Caste Class Races- Oliver Cox [new].pdf

Cox took pains to chart the differences between the Indian caste system and the dynamics of racial stratification in this country, and he argued that the dissimilarities of the two systems were so great that the caste notion could not clarify American race relations. However, his main brief against the “caste school of race relations” was that it abstracted racial stratification in the United States from its origins and foundation in the evolution of American capitalism. In so doing, he argued, the caste school treated racial hierarchy as if it were a timeless, natural form of social organization. The caste approach to the study of American race relations has not been in vogue for several decades; other equally misleading metaphors have long since supplanted it.

Cox’s critique of the caste school was linked to his broader view of the inadequacy and wrong-headedness of attitudinal or other idealist approaches to the discussion of racial inequality. He emphatically rejected primordialist notions of racial antipathy or ethnocentrism as explanations of racial stratification. He insisted that racism and race prejudice emerged from the class dynamics of capitalism and its colonial and imperial programs. This was the basis of his critical assessment of other prominent tendencies in the liberal scholarly treatments of American race relations, including the work of Robert Park and Ruth Benedict, as well as Gunnar Myrdal’s singularly influential volume, An American Dilemma.

Cox believed that the theories of Robert Park, one of the founders of the Chicago School of Sociology and Booker T. Washington’s former ghostwriter, in effect naturalized notions of fundamental difference in two ways. First, said Cox, Park alleged that “the beginnings of modern race prejudice may be traced back to the immemorial periods of human associations.” Second, Park maintained that the racial subordination that prevailed in the South stemmed from custom and “mores,” a static, ahistorical notion of core beliefs and norms around which populations supposedly cohere organically. Similarly, while acknowledging that Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist of race relations and a former student of Franz Boas, improved on Park in recognizing racism’s historically specific, modern origins, Cox objected to Benedict’s construing of racism as an example of a universal tendency to ethnocentrism. The consequence, he argued, was that Benedict “conceives of race prejudice as essentially a belief and gives almost no attention to the materialistic source of the rationalization.” In his critique of Myrdal, the Swedish economist and sociologist commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to produce a systematic study of American race relations, Cox was most critical of the tendency to locate American racial dynamics within abstract, transhistorical dispositions or attitudes. Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, Cox charged, was built around an evasion, the attempt to avoid a class analysis of American race relations. Thus Myrdal resorted to explaining American racism through airy, reified formulations, such as assertion of tensions and ambivalence around an idealized American Creed or a struggle for the “national soul.” Because the Myrdal study has had such lasting influence on American racial discourse, quoting Cox’s summary judgment of the document is useful both for clarifying his critique and for giving a flavor of his intellectual style.