Racism and Power

[Stephen Bezruchka]

This book review seems to hit some ideas right on the mark, namely that
differences between races cannot exist in one society on terms of
equality, that it involves difference and power.  But the reviewer, who
recently made a great deal of news for leaving Harvard because of
differences with the new president, doesn't realize that hate among the
powerless is prescisely a form for what he calls the "powerless" to gain
some power.  STephen

******
August 4, 2002  'Racism A Short History by George M Fredrickson, Princeton
U Press review titled: History of Hatred  By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH  NY
Times Book Review

There are many claims about racism that would be accepted by most
reasonable Americans. Here, for example, are three. Nazi ideology was
racist. Apartheid was racist. The Ku Klux Klan was racist. These cases are
easy to agree about in part because they involve judgments about other
places or other times. Ask people, on the other hand, whether recent
Republican campaign rhetoric or current Democratic support for affirmative
action is racist, and the consensus disappears. Racist laws,
pronouncements and actions, we can agree, marred much of American history
(and in this respect our history is far from unique). But how racist is
the United States today? And who are the racists? Try getting agreement
about that.

One reason for the disagreement is just that people have different hunches
about what's going on in other people's heads. Announce, say, that
African-Americans with good credit pay more on average for their cars than
whites, and some will assume bigotry, others (including, no doubt, many
who count car salesmen among their friends) will not.

But another reason we cannot agree about racism is conceptual: people
understand the term rather variously. More than this, while you would have
to be eccentric to think that racism is not wrong, it is far from clear
that most of us share a view about why it is wrong. Is it that racists
have hatred or contempt for people of other races? Or that they have
irrational beliefs about them? Or that they tend to treat them badly? Is
it, as some opponents of affirmative action allege, that it is wrong to
take account of a person's race at all? Or is it, as those who speak of
''institutional racism'' hold, that the motives and acts of individuals
matter less than the systematic ways in which people of some races are
disadvantaged in law and social life?

Over the last few decades, philosophers, historians and social scientists
have debated these questions, deepening our understanding of racial
attitudes and of the ways in which race affects the life chances of
individuals, and exploring the history of those attitudes and of the
social practices within which they are embedded. One of the earlier
contributions to this discussion was ''The Black Image in the White Mind''
(1971), in which the historian George M. Fredrickson discussed white
American racial attitudes in the century leading up to World War I. In
1981, Fredrickson published ''White Supremacy,'' a comparative study of
North American and South African racism. In ''Racism: A Short History,''
written in his characteristically crisp, clear prose, he draws both on a
wide range of recent work by others and on nearly half a century of his
own writings on immigration, race and nationalism, in the United States
and elsewhere, to provide us with a masterly -- though not uncontroversial
-- synthesis.

Fredrickson announces in his introduction that his aim is ''to present in
a concise fashion the story of racism's rise and decline (although not
yet, unfortunately, its fall) from the Middle Ages to the present.''
Historians are often reluctant to theorize, and Fredrickson, a former
president of the Organization of American Historians, is very much a
historian's historian. But, as he acknowledges at once, the task he has
set himself for this book requires him to have what he calls ''a theory or
conception of racism.''

If we all agreed what racism was, one would not need a theory to find
examples of it in the past. But things are made even more difficult by the
relative novelty of the term ''racism'' itself. Sometimes historians can
avoid taking sides in contemporary semantic squabbles by using words as
they were used in the  period about which they are writing, but that would
make a history of racism going back to the Middle Ages impossible. For the
word ''racism,'' in something like its modern sense, appears only in the
1930's, ''when a new word was required to describe the theories on which
the Nazis based their persecution of the Jews.'' The late start of the
word ''racism'' has led some to think that the phenomenon itself must be
relatively new; that it is, as Fredrickson summarizes the view, ''a
peculiar modern idea without much historical precedent.'' At another
extreme are many who think of racism as ''simply a manifestation of the
ancient phenomenon of tribalism or xenophobia.''

Fredrickson proposes that racism combines ''an attitude or set of
beliefs'' with a set of ''practices, institutions and structures.'' The
attitude in question involves treating what are in fact mutable ethnic or
cultural differences ''as innate, indelible and unchangeable.'' And the
practices range from ''unofficial but pervasive social discrimination at
one end of the spectrum to genocide at the other, with
government-sanctioned segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, forced
deportation (or 'ethnic cleansing') and enslavement among the other
variations on the theme.'' Racism, as he puts it, is difference plus
power. All forms of racism suppose, on Fredrickson's conception, that the
differences between races mean that they cannot coexist in one society on
terms of equality. That is difference. Expulsion, elimination or
subjugation are, for the racist, the only options. That takes power.

''Racism: A Short History'' does not stray beyond Western racism, in part,
Fredrickson says, because it has had a wider impact than any comparable
ideology, spreading, as it did, with European empires around the globe.
But he also believes that racism received its fullest theoretical
elaboration in the West because racist ideology developed in societies
where it offended against a growing conviction that ''all men are created
equal.'' As a result, as the ideology developed, it was also ''condemned
and resisted.'' If racism is indeed an ideology that grows up in order to
rationalize expulsion, elimination or exploitation, it makes sense then
that it is a relatively modern phenomenon in the West. For it is only in
the modern period that these offenses against others needed rationalizing.

Fredrickson argues that Western racism has two prime strands -- one
anti-Semitic, the other white supremacist -- and that anti-Semitism came
first. It was only in the 15th century that the religious anti-Judaism of
the European Middle Ages -- which allowed that, though Judaism was
religiously incorrect, Jews, once converted, were as good as anyone else
-- was replaced, in Spain, with something more like racism. The process
began when religious antipathy to Jews as nonbelievers was replaced by ''a
consuming hatred that made getting rid of Jews seem preferable to trying
to convert them.'' This anti-Semitism became racist when ''the belief took
hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely
having false beliefs and wrong dispositions.'' Now conversion was not so
much undesirable as impossible. In a sense, then, anti-Semitic ideology
developed in an attempt to reconcile that supposed impossibility with the
conflicting demand that Christians should treat all men as children of a
single God.

Similarly, when the Atlantic slave trade in Africans began, it largely
involved the capture and exploitation of heathens. Even as slaves in the
New World came increasingly to be baptized, there was no need to justify
their enslavement -- until it was challenged, in the Enlightenment. At
that point slavery's defenders needed an ideology. It is something of an
irony that the tools with which they addressed this task came increasingly
from another side of the Enlightenment, the rationalizing, scientific side
that was beginning to treat human beings not (or at least, not only) as
God's special creation but as natural creatures whose history could be
studied along with that of other organisms. It is in the Enlightenment
that the first modern attempts at racial classification, based not on
religious ideas but on purportedly scientific ones, were developed. And
these naturalistic accounts of the supposed inferiority of blacks and Jews
eventually overtook the religious ones that dominated the debates of the
early 19th century about slavery.

Fredrickson's idea, then, can be put this way. People everywhere,
throughout history, have sometimes been beastly to members of groups they
thought of as different. What is distinctive about racism in the West is
the development of a full-scale systematic ideology to explain why these
others deserved bad treatment. And that theory was necessary only because
modern Western societies were unlike most others, which did not share the
assumption that human beings were created equal and thus had nothing to
explain away.

Within this framework, Fredrickson sketches out the key developments, both
in attitude and in institutions, in the treatment of Jews and blacks in
Europe and the Americas over the last half-millennium. The book is worth
reading just for its pathbreaking attempt to tell the stories of
anti-Semitism and white supremacy together, while insisting both on their
interconnections and their differences.

Nevertheless, I think Fredrickson's analysis is potentially misleading in
two ways. First, his just insistence on the role of racism as an attempt
to rationalize abuses might lead some readers to conclude that the real
harm is done by whatever causes people to abuse outsiders in the first
place. But, of course, once a racist ideology is in place -- as we have
seen in episodes on five continents in the last few decades -- it can lead
people to do the most appalling things. Even if racism starts as a
rationalization for abuses that have other motivations, it ends up having
a powerful negative force of its own. Fredrickson says toward the end of
his book that racism in the United States is ''like a bacillus that we
have failed to destroy, a live germ that not only continues to make some
of us ill but retains the capacity to generate new strains of a disease
for which we have no certain cure.'' So he is not himself misled on this
point. Still, his theory might be carelessly construed as the view that
racism is a rationalizing gloss for forms of exploitation whose real
motivation is something else.

A second difficulty comes from Fredrickson's insistence that racism must
involve both difference and power. ''To attempt a short formulation, we
might say that racism exists when one ethnic group or historical
collectivity dominates, excludes or seeks to eliminate another on the
basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable.'' It
is certainly true that racism developed in the West that way. But once the
ideology developed, it colonized minds, many of which are now far from the
levers of power. An individual racist attack surely need not be part of a
current pattern of attempts at group domination.

There is a deeper difficulty here, that the attitudes Fredrickson stresses
are, as he says, ''sets of beliefs'' about the immutable awfulness of
other races, rather than hostile feelings toward them. But while racist
ideology -- formal, articulated, theoretical racism -- is indeed a
characteristic and distinctive feature of the forms of hostility to blacks
and Jews that provide the central paradigms of racism, at least as
important in the everyday life of racism are the deep feelings of
revulsion, hostility, contempt or just plain hatred that many racists
feel. As the philosopher Jorge L. A. Garcia has put it, racism lives more
in the heart than in the head.

It is, I think, quite natural, faced with the worst moments in the history
Fredrickson recounts -- slavery, lynching, genocide -- to focus on the
terrible harms to racism's victims. And certainly the greatest wrongs have
occurred when racial hostility or contempt has been combined with power.
But hate-filled or contemptuous thoughts and feelings about other races
can be found too, alas, among the powerless.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of
Philosophy at Princeton University and its University Center for Human
Values and the author, with Amy Gutmann, of ''Color Conscious: The
Political Morality of Race.''