Racisms

An Introduction

Steve Garner

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781526412867
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Combining key theoretical perspectives with contemporary case studies, this text will be invaluable in helping you to fully understand the complex issue of racism. With clear definitions and practical examples this is a solid resource when seeking to examine the way in which racisms have become part of social practices and institutions.

Providing a clear and readable introduction to all of the key concepts, theories and debates, this fully revised new edition:

• Includes new chapters on Ethnicity and Immigration
• Has 30 new boxed case studies with a more international focus
• Contains new learning features including further reading and questions for reflection

Racisms is an ideal introduction for undergraduates studying race and ethnicity, social divisions and stratification.

1 The Idea of ‘Race’ and the Practice of Racisms

In this chapter we will

• Examine the history of ‘race’ as an idea
• Understand how ‘race’ has been theorised in the social sciences
• Look at definitions of racism and
• Arrive at our own definition, to be used for the remainder of this book

What is race? The striking element of all scholarly attempts to understand what ‘race’ is seems to be the impossibility of providing a definition. We think we know, obviously, who is in what ‘race’, even though we may try very consciously not to attach any further importance to it as an identity when we deal with other people. Clearly, dividing up people into ‘races’ is an act of categorisation. Yet when we look more closely at the kinds of assumptions this form of categorisation is based on, they do not hold water. We think ‘race’ is about physical appearance and has been a characteristic of humanity for centuries. But how many ‘races’ are there and what are they called? If you watch American crime shows, you may think ‘Caucasian’, ‘African American’ and ‘Hispanic’ are the main ones. Yet there are a number of problems with this understanding. First, these labels are all relatively new. ‘Caucasian’ was not used before the 1940s; ‘African American’ has only come into use since the 1990s; and ‘Hispanic’ has only been used since the 1970 Census. Second? Sorry my US readers, but the world really is bigger than the USA. What separates people’s understandings of who is who in one place, at one time, is not necessarily the same logic that applies elsewhere at other times. Third, and we will come back to this many times, pursuing the idea that the world can be divided into ‘races’ requires a special suspension of logic.

What are the physical attributes we are really talking about in the discussion of ‘race’? Skin colour, hair type and colour, eye colour, shape of eyes, shape of nose. Are there any more? Yet let’s think for a moment about all the ways in which two human bodies could differ from one another. If you had to make a list of such elements, that list would be very long. Once you have proportions of limbs to body, shape of head, distance between eyes and muscle definition, I am sure you could come up with 20 before you have even started to struggle. That’s just the external (phenotypical) differences. If we then start to think about genetic differences, the scale of the sleight of hand involved in dividing the world up into ‘races’ on the premise of biology becomes apparent. In Box 1.1, we can see some information derived from contemporary science about the various ways in which human bodies could be grouped together and it is counter-intuitive for people whose culture encourages the normalisation of ‘race’.

Box 1.1 Race and Genes

While each human being has around 25,000–30,000 genes, the largest difference between two individuals seems to be in the region of 1 per cent. Although the biological basis of ‘race’ suggests distinct groups of people with more shared genetic heritage than genetic discrepancy, research into genetic differences shows that this is a false claim. The science does not stand up. Indeed, often there are geographical, social and medical reasons for the relatively small differences in genetic structure between people.

Example 1 – Sickle cell anaemia: often seen as a disease for which people of African origin exclusively are at high risk. The cluster of genes that means a person is likely to develop this form of anaemia is concentrated among groups of people whose ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and India. Thus, it is not solely a ‘black people’s’ disease but rather closely linked to malaria; hence the geographical concentration of the pathology. Malaria exacerbates the illness, and so where malaria is not present, the rate of sickle cell sufferers drops. African Americans’ rate is below that of West Africa, and falling as malaria has been eradicated in the USA.

Example 2 – IQ testing: the controversy about psychometric testing for Intelligence Quotient is ongoing. Introduced in the early twentieth century in the USA, its objective was to screen for intelligence among recruits for the armed forces. It was then used as a screening test for immigrants. The claims of those who advocate such tests are that different ethnic and racial groups score at different rates – even when environmental factors are taken into consideration. Those who disagree argue that there are a host of social class and culture-related issues around what is counted as intelligence and what is actually measured in these types of test. People can score at higher rates with training in the types of question asked, and in the case of immigrants, after longer exposure to the culture of the country in which the test is administered (Duster, 2003, 2006; Herrnstein and Murray, 1994; Fraser, 1995).

Ultimately, the judgement of science on ‘race’ as a way of definitively organising the human population into discrete groups, according to genetic make-up, is unequivocal:

Modern genetics does in fact show that there are no separate groups within humanity (although there are noticeable differences among the peoples of the world) … Individuals – not nations and races – are the main repository of human variation for functional genes. A race, as defined by skin colour, is no more a biological entity than is a nation, whose identity depends only on a brief shared history. (Jones, 1994: 246)

This is not to say that people do not share characteristics such as complexion, hair type, eye colour, etc., but instead it should draw our attention to the relatively tiny proportion of physical features that we use as criteria for our understanding of ‘race’: skin colour, hair type, eye colour, shape of mouth, shape of eyes, etc. Why, out of all the biological differences there could be between two people, do we only focus on half a dozen at most? Moreover, biological genetic similarity within a supposed racial group, and its distinction from another, represent only half the story: ‘race’ has always been about linking culture and behaviour to physical appearance. How we think about ‘race’ is to assume, for example, that Person X is part of group A, therefore she behaves in a certain way. There is more in this book about how the links were originally made, and on the idea of culture later, but here, we just need to underline the fact that the idea of ‘race’ is not merely about bodies looking similar to or different from one another, but about the ideological labour we invest into collectively interpreting those similarities and differences.

So, if we accept that there are many physical differences possible, yet when we think about ‘race’, there are only a few features that we are interested in, the problem for us becomes, ‘why is this the case?’ Moreover, the terms we use, like ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘yellow’, ‘red’, etc. are not even descriptions of what they claim to describe. Nobody living is actually white. Nobody is really ‘black’ in the sense of the ink on this page, although there are some people with very dark complexions indeed. Certainly, nobody’s skin is yellow or red – unless they are sunburnt or suffering from particular diseases. So the conclusion must be that such terms have social meanings but not biological ones.

The same could be said for the idea of ‘race’. Our social worlds are full of ways to distinguish between one group and another in a specific context, and ‘race’ is one form of categorisation. The interpretations of physical differences that we make in our societies are determined not by the indisputable fact of racial difference, but by the social imperatives that enable us to do so. In other words, the social world provides us with tools specific to both our culture and our period of history, which we then use to read ‘race’ from the bodies of human beings. We are bombarded with ways of admitting that ‘race’ is a natural part of our social world, one of the legitimate ways in which we try to make sense of difference. ‘We hold these truths’, it appears, ‘to be self-evident’: all people are created racial.

Indeed, ‘race’ has never been the object of consensus because of this slippery relationship to the facts. Throughout this book, we will examine geographical and historical contexts in which the interpretations afforded to ‘race’ differ. Michael Omi’s conclusion is valid not just for the USA:

… the meaning of race in the United States has been and probably always will be fluid and subject to multiple determinations. Race cannot be seen simply as an objective fact, nor treated as an independent variable. (Omi, 2001: 244)

Paul Silverstein’s anthropological perspective is that ‘race’ is a ‘cultural category of difference that is contextually constructed as essential and natural – as residing within the very body of the individual’ (Silverstein, 2005: 364). So, making sense of such clues, which we are primed to do in our cultures, is labelled a ‘social construction’ in the social sciences. Sociologists have long argued that ‘race’ is a social construction, but that the meanings attributed to it have concrete impacts on social relations. Although there might be strategic reasons why ‘race’ could be retained, as a basis for solidarity (Gilroy, 1987), I am convinced that as far as academic practice goes, Stephen Small’s rationale (1994: 30) is the correct one. Contrary to the focus on ‘race relations’, he maintains, which first ‘assumes that “races” exist and then seeks to understand relations between them’, racialisation directs our attention to ‘how groups not previously defined as “races” have come to be defined in this way and assesses the various factors involved in such processes’. These processes result in ‘race’ becoming a salient factor in the way social resources are allocated and how groups are represented, that is, racialised. The concept of ‘racialisation’ will be introduced and exemplified in detail throughout the next chapter.

Different Places, Different ‘Races’?

As we said, these readings differ from one place to another and at different moments in time. Let’s take an example of a person whom we shall hypothetically move from place to place. Using the racial terminology available to us in our understanding of the world seen through the lens of ‘race’, her mother is white and her father is black (UK), or Caucasian and African American (USA). This makes her either African American or bi-racial (USA) or black or ‘mixed race’ (UK). If we take this fictitious person with light brown skin to Brazil, there are at least four ways to categorise her racially: parda, preta, morena and negra. Each of these has different connotations, and the degree to which one is not white often affects your life chances in terms of education, employment, etc. Returning to the Caribbean via Latin America, she would pass through a set of cultures where the gradations between black, white and native American origins have an elaborate terminology: there would certainly be a term to describe her, possibly mulatta or morena, for example, and when she gets to somewhere like Jamaica, she might be referred to as ‘red’ or ‘yellow’.

If we take her back to South Africa between 1948 and 1994, when the system called Apartheid was in place, she would have been ‘Coloured’. This meant you were restricted to living in particular areas, barred from others, and this, in turn, meant restricted access to education, employment and other resources, in a context where the entire population was identified by ‘race’ and governed on that basis.

In such systems of attributing social value, therefore, everyone has a set of physical attributes that can get you categorised. However, in this form of categorisation, the outcomes are unequal. If you look like this person in the USA, South Africa, or Brazil, particular openings are closed off to you. Yet should she stay in a country where the vast majority of people are black, let’s say Nigeria, her identity is much more likely to relate to religion, region of origin, language, professional status, etc. Lastly, if we took her back to 1930s Germany, she would have been a candidate for the forced sterilisation programme. After the First World War, the Rhineland (the industrial region bordering France) was occupied by American and French African troops, several of whom had children with German women. From 1937 onwards, as part of the ‘racial hygiene’ programme led by Dr Eugen Fischer, these 400 children were sterilised in order that they did not contaminate the Aryan gene pool. In each of those settings, the social and political distinctions between people have their own histories; the words used to describe groups of people based on culture and physical appearance have different meanings, and refer the individuals concerned to different positions of relative power in their society. ‘Race’ is therefore not a universal concept, but a particular and contingent one.

There are some significant elements to note from this small set of examples:

• ‘Race’ in biological terms (of simply what people look like) matters a lot. For example, it bears importantly on the way resources are made more or less accessible.
• It is not individuals alone, but also important institutions like the State, which have input in determining the meaning of ‘race’.
• Different social systems and their cultures attach different types of meaning to physical appearance.
• It is not simply a case of some people being denied access to goods and resources, but of the corresponding easier access for others. Racism, as we shall define it below, is a social relationship. This means that there is always an imbalance of power, expressed through access to resources.

If racism’s departure point is the idea of ‘race’, our first exploration must be into that term and its development. Once this is clear we can move on to the second aim of the chapter, to provide a working definition of ‘racism’.

Some Key Moments in the Development of the Idea of ‘Race’

The purpose of this section is to establish that the three foundational aspects of racism outlined above change over time, and from place to place. The meanings attached to ‘race’ and the practices it endorses are also specific to different eras and contexts. This is an important stage in the argument, because when we come to discuss configurations of racism post the Second World War, the idea that it consists of physical-based representations can be countered, and the debate moved forward. In later chapters, we shall go into some of these topics in much more detail. The three moments selected here are: the sixteenth century, the Enlightenment and classification, and racial science.

Although there were of course empires before the European expansion into the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia, the phase of empire that began in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century is the key one for students of ‘race’. Spanish and Portuguese involvement in establishing colonies, the slave trade and the subsequent struggle for advantage that dragged in all the European powers had immense historical consequences. In the realm of racism, this was the period which witnessed the encounter between European and native that was to frame the colonial epoch. Such an encounter was frequently violent. The Europeans held technolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Sidebar List
• Sidebar List
• Illustration List
• Table List
• Sidebar List
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Idea of ‘Race’ and the Practice of Racisms
• 2 Racialisation
• 3 Ethnicity
• 4 ‘Race’, Class and Gender
• 5 ‘Race’, Nation, State
• 6 Institutional Racism
• 7 Science
• 8 Mixedness
• 9 New Racisms?
• 10 Immigration
• 11 Whiteness
• 12 Islamophobia
• Appendices
• References
• Index