The Idea Of Race

Michael Banton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367292959
• eBook ISBN: 9781000302325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book deals with the study of race relations as a general body of knowledge which tries to bring together in a common framework studies of group relations in different countries. It explores the intellectual context within which the old conception of race relations arose.

1
The intellectual inheritance

On the fourteenth of August 1862, Abraham Lincoln summoned to the White House a group of black Americans to explain to them his despair about the future of black people in the United States and his interest in schemes for sending them back to Africa. He began:

Ύou and we are different races. We have between us a broader differenee than exists between any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence…’

Congress had appropriated funds to colonize blacks outside the country. Lincoln emphasized that on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours’. In his judgement they were suffering ‘the greatest wrong inflicted on any people’. The President did not spell out his explanation of why they were treated in this manner. Apparently he thought that for some unspecified reason white Americans were incapable of behaving with justice towards blacks. Criticizing the colonizationists, a contemporary had asked if it was conceivable that Christ had commanded men to love one another without giving them the power to do it. Lincoln did not refer to this objection. He seems to have regarded racial prejudice as in part a moral issue, but not entirely. What he called ‘this physical difference’ apparently marked a boundary within which communal sentiments operated (Sinkler, 1971: 37—53).

Lincoln’s remarks reflect the belief that there is something about relations between people of different race that distinguishes them from relations between people of the same race. That belief was nurtured by the theory of racial types formulated in the middle years of the century, and it lingered on to give plausibility to the view that race relations constituted a special field of study. Today it would be generally agreed that the subordinate position of blacks in the United States in 1862 did not spring from differences in the biological nature of blacks and whites but from political, economic, and social causes. According to this interpretation race relations are relations between members of social categories that happen to be identified by racial labels.

This book explores the intellectual context within which the old conception of race relations arose, and goes on to discuss the main lessons to be learned from changes in the way of looking at these matters. It deals with the study of race relations as a general body of knowledge which tries to bring together in a common framework studies of group relations in different countries and in different periods of history. If such a framework exists, it is at present far from adequate. Indeed it is worth considering whether the attempt to improve it shows any promise since many scholars would consider this a misconceived enterprise. They maintain that ‘race’ has meant different things in different circumstances and the categories to which the label has been applied in particular circumstances have been so varied that the scholar can do no more than write the history of particular societies and particular conflicts. For example, at the beginning of this century a reference to race relations in South Africa was usually a reference to relations between Afrikaans-speaking whites and English-speaking whites, whereas today it would surely refer to relations between blacks and whites. When a group starts to regard its relations with another group as, racial’ this may well betoken a change in the nature of those relations, and may merit attention on that account. Equally, an understanding of Lincoln’s beliefs about the nature of race may help the historian interpret the President’s actions, but no one today who asks what American race relations were like in 1862 would be justified in starting from Lincoln’s assumptions about the nature of race. The student of race relations must not limit himself to the participants’ conceptions of what was racial, even though his material has always to be considered in its historical context.

To ask what we have learned about race relations is therefore tõ pose a complex question. It entails, first, the study of the growth of knowledge; second, it examines knowledge about a changing subject matter which appears to be transformed as peoples’ conceptions of race have changed; third, it requires study of the work of scholars who did not stand apart from their subject matter but shared understandings about the nature of race with the people whom they were studying. For this last reason at least it is unwise to separate the sociology of race relations sharply from the history of the idea of race. Sociological theory is built with ideas, and these ideas have their histories, so that the relationship between the theory and the histories is something the sociologist must keep under examination.

As people can understand their history only through the concepts of their own time, it is continually necessary to rewrite history in the light of new concerns and understandings. Equally, people interpret their own time in the light of their beliefs about the past, and if they misunderstand their past they cannot properly understand their present. In human affairs there is a continual inter-relation between the present and the past which is reflected in all the social sciences and has a special relevance to a field like race relations which has to build on uncertain foundations.

It is also unwise to study the idea of race in isolation from two other ideas that were likewise reborn in the early years of the nineteenth century. The modern ideas of race, of class, and of nation, arose from the same European milieu and share many points of similarity. All three were exported to the furthest parts of the globe and have flourished in many foreign soils. In so far as men have believed that it was right to align themselves on the basis of race, class, and nation, or have believed that these would become the major lines of division, so these ideas have proved their own justification. But events have not borne out the predictions very closely. Nation has been the most successful of the three. The idea promised that every man possessed a nationality as a natural attribute and that he had a right to be ruled only as a member of his nation. This implied that a state must coincide with a nation and that minorities should separate and join up with their fellow nationals. That promise has not been fulfilled. Some states, like the United Kingdom, inelude more than one nation. Almost every state includes one or more minorities (Iceland, Europe’s oldest nation, is an exception that scarcely upsets the generalization). If one state seeks to expel one of its minorities, as Uganda has recently done, it adds to the minority problems of other states. The idea of class promised an ever-widening patterning of group alliances based upon common relations to the ownership of the means of production. Yet instead of sharper discontinuities, social stratification in most industrial countries today is characterized by a continuous distribution of positions along a scale of status. There are occupational communities that show a sense of collective identity but across the broad social range class consciousness is a feeble force compared with the consciousness of status differentiation. The third idea, that of race, promised at first that each racial type would take command of the territory to which it was naturally suited, but this gave place to the belief that the whites had inherited a superiority that would enable them to establish their rule in all the regions of the world. In neither form has the prediction been fulfilled. The self-confidence of the Anglo-Saxons has been shattered and the appearance of a biological basis for racial theories has disintegrated.

One approach to the study of social relations starts from Marx’s grandiloquent assertion that ‘the dominant ideas [of any age] are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationship’ (Marx, 1956: 93). This declaration can be taken in either a weak or a strong sense. In the weak sense, that of advice to examine the relationship between the popularity of particular ideas and the structure of poiitical and economic relations in the society, it is of the greatest importance. In the strong sense, it can be taken as an insistence that race, class, and nation are political ideas that arise from underlying economic and political structures. Race and nation could be seen as propagated by ruling classes, whereas the idea of class would emerge from an awareness among the subordinated of the structure that promotes their exploita- more problematic than the quotation acknowledges. The sentiment of and has changed in character, but all along it has been related to a uni- many considerations independent of social structures, and this must demonstrate that the definition of what constitutes an idea is much more problematic than the quotation acknowledges. The sentiment of nationality is obviously influenced by the natural boundaries of geography, by shared language, outward appearance, and culture. Nor can race be regarded as a purely political idea; it has appeared in diverse forms and has changed in character, but all along it has been related to a universe of biological knowledge where the understanding of race has been less subject to political influences. Those who would argue for a strong interpretation of Marx’s claim have made little attempt to demonstrate that it can be satisfactorily applied to the understanding of racial categories.

‘Class’ became a central concept in the sociological tradition, but ‘nation’ has been neglected and the problems in the use of ‘race’ have been evaded. Since some social relations have been generally defined as race relations, it is not surprising that this has been regarded as a more or less distinctive field of political concern and social enquiry. Scholars have for many years been plagued by doubts about the legitimacy of defining an area of social study in terms of an apparently contentious con־ cept on which the biologists are the authorities. The argument of this book is that the student who wishes to understand the nature of the field of race relations study (including its recent shift in the direction of, ethnic relations’) should approach it from the standpoint of the growth of knowledge. This will give him a grasp of the character of the field and what has governed that character. It will also help him formulate his views upon what the field might or should become.

There was no clear-cut nineteenth century idea of race. There were many classifications and theories, and much controversy. But in so far as one simple conception caught popular attention and led to a notion of race relations, it was the doctrine of permanent human types reflected in Abraham Lincoln’s words. This doctrine was slowly constructed in the first half of the century and attained its most systematic statement in a book called Types of Mankind which was published in Philadelphia in 1854. The influence of this school of thought is apparent in Lincoln’s belief that there is a finite number of races or types (blacks and whites being the most distant); that the differences are permanent; and that the differences have a decisive influence upon the kinds of social relationship possible between members of different races, perhaps because each race is situated to a particular part of the globe. There is a little more to the doctrine, but Lincoln had certainly seized some of its chief features. In Chapter Three I shall show that it is useful to return to the distinction between race and type drawn by many nineteenth-century anthropologists and shall show that the view that influenced Lincoln constituted a theory of racial typology. Before doing so, I shall, in Chapter Two and part of Chapter Three, discuss some of the sources of this theory which have received insufficient attention in earlier writings.

The theory of racial typology ushers in the beginning of the study of race relations, for though it was a theory about race, it held that the nature of races determined the relations between them. If one seeks an event and a date to mark this development, the best is the publication in 1850 of Robert Knox’s The Races of Men. Earlier books had advanced racial classifications and some of Knox’s contemporaries made contributions to the theory of equal or greater importance, but Knox was the first to come forward with an exposition that was comprehensive even if jumbled and confusing. However, Charles Darwin’s work almost immediately cut the ground from under the feet of Knox, Gobineau, Nott, Gliddon, and the other typologists, by showing that in nature species were not permanent entities but were subject to evolution by adaptation and selection. Darwin’s studies raised questions which no one at the time was able to answer, concerning such matters as the source of variation and the unit upon which selection operated. Adaptive characteristics are transmitted, and tend to come in clusters, like the skin colour, hair form, nose and lip shape of Negro West Africans. It was difficult to banish the misleading concept of racial type until something to comprehend such clustering was ready to be put in its place.

It took more than seventy years for this to be achieved and for the nature of Darwin’s revolution to become fully apparent. Only in the early 1930s with the establishment of population genetics was it clear that the concept that had to take the place of racial type was that of population, and that populations had to be studied statistically instead of typologically. Populations are always changing, not because of the nature of the whole, but because their individual members are subjected to the pressures of selection as they adapt themselves to changing environments. If this has been scientifically demonstrated does it mean that the study of race relations is founded on a ghastly error and that wherever the word race appears we should now substitute that of population?

Such a substitution would indeed reflect the lessons that the studies of geneticists have to teach, but there are several sets of circumstance that tell against so simple a solution. First, the populations with which we are concerned in many cases constitute what have been called geographical races. They draw upon gene pools which include at high frequencies genes that ensure that nearly all the members of each succeeding generation display the appearance that causes ordinary people to ascribe them to particular races. The appearance persists of what or dinary people believe to constitute race and the general public is bound to lag behind the more sophisticated understandings of the scientist. Second, the nineteenth-century idea of race has been threaded into the tapestry of world history and has acquired a social and political significance that is largely though not completely independent of the significance that can be given to the concept of race within biological science. For these reasons also, the substitution of the word population’ would be of little assistance. The third set of circumstances turns on questions of another kind. When it appears that a concept is no longer sufficiently accurate and is causing misunderstanding, the main task is not to ban a bad label but to find a better one to put it its place. The geneticists were able to make better progress by putting population’ in place of, race’ but social scientists have different interests. They must identify what for their purposes are the key features of the kinds of social catego ries that have been designated races. Though this is not a completely satisfactory solution, it looks as if for social science purposes it would be better to use the concepts of majority and minority in this connection. The arguments in favour of this conclusion are brought together towards the end of the book.

Some of the nineteenth-century writers who attempted to synthesize the new knowledge about man’s social nature reasoned as if individual men possessed attributes of race, nationality, and class, which, when allowed free expression, brought them together with others of their kind, so that the history of mankind, in the past and the future, was the product of this inner nature working its way through to the surface of human affairs. Contemporary social science sees races, nations, and classes as social groups, the outcome of a process whereby individuals join with one another to form coalititions, factions, and cliques as well as larger units. This social process of alignment is inter-related with a psychological one whereby individuals are conditioned to identify themselves with certain others and to perceive the social world in terms of shared associations. An English child brought up among children who are all of pinkish complexion is likely to categorize children of another complexion as socially different. Many characteristics become associated with racial distinctions and are passed on to successive generations as part of a cultural process. This includes not only unfavourable judgements of others but also the ways in which individuals conceive their own groups. Ideas about race have been woven into such categorizations and judgements in ways that differ from one part of the world to another and are sometimes quite different from those of racial typology.

Those who preached nationalism in the nineteenth century were anxious to bring together into single political units people whom they thought belonged together. Intermediary groups and national minorities upset such schemes. Instead of their being eliminated in one way or another, such groups have multiplied and have become more significant. Revolutionary changes in transport, and the cost of travel, have made it possible for men to move to other continents in search of work. Members of minorities can now keep in touch with their homelands, revisit them, and maintain their homeland ties with a facility previously impossible. For a far longer period they can entertain the thought of returning to the country of their birth and do not have to contemplate a future in which assimilation seems the only outcome. From the declining importance of nationality in such circumstances springs the enhanced significance of ethnicity. If nations are populations that have come to gether, or are disposed to come together in nation states, ethnic minorities are groups possessing national attributes that are willing to live within states that do not put at the centre their customs, language, religion, and values. Notions of race have become so closely involved with the affairs of ethnic minorities that it is frequently unproductive to try to demarcate the study of race relations from the study of ethnic relations. Examination of the history of many minorities shows that it is impossible to separate the influence of race, ethnicity, class, religion, and so on, as if these were factors in an algebraic equation. Human history is not that simple.

Today race relations have to be understood as the outcome not of biological qualities, but of the way individuals in different situations align themselves with those they perceive as allies, and in opposition to others. Just how they align themselves depends upon many things; not only political oppositions, economic interests, beliefs about the nature of social groups, and other general circumstances, but also human choice, leadership, and responsibility in the critical situations that mark the beginnings of new periods in political history.

Though Darwin’s discoveries spelled the end for the concept of the permanent racial type, it took several decades for their import to be appreciated. During this period it appeared as if the theory of natural selection had given new life to some elements of the earlier theory of race. A new school of thought arose, often called social Darwinism, in which race once more featured as an important biological category, but which nevertheless differed in important respects from its predecessor. There is no obvious date signalling this new phase, but one as good as any is 1875, when Ludwig Gumplowicz s Ras se und Staat was published. Gumplowicz’s initial enthusiasm for the biological explanation of social relations faded with the years, but there were may others who developed this line of thought with greater stridency, maintaining that race was the key to race relations. Their influence, like that of the typologists, can still be discerned today.

With the rise of sociology in the United States another approach extricated itself from the coils of social Darwinism. The change was gradual but is signalized best by the appearance in 1921 of an influential text book edited by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess entitled An Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Park advanced a general conception of race relations as the product of European expansion. They were to be seen in a historical context, the outcome of the same forces as those that generate other features of human history. American scholars chiefly developed those aspects of this approach that could be applied in a domestic context. Sociology took over decisively as the leading discipline in this field and the emphasis was moved to the study of social relations distinguished by race. This was the work of Charles S. Johnson, John Dollard, W. Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, Gunnar Myrdal, Oliver C. Cox, E. Franklin Frazier, Everett C. Hughes and their generation, many of them Park’s pupils. It established a tradition of en־ quiry located within American sociology. Separate smaller and affiliated traditions (which I have had to omit from this book) can later be detected in the influence of scholars such as Max Gluckman, who approached the problems from a South African background and looked more towards social anthropology, and Roger Bastide who has joined a French view of sociology to psychiatry and has exercised a major influenee on race relations studies in Brazil. But so far the research in South Africa and Brazil, like that started by Kenneth Little in Britain, has not been adequately related to the American work so as to constitute an inter national discipline which can benefit from the variety offered by different local situations instead of being confused by its great complexity. A tradition of study incorporates sets of ideas of how to go about the task, what topics to investigate, and what methods to use. Any successful book tends to be taken as a model by research workers who subsequently start in the same field. A successful teacher cannot help but indicate to his student that there are recommended questions to ask; often the students concentrate upon trying to improve upon the answers which their teachers have advanced. When several scholars are at work on similar topics they tend to sharpen one another’s wits and there are advantages to be gained from the occasional appearance of distinctive schools’ of interpretation. A whole generat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The intellectual inheritance
• 2 The racializing of the West
• 3 The racializing of the world
• 4 A nineteenth century racial philosophy: Charles Kingsley
• 5 Social Darwinism
• 6 Social interaction
• 7 Structure and function
• 8 Ethnogenesis
• 9 The idea of racism
• References
• Index