To discuss race in the current world means, alas, to take a political position. I say ‘alas’ because I just don’t think this ought to be an issue that could be dismissed as partisan. To me it’s an issue of basic humanity, but there we are. That’s where we find ourselves.
The first thing I want to discuss in this lecture package is the difference between ethnicity and race. Back in the mists of time, when I was a child, it was commonly believed (and it still is believed, though less commonly) that ethnicity was a sub-set of race. In the same way that it used to be thought (and still is, etc.) that gender was a social construction built on the scientific, biological reality of sex, it was thought that ethnic identity was a social construct built upon a scientific, biological reality of race. This was just a then-current version of a set of ideas that had been developing since the Renaissance and which gained particular impetus (ironically perhaps) during the Enlightenment. To illustrate this we need a brief and very simplified history of European ideas of race since about the 15th century.
The encounter between Europeans and (to them) new worlds at the end of the middle ages made Europeans think about the (to them) new peoples they’d met. Some of this was not a whit different from classical Roman ideas about the barbarian and that wasn’t really surprising. Many writers on the theme drew heavily upon ancient Greek or Roman authors. Tacitus’ Germania was rediscovered at about the same time and – quite apart from providing (entirely ironically) a stimulus to northern European, German nationalist ideas, and a German renaissance – also presented some models about how one might write about the noble savage. 16th-century authors such as Montaigne wrote about the peoples of the New World in similar fashion, as ‘noble savages’ and indeed used this to critique their own society in much the same way. Also as with the Romans though, there was a more malign strand that saw such peoples as inherently inferior and as practically sub-human. This received an added dimension from Christian thought. Though there were Christians who saw the (to them) new peoples as deserving to be treated in a good Christian fashion, in some Christian thinking, these peoples pushed to the edge of the world had been shunted there from, I assume, the Garden of Eden on account of their greater sinfulness. Clearly, this sort of thinking inevitably led to displacement, enslavement and genocide and it would be sadly incorrect to think that any of that sort of hierarchical creationist thought has entirely gone away. Clearly, too, it was part and parcel of the development of the transatlantic slave trade. I pause briefly to remind you that there were always people at the time who voiced the idea that these things were morally and ethically wrong, on a number of grounds. There was always a choice. There is always a choice.
What happened at the Enlightenment, and Foucault would see this as part of the enlightenment mania for classifying and categorisation, was that this hierarchy of the peoples of the world – something perhaps in a way akin to the Romans’ taxonomic ethnography, note the similarity between these views and the classical idea that people further away from the Mediterranean were inherently more barbaric – this hierarchy received a sort of (and I stress ‘sort of’) scientific basis. This was the period when scholars like Linnaeus were dividing the natural world into genera, species, sub-species and so on. So it was felt that humans could simply be categorised similarly into races, species of the genus homo sapiens.
There are a couple of absolutely crucial things that must be stressed about this. The first, and I can’t underline this enough, is that this was entirely socially contingent. It was defined by people who by then saw themselves as white Europeans as a justification for a racial hierarchy with them – white European males – at the top, justifying their conquests, enslavement and exploitation of other peoples. Just as in exactly the same way as the Roman concept of civilisation received what it thought was a scientific justification in terms of the moisture and the humours of the body, distance from the sun and so on, to justify the position of the Roman male at the top of the hierarchy. Racial categories are not neutral scientific observations, let alone a sort of disinterested categorisation of things that are different but the same – apples and oranges within the category of fruit, say – things that are different but not qualitatively ranked.
The entire – still very much-existing – western system of race is predicated on the idea that the white man is at the top of the pile. Taking any subject position with reference to that schema – any subject position at all – acknowledges that that system was set up that way. Black, African-Caribbean, African American, Asian, south or east Asian, subject positions which are taken up as ‘people of colour’, BAME or whatever, within social systems dominated by the western system of racial categorisation are nonetheless taken up with reference to, or interpellated into, a racial hierarchy and categorisation set up by white men. That’s not – let me make this absolutely clear – to say that those subject positions accept the sort of natural superiority of white people that enlightenment thinkers took for granted; it is a recognition of a position within a hierarchy set up to disadvantage them, in which – structurally – they don’t have the power. I accept that there might be those among you who are going to find this set of ideas difficult to accept, challenging or even offensive, but I am not going to apologise: a historical education is there to challenge the way you see the world, as a provocation if you like, a provocation to rethink your ideas – so if we accept that racism is a relationship of power – prejudice plus power as I think Reni Edo-Lodge calls it in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race – then there simply cannot be reverse racism, anti-white racism. It’s an oxymoron. It’s like saying that Jewish people who are maybe suspicious of, or even prejudiced against, Germans on the basis of the holocaust are somehow guilty of reverse anti-semitism. All prejudice is bad but not all prejudice is the same and not all prejudice is racism. Some black people might be prejudiced against white people but think about it. If a black person is prejudiced against me because I am white (rather than because I am an asshole, which would be fair enough) then that is probably because they see me as representing a group which, first, historically, has oppressed people of colour for the past 500 years and, secondly, as representing a group that is structurally set up – unlike them – not to be disadvantaged on the basis of the colour of their skin. I am not saying that any prejudice is good, but that’s not a prejudice that comes from a position of power. On the other hand, if I were prejudiced against someone just for being black, my prejudice would come from a very different place. I hope you can see, and understand, that.
The second point is that the science of racial categorisation is based around the categorisation, not vice versa. If I decide that sub-Saharan Africans are a different race from white Europeans, I will be able to find genetic and other scientific differences between those categories. But the same would be true if I established up a system of racial categorisation on eye-colour or hair-colour that would similarly yield ‘scientific’ differences. Race is about categorisation and the person doing the categorising has the power. Again, just as in the classical Roman ways of categorising the world.
So, we come to the point that contrary to the views I mentioned at the start, if anything, race is a sub-set of ethnicity. Ethnicity isn’t naturally-occurring either but the world is made up of groups, as we’ve seen, that see themselves as sharing some sort of identity and as being different from the others. With race, some of those ‘different’ groups have been sorted again into those which are ‘naturally’ inferior, less civilised, less intelligent, lazier, even if perhaps naturally better at some things (remember: the Romans thought that Africans were more cunning than they were, and that northern barbarians were stronger and fiercer).
I think it is very important to maintain that distinction. There is a qualitative distinction between ethnic prejudice, ethnic chauvinism and so on – which can operate very much on an equal or at least reciprocal, tit-for-tat, plane, and actual racial discrimination, which is entirely predicated on an imbalance of power rendered supposedly ‘natural’. Now, a lot of this has been contemporary, and you might note the influence of some aspects of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is now apparently not to be used in state-funded education in the UK – which is why I just mentioned it – so you might see it as political. If it is, I don’t apologise, but I don’t think it ought to be a matter of partisan politics at all. I don’t understand how the recognition of injustice is partisan, just as I don’t actually see CRT as a theory – it seems to me more like a series of analytical, factual observations. If you do see this as political, partisan bias, you might want to have a bit of a sit down and do a little critical thinking about your world-view. Remember: history isn’t meant to be comfortable. If it is, you’re doing it wrong. Anyway, in the next lecture I want to pursue these points with a specific focus on late antiquity.
