Trauma and the Conservation of African-American Racial Identity

W.E.B. Du Bois asserts in “The Conservation of Races” that to achieve social equality African-Americans must conserve the concept of race and maintain their “race identity” (“Conservation” 248). Many African-Americans today support Du Bois's position, claiming that they maintain the concept of race as a means to fight politically against racism. African-American critic Lucius Outlaw, for example, argues that because of “continuing legacies of invidious ethnocentrism and racism” in America, justice cannot be “achieved without consideration of race and ethnicity” (18). However, Anthony Appiah's critique of Du Bois in his essay “Illusions of Race” implies that it is not only the political utility of race that causes African-Americans to use and conserve this concept; often, it is also an unconditional attachment to the concept of race itself. Appiah reveals that whether or not Du Bois was able to use the concept of race to escape “racism, [Du Bois] never completed the escape from race” itself (45). But Appiah cannot identify the agency that produces in African-Americans like Du Bois this attachment to race. How do we explain this attachment to race that goes beyond race's political utility?

I propose that the conservation of race by African-Americans often masks an effort to conserve the trauma of a racial history. Here, in keeping with Jacques Lacan's description of trauma as a “form” of the real, I will view slavery as an intrusive traumatic past, a real with which African-Americans maintain a psychological link through race (Fundamental 55). African-American racial identity functions to both maintain the traumatic real as a center of the self and to exclude the real from consciousness. The allegiance African-Americans feel toward the concept of race does not stem only from race's ability to protect them from what Outlaw calls the “legacies of racism.” It stems also from race's ability to establish for them a link with the trauma of slavery, while simultaneously offer