Racism

I. INTRODUCTION

Racism, doctrine, belief, or assumption that inherited biological differences cause some human subpopulations to be fundamentally different from, or superior to, others. In this sense, racism originated in the mid-19th century, although evidence of racial discrimination can be detected in much earlier historical periods.
By the beginning of the 20th century there were frequent discussions of the ?race problem?, meaning the social and political consequences of biological differences between human groups. At the end of the 20th century an equally general view is that the ?problem? is not race but racism, meaning both the prevalence of racist doctrine and the practice of racial discrimination. Only an historical account can explain the many senses in which the words ?race? and ?racism? have been used.

II. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

A. Before Darwin
The word ?race? was introduced into European languages around the beginning of the 16th century. It came to be used in the sense of lineage, as in a reference to ?the race and stocke of Abraham? in The Book of Martyrs (1563) by John Foxe. To account for the differences between themselves and Africans, Chinese, and others, Europeans turned to the Old Testament in the Bible, which provided genealogies showing how, by descent, people acquired membership of groups. When the morality of the Atlantic slave trade was debated at the end of the 18th century, both the pro- and anti-slavery parties assumed that blacks and whites shared a common humanity. The relative technological backwardness of Africans was attributed to their living in an unhealthy climate and their lacking the kinds of political and social institutions that encouraged economic development. The claim that they were permanently inferior came only later.
Geologists and natural historians were at that time beginning to uncover processes of development in natural forms. Their evidence conflicted with the popular belief that God had created each species separately. Since children resembled their ancestors, it was difficult to explain how the differences between human groups could have appeared within the period of 6,000 years, which was all that seemed to be allowed by the Bible's chronology.
The first version of so-called ?scientific racism? was an attempt to solve this problem. According to the doctrine of permanent racial types, the world was divided into a series of natural provinces. Thus, it was only in Australia that kangaroos and other marsupials were found. Likewise, only in that region were there human beings with the distinctive features of Australian Aborigines. The theory held that the Aborigines corresponded to marsupials in being the sort of human beings suited to that environment. For as long as evidence had existed, each province had supported its own types of flora and fauna, including human beings. This doctrine taught that it was futile for human beings to attempt to colonize any region outside their own natural province. Those who advanced this doctrine usually equated ?type? with species, maintaining that blacks and whites were separate species within the genus Homo sapiens. More reputable scholars sided with Christian orthodoxy in regarding blacks and whites as separate varieties (subpopulations) within that species.
In the United States, those who defended the institution of black slavery relied primarily upon passages in the Bible that seemed to authorize it. After the American Civil War and the emancipation of slaves, black subordination was reinforced in new ways and more use was made of the doctrine of the inferiority of the black racial type.

III. RACISM AFTER DARWIN

By showing that development occurred through natural selection, Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) started a revolution in the understanding of human variability. Yet his theory inspired a second form of scientific racism, according to which racial prejudice served an evolutionary function. Prejudice was said to keep human groups distinct and enable them to develop special capacities (as in animal breeding). Thus, some groups would be superior to others in performing particular tasks or in particular environments. Some whites saw support for such interpretations in the decline of the indigenous populations in areas of the Pacific colonized by Europeans. In Australia, New Zealand, and the smaller islands it looked as if the indigenous peoples might be dying out. Whites in general neglected evidence of the spread of European diseases (sometimes deliberately spread) and concluded that nature intended the country for their occupation.

A. Social Theory
Only in the 1920s did psychologists start to assemble evidence that racial prejudice was not an inherited characteristic but a form of behaviour learned in the course of socialization.
Every society has its culture, and therefore its own cultural biases. The tendency to make judgements by reference to the values shared in the subject's own ethnic group, as if it were the centre of everything, is known as ethnocentrism. Individuals share their own society's preferences for particular skin colours, and this may be a basis for the less favourable treatment of outsiders. On occasion, a group within a society is singled out for such treatment: the ethnic majority in, for example, Japan avoids contact with the Burakumin, an ethnic minority descended from an occupational caste created in the feudal period who are not physically distinguishable from other Japanese. The European vocabulary of race has been exported to other regions and employed there despite differences in attitudes. The practices of the Hindu caste system and the relations between ethnic groups in some black African societies can be discriminatory in ways that appear racist to outsiders.
Though doctrines of racial superiority have been widely condemned, the concept of race has continued to be used in the English-speaking world as a social construct. Physical differences are used as markers for the delineation of social groups in ways that do not reflect biological inheritance. For example, in the United States a person of partly African genetic inheritance may consider himself or herself, and be considered by others, to be a member of the African-American racial group.

B. Biological Theory
Biological understanding was similarly transformed in the 1930s by the establishment of population genetics. This demonstrated that it was the gene and not the species that was the unit of selection. It led to the conclusion that there could be as many ?races? as there were genes. In a book entitled We Europeans (1939), Sir Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon argued that the groups commonly referred to as races were politically rather than biologically constituted and that they should therefore be called ethnic groups.

IV. GENOCIDE

Beginning in 1920, the Nazi movement in Germany mobilized the population politically in support of a doctrine that relied upon a typological conception of race (that is, in terms of permanent racial types). The word ?racism? was introduced by their critics to identify any doctrine that certain races were inherently superior to others. The Nazis' stigmatization of Jews as ?Untermenschen? (subhumans) helped motivate the slaughter of some six million Jews and a quarter of a million Gypsies. In 1944 Raphael Lemkin coined the word ?genocide? for such attempts to kill whole peoples.
The origins of World War II lay in Europe. As a doctrine, racism was a product of Europe and North America. Other regions could claim that racism was foreign to them and that they had no word corresponding to the word ?race? in English. In Malay, for example, the word ?bangsa? is used to translate both ?race? and ?nation?, while the words used in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and the languages of Sanskritic origin do not capture all the senses of the word in English.

V. THE UNITED NATIONS

The United Nations (UN) was founded in 1945 and aimed ?to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war?. Racist doctrine was identified as one of the causes of the war that had just ended. In early 2002 there were 189 member states of the UN. With decolonization (see Colonies and Colonialism), the number of independent African member states had increased from 6 in 1959 to 32 a decade later. These states pressed for action against the racially discriminatory system of apartheid in South Africa, which was being implemented ever more systematically by the Nationalist government that had come to power in the country in 1948 (see below). As a result, the UN General Assembly was persuaded in 1965 to adopt the International Convention Against All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This defines racial discrimination as ?any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment, or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, or any other field of public life?. More than three-quarters of the world's states have now ratified this convention and accepted the extensive legal obligations to combat racial discrimination that ratification entails.

VI. RACISM: CRIME OR SICKNESS?

The word ?racism? acquired new meaning in the late 1960s. Previously it had been used to denote a type of doctrine and was often distinguished from ?racialism?, the practice of such a doctrine. The International Convention had defined racial discrimination as a practice that resembled a crime. Participants in the Civil Rights movement in the United States then gave a wider significance to ?racism?, to denote racial prejudice and discrimination as well as associated doctrine. Racism in this wider sense was said to be institutionalized in white society and was represented as a social sickness. To call someone or something racist was to issue a potent moral condemnation. Thus, racism became a concept that empowered the African-Americans who had previously suffered from the racial assumptions of whites.
When racism was defined from this purely North American perspective, it often excluded any possibility that a black person could be called racist. It seemed to simplify the issue by implying that there was a single evil to be eliminated rather than a variety of evils. However, if there were no distinction between racism and racial discrimination, one of the words must be redundant. If racism existed in the realm of ideas, it could be said that racism causes racial discrimination, since ideas are often translated into action. However, as customary patterns of behaviour encourage corresponding ways of thinking, it could equally be maintained that racial discrimination causes racism. Thought and behaviour thus influence each other.

VII. IQ TESTS

Controversy has continued over research findings regarding the heritability of intelligence as measured by Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests. In general, people of Asian origin in the United States score more highly than those of European origin, and they in turn score more highly than people of African origin. The influence of heredity is not easily separated from that of environment. Whether the factors that seem to explain differences in the scores of individuals can also explain the differences between groups is vehemently contested. Those who argue for the inheritance of differences by groups have been accused of advancing a new kind of scientific racism. This is very contentious.

VIII. CONTEMPORARY CONFLICTS

In the last quarter of the 20th century the struggle against racism has been transformed by the growing movement for the protection of all human rights and by the eruption of new forms of conflict.
The new laws adopted worldwide since 1965 to meet UN treaty obligations prohibit both the dissemination of racist doctrines and racially discriminatory practices. They have extended the definition of what is ?racial? by forbidding less favourable treatment on grounds of ethnic and national origin as well as on grounds of race.
Partly because of the ending of the Cold War, there has, since 1988, been a proliferation of conflicts inside states in which the contending groups are identified by their ethnic or national origin, as in the former Yugoslavia, in the Caucasus, and in the two related African states of Rwanda and Burundi. Leaders have been able to mobilize ethnic groups for political action by cultivating the belief that members of one group are naturally different from members of other groups and that they have distinctive rights to territory. In many cases, the leaders have been responsible for campaigns of so-called ?ethnic cleansing?, by which members of other groups have been brutally expelled, or slaughtered, in order to assert claims to territory. The conditions have thus been created in which people must depend upon their co-ethnics for their personal security. In turn, awareness of the crimes that have been committed instils fear that those on the other side will seek revenge. People who have previously co-existed peacefully have been forced apart. Many assert that reconciliation will not be possible without the punishment of those responsible for the atrocities.
In Southern Africa the illegal white settler regime in Rhodesia was ended in 1980 with the establishment of the new state of Zimbabwe on the basis of universal suffrage. In the Republic of South Africa the white minority government started to retreat from apartheid around 1970. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990. Four years later black Africans in the country were able for the first time to vote in an election which led to a government in which representatives of the black majority shared power with representatives of the smaller groups. The political stability of many of the new African states now depends upon the relations between indigenous ethnic groups.
The Chinese government has promoted the large-scale settlement of Han Chinese in Tibet, where they enjoy a status superior to that of the Tibetans, from whom they are in effect segregated. To Western eyes, this appears to be racialist practice, although there is no explicit racist doctrine. In east Africa in 1967-1968, black governments expelled their countries' minorities of Indian origin. Their actions appeared to be racially motivated, although there too there was no underlying racist doctrine. Those who had defined racism as characterizing whites only had then to consider whether this was an example of black racism. Examples such as those of Tibet and east Africa suggest that conceptions of racism fashioned to suit conditions in Europe and North America may not fit the circumstances of countries in other continents.
There is now much more concern about the rights of indigenous peoples, who in general object to being classified as ethnic or racial minorities. They maintain that as the original inhabitants, their status is in no way subordinate to that of people descended from colonial settlers. Recognition of their rights has come slowly. Australian Aborigines acquired full Australian citizenship and the right to vote only in 1968. The Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand (Aotearoa is the Maori name for the country) now adjudicates upon Maori claims to the restitution of land improperly seized by settlers. In Canada, the indigenous peoples have been given the status of ?First Nations?, putting them constitutionally on an equal footing with the English- and French-speaking groups. In Latin American countries, legal protections against racial discrimination are being extended to the indigenous peoples.

IX. ECONOMIC CONCERNS

Technological progress has prompted steps towards a global market for labour. Job security in the industrialized countries has been reduced as production has been transferred to countries where labour is cheaper. As the world's population increases, migrants thus try to move from poor to rich countries. Many move northward, from Mexico to the United States or from Africa or the Middle East to Europe, for example. Others move from the Philippines or Pakistan to the oil-rich states of the Arabian Gulf or to Japan. As a result, states that have previously welcomed migrant workers may now try to prevent their entry. When competition for work is seen in ethnic terms, protectionist and nationalistic movements gather increased support. While some of these appeal to old-style ideas of white racial superiority, there is a more important underlying fear of the economic threat posed by immigration. Such attitudes are more accurately described as xenophobic than racist. That is, the hostility derives from a belief that the newcomers are fundamentally different rather than from any belief that they are inferior.
Experience in industrialized countries suggests that the persistence of racial inequality is not a consequence of racist doctrines so much as of the transmission of socio-economic inequalities from one generation to the next. Physical differences become associated with differences of socio-economic status. In order to break the vicious circle of transmitted deprivation, the United States in the late 1960s embarked upon policies of affirmative action which entailed discrimination in favour of minorities (see Positive Discrimination). These policies have aided the growth of the African-American middle-class, but their positive effects are seen by many to have been outweighed by contrary trends, such as their unfairness to individuals.
The intensification of residential segregation has had many negative consequences. The restriction of their opportunities means that, dollar for dollar, blacks are able to buy fewer neighbourhood amenities than whites. In the black urban ghettos a culture has developed that opposes what are represented as ?white? values, making it more difficult for African-Americans to succeed in the wider society and appearing to justify white beliefs that blacks are different by nature. Residential segregation comes to be taken for granted, and is generally endorsed by black leaders who see it as a way of maximizing their political influence. Because the housing market is interrelated with the cultural aspects of both black and white society, the whole complex may be described as an example of institutionalized racism.
If the examples identified and other forms of racial discrimination are to be remedied, the various components of the complex have first to be precisely identified and all the cause-and-effect relations examined.
There are no simple solutions to the problems which in the past have been associated with racist doctrine. Future action against racial discrimination may well form part of policies to protect human rights and to implement the principle of equal treatment.

Contributed By: Michael Banton

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