Race and America's Long War

by Nikhil Pal Singh

Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency in 2016, which placed control of the government in the hands of the most racially homogenous, far-right political party in the Western world, produced shock and disbelief for liberals, progressives, and leftists globally. Yet most of the immediate analysis neglects longer-term accounting of how the United States arrived here. Race and America’s Long War examines the relationship between war, politics, police power, and the changing contours of race and racism in the contemporary United States. Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the United States’ pursuit of war since the September 11 terrorist attacks has reanimated a longer history of imperial statecraft that segregated and eliminated enemies both within and overseas. America’s territorial expansion and Indian removals, settler in-migration and nativist restriction, and African slavery and its afterlives were formative social and political processes that drove the rise of the United States as a capitalist world power long before the onset of globalization. Spanning the course of U.S. history, these crucial essays show how the return of racism and war as seemingly permanent features of American public and political life is at the heart of our present crisis and collective disorientation.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Politics, Sociology, United States, Essays

296 pages, Hardcover

Published November 7, 2017

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compulsively readable, historically and theoretically literate account of America’s deep-rooted connections between racism and (internal and external) warfare.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because I think one of the missing pieces -- one of many -- in our discussion of the rise of the far-right in the era of Trump is its relationship to America's role in the broader world. Diplomatic history has, for the last twenty years or so, been working on the relationship between domestic politics and American foreign policy, but it's still pretty specialized and under-developed. Consider how much angst and ink has been split over the relationship between college campus politics and the rise of the right, and how little of both we see how the fact we've been at war for more or less the entire time undergrads today have been alive might condition the situation. This imbalance tells us a lot.

In the essays collected in "Race and America's Long War," Singh works to put America's current wars in the framework of the long war of settler colonialism and capitalist accumulation. War and policing inform each other in a never-ending cycle going back to the wars against the Native Americans and the policing of slaves. Singh argues that in many respects race (and, he alludes, other identity categories, but he spends less time with them) is continually created by an array of policy decisions and the violence that goes into backing them up. If the post-WWII era changed the normative background of how America's war-police complex was justified -- eventually making its peace with a notionally color-blind liberalism while still maintaining deeply racialized structures of inequality -- liberal policymakers (like Obama) never challenged the underlying logic of the system. This left the whole thing open to being taken over and rolled back by openly revanchist elements, like Trump.

The devil, of course, in the details. The crises -- either spun off or accelerated by the ur-crisis of climate change -- are mounting in intensity at a time when the US is, relatively (and maybe absolutely) speaking,declining in power. You have to figure that's going to make a difference in terms of the type of freak-out we're likely to see from those in power and those who hold dear to the tropes and methods of racialized power Singh illuminates. Singh offers provocative examples and short case studies, but by and large devotes himself to the big picture in this book. In part that's probably due to the book's provenance (essays published elsewhere) and Singh's efforts to theorize the relationship between America's foreign and domestic politics. It can be dense going at times (though a lot less so than many theory-inflected writers) but it's a pretty good start. ****'

https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was short but also a slog to get through. I generally have a big problem with the mixing of advocacy and scholarship, and this was really a piece of advocacy that was frequently one-sided in its use of evidence, often hyperbolic, and weak in many core claims. It's also highly turgid, with super-long and abstract sentences. The chapters do not cohere well and repeat the same content/argument significantly.

I also felt like I had seen the argument elsewhere, although it has some truth to it. This is a meta-narrative that argues that American history has basically always been the same story of white elites waging inner and outer wars against racialized and class-based groups. The inner war is the long history of using race to divide the working class as well as deploying racism to put people of color outside the boundaries of citizenship and wage labor as an even more exploited group of people. The outer war is conquest, appropriation, extermination, imperialism, etc against racialized outsiders against whom Americans claim the right to use indiscriminate force. He argues that by the late 20th and early 21st centuries, these wars were coming together in both their goals (maintaining capitalism, inequality, and racial dominance) and their methods (such as the merging of police and counterinsurgency type methods in racialized spaces from Iraq to US cities).

This is all valid to some extent, although it's certainly a very one-sided portrayal of American history. For all of leftist scholars' complaining about "essentializing," they are more than happy to do it when it comes to America being bad, especially its ruling classes. NPS occasionally takes a shot at linking this story to the War on Terror, although he does so in a rather haphazard and poorly supported way. He takes a borderline conspiratorial view of post-911 contexts, using selective quotations and dismissing factors like democratization and WMD intel as pretexts for imperialism. While I obviously agreed with his assessments of people like Trump, overall I found this to be a dense and dogmatic book.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would probably give this book a 3.5 stars, I think chapter 2 is a true gem and I think the underlying premise of the book is compelling. I think I would have found it interesting to see a connection between “non-being” death in war and “non-being” death in domestic contexts. Ultimately, I found the book a little meandering and assume it was supposed to end with a critique of Obama and H. Clinton’s continuation of neoliberal racialized foreign was and then had to be quickly rewritten for Trump’s election.

[Eric Bottorff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very uneven in its writing and in the strength of its analysis—too often I couldn’t figure out who the intended audience was, quite frankly, as it struck me as too academic and jargon-y for a general audience but frequently lacked the rigor of a proper academic title. Nonetheless there are a few excellent chapters in here that are worth the price of admission, particularly the chapter on racial formation—I’d recommend skimming or skipping much of the rest of the book.

[Josh Hobson · Rating 2 out of 5]

As stated by others there are some interesting ideas presented, but unfortunately it’s truly terribly written.

It’s so verbose as to render it almost unreadable and I was constantly re-reading sentences and entire paragraphs trying to decipher the absurdly over complicated language and structure.

Not recommended at all for a casual reader. If you were assigned this for a class, strap in because it’s a long dry ride.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, a very good examination of the relationship between race and America's history of violence. The discussions of racemaking and the similarities between internal policing and external war are especially strong. It's a challenging book at times and if the author is aiming for a more general audience, it could benefit from less jargon and a bit more clarity.

[Leah Montange · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate Singh's reference points and approach overall. some great quips but didn't feel that new to me.
problematizing and troubling the boundary between war and policing; colonialism and mass incarceration. instead of trying to put his finger on what is new about this moment we are in with Trump and the alt-right, looking at it as in continuity with what came before.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author makes an interesting connection on how oppression abroad looks a lot like oppression in the USA with the militarization of police and mass surveillance. And usually the targets are- people of color.

[Jonathan Cantor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brisk read on a compelling subject. Took the perspective from a different angle.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex text with heavy ideas. It took me a while to get through it as it warranted deep reflection and lots of re reading.

[Georga Hackworth · Rating 1 out of 5]

Horribly written book with good info. Find something else to read on the same topic.

[Dave Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most enlightening analyses of the overlapping of race-creation, capitalism, colonialism, warfare, and state-craft in American history I’ve found. I’m equal-parts morally devastated and intellectually wound-up.