GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 12 ● Number 2 ● Summer/Autumn 2010—Race and Racisms Editor's Note
Race remains a mysterious and highly controversial concept. Most of the scientists centrally concerned with race—biologists and anthropologists—reject the notion that humanity can be divided into distinct biological categories. They deny that race is a true natural kind, something to be found in nature, its presence confirmed by empirical investigation. The scientific consensus seems to be that race is a “social construction”, a creation of the human mind for its own classificatory convenience, something projected by humans onto nature, not an objective biological fact.
Weak though its evidentiary basis may be, the concept of race has deplorable real-world consequences. It is the intellectual foundation for a phenomenon that has long plagued humanity—racism, the contempt for, discrimination against and antipathy towards individuals and groups on grounds of their perceived ethnicity, colour, descent or national origin. Racism has underwritten genocide, slavery and the colonial dispossession of “inferior” peoples. Today, numerous military conflicts are exacerbated by, even if they do not have their origins in, racial animosities and rivalries. Countries externally at peace are troubled internally by racial tensions that often find expression in violence, generally directed at vulnerable minorities, but sometimes taking the form of a backlash against what is seen as an uncaring or complicit host society.
The purpose of this issue of Global Dialogue is to examine the nature of race and to look at a number of specific instances around the world of the racism which this elusive idea upholds.
Eric C. Thompson of the National University of Singapore provides an opening survey of the complexities of the concept of race. Drawing on its meanings in (American) English, Malay, and Chinese, he contrasts what might be called “naive realism” about race with the idea that it is a social construct. Race and coterminous notions such as “ethnicity” and “nationality” are social constructs, he argues, but ones in which biological difference plays a fundamental role, forming the material out of which the constructs are made, without determining their final shape.
Our next contribution, by Ronald R. Sundstrom of the University of San Francisco, reflects on xenophobia, hatred and fear of the other, of which racism may be considered a special case. The chief forms xenophobia takes in the West today are Islamophobia and hostility towards immigrants and refugees. These two antipathies may not always or strictly be forms of racism, but they are instances of xenophobia, and so are equally to be deplored. That they are not, Sundstrom argues, is because the very manner in which liberal–democratic societies determine their memberships has the effect of diminishing the moral significance of xenophobia and may even foster it.
Islamophobia is further explored by Junaid Rana of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Discussing the controversy over the plans to build an Islamic centre near “Ground Zero” in New York, he argues that Islamophobia in the West since 11 September 2024 has increasingly come to resemble racism in its virulence, a claim he supports by reference to recent ethnographies of post-9/11 anti-Muslim hostility in the United States. Rana concludes his analysis by describing Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 interactive performance exhibit “Domestic Tension”, an aesthetic project which he believes sheds interesting light on anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia during the ongoing War on Terror.
Naomi Zack of the University of Oregon undertakes a philosophical inquiry into the possibility of a universal ethics of race. Distinguishing between “ethics”—universal normative ideas and practices that can apply to the whole of humanity—and “mores”—the customs, historical traditions, identities and political aspirations of individual peoples—she argues that almost all of our racial discourse is about mores. The best that this can achieve is a competitive, contending pluralism. But the history of moral philosophy does furnish resources, she believes, for a more universal discourse, a genuine ethics of race.
With the articles that follow, our focus shifts from general, theoretical considerations of race and racism to specific examples of racial oppression and discrimination in various parts of the world. The long and continuing ordeal of Australia’s Indigenous people since white settlement in the late eighteenth century is detailed by David Hollinsworth of the University of Queensland. He describes the many grievous wrongs inflicted on Indigenous Australians over the years, including territorial dispossession, denial of political rights and representation, and the removal of children from their families in a quasi-genocidal attempt to “breed out” Aboriginality. Much remains to be done today to combat institutional racism in Australia and “close the gap” of disadvantage between its Indigenous and non-Indigenous inhabitants.
For centuries, Europe’s Roma, commonly known as “Gypsies”, have been the victims of racial persecution, most terribly under the Nazis, who targeted them for extermination and killed hundreds of thousands in the process. In the European Union of today, the Roma continue to suffer harsh discriminatory treatment, notably moves by France and Italy to evict them from their homes and expel them to their countries of origin, primarily Bulgaria and Romania. As Robert Kushen, executive director of the European Roma Rights Centre, explains, such policies violate not only international human-rights law, but also several provisions of EU law regarding the free movement of people and their right to seek work in the European Union.
The three contributions that follow consider the situation in the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country, the United States, where developments on racial matters have long been a benchmark for global attitudes and policies.
The election of Barack Obama as US president in November 2008 was hailed by many as signifying America’s arrival at a “post-racial” moment; the popular choice of a black man to fill the highest office in the land surely marked the end of old-fashioned racial discrimination. Vijay Prashad of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, begs to differ: reviewing the course of the struggle for civil rights and racial justice in the United States, he argues that while racism has certainly changed over the last thirty years, allowing some hitherto-excluded people to enjoy the fruits of the American dream, at the same time the system has been altered to exclude most of the population from sharing in that dream. The growth of corporate power has seen an erosion of the commons, resources and public goods that ideally should benefit all.
Race is not the only area of life in which people face oppression and inequality: gender and class, too, embody unjust hierarchies of power and privilege. Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin describes techniques he uses in diversity training to increase awareness of the enduring and pervasive role of racism, sexism, and classism in contemporary US society. A consideration of the ideological and material realities of each of these systems shows, he argues, how false are the widely held beliefs that America has moved beyond white supremacy and created a “post-racial” society, that it is “post-patriarchal” and no longer male‑dominated, and that in capitalism the United States has found a just and natural economic system that does not foment class divisions.
Native Americans are, of course, the indigenous inhabitants of the land that eventually became the United States. Their genocide and dispossession form one of the most terrible episodes in history, which together with their continuing marginalisation and exclusion today are of enduring interest to scholars concerned with the baleful effects of racism. Andrea Smith of the University of California, Riverside, notes that Native peoples are often seen simply as ethnic groups suffering racial discrimination rather than as nations who are undergoing colonisation. She argues that the lack of attention to settler colonialism hinders the analysis of race and white supremacy developed by scholars who focus on race and racial formation. At the same time, lack of attention to race and white supremacy impairs Native studies and Native struggles. Smith identifies three primary logics in the operation of white supremacy: slaveability/anti-black racism, which anchors capitalism; genocide, which anchors colonialism; and orientalism, which anchors war.
We conclude with a consideration of race in the two giants of East Asia: China and India. China is a country of enormous ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity, its inhabitants including Uighur Muslims in the far west, Tibetans, Mongols, and the people of the contested island-nation of Taiwan in the east. Although more than fifty “minority nationalities” are officially recognised by the People’s Republic, well over 90 per cent of the population are classified as “Han”. Surveying racial discourse in China in the modern era, Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong shows how “race” has above all served a political purpose, being used to forge a sense of national unity among China’s various population groups vis-à-vis the foreign powers believed to threaten the country.
Eleanor Zelliot of Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, brings our issue to a close with a description of the lot of India’s Dalit caste, otherwise known as “Untouchables”, long a byword for an oppressed and discriminated-against community. So severe are the burdens of prejudice and exclusion under which Untouchables labour that Indian casteism has been likened to racism and apartheid. Reviewing the origins and nature of the caste system and untouchability, Zelliot weighs the accuracy of this charge. An account is given of the work of the great Dalit intellectual and reformer, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), to alleviate the plight of his people.
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