Racism and Power

[Clarence Spigner]

I agree with your conclusion.  By the way, that was Cornel West who had a
falling out with the presidnt of Harvard and left.  Appiah was at Harvard
as well, and decided to exit with West for his own reasons.

On Sun, 4 Aug 2002, Stephen Bezruchka wrote:

> 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.''
>
>
>