“Radical” as in “to the roots.”
The progressive internet community has been talking about racism, specifically what its like being on the white side of the racial divides. Here’s my thought: the appropriately radical (“to the roots”) solution to the problem of race and white privilege should begin with the understanding that what we call “race” has no basis in biology. Race is not biological; it’s a social construction developed through a particular (and particularly nasty) history.
This is explained in detail in the American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race,” which everyone should read –
http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm
As far as biology is concerned, careful analysis and common sense both demonstrate that humans cannot be divided up into a discrete number of distinct groups based on genes or appearance or any other physical characteristic. (What “race” is someone like Tiger Woods?) Human physical diversity is not a bunch of categories, but a big ‘smear’ of difference with every position in the field bleeding into those around it.
On the socio-historical side, the point is the ideas and practices of “race” were developed by Europeans and Americans to classify people who looked different and then to subjugate, use, and abuse those deemed “other.” (This is why honest, moral people cannot agree that America is as unambiguously “great” as many Americans reflexively believe – America (our borders, economy, and social order) was built on racism, specifically on the racist domination and subjugation of American Indians, Africans, and meztisos.)
Unfortunately, just because race does not exist in biology does not mean at this point that race is not real. We have made it real and embedded it in our society and our selves. But the hopeful point is that as a social construction, we can do something about race and its place in our society – through an honest, moral discussion (including something like apologies from those of us who are “white” – specifically, acknowledgments of understanding and regret that we ‘white’ people have benefitted so much from the invention of race) we can work together to get humanity beyond the white-power-imposed nightmare of race.
Thanks for the information and link. I believe that “everyone” as you mentioned should read the American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race” because it brings to light the real issues that we face in the months and years to come.
I don’t think it is accurate to say that Europeans invented the concept of race. All human communities have developed with unique characteristics and they have viewed others as different and usually inferior. It is only when human communities come into contact with each other that they begin to try to define the differences, whether they be physical or theological or cultural.
It’s true that Europeans developed theories of race as a way to define differences, but the theological and cultural definitions were probably even more important in justifying imperialistic policies.
You’re right that almost all sociocultural groups identify differences and then proclaim themselves the ‘real’ people in contrast to the ‘flawed others.’ But “race” as we know it is not some universal way of doing that — it is a modern Euroamerican way. Other groups generally defined differences based less on phenotype (physical characteristics) and more on other characteristics because the people they encountered looked more or less like they did. So in their schemes of difference (“ideologies of inequality” in anthropological terminology), language or customs were typically the salient features.
As the AAA Statement suggests, cultural and to some extent religious differences were tacked onto the modern “race” ideology of inequality, because race, as putatively ‘biological,’ was more amenable to dehumanization than just religion or customs.
The AAA statement says all this better than I can. Here is an excerpt:
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Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.
From its inception, this modern concept of “race” was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus “race” was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used “race” to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.
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I guess what I am trying to say is that all communities take note of phenotypes, and race consciousness predates the development of racial theories.
Racial theories are only the expression (admittedly EuroAmerican) of an previously unspoken consensus shared by all peoples.
It isn’t until you encounter a multicultural, or multiracial society that these distinctions become important enough to classify and philosophize about.
We see the same things in Alexandrian Greece, in the post-exile Judaism, in the Roman Empire, and in the New World, and the Imperial era more generally.
Race is a phony category. But it is a marker for something real. And that is the fact that physical characteristics are shared within cultures until they mix. And then those ‘racial’ traits are generally good indicators of what people believe, what religion they adhere to, etc.
In a country like America, those distinctions become less and less useful over time. Blacks eventually became Protestants, but now many are Catholics or Muslims. Italians and Irish were Catholics, but many are moving to other belief systems. Phenotypes are increasingly unreliable as indicators of beliefs or culture.
Race was never a real scientific category, but for a long time it at least had predictive value. Even today, it has predictive value, but it less and less true.
I guess what I am saying, is that racism is only a manifestation of a more general phenonemon. Race may be the unique EuroAmerican way of expressing that phenomenon, but Chinese exceptionalism is no different. It just manifests itself differently.
The notion of race is modern. There was no equivalent idea in ancient Greece for example. Even though Greeks considered other societies barbaroi this was not a racial, but rather a cultural distinction based upon their self-perceived social superiority.
What is modern about the idea of race (See two books, “Race: The History of An Idea,” and “The Invention of Race”) is that the Spanish first, and then all Europeans relegated “Negroes” and “Indians” not to the realm of human civilization but to the realm of nature. Then, the Spanish, for example, could think when they confronted the Aztec or Maya or Incan civilizations that these human constructs were “really” a part of nature not any different than an anthill.
I decided to email the AAA and pose the question of how did they determine that Europeans invented the concept of “race.” If I receive a response, I will post it, unless it a large document. If it is a document, I will post the high level summary and offer to provide the full document in some manner on-line.
The idea that human beings have always thought racially is simply historically wrong. True, human beings have always distinguished their social identity from that of others. But race is a modern European invention that coincides with their “discoveries” of Africa and North and South America. The core of modern race theory is that it relegates “Negroes” and “Indians” (two made up distinctions) to the realm of nature rather than treating them as other human civilizations or cultures. This is quintessentially modern. Ancient Greeks, for example, called others barbarians but this was a cultural distinction not a racial one. In other words, Greeks recognized the Persians, whom they considered barbarians, to nevertheless be another human civilization but certainly not as good as their own. There is no equivalent notion of the modern idea of race until the Spanish created it in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
Yes, but the point I am making is that Europeans set out to classify and explain differences, but all peoples recognized differences and acted accordingly.
The Greeks did refer to others as barbaroi, and they saw them as inferior. They recognized barbaroi by their physical characteristics just as clearly as any conquistador. So racial thinking is just a modern way of explaining something universal and timeless.
It’s the mixing of diverse communities that makes racial thinking inadequate as a predictive tool. In past days, someone that looked significantly different from you probably was a threat and probably did hold radically different views. So, racial thinking had utility even if it wasn’t classified as racial thinking.
In other words, Europeans didn’t invent racism.
I hear what y’r saying. I think the anthropologist point is that yes, bigotry — “ideologies of inequality “– existed pretty universally, but the form of those ideologies is necessarily particular to particular social and historical settings. In that ‘particularly located’ sense, “race” as we know it did not exist before we invented and began practicing it.
The point is not that Euroamericans are bad compared to everyone else because we classify and they don’t (as you note, that’s not true). The point is that our ideas of race are historically located within our soceities; our ideas of race are something we DO, not fundamentally something we ARE except to the extent we have made ourselves “racial” in the senses we imagine.
And then the larger, progressive point is that as a social construction, even a deeply embedded one, we can ultimately do something about it — talk and practice ourselves into a less bigoted understanding of human diversity.
In the back and forth discussion of race, particularly as it relates to slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, we too often find that EuroAmericans are demonized for inventing some new kind of thinking that justified it all in the minds of the perpetrators. That is simply not true. And things are a lot more complicated.
As one example, the Spanish were much more willing than other Europeans to mate with the indigeneous population, giving rise to an entirely new ‘race’ of people.
Why did Northern Europeans eschew such interracial relations and why are there so few mixed race U.S. of A Americans?
That’s an interesting topic for discussion, especially since we are currently being forced to deal with the problem is immigration of people of the new race into this country.
The fact remains, however, that the idea of race is really only a pseudo-scientific attempt to explain why some people do not practice the same rituals or believe in the same gods. It is not a novelty in world history, but just a the first lame attempts of Europeans to explain the world and its multivariety.
It’s true that Europeans saw Africans and Native Americans as inferior beings, and that they attempted to explain the differences by reference to a chain of being. But all people everywhere that have found themselves in a position of technlogical superiority have done the same in substance, if not in specifics.
The lesson is that people are not defined by their physical characteristics. In the past, that was a reasonable assumption, since appearance was a very good predictor of what a person believed, practiced, and was capable of. But it has long since stopped being a good indicator.
Racism is a dead ideology. People still practice it, which is a major concern (even among minority groups that insist on self-identifying racially), and it is still a legacy that cannot be ignored.
But, it would still be wrong to see the problem of racism as primarily of European origin. It’s root is in the isolated development of major human cultures, so that physical charactistics could be used as solid indicators of what one believed and who one aligned oneself with politically or militarily or theologically.
As the world grows more intertwined, these distinctions evaporate and the utility of racial thinking disappears.
Look where it is still strongest. Arabs are almost certainly Muslims. Therefore, racism against Arabs still has the strongest utility, therefore they are the only group where against which racist thinking is ascendent.
Yes, Europeans did invent racism, because the modern conception of race classified the two groups created by the invention of race thinking, namely Negroes and Indians, as a part of nature and not a part of human civilization. Barbarians, to Greeks, were still human, even if they (the Greeks) thought they were superior to all other societies.
There is a qualitative difference between recognizing that people look different on the one hand, and creating two false classifications (Negro and Indian) to deny the very humanity of the so called members of those classes on the other.
Until Europeans invented the names there were no such things as “Negroes” or “Indians.” The tribal people of Africa and the Americas called themselves Masai or Watusi or Lakota, Maya, Aztec, etc.
It’s intellectually sloppy to make this argument:
This is taking a modern concept and assuming that people in the past thought the same way just because we do.
Nice Diary. Two excellent books on just this subject make it clear that race is a political not a biological defnition used to create a false standard of judging a person’s actions and words and that the race idea is a particularly modern, Western notion used by Europeans to justify their enslavement of “Negroes” and genocide of “Indians.” The words Negro and Indian are the first racist tools. Nobody ever identified themselves with these descriptions. They called themselves Masai, Watusi or Hutu or Lakota, Cherokee or Hopi. The first is “Race: A History of An Idea” by Ivan Hannaford, and the second is “The Invention of Race” by Allen Huemer.
They should be required reading for every American.