Melissa Wright

Dr. Jorge Gracia

Texts and Their Interpretation
11.6.2013

Anti-Latino Racism and Ideological Expediency

As the last Presidential election and media recap of the value of the Hispanic vote
suggest, we are increasingly encountering examples of strategic expediency in the treatment of
Latinos in the political sphere. A particularly sensational example comes in the form of the
GOPs oddly self-disclosing attempts to win favor among Latinos, who, their researchers have
shown, share an affinity for social conservatism. Of course, for Republicans the promise of
Latino votes, as Linda Alcoff might put it, does not come without a corresponding threat of
building a pathway to citizenship, a reality many Republicans have faced and accepted.
Indeed, several conservative politicians have called for immigration reform, some more
forthcoming than others about their rationale, which indeed seems structured by sometimes
conflicting commitments to the voice of the peoplewho demand a change in immigration
policyand clandestine motivations for Republican reelection.
While I do believe that cultural racism has mobilized profitable political and economic
strategy, as evidenced by Latinos current position in the political field, I also think the presence
of such large scale group bias allows one to engage in an ideology critique, one that does not
entail an exposition of the hidden truths of a situation, but rather an explanation that splits the
object of critique into the old and the newinto that which reproduces capitalist exploitation
and that which liberates from it. I would like to argue that cultural racism is indeed consistently
employed in ideologically expedient ways against Latinos, regardless of whether or not such
expedients constitute conscious acts. While I agree with Alcoffs argument for maintaining
cultural identity distinctionsas a means of acknowledging the social reality of lived experience
and the biases, both conscious and unconscious that cultural practices can createI would argue

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that we need to push a bit further to understand how cultural racism is mobilized by unconscious
attachments in ways that serve ideological functions.
As such, in this paper, I will specifically explore and complicate the fantasy of a postethnic world, which Alcoff critiques in Against Post-Ethnic Futures, by employing a Marxist
analysis of the functions and perceptions of Latino workers in the United States. I will argue that
the presence and corresponding representation of this population exposes the incoherence of
simultaneous unemployment and unfulfilled demand for labor, thus allowing us to demonstrate
the structural necessity of variable capital and the Industrial Reserve Army and the
ideological function of blaming Latinos for that unemployment.

The post-ethnic debate: Strategic and Realist Views

In her article Against Post-Ethnic Futures, Alcoff characterizes post-ethnic theories
as any argument disfavoring the use of ethnic categories on the basis that they are (1)
strategically motivated and/or (2) downright pernicious (100). In the article she primarily argues
against what she terms the strategic account, or the claim that ethnic identities are highly
contingent, strategically motivated, and eradicable social constructions (100). This strategic
account Alcoff argues is important to the extent that it identifies the political contexts that situate
and motivate any historical interpretation, though she remains unconvinced that such a position
could explain lived experience.
To oppose this strategic account, she puts forward what she refers to as the realist
account, and describes it as follows: On this realist account, the political salience of ethnic
identities is not, in the main, subject to choice, strategic maneuver, or invention. Given the reality
of ethnic identities, it follows that any viable conception of justice or democratic process will

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have to work with them, and pining for their disappearance is unconstructive at best (100).
Alcoff uses the term realist to account for the fact that ethnic identities do indeed correspond to
lived experiences, have truck with the real world, and cannot be substituted with formational
interpretations of history, however motivated or strategic they might be (102). She writes:
Even if strategic effect is the sole aim [of a given interpretation], an identity claim will not work
unless it resonates with lived experience in a meaningful and significant way. I would argue that,
instead of viewing all realist claims to a historically grounded ethnic identity with equal
skepticism, we should examine the mediations influencing a given interpretive claim in a given
instance (103). Without intending to diminish the important nuances of Alcoffs claim here, it
can indeed be simplified: Identity must involve culture (i.e., material practices both imagined and
lived). While Alcoff acknowledges that interpretations of history will necessarily result in
motivated claims to the benefit of one group over another, I think we can push the issue further.
Putting aside for a moment whether or not its even possible, is it a good idea stop examining
cultural histories and simply look at the underlying relations, such as economic ones?
An easy way to answer this question is to acknowledge that cultural identities precede
capitalism. Because of this fact it would be counterintuitive at best to dissolve such categories
when the terms describe lived experience that is necessarily interlaced with but which cannot be
reduced to a series of strategically maneuvered interpretations. Alcoff summarizes the postethnics on this point: [I]f history is nothing but the product of strategic interests, it might be
better to leave aside all historical explanations for ethnic identity claims and be honest about our
more fundamental strategic aims (104). Of course these cultural categories can no doubt be
deployed for aims both strategic and ideological, a distinction that is necessary because the
former generally implies volition while the latter may be entirely structural or unconscious, that

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is, one can be unaware that they mask the ills of capitalism, though their deployment of
expedients very much functions in such a way.
Put differently, the strategic account seems to recommend a decontextualized version of
history that ignores the very contingent uses of ideological expediency on the level of actual,
lived discrimination. Moreover, as Alcoff points out, history may depict a series of fits and starts,
but this is insufficient to account for the realities of actual social conditions: Ethnic identities
are, on my realist account, historical entities and thus fluid, but the conditions of their fluidity
depend on the realities of social conditions and not simply on changes in the strategic aims of
either individuals or political movements (102). In other words, strategy does not only come
about in moments of historical retrospect, but is also employed as a part of lived experience.
Furthermore, ethnic categories have explanatory power, Alcoff argues, because they help to
explain why groups tend to share similar lived experiences and because they allow us to bring
the conscious and unconscious motivations common to a specific group under scrutiny. In her
talks at UB, Alcoff acknowledged and even celebrated the ways that self-ascription can shape an
individuals life and interpretation of the world, giving them a sense of community and purpose,
but was also careful to note that self-ascription does not forestall or preclude implicit bias (i.e.,
unconscious acts of discrimination), which can also come about from those same shared social
practices.1
This seems entirely consistent with the final talk Alcoff gave at UB, in which she defined
social identity as having the following characteristics: 1) It renders experience intelligible (i.e., it
has explanatory power); 2) It necessarily involves material practice (e.g., visible features of

1 To illuminate implicit bias Alcoff described the Claude Steele chair arranging study, in which white
subjects repeatedly rejected the importance of their whiteness to their identity but then arranged chairs in
ways that suggested comfort with other white subjects and discomfort with black subjects.
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social world, visible morphological attributes, and organization of practices with attached
meanings), and 3) Is historically determined (i.e., the effects of history shape identity both
consciously and unconsciously, through the memory of historical events, traumas, and
narratives). In other words, Alcoff acknowledges that cultural difference is not irrelevant, but
culturally constituted and indeed real to those individuals who self-ascribe as belonging to one.
Moreover, these self-ascriptions she argues have more purchase than state-based definitions,
which do not explain experience and collective meanings.
It is for these reasons, I believe, that Alcoff largely referred to various kinds of ethnic
discrimination throughout her three talks as cultural racism, not least because it is now cultural
difference that commonly takes center stage in those highly motivated strategic discussions
perhaps not unlike those that took place behind the closed doors at the Republican National
Committee meetings. As Alcoff carefully explains, cultural racism is still racist because it
maintains its essentialist footing. It treats cultures, like previous notions of the biological body,
as having features that are static and non-contingent. Indeed, ethnic identities, Alcoff argues, are
still viewed as corresponding to static and essentialist practicespractices that are treated with
the same smack of judgment that assumed (and sadly still assumes in some cases) that biological
bodies were different on an essential level. The fear of the other, in other words, is not
dissipating, but is in fact evolving to fulfill new strategic and ideological aims; however, that
strategy does not diminish the lived understanding of social identity, but merely exploits the fact
that any target exists at all. It seems very problematic to argue that collapsing the specificity of
social identities, or doing away with them altogether, would go any distance toward making
explicit the real motivations of various forces, which for the purpose of my paper, will be read as
capitalist. These social identities become targets, in my understanding, because they are

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available, and because no group is without political/economic motivation. But can we really
imagine a world in which no social identities exist, even nascent ones? If we cannot, then the
cosmopolitan homogenization of identity implicit in the post-ethnic view does not seem very
effective.
I introduce this argument in part because I find it important, but also because I think it
would be possible to mistake my argument for that of the strategic account. However, to be clear,
while the phrase ideological expediency does imply some strategic impulse, which may or may
not be conscious, this is not a strategy that governs a kind of group formation, but rather an
ideological strategy that implicitly relies on existing identity distinctions and their corresponding
practices, however falsely imagined or historically rooted. The scope of my inquiry is indeed
considerably smaller than that of the post-ethnic theorists, as it does not attempt to do away with
whole categories. Moreover, I think one can argue that if the kind of ideological strategy I
describe exists (i.e., use of racially biased claims that serve, whether consciously or
unconsciously, as distractions in the service of capitalist interests) then the need for identity
categories is all the more important so that we do not blindly ignore the specific historical
circumstances of a given act of social discrimination when indeed the nature or context of the
attack may help to expose underlying contradictions. While perhaps all social identities are ripe
for the taking, as I suggest above, some are perhaps more historically prone than others and upon
analysis may in fact teach us something about how ones unconscious attachments (e.g., viewing
the U.S. as primarily white) may indeed serve ideological purposes (e.g., shift blame of
unemployment from big business to Latinos) in ways that could not be articulated without those
identity categories (e.g., citing the Latino problem as a problem of undocumented workers).
Categories of the visible: race and ethnic

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Before we can begin such an analysis of ideological expediency, I first need to give an
account of how implicit biaswhich for my current purposes is interchangeable with the sense
in which I use unconscious attachmentscomes to be. In Latinos beyond the Binary, Alcoff
offers a useful definition of racism: [R]acism can be defined as a negative value or set of values
projected as an essential or noncontingent attribute onto a group those members are defined
through genealogical connectionthat is, as sharing some originand who are demarcated on
the basis of some visible phenotypic feature (113). Another way of putting this is that racism
mistakes certain phenotypic features as evidence of some genotypic subcategory, which is
assigned a negative value and imagined to be essential. Of course, there are not subcategories of
genotypic features, because we are all Homo sapiens sapiens (that is, we all share the same
species and variation of that species). What I find so useful about Alcoffs understanding of
racism, however, is the way in which she foregrounds the visiblesomething that obtains in her
later definition of cultural racism, as noted above. Visual difference allows one to create these
dividing lines and to lob insults or charges at a group because they are defined in a visible way.
And while there is no such thing as genotypic subcategories, such differences can be construed
as the result of cultural closure. This, Alcoff offers, is Max Webers account, perhaps
summarized most succinctly in his idea that certain social groups create a cultural monopolistic
closure that results in in-group reproduction and a shared set of hereditary features. In other
words, she writes, Webers account begins to sound a lot like a definition of race.
In this same essay, Alcoff charts the various slippages of race and ethnicity, starting with
the Greeks, who used ethnic as a pejorative term to denote nationality. The running theme
throughout these definitions is that a group is defined by some common characteristics (ranging
from phenotypic features to culture, language, religion, etc.) and that the category of ethnic is

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proportionally defined with respect to a larger system, that is, a majority. Alcoff offers the
following definition from the nineteenth century: [T]he definition of ethnic was given in the
OED as pertaining to race and as having common racial, cultural, religious or linguistic
characteristics, esp. designating a racial or other group within a larger system. This indicates that
ethnicity was associated with a minority group, never a majority (120). In other words, it would
seem at least on a semantic level that cultural racism is built into the very etymology and usage
of the word ethnic, if by ethnic we mean an identifiable other within the confines of an
otherwise observably consistent social corpus. Ethnic points to contextualized difference: A
foreground of ethnic specificity emerges against the background of what we have to refer to in
U.S. history as a white ethnicthe adjective here required because whites, by this definition in
U.S. history, have been the ruling majority and are therefore non-ethnic.
While this history is clearly important to Alcoff, she takes up these instances of linguistic
slippage to make a case against a specific faction of contemporary philosophy, namely those who
think it possible and desirable to do way with the word race in favor of ethnicity. She writes:
I have for the most part in this quick synopsis referred to negative treatments of race and
ethnicity and to what seem to be unconscious conflations of the terms, which suggests the
important observation that we would be foolish to think that we can escape pejorative
essentialisms by ceasing to use the word race and using only the word ethnicity (121). Alcoff
zeroes in on the unconscious conflations. These conflations are products not only of
strategically defined motives and their respective fallout, but also of lived and practiced biases,
which take visible reality to be essentialan unfortunate aspect of human history that predates
capitalism. What I do not think gets fully taken up here by Alcoff, however, is the overestimation
of the transformative power of language among these thinkers.

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Alcoffs criticism of these contemporary philosophers, as we see above, seems to imply

that language not only enacts social practice via the distinctions it makeswhich is to echo the
tenets of the strategic accountbut can also work to dissolve social practicein this case,
social discriminationby delegitimizing a given word. In other words, the contemporary
thinkers Alcoff cites seem to think that a change in vocabulary would somehow work to upend
the structure of cultural racism. (If this isnt their view, and Im missing important aspects of
their argument, then I still have to wonder what they expect such a linguistic sleight of handor
literal turn of phraseto accomplish.) Clearly, as Alcoff argues, variations on the term have
not resulted in increased clarity and though troubling to admit, its original usages, dating back to
the Greeks, still seem functional in describing the relations of social discrimination today: The
hysteria surrounding the Latino presence on U.S. soil epitomizes such an us (assimilated, nonethnic Americans) vs. them (Latino, ethnic others) cultural epidemic. The sheer fact that
the equation so commonly employs the terms nation vs. Latinos and not white people or
black people vs. Latinos recommends the very real possibility that the OEDs nineteenth
century definition still obtains. This is not to say that language doesnt help us to make
distinctions and more accurately describe existing social practices, but it seems a bit optimistic
if not philosophically idealistthat word substitutions would altogether change social practices.

They took our jobs: Latinos and unemployment

As Ive been alluding throughout this paper, I think the volume of Latino workers in the
U.S. poses a particular problem for capitalist exploitation. The representation of Latinos reminds
us of the inevitability of a new America, a statistical reality that may inspire concern and

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mistrust (which is no doubt a generous way to describe the anti-Latino racism so prevalent in
recent news). Alcoff describes this perception succinctly in Latinos beyond the Binary:
Although other groups do experience similar lovehate relations in the U.S. cultural
imaginary, Latinos are a highly specific form of threat and promise, a more real threat
and more significant promise situated as we all are in the Americas, where Spanish is
dominant throughout the hemisphere and no border is unnavigable. No other minority can
realistically pose the threat of ballooning numbers that we can (113).
Regardless though of how one chooses to interpret these ballooning numbers, Latinos, on the
one hand, do represent change. And while every historical moment is distinct, one can find
similar kinds of culturally racist behavior toward the Chinese in the 20th Century, specifically
with regard to immigration in California. On the other hand, Latino workers have supported the
agri-business and construction economy in the U.S. for decades; they are practically a built-in
fixture in these capital accumulating machines. The 2009 Pew Research Hispanic Trends report
indicates that Latinos make up 25% of the farming workforce, 19% building, grounds, and
maintenance, and 17% construction. As is now often commonly asserted (in ways both pejorative
and factual), these workers bring down the cost of labor, which then changes the pay scale and
sends white workers in search of jobs with more desirable wages. The SEIU website offers a
practical explanation of this problem, in the aptly titled page They take our jobs
Debunking Immigration Myths:
The problem with today's economy is not immigrants; the problem is our broken immigration
laws that allow big business to exploit workers who lack legal status, driving down wages for all
workers. If every immigrant were required to get into the system, pay their dues, and become
U.S. citizens, we could block big business' upper hand, eliminate the two-tiered workforce, and
build a united labor movement that raises wages and living standards for all workers.
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While the SEIU accurately directs all culpability at big business, we can understand from this
explanation how Latinos could come to be blamed for a fact of capitalism, that, in other words,
improved immigration laws alone would go a great distance to solve the problem. This is
partially true, but I think misses a central fact of capital, namely that variable capital, or labor
power, is the very foundation of the production of capital, chiefly because it is variable, that is,
capable of manipulation. Constant capital or the means of production (e.g., machinery) is in
contrast relatively stable, though no doubt can fluctuate. However, as Marx meticulously
demonstrates in chapters 8 and 9 of Capital Volume One: The rate of surplus value is therefore
the exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the worker
by the capitalist (326). In other words, capital = extracted surplus value from workers. This is
in part the case because the transformation of constant capital does not result in significant
increases in value in itself; cotton in the creation of cloth is still largely cotton and the value of
the raw material is negligible, according to Marx, when considered next to the variable value of
labor.
Perhaps more to the point of unemployment, however, the development of capitalist
productive forces indeed demands what Marx refers to as a surplus population of workers or
an industrial reserve armya redundant surplus of laborers that both encourage the increased
productivity of the active industrial army and make themselves available in a pinch should the
demand for or scale of production increase (Marx 782). Because productive forces change,
centralize, and become more efficient, workers are necessarily made redundant and laid off.
Moreover, the sheer volume of this surplus population strikes fear and creates motivation among
workers who are employed, an idea that sheds new light on both the claims of laziness directed
at certain unemployed populations, but also those oft directed at certain groups of Latinos for

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being hardworking. These claims are ideologically expedient because they use cultural bias as
a way of presuming agency and social custom, rather than acknowledging the possibility that
work ethic or lack thereof is neither essential nor culturally static, but the product of contingent
socio-historical realities.
So when we consider the trope they took our jobs, as South Park has ironically
sloganized, we have to remember that it is exactly that, a trope: as the OED defines it, A figure
of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper
to it. Latinos do not take our jobs; the unfixed directionality of the pronoun itselfthey could
be anyonesignals the truth (or proper meaning), that is, that capitalists take our jobs and
control as best they can the variable value of labor. Value is not added with cheaper labor
because cheaper laborers work harder thus producing more alluring and valuable commodities,
but because they produce at a cheaper rate, thus creating more value. Thus, we have to
remember, on the one hand, that capital is produced from the variability of the value of labor,
which helps to clarify why exploitation is the very basis of capital and not specific to Latinos
(though they are no doubt very vulnerable to it), and, on the other hand, that the Industrial
Reserve Army is an unfortunate necessity of capitalism, making it impossible to ever stop yelling
they took our jobs in the current economic system. We just need to learn that directing it
anywhere other than the capitalists is not only a trope, but an act of cultural bias made opportune
by the exploitive underlying system.
The ballooning numbers of Latinos, however, ought not to be taken as something intrinsic to
this population, which could justify some essentialist act of discrimination on the level of both
individuals and the group. The kind of cultural racism directed against Latinos is not in my view
inherently different from that directed against the Chinese, for instance, or in future possibilities,

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which become increasingly imaginable as the world continues to shrink against the tide of Global
Warming. However, the historical specificity of Latinos as an emerging majority in U.S. cities
does make them an unfortunate target for ideological expediency. In some sense, we might say
that the scale of Latino racism is proportionate to the extent this group makes visible the
contradiction of capital. The pressure Latinos put on the job market, in other words, exemplifies
the contradiction (i.e., the incoherence of the simultaneous demand for labor and the existence of
unemployment) that is always present in capitalism, and even more extreme in our global
market. We need our identity categories, as Ive argued, because such categories predate
capitalismtherefore helping to explain both lived experience and the unconscious attachments
such experience producesand because it is almost impossible to imagine, right now at least, a
moment in which such visible and historically affirmed differences will not be put to the service
of ends both ideological and strategic. As such, to ignore identity differences would ignore the
form of ideological maneuvering, and, as I think Alcoff rightly argues, fail to meet its nuanced
flexibility with equally flexible redress.

Works Referenced
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Alcoff, Linda. Against Post-Ethnic Futures. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.2
(2004): 99-117. Web. 3 Nov. 2013
--. Latinos beyong the Binary. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 47.1 (2009): 112-127.
Web. 3 Nov. 2013.
Marx, Karl, et al. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. London; New York, N.Y., USA:
Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1990. Print.
Passel, Jeffrey and Cohn, DVera. A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States.
Pew Research Center. n.p. 14 Apr. 2009. Web. 6 Nov. 2013.
They take our jobs Debunking Immigration Myths. SEIU.org. Service Employee
International Union, CTW, CLC. n.p. Web. 5 Nov. 2013.

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