Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (8 page)

However, if Taylor’s account pays insufficient attention to the clearly structural and economic realm of domination, then Fraser’s does so from the opposite angle. In order to avoid what she sees as the pitfalls associated with the politics of recognition’s latent essentialism and displacement of questions of distributive justice, Fraser proposes a means of integrating struggles for recognition with those of redistribution without subordinating one to the other. To this end, Fraser suggests that instead of understanding recognition as the revaluation of cultural or group-specific identity, and misrecognition as the disparagement of such identity and its consequent effects on the subjectivities of minorities, recognition and misrecognition should be conceived of in terms of the “institutionalized patterns of value” that affect one’s ability to participate
as a peer
in social life. “To view recognition” in this manner, writes Fraser, “is to treat it as an issue of
social status
.”
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Although Fraser’s status model allows her to curtail some of the problems she attributes to identity politics, it does so at the expense of addressing two of the most pertinent features of injustices related to mis- or nonrecognition in colonial contexts. First, when applied to Indigenous struggles for recognition, Fraser’s status model rests on the problematic background assumption that the settler state constitutes a legitimate framework within which Indigenous peoples might be more justly included, or from which they could be further excluded. Here Fraser, like Taylor, leaves intact two features of colonial domination that Indigenous assertions of nationhood call into question: the legitimacy of the settler state’s claim to sovereignty over Indigenous people and their territories on the one hand, and the normative status of the state-form as an appropriate mode of governance on the other.
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Indeed, at one point in her well-known exchange with Axel Honneth, Fraser hints at her theory’s weakness in this regard. While discussing the work of Will Kymlicka, Fraser admits that her status model may not be as suited to situations where claims for recognition contest a current distribution of state sovereignty. Where
Kymlicka’s approach is tailored to demands for recognition in multinational societies, Fraser’s project, we are told, seeks to address such demands in “polyethnic” polities like the United States.
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The problem with this caveat, however, is that it is premised on a misrecognition of its own: namely, that as a state founded on the dispossessed territories of previously self-determining but now colonized Indigenous nations, the United States is a multinational state in much the way that Canada is. My second concern is this: if many of today’s most volatile political conflicts
do
include subjective or psychological dimensions to them in the way that Fraser admits (and Taylor and Fanon describe), then I fear her approach, which attempts to eschew a direct engagement with this aspect of social oppression, risks leaving an important contributing dynamic to identity-related forms of domination unchecked. By avoiding this “psychologizing” tendency within the politics of recognition, Fraser claims to have located what is wrong with misrecognition in “social relations” and not “individual or interpersonal psychology.” This is preferable, we are told, because when misrecognition “is identified with internal distortions in the structure of the consciousness of the oppressed, it is but a short step to blaming the victim.”
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This does not have to be the case. Fanon, for example, was unambiguous with respect to locating the cause of the “inferiority complex” of colonized subjects in the colonial social structure.
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The problem, however, is that any psychological problems that ensue, although socially constituted, can take on a life of their own, and thus need to be dealt with independently and in accordance with their own specific logics. As mentioned previously, Fanon was insistent that a change in the social structure would not guarantee a change in the subjectivities of the oppressed. Stated simply, if Fanon’s insight into the interdependent yet semi-autonomous nature of the two facets of colonial power is correct, then dumping all our efforts into alleviating the institutional or structural impediments to participatory parity (whether redistributive or recognitive) may not do anything to undercut the debilitating forms of unfreedom related to misrecognition in the traditional sense.
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This brings us to the second key problem with Taylor’s theory when applied to colonial contexts. I have already suggested that Taylor’s liberal-recognition approach is incapable of curbing the damages wrought within and against Indigenous communities by the structures of state and capital, but what about his theory of recognition? Does it suffer the same fate vis-à-vis the
forms of power that it seeks to undercut? As noted in the previous section, underlying Taylor’s theory is the assumption that the flourishing of Indigenous peoples as distinct and self-determining entities is significantly dependent on their being afforded cultural recognition and institutional accommodation by the settler state apparatus. What makes this approach both so intriguing and so problematic, however, is that Fanon, whom Taylor uses to make his case, argued against a similar presumption in the penultimate chapter of
Black Skin, White Masks
. Moreover, like Taylor, Fanon did so with reference to Hegel’s master/slave parable. There Fanon argued that the dialectical progression to reciprocity in relations of recognition is frequently undermined in colonial situations by the fact that, unlike the subjugated slave in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
, many colonized societies no longer have to
struggle
for their freedom and independence. It is often negotiated, achieved through constitutional amendment, or simply “declared” by the settler state and bestowed upon the Indigenous population in the form of political rights. Whatever the method, in these circumstances the colonized, “steeped in the inessentiality of servitude,” are “
set free by [the] master
.”
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“One day the White Master,
without conflict
, recognize[s] the Negro slave.”
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As such, they do not have to lay down their lives to
prove
their “certainty of being” in the way that Hegel insisted.
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The “upheaval” of formal freedom and independence thus reaches the colonized “from without”: “The black man [is] acted upon. Values that [are] not . . . created by his actions, values that [are] not . . . born of the systolic tide of his blood, [dance] in a hued whirl around him. The upheaval [does] not make a difference in the Negro. He [goes] from
one way of life to another, but not from one life to another
.”
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There are a number of important issues underlying Fanon’s concern here. The first involves the relationship he draws between struggle and the disalienation of the colonized subject. For Fanon it is through struggle and conflict (and for the later Fanon,
violent
struggle and conflict) that imperial subjects come to be rid of the “arsenal of complexes” driven into the core of their being through the colonial process.
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I will have more to say about this aspect of Fanon’s thought below, but for now I simply want to flag the fact that struggle serves as the mediating force through which the colonized come to shed their colonial identities, thus restoring them to their “proper places.”
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In contexts where recognition is conferred without struggle or conflict, this fundamental self-transformation—or as Lou Turner has put it, this “inner differentiation” at the level of the colonized’s being—cannot
occur, thus foreclosing the realization of freedom. Hence Fanon’s claim that the colonized simply go from “one way of life to another, but not from one life to another”; the structure of domination is modified, but the subject position of the colonized remains unchanged—they become “emancipated slaves.”
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The second important point to note is that when Fanon speaks of a lack of struggle in the decolonization movements of his day, he does not mean to suggest that the colonized in these contexts simply remained passive recipients of colonial practices. He readily admits, for example, that “from time to time” the colonized may indeed fight “for Liberty and Justice.” However, when this fight is carried out in a manner that does not pose a foundational “break” with the background structures of colonial power as such—which, for Fanon, will always invoke struggle and conflict—then the best the colonized can hope for is “white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by [their] masters.”
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Without conflict and struggle the terms of recognition tend to remain in the possession of those in power to bestow on their inferiors in ways that they deem appropriate.
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Note the double level of subjection here: without transformative struggle constituting an integral aspect of anticolonial praxis the Indigenous population will not only remain subjects of imperial rule insofar as they have not gone through a process of purging the psycho-existential complexes battered into them over the course of their colonial experience—a process of strategic
desubjectification
—but they will also remain so in that the Indigenous society will tend to come to see the forms of structurally limited and constrained recognition conferred to them by their colonial “masters”
as their own
: that is, the colonized will begin to
identify
with “white liberty and white justice.” As Fanon would later phrase it in
The Wretched of the Earth
, these values eventually “seep” into the colonized and subtly structure and limit the possibility of their freedom.
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Either way, for Fanon, the colonized will have failed to reestablish themselves as truly self-determining: as creators of the terms, values, and conditions by which they are to be recognized.
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My third concern with Taylor’s politics of recognition involves a misguided sociological assumption that undergirds his appropriation of Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition. As noted in the previous section, at the heart of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic is the idea that both parties engaged in the struggle for recognition are dependent on the other’s acknowledgment for their freedom and self-worth. Moreover, Hegel asserts that this dependency is even more crucial for the master in the relationship, for unlike the slave he or she is unable
to achieve independence and objective self-certainty through the object of his or her own labor. Mutual dependency thus appears to be the background condition that ensures the dialectic progress towards reciprocity. This is why Taylor claims, with reference to Hegel, that “the struggle for recognition can only find
one satisfactory solution, and that is a regime of reciprocal recognition among equals
.”
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However, as Fanon’s work reminds us, the problem with this formulation is that when applied to actual struggles for recognition between hegemonic and subaltern communities the mutual character of dependency rarely exists. This observation is made in a lengthy footnote in
Black Skin, White Masks
where Fanon claims to have shown how the colonial master “basically differs” from the master depicted in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
. “For Hegel there is reciprocity,” but in the colonies “the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is
not recognition but work
.”
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To my mind this is one of the most crucial passages in
Black Skin, White Masks
for it outlines in precise terms what is wrong with the recognition paradigm when abstracted from the face-to-face encounter in Hegel’s dialectic and applied to colonial situations. Although the issue here is an obvious one, it has nonetheless been critically overlooked in the contemporary recognition literature: in relations of domination that exist between nation-states and the sub-state national groups that they “incorporate” into their territorial and jurisdictional boundaries, there is no mutual dependency in terms of a need or desire for recognition.
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In these contexts, the “master”—that is, the colonial state and state society—does not require recognition from the previously self-determining communities upon which its territorial, economic, and social infrastructure is constituted. What it needs is land, labor, and resources.
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Thus, rather than leading to a condition of reciprocity the dialectic either breaks down with the explicit
non
recognition of the equal status of the colonized population, or with the strategic “domestication” of the terms of recognition leaving the foundation of the colonial relationship relatively undisturbed.
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Anyone familiar with the power dynamics that structure the Aboriginal rights movement in Canada should immediately see the applicability of Fanon’s insights here. Indeed, one need not expend much effort to elicit the countless ways in which the liberal discourse of recognition has been limited and constrained by the state, the courts, corporate interests, and policy makers in ways that have helped preserve the colonial status quo. With respect to the law, for
example, over the last thirty years the Supreme Court of Canada has consistently refused to recognize Aboriginal peoples’ equal and self-determining status based on its adherence to legal precedent founded on the white supremacist myth that Indigenous societies were too primitive to bear political rights when they first encountered European powers.
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Thus, even though the courts have secured an unprecedented degree of protection for certain “cultural” practices within the state, they have nonetheless repeatedly refused to challenge the racist origin of Canada’s assumed sovereign authority over Indigenous peoples and their territories.

The political and economic ramifications of recent Aboriginal rights jurisprudence have been clear-cut. In
Delgamuukw v. British Columbia
it was declared that any residual Aboriginal rights that may have survived the unilateral assertion of Crown sovereignty could be infringed upon by the federal and provincial governments so long as this action could be shown to further “a compelling and substantial legislative objective” that is “consistent with the special fiduciary relationship between the Crown and the [A]boriginal peoples.” What substantial objectives might justify infringement? According to the court, virtually any exploitative economic venture, including the “development of agriculture, forestry, mining, and hydroelectric power, the general economic development of the interior of British Columbia, protection of the environment or endangered species, and the building of infrastructure and the settlement of foreign populations to support those aims.”
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So today it appears, much as it did in Fanon’s day, that colonial powers will only recognize the collective rights and identities of Indigenous peoples insofar as this recognition does not throw into question the background legal, political, and economic framework of the colonial relationship itself.
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