics during and after the period of black-led civil rights struggle. Nonetheless,
conceptually, the tendency to counterpoise ‘race’ as particularism (either to be valued as
inconsequential ‘diversity’, or denigrated in new iterations of black fecklessness or
criminality), with ‘nation’ as a universalizing horizon, continues to structure the American
political imaginary in unhelpful ways. What is unhelpful is that this opposition tends to
conceal or underplay how racial animus (especially anti-blackness) and racial division
remains, in both manifest and latent forms, a structuring and symbolic dimension of power,
place and personhood in the US (and in the world). In short, racial difference is less the
contradiction to America’s vaunted universalism, than the enduring, supplementary trace
of its founding and renewed violence.

It is in this sense that I argue that American universalism is less an antidote t o racial
division than the font of its poison. This does not mean abandoning or rejecting claims to
insurgent universality. To the contrary, efforts to redefine the horizons of universalism
against the enclosures and foreclosures of the US as both an internally racialised nation-
state, and an expansionist empire have been at the centre of the history of black freedom
struggles. In many ways, James Baldwin put it best in the context of his linked indictment
of the anti-black violence of urban policing at home, and genocidal ‘police action’
overseas in Vietnam: ‘One could scarcely be deluded by Americans anymore’, Baldwin
writes, one scarcely dared expect anything from the great vast blank generality; and yet
one was compelled to demand of Americans – and for their sakes after all—a generosity,
a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of themselves. Part of the
error was irreducible, in that the marchers and petitioners were forced to suppose the
existence of an entity which, when the chips were down, could not be located.
It is likely that we are living through another decisive, even fatal re-articulation of
American universalism. Since the early 2000s, Bush, Obama and Trump in different ways
have openly signalled the end of ‘American exceptionalism’, throwing into question its
progressive historicist dynamics of ethno-racial inclusion, upward mobility, and global
expansionism. Bush’s Iraq misadventure launched in part as to spur a ‘new American
Century’, but whose lies and torture exposed the squalor and corruption of the US
governing order, ended his reign presiding over the fiscal destruction of American middle-
class prosperity. As the nation’s first black President, Obama initially presented as a
corrective, and as American universalism’s apotheosis via unprecedented racial inclusion:
the fulfilment of a national ideal, where as he put it on the night of his election: ‘anything
is possible’. The stubborn intractability of economic inequality and stagnation, resurgent
racist opposition, state sanctioned racial murder and permanent war, quickly gave the lie
to ‘hope and change’. Trump’s doom-saying represents the latest inversion, as he envisions
an America that can only remain ‘great’, by restoring founding logics of exclusionary
racial order, and by setting literal, concrete limits around its own borders.
In the recent movie, I am not your Negro, it is argued that in the end of the life of
Malcolm X there is a convergence between his and Martin Luther King’s political
vision. What is your take on this opinion? Was there such a convergence between the
two figures of the black liberation movement and if yes, in which ways?

I think there is a strong case to be made for convergence. The division between King and
Malcolm is typically framed around the question of racial integration and juridical reform
as the priority of the kind of civil rights liberalism for which King has been made the
exemplar, and that Malcolm X typically excoriated as supplicatory and ineffective. But at
the end of their lives, when each man was shadowed by intrusive government surveillance
only to be cut down by shadowy assassins, both had embraced anti-war and anti-imperialist
politics, and both recognized the necessity for cross racial movement-building, with
specific overtures to labour and the left, as requisite to building the kind of political power
that would be necessary for large-scale, transformative, social change. It is of course
useless to speculate on what might have happened had either of them lived to develop their
ideas and practices and worth remembering how young they were when they died.
In Black is a Country you argue that a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality
and universal political ideas beyond the problematic universalising tones of
liberalism and global democratic imperatives can only be carried out by a black
public sphere that is constantly critical of the imposed limits of US democracy. How
has this black public sphere been created in history and today? Along with the public
sphere, would argue that a political vehicle is necessary to give specific political shape
to these ideas?
The idea of a black public sphere, or ‘counter-public’, owes a lot to the work of Nancy
Fraser and particularly Michael Dawson, whose book Black Visions is essential reading.
It is less a normative ideal, than something that materialises within a given conjuncture,
that is to say it is the product of on-going trans-local organising and institution-building
that has occurred in response to racial despotism, and has included development of
heterogeneous strategies and struggles from mutual aid, riots and protest marches, to legal
challenges and more institutionalised forms of political contention. Black is a
Country traces a specific arc of black public contention from the 1930s to the 1970s. It
suggests that the concept of a black public is more useful for grasping the dynamic
contention between independent, black organisation and broad, multi-tendency struggles
for social justice during this period, than either reified notions of a wholly separate black
‘community’, or normative conceptions that define the horizon of racial justice in terms
of racial integration into some larger corporate body (i.e., class, citizenship, nationality).

In the 1940s, C. L. R. James formulated this issue in a way that remains unsurpassed: ‘The
independent Negro struggle’, James wrote, ‘has a vitality and validity of its own; it has
deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggle; it has an organic political
perspective, along which it is traveling to one degree or another’, and comprises a ‘crucial
pivot of the American political system’ as a whole. In the 1960s, King argued similarly:
‘the black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes’, he wrote, ‘it
is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws, racism, materialism and militarism. It
is exposing evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society.’ Reflecting
back on his own 1984 and 1988 Presidential campaigns under the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse
Jackson likewise observed that black struggles had been the ‘trigger struggles’ for broadly
democratic and egalitarian transformations of American political culture and its public
sphere, influencing a host of related struggles across the front of gender, ethnicity, ability
and sexuality.
The point of these examples is that they suggest the tight rapprochement between black-
centered, anti-racist struggles and the society-wide struggle for more general democratic
and egalitarian goals. But the context matters no less than the balance of forces. Writing
in the early 1940s, James and others believed that insurgent black politics and the labour
movement under the leadership of the CIO would come together synergistically, pinning
their hopes on cross-racial labour insurgency in the US south that never materialized. At
the time of King’s death, American trade unionism, was on the brink of its historic decline,
compromised by its support of empire and confronting growing racial fractures between
the working and workless poor that manifested in the urban riots and sharp law and order
turn of the late 1960s. To the extent that official commitments to racial justice persisted,
they became increasingly restricted to meliorist, class-bound policies such as affirmative
action. Meanwhile black power politics was diverted into strategies of governance and
intra-racial class mobility at municipal scales, even as open, racist revanchism fueled the
rise of what would become the world’s largest carceral state.
In our own period, the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist valences of a prior era of black
struggle have been either repressed or abandoned, while more anodyne conceptions of
racial inclusion and ‘diversity’, have been effectively incorporated, at least on the surface,
as the progressive face of a corporate-media-university complex. This has led some on the
left to a simplistic, frankly reactionary conclusion that anti-racism and more specifically,
struggles addressed to ‘black lives’ are now merely a species or reflex of neo-liberal
ideology. In contrast, I would say that we continue to live in a society structured in

dominance in which racism and class exploitation constitute overlapping, coeval
dynamics. Race and racism remains a major pivot on which US capitalism turns, for both
the waged and wageless, who are subject in different ways to diminishing health, life
chances and crushing market dependency. We should not be surprised should we find
ourselves truly capable of broaching questions of economic justice under the aegis of
renewed labour and class struggles that it occurs in tight, if at times tense, rapprochement
with a resurgence of militant anti-racist struggles.
In sum, as I have written elsewhere, in the US historical experience, black freedom
struggles offer key insights into how radicalizing opposition to racial domination is a route
to a universalist politics of human emancipation grounded in political economy. In the era
before WWII, elite consensus viewed capitalist civilisation as a racial and colonial project.
Despite claims of ‘post-racial’ and post-colonial transition, it is not clear that capitalism
suddenly stopped being what Cedric Robinson termed ‘racial capitalism’. From structural
adjustment to subprime mortgages, the naturalisation of the unequal worth of peoples has
been retained as one of the surest ways to justify and profit from collectively enforced
misery.
By the same token, black organising and anti-racist activism was at the forefront of the
most radical reform periods of U.S. history, including Reconstruction, the New Deal, and
the Great Society, while from the early cold war to the Reagan revolution into the present
day, overt and implicit racism has been the bedfellow of political reaction. Rather than
deriding race-first politics as a mode of neoliberal incorporation, it is healthier when the
left actively supports and promotes, as black radicals from CLR James to Ella Baker
counselled, independent black political initiative as the bellwether of broader
radicalisations.
Let’s also speak about Black Lives Matter. Would you argue that the Black Lives
Matter movement is a civil/human rights movement that is creating a new black
public sphere? What do you say about the rise of demands for communal self-
governance put forward by black communities in the US? Looking at the
contemporary ruptures on state power by grassroots struggles across the world,
thinking of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Struggle, Rojavan Revolution and Black
Lives Matter, do you see commonalities?

It is undoubtedly the case that black lives matter is a new iteration of black counter-public
politics in an age of digital media, carceral expansion and hyper-segregation. As
important, it is a form of activism born of an era of circulation and social reproduction
struggles against the backdrop of secular economic stagnation. The great black radical
geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore has movingly described what she calls ‘the triple
workday’ of black women doing wage work, domestic care work, and social justice work
that includes traveling long hours to maintain affective ties with incarcerated loved ones.
Women’s work of this kind has long been indispensable to black freedom struggles, and
yet also behind the scenes, and often rendered invisible by the practice and discourse of
male-centred leadership, and undifferentiated claims about ‘the black community’, (as if
it too were not sundered by divisions of labour, gender and sexuality). Black lives matter,
by contrast, the hashtag coined by three creative women organisers in the aftermath of
Trayvon Martin’s murder, has not only foregrounded women’s leadership, but following
the pioneering legal and scholarly interventions of black intellectuals like Kimberlé
Crenshaw and Cathy Cohen, emphasised the ‘intersectional’ d imensions of racial
domination specific to a period that has been defined by the ‘advanced marginalisation’ of
the black urban poor.
How black lives matter relates to the movements of the global wave of 2011–2012 remains
open and demands a longer, collective discussion. We remain within the long crisis-
conjuncture defined by secular stagnation and populations rendered surplus to the
requirements of production. In the US, as has often been the case, African Americans in
the old urban core were canaries in the coalmine. As early as 1970, sociologist Sidney
Wilhelm published a book, Who Needs the Negro? that envisioned a situation in which
blacks, increasingly rendered surplus by automation and deindustrialization, would
become a population slated for elimination in the manner of the ‘American Indian’. A few
years later, in a vitally important book, Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and his
collaborators observed how a new coercive edge of state racism had begun to re-jigger the
domestic Keynesian logic that prized hegemonic consent, toward a tutelary law and order
discourse that targeted the racialised poor, black arrivants from former British colonies,
theorised as surplus populations.
Neither of these works foresaw the scale of the development of mass incarceration in the
United States that was just beginning, and whose leading racial edge metastasised into an
arrest and incarceration complex of staggering proportions – one that has grown, in spite
of racial disproportionality, across racial lines, and that now also merges with no less

formidable migrant detention and deportation complex. Young men without advanced
education who were once exploited and used up in the factories and fields, are now slated
for idleness and diminution in prison yards, with fastest rising rates of incarceration now
occurring among the white, rural poor. Law and order increasingly became something that
an ever more austere social welfare state was still able to do, making bondholders and
ambitious prosecutors cum politicians, wealthy and successful beyond their wildest
dreams, and giving some economically devastated towns and regions a lifeline of public
employment via prison labour. It is increasingly clear that this state of coercion and
stagnation is producing society wide pressure and instability. Less clear against this
backdrop is what will comprise the agency and agent of transformation in what radical
poet and theorist Joshua Clover has convincingly described as our ‘age of riots’.
In your work you show how black radicals have tried to adapt a political analysis of
colonial societies to American conditions. You have also visited Palestine as part of a
delegation. In terms of different forms of racial discrimination and colonial policy,
do you see parallels between Israel and the United States; black liberation and the
Palestinian question?
Many plausible explanations have been proffered for US support for Israel, including
historic guilt for the Jewish victims and refugees of Europe, the establishment of imperial
proxy relations in the heart of the world’s energy resources, and the influence of specific
lobbying entities inside the US Congress. Yet, an explanation that may require further
exploration and elaboration is how Israel became a political-cultural representation of the
oldest of US national conceits: the settler colony as the beleaguered Western outpost in a
savage and fallen world. More than a ‘special relationship’, US politicians from across the
political spectrum tend to imagine Israel as part of a single political community — one
whose unity, even across radically dispersed geography and jurisdiction, is precisely
defined by its precariousness and justified paranoia in the face of existentially threatening
‘others’. Shadowed by the history of racism — the denial or refusal of any other human
precedence in the zone of enclosure — each settler colony has proven uniquely resistant
to decolonisation. Persistently disavowing the violence that institutes its rule, it can never
be secure, and so it violently doubles-down on its own escapist illusions.
What is new in the Israeli situation today is not settler colonialism which has been the
policy of the state of Israel since its inception; it is the breaking apart of the legitimating

formula in which Israel is imagined as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. ‘Democratic, when
and only if Jewish’, would be a more accurate formulation. Indeed, settlers (many of them
Americans by birth) increasingly decry Israeli squeamishness around the term democracy.
As one veteran Israeli settler leader put it, ‘We didn’t come here to establish democracy,
we came here to return the Jewish people to their land.’ Under these terms, support for the
millions of indigenous people of this land, the Palestinians, who live here side by side and
in exile, and whose demands for equal rights, equal sovereignty, and historical and
political recognition already constitute an enormous concession on their part, is
increasingly seen by Israel as a threat to the survival of the state itself. This is at the core
of the hysterical response to the critique of Israel today – for it is Israel that demands the
unwavering equation between Zionism and Judaism, and it is the Zionist project today
whose political instability and moral and ethical bankruptcy is visible to anyone willing
to see it clearly.
Unsurprisingly, radical black organisations like SNCC and the Black Panthers, and black
civil rights leaders, not only leftists, from Jack O’Dell, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson
in the 1970s to Angela Davis and Marc Lamont Hill in our own period linked black and
Palestinian struggles as part and parcel of the struggle against colonialism, spatial
apartheid and unequal citizenship. Where the earlier generation pointed out Israeli support
for South African apartheid, the current generation has been at the forefront of challenging
Israel’s role in counter-terrorism and police training in the US. Nor has the traffic been
only one way. In Ferguson, MO where 2014 protests against police murder of Michael
Brown achieved sustained intensity, Palestinians famously tweeted advice to protestors
about how to deal with police tear gas, observing that similar tear gas canisters, ‘made in
the USA’, had been used on them.
In your recent book Race and America’s Long War, you define race making as a
product of American history that goes back to the imperial, settler-colonial, and
slaveholding origins of the country. What was the motivation for you to write this
book? Can you elaborate more on the intersection of US race and empire? Which are
the main arguments that you make?
This question demands a long answer, so I encourage people to read the book! In brief,
I’ll say that I began writing the essays collected in this book immediately after the
publication of Black is a Country, and in the context of the onset of the Iraq War. It is my

effort to make sense of a new era of permanent war in the US and its relationship to new
iterations of racial despotism, and it also marks some preliminary thinking about better
ways of positing the coeval development of historical racisms and capitalism.
On the eve of the Iraq War, in an essay, whose negative example first inspired me, Michael
Ignatieff argued that, whether or not we settled on the term empire, US military
intervention in the world at large after 9/11, including the impending Iraq War which he
supported, was acceptable because, the US, unlike empires past was not built on
‘colonisation, conquest and the white man’s burden.’ A couple of years later, as Hurricane
Katrina exposed the depths of America’s organised abandonment of poor people of colour
and the scandal of torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo exposed the gratuitous violence and
impunity of America’s overseas wars and military occupation amidst Arab and Muslim
peoples, US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice doubled down on this claim, going
Ignatieff one better: ‘Across the empire of Jim Crow, from the upper Dixie to the lower
Delta the descendants of slaves shamed our nation and with the power of righteousness
redeemed America at last from its original sin of slavery’, Rice argued. ‘By resolving the
contradiction at the heart of our democracy, America finally found its voice as a champion
of democracy overseas.’
Around the time of Rice’s speech, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco offered a
strikingly different directive to Louisiana’s National Guardsman – enjoining them to shoot
to kill suspected looters in New Orleans historically African American, ninth ward: ‘These
troops are fresh back from Iraq’, she noted, ‘well trained, experienced, battle-tested, and
under my orders to restore order in the streets … They have M-16s and they are locked
and loaded … [they] know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so,
if necessary, and I expect they will.’ Running directly counter to the assuring story in
which domestic racial progress supposedly ensures the preservation of a benign, world-
ordering American empire (one that the election of President Obama three years later once
again sought to affirm), Katrina illuminated a different set of through lines long charted
within black radical imaginative and activist traditions: namely how the moral and
technical infrastructures of imperial warfare overseas and racialised policing at home have
consistently blurred in a zone of indistinction.
Race and America’s Long War explores this nexus: the reciprocal relationship between
race making and war making in US history, from the lynching-trophy style photographs
from Abu Ghraib circulated by soldiers, many of whom previously served as the jailers
and wardens of prisoners at home – to the black sites and torture imported into Chicago

other urban police precincts after the Vietnam war, even as veteran urban police officers
were seconded as interrogators to Guantanamo and various ‘black sites’ of the global war
on terror a generation later. As the great black radical activist and intellectual Jack O’Dell
wrote in 1967, ‘the road which leads from the Indian massacres of the last century to the
Pentagon, an another from the oppressive slave plantation to the ghetto are the major
conjunctive highways running through the very centre of US life and history.’ It is a
remarkable passage – one that limns the conjunction of what I call “the inner and outer
wars” – the continuum of war and policing that marks the most consequential
differentiations of group life and death in the history of the US. Equally telling is O’Dell’s
use of the metaphor of the highway – framing race and racism as a kind of infrastructure
– one organises in an ongoing way, the creation and unequal differentiation of publics and
peoples in time and space.
One chapter in the book that may be of specific interest here develops the idea of racism
as infrastructure in relation to Marx’s oeuvre, and in particular the concept of so -called
primitive accumulation, arguing that when we talk about race and racism in historical
terms, we are talking about what has been under changing circumstances, necessary to
police and govern life under capitalism in both a technical and an affective sense. The
infrastructural aspect helps us to see the ways race/racism is made and remade as a form
of material-spatial-symbolic ordering of relations of appropriation (that exceed ordinary
relations of class/exploitation) within capitalism. This is important for understanding the
durability and reproducibility of racial distinctions via prior infrastructural determinism,
much of which has rested on overt racism and colonial dispossession, but that also persists
and renews itself even in a context of successful challenges to the legalisation and
normalisation of racial ascription.
In some current work in progress, I argue that empire and race should be thought together
as practices of government and institutional forms (encompassing more than issues of
sovereignty or territory) that have been intrinsic to capital accumulation both via the
exploitation of living labor, but also via the appropriation of what Jason Moore calls cheap
human and extra human natures (and given social and ecological relationships). Racial and
colonial relationships are constituted at this nexus, primarily through creation of fungible
commercial and military infrastructures of separation/extraction from these same
‘natures’. Racial and colonial relationships might also be thought of as toxic by-products
of this process of creative destruction and destructive creation, leaving poisoned
atmospheres, toxic social relations and social identities marked by injury and trauma. It is

in this sense that ‘race’ is more than ideological ‘superstructure’ and more (like) an
infrastructure: a renewed technical and moral matrix of modern forms of anonymous
collectivity.
I believe this approach offers a way out of a common impasse within discussions of race
and racism that oscillate between a view of race/racism as a mystification, i.e.,
superstructure/ ideology/social construction (the left-progressive argument), and
temptations of returning to a view of race in terms of ontology, i.e., as the more or less
fixed and invariant emanation of anti-blackness as it acts upon bodies (the Afro-pessimist
view). It also allows us to recognise how structural racism and capitalism are functionally
inseparable. US racial formation has been remade and reworked via large scale
public/private partnerships that fashioned material spaces/structures enabling circulation,
exchange, extraction, and (unequal) accumulation for some, while enforcing isolation,
immiseration, dispossession and arrest, upon others. Once again, in this way racial
differentiation is neither ontology/essence nor ideology/superstructure — it is more (like)
an infrastructure (think suburbs, prisons, pipelines, or border walls) – a technical and
symbolic matrix shaping (probabilistic) communal formations and material distributions
of/within modern institutions of anonymous collectivity, (and most pointedly and
contentiously within collectivities that share a sphere of legitimate political representation,
even though the reach of race/racism as infrastructure is extra-national, and inextricable
from capitalism itself).
Many people on the left believe that the Democratic Party cannot be the political
organization that will bring significant social transformation in favor of the interests
of the subaltern classes. Which is your take on this? Connecting to this issue – what
role did Obama play in the recent conjuncture of American politics? Do you agree
with the liberal media’s characterization of Trump as a fascist? How is the best way
to conduct antifascist politics in the current conjuncture?
In the current moment, the Democratic Party is unlikely to be the vehicle to bring
significant social transformation to the US; it is simply too beholden to big donor and
corporate interests. That said, for the time being, and in the absence of significant, well-
organised extra-party left opposition, it remains a vehicle that is worth struggling over. It
will not be easy to break the party duopoly, therefore, I am skeptical of third-party
challenges from within the electoral system. Our best hope now is to continue to rebuild

the sources of dual power, inside and outside the official Democratic Party, in social
movements and in the arena of renewed labor organising. Whatever we do, the forces that
are moving will not stand still, and it is likely that we face a long period of political
sclerosis within the ruling order, in combination with rising levels of more of less
spontaneous upheavals of social discontent and struggle with an uncertain political
trajectory.
Obama offered the system temporary stabilization in the aftermath of the 2008 financial
crash and the military adventurism and illegitimacy of the W. Bush years. The election of
a black President speaking soft populist tones of hope and change may have seemed
unprecedented, but it was mostly a project of providing soothing balm and laundering a
decade of fiscal and military recklessness. In contrast to his critics, I think Obama was
actually a competent imperial manager, and perhaps he even believed that restoring
government competency was adequate to the crisis-conjuncture and historical precedent
he sometimes claimed for himself. He also faced an intransigent and irrational far-right
opposition that framed his moderate, even right-leaning centrism as the monstrous off-
spring of Bolshevism and the Mau Mau. Rhetorically and intellectually, Obama affirmed
the best aspects of the American liberal reform tradition from abolition to the New Deal
to the civil rights movement. At times, he explicitly invoked this ‘better history’ as a spur
to needed reform. But in the end, he simply ran out the clock to the tune of cautious
moderation.
Trump arose as Obama’s self-styled doppelganger. In the campaign, he ventured recklessly
outside the proscribed progressive, neoliberal and imperial shibboleths, welding a
populism oriented to abandoned heartland producers, advocating a foreign policy
combining disengagement with scorched earth unilateralism and sadistically inverting the
niceties of neoliberal diversity talk with promises of racial, gender and sexual punishment.
But Trump is neither an exception, nor is his a fascist administration, (though he personally
may have fascist leanings). The US even under Trump remains a Constitutional
democracy. And it is worth remembering that the most vile and violent episodes of US
history, from Indian removal to the defense of fugitive slavery, Jim Crow, police
repression, red scares and genocidal wars – what black poet Langston Hughes once called
‘our native fascisms’ – have retained a Constitutional imprimatur. Likewise, American
racism has long functioned as a medium of decentralised despotism, mediating legal (or
state-sanctioned) and extra-legal violence, that is, police power. Still the case.

In short, Trump rides on the train of this history (call it America’s ‘worst history’).
Ironically, his fundamental incompetence, vulgarity and illegitimacy poses problems for
the right, and even for the center that long ago learned to couch racial and imperial
violence in the guise of civility, the rule of law and even human rights. This does not mean
that Trump is not dangerous or damaging. Nor does it mean that we are not living in the
midst of renewed far-right movements globally. But when Trump finally departs the scene,
there will be another attempt to clean up the mess, and to tell us that all is still for the best
in the best of all possible American worlds. But it won’t be any more true then than it is
now, and when the next shoe drops, those of us fighting for another world, a better world,
built on mutual recognition across lines of difference, economic justice, ecological
sustainability, and life worth living, better be ready.
The current upsurge of consciously left electoralism, first inspired by Bernie Sanders
insurgent 2016 campaign in the Democratic primary, now resumed in 2020, is especially
promising as it represents a return to an older and more antagonistic language of class
struggle, further to the left of anything we have seen in recent memory and hearkening
back to the origins of New Deal era. But Sanders is also fighting a two-front war, against
a rapidly consolidating nationalist conservatism that pegs populist themes to deepening
racial animus (especially toward migrants), and entrenched boardroom progressivism that
has made racial diversity, gender and humanitarian sensitivity tokens of class rule.
Unfortunately, the necessary challenge to persistent race and gender inequality and
disparity in economy and everyday life now flows into a politics that is largely captured
by political, university and media professionals jockeying for positions within a narrower
and more formidably encased class hierarchy. Challenging white supremacy and
patriarchal sexual prerogatives, a hallmark of a broad emancipatory aspiration on the left,
has in turn been substantially reduced in practical terms to an individualized politics of
shame and accusation, one that is also sometimes deployed cynically and opportunistically
to take down political opponents and advance careers. Worse, downwardly mobile, non-
college educated white voters are often depicted as the font of dangerous racism and
reactionary politics, an approach that hinges anti-racism to class contempt.
Deindustrialisation, declining rates of unionisation, spatial apartheid, hyper-incarceration,
the criminalisation of immigration policy, moreover, have combined to reconstitute the
field of class struggle. A situation in which the nationally bounded working and workless
poor are divided and decomposed into the contracted and undocumented, the stable and
informal, the fully-employed, under-employed, and formerly incarcerated barred from

work, poses serious challenges for a left interested in renovating majoritarian politics
centered on the needs of ordinary working and poor people. Solidarity is likely to prove
elusive if forms of super-exploitation, labor disposability and criminalised indebtedness,
charged by race, gender and national status discrimination, is effectively made the enemy
of class politics.
Less concretely, open-ended military authorisation and decades of war-making in the
aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 has engendered a more generalised atmosphere of
civil insecurity and protean racial animus, including the militarisation of domestic policing
and border politics, conflicts over the rights of citizens to bear military-grade weaponry,
and recurrent episodes of aleatory mass slaughter. Adding to these challenges, face to face
political socialisation developed through neighborhood and class-based workplace
associations has given way to anonymous, undisciplined, and easily manipulated social
media interchange. University students though increasingly open to left politics, are
saddled with unprecedented levels of debt and uncertain employment prospects.
Professional non-profits, networked to philanthropic resources and big donor influence
hoover up any sign of bottom up, collective initiative, the latter tending to break out more
widely, only in ephemeral forms of riot and assembly.
The desire for, and necessity of, an insurgent and organised mass politics capable of
articulating political demands remains, but the ecology of collective politics has been
fundamentally corroded, fragmented and atomised. The burning question remains: how to
get there?