The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity

Charlton D. McIlwain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136866463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity is a comprehensive guide to the increasingly relevant, broad and ever changing terrain of studies surrounding race and ethnicity. Comprising a series of essays and a critical dictionary of key names and terms written by respected scholars from a range of academic disciplines, this book provides a thought provoking introduction to the field, and covers:

• The history and relationship between "race" and ethnicity

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• The impact of colonialism and post colonialism

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• Emerging concepts of "whiteness"

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• Changing political and social implications of race

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• Race and ethnicity as components of identity

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• The interrelatedness and intersectionality of race and ethnicity with gender and sexual orientation

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• Globalization, media, popular culture and their links with race and ethnicity

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Fully cross referenced throughout, with suggestions for further reading and international examples, this book is indispensible reading for all those studying issues of race and ethnicity across the humanities and social and political sciences.

PART I

1
ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPT OF RACE

F. CARL WALTON AND STEPHEN MAYNARD CALIENDO

The concept of race can be considered in both cultural and political terms. In that regard, race has been used to create a dividing line between those who were white and those who were non-white and to determine who would and would not have political rights (and, by extension, political power). In addition, cultural traditions created and adhered to by persons of European descent have come to be the “norm,” while those from non-white races are deemed to be a less significant “other.” In the end, race (and, by extension, racism) has been constructed as a great divider and the avenue by which people of certain ethnic groups have come to be framed as inferior to whites.

BIOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION AND IMPLICATIONS

There is a long history of linking broad categories of difference to physical features. In the sixteenth century, for instance, racial classification was largely understood to differentiate humans from other species (i.e. “the human race”). While differences between and among humans is reflected in evidence from ancient times, it is not surprising that, as Europeans began to explore the globe and encounter persons who looked, spoke and acted differently from themselves, and from what they understood to be “normal,” there was increased discussion of classification. Thus, an “ideology of race” took shape in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such that the mixing of common understanding and scientific evidence opened the door for widespread abuses on the basis of race.

As exploration gave way to colonialism, the usefulness of racial classifications became enmeshed with power – the opportunity to control entire populations. In 1684, the French physician François Bernier identified four groups of humans: Far Easterners, Europeans, blacks and Lapps. As scientific methods advanced in the eighteenth century, a number of writers offered more nuanced classifications. Perhaps the most notable of these was German physician, physiologist and anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who, in 1775, created a racial classification system that divided humans into five races: Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), Malayan (brown), Negroid (black) and American (red).

By the nineteenth century, there were dedicated searches for a universal definition of race that would be applicable across time and geographic location. Scientists went to work measuring bones and craniums in an attempt to justify racial distinctions on the basis of biology. Beyond physical differences related to these and other factors (it should be noted that skin color, for instance, continued to be a relevant variable), there were explicit attempts to link such differences to moral and intellectual judgments. It is this step that renders troublesome the otherwise benign study of humans on the basis of biological difference. In other words, it became widely accepted that, not only were some physical differences reflective of fundamental biological differences between groups, but that some groups were inherently superior to others. As early as the nineteenth century, however, there were arguments to the contrary. Charles Darwin, for instance, believed that there was only one race of humans, noting that attempts to classify had resulted in confusion and disagreement over how many “races” there really were. It is this logic that has led to contemporary scientists widely rejecting the notion of race.

Essentially, the meaningful construct has to do with measuring the degree of difference between groups compared to the degree of difference found within groups. In other words, while there are certainly biological characteristics – some of which appear to be quite obvious – that link persons of different races to one another and separate them from persons of other races, there is considerable evidence that the differences among people of the same “race” are greater than differences between them and those of other races.

We should be clear, however, that Darwin’s objections did not signal the end of biological models of race. Ostensibly scientific models of identifying races continued throughout the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, through the writings of such notable figures as Louis Agassiz, Joseph Arthur Compte de Gobineau, and Carleton Coon. A number of writers engaged in the study of population genetics have interpreted scientific data to reveal that there are genetically based differences in IQ that would explain (and even justify) the widespread and seemingly durable socioeconomic gaps between whites and members of other racial groups in the United States and throughout the world. As recently as the 1990s, in fact, Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray offered The bell curve, in which they suggest, through the study of intelligence, that genes and environment have a connection to race difference. Critics of these interpretations note that the enmeshed social and environmental factors that contextualize human development and functioning cannot be appropriately isolated.

Further, there might be normatively benevolent reasons to consider biological differences among persons of common ancestry. There are current discussions within the field of epidemiology that center on the degree to which biological similarities amongst individuals with a common racial classification can, and should, be used to cue health-care practitioners with respect to diagnosis or treatment. For example, sickle cell anemia is a dangerous medical condition that is found in a disproportionately high number of persons of African descent, so it is useful for physicians treating persons with such heritage to be aware of those unique risks. However, sickle cell anemia is also found in whites (particularly those with ancestry tracing back to the Mediterranean), so it would be equally unwise to construct rigid classifications based on this type of information.

Arguably more important – and certainly more salient – than the medical issues involved with biologically based classifications of race is the way that such identification has been used to privilege members of some races and disadvantage members of others. In the next section, we briefly consider the degree to which racial classifications have become normalized, along with the ways that assumptions about members of racial groups have been used to control power in multiple contexts.

RACE MATTERS

As noted above, if the differences used to identify racial categorizations were limited to their usefulness in medical diagnoses and treatment, it would be unlikely that entire bodies of scholarship (such as those reflected in this book) would have surfaced. To borrow a phrase from Cornel West, “race matters” because it has mattered so much in the lives of millions of people throughout the world. Far from being a harmless classification system, the concept of race has come to embody a series of assumptions that subconsciously affect our thoughts and behaviors and which have been incorporated into our social and political institutions.

In the American context, A. Leon Higginbotham has identified four essential steps that contributed to the establishment of black inferiority and white superiority in what would become the United States. It was necessary, he argued:

1 to convince white colonists that, regardless of their social or economic status, they were superior to blacks;

2 to convince blacks that they were inferior to all others;

3 to enforce the inferiority of blacks and superiority of whites in the most open and public manner; and

4 to explain the inferiority of blacks and superiority of whites by reference to Christianity.

These ideals provided the basis for a long period of legalized racial oppression and segregation (the results of which can still be observed today). Such attempts were often both bolstered and perpetuated by reliance on religion, as Higgenbotham’s fourth step reveals. From colonists’ work in preaching Christianity in Africa and the Americas to the United States based white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan, Higgenbotham’s first two steps were achieved, in part, by interpreting references to lightness and darkness (not to mention slavery) in the Bible as relating to skin tone. The public acknowledgement of such differences (Higgenbotham’s third step) serves to legitimize the attitudes and create an aura of inevitability about race-based segregation and white supremacy.

Further, James Horton argues that the race-based separation during the colonial period, which provided the philosophical justification for slavery, was economically opportunistic, not simply rooted in beliefs about the superiority of whites. Africans could be embraced by the colonists as a source of free labor because of the inherent belief that they were inferior but, implicit in those racial distinctions, was the fact that they had different physical features from Europeans and, thus, were easily distinguishable if they tried to escape. In this way, the moral distinctions between races combine with the prospect of economic success such that the interaction of these ideas was more powerful than either on its own. Slavery in the American context is an example of the way that conceptualizing race based on biology can serve as a justification for, as well as a perpetuation of, deeply held assumptions and expectations that are deemed to be consistent with the categorization. In this way, we can understand racism as a related construct that emerged from such attempts to classify.

Classifications, however, must be constructed. It is important to be attentive to the process by which a group is “racialized,” or assigned a label of race (by those in a dominant position). Members of groups with access to power have the privilege of determining labels. It is not uncommon, for instance, for whites to tacitly assume that they are race neutral and that only those who are members of racial (power) minority groups have a race. Put another way, merely mentioning “race” almost always immediately calls to mind members of racial minority groups, not whites. This unstated reference point of whiteness and the subsequent racialization that occurs has effects that reach far beyond an individual’s resentments or even hatred for members of another racial group.

RACISM

The emergence of the concept of race and the realization that it could be used to distinguish groups from each other has led to the presence of racism, which is the imposition of political, social, and economic power, as justified by racial categorizations. Because race was used as a means to distinguish between, and ultimately separate, groups of people in a way that would preserve power for the dominant group, a discussion about the concept of race is inherently couched in the struggle for preservation of power on the one hand and the struggle to gain equality on the other. In Black power, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton define racism as the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over it.

One of the most vivid examples of racist action occurred in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. German leader Adolf Hitler, driven by the precept of Aryan superiority, took the position that Aryans were a superior race – the chosen people. In 1933, Hitler’s Nazi Party issued a degree that sought to legally classify citizens as Aryan or non-Aryan and, in the context of economic hardship, those of Jewish descent provided a convenient scapegoat for society’s troubles. Jews were identified as the enemy –“the other”– and that distinction served as justification for them being denied access to land and power, beginning in the 1930s, and, ultimately, to their imprisonment and mass murder in the 1940s.

More recently, the system of apartheid in South Africa comprised a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party Government between 1948 and 1994. Although whites were the overwhelming numerical minority in the colonized nation, they controlled virtually all meaningful access to power. Now that blacks have access to the levers of power in South Africa, all is not settled. Besides that hostility and resentment that follows decades of race-based oppression, the residual disadvantage that black South Africans face after generations of being denied access to education and wealth and th...