Who Do We Think We Are?

Race and Nation in the Modern World

Philip Yale Nicholson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780765603913
• eBook ISBN: 9781317452058
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This text offers a provocative explanation of the force and place of race in modern history, showing that race and nation have a linked history. The author seeks to show the close historical connection of race and nation as each interrelates with the other in shaping and carrying social and institutional practices over many centuries.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The mass media have a natural commercial interest in focusing public attention on catastrophes that are current or potential. Hurricane warnings, plane wrecks, and fires are always at the top of the news. Epidemics, famine, and war attract the same concentrated focus of public interest. When these dramatic phenomena pass from immediacy, some of them become the subject matter for scholars or experts to pick over and explain. The findings of these scholars sometimes help to provide closure, but some catastrophes defy the routine. They will not go away, and they are not satisfactorily explained.

The destructive power of racial mythology has been the most deadly human phenomenon in the modern age; it is another horseman of apocalyptic dimension. Racial mythology is no less virulent now than it was a hundred years ago when Mark Twain wrote King Leopold’s Soliloquy to condemn the Belgian government’s extermination policies against an African colonial population. In his satirical essay “To a Person Sitting in Darkness,” Twain similarly pierced the allegedly benevolent policy of the United States toward civilians in pursuit of American goals in the Philippine Islands. Professor John Dower, a Stanford University specialist on East Asian and Japanese history, has estimated that of the more than 55 million fatalities in the course of World War II, most were civilians who perished after the outcome was certain, and whose loss was justified or deliberately carried out under officially sanctioned, national vilification policies built on racial, cultural, or ethnic mythologies.¹ Today, in North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Far East, nations regulate and control the residential practices of their populations and define or limit their legal and political rights based on racial mythologies that have been condemned by biological and anthropological science as worthless and by most human rights advocates in and outside the United Nations as in defiance of all their basic codes.² People struggling to establish new nations in the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the contested remnants of old colonial empires rely on these same discredited beliefs to sustain murderous assaults on their neighbors.

The scale of suffering, of human agonies unimaginably vast, makes the subject an emotional powerhouse. Language itself is a hotly contested terrain. Are American citizens of African descent Negroes, people of color, black, African Americans, or what? Why is any such term needed? The term Holocaust, for all its dramatic grandeur, is probably too small to capture the enormity of the events it seeks to encompass. Perhaps human consciousness itself rejects emotional information that would be too maddening to absorb fully.

The topic of racism is never casual in everyday conversation. A newspaper reports that in Austria today many quite ordinary citizens suffer a physical revulsion at the thought of touching the hand of a Jew. The same intensity of feeling affects the victims of racism and those who empathize with their plight. In Germany, the United States, and Japan, fifty-year-old emotional debates and legal battles take place over national war reparations, guilt, responsibility, and the origin of racially based destructive decisions against their own or foreign populations during World War II. Hundreds of millions of people have sharply etched living memories of personal horrifying losses, lynchings, assaults. More still experience everyday insults, slights, and abuses, legal barriers, and economic injustices as a consequence of racial categorization.

Never far beneath the surface, racially divisive issues and emotions are as ubiquitous in the United States today as they were when the Kemer Commission released its famous warning in 1968 that the country was becoming dangerously divided into two unequal nations, one white and one black. In spite of massive executive, judicial, and legislative government intervention since then, little has changed what has turned out to be more of a prophecy in the commission’s report than a prescription for remediation. The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation issued a report to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the Kemer Commission report. The study, “The Millennium Breach,” found that “the racial divide in the United States has not only materialized (as predicted in 1968), it’s getting wider” (New York Times, March 1, 1998, p. A25). Legally enforced segregation in the United States according to race, or jim crowism, is gone from public life. That was a mighty achievement. Nonetheless, during the final three decades of this century increased racial ghettoization, impoverishment, and imprisonment have not been offset by the modest and sometimes questionable gains of affirmative action programs, school busing, and the creation of political “minority districts.” Race plays no less a powerful part in the social and political life of the United States today than it ever did. In most of contemporary Western Europe, immigration from the colonial periphery has brought renewed passion to old racial modes of thinking.³ When the economic pie shrinks or grows inequitably, racism comes into the political foreground. In Ireland, Israel, South Africa, Australia, and throughout formerly colonized Africa and Asia, forceful reminders of old racial wounds refuse to heal, and new battles are still being fought over racially contested national issues.

In spite of the pervasiveness of race throughout the modern history of nations, too little attention has been given to its foundations or causes. To understand these limitations requires a brief overview of how race was regarded during most of this period. From about the 1750s to the 1940s, informed thinking about race and racism went through a period of established scientific legitimacy. Enlightened empiricism upheld racial categories of human differentiation. Criticism of slavery, including the stridency of most abolitionists, did not typically decry racism. Antiracist arguments came principally from victims or from those few who spoke or wrote on their behalf. Benjamin Baneker, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and W.E.B. Du Bois were occasionally joined by some Quakers or extraordinary individuals. For more than two centuries, high scholarship provided little support for the creation of a nonracially conscious human society in the United States or elsewhere in the world of enslaved or colonized populations.

In the United States the great historical works on slavery by Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), presented a benign portrait of that institution, and no critical analysis whatsoever of racism. It was the colonialists’ and slaveowners’ commonplace view that their stem control was a necessity for bringing the blessings of Christianity or civilization to backward people, the “white man’s burden.” Professional historians were not far ahead of (or behind) their dominant cultures’ sentiment on race. While usually deploring brutality, historians rarely condemned the segregationist policies enforced by federal and state agencies in the United States or the racial practices of colonial powers in their far-reaching domains. Journalistic, humanitarian, religious, or radical-left critics of racial inequities found few allies in government or the academy. President Woodrow Wilson’s expansion of racial segregation of government agencies after 1913 aroused almost no intellectual outcry or popular protest. The complex and elaborate system of apartheid was established in South Africa after the racial depredations of World War II, in the midst of Nazi war-crimes trials, and coincidental with the condemnation by the newly formed United Nations of its racially theoretical underpinnings. The historical profession, like most, was not nearly as democratically accessible as it later became. The conservative cultural and class bias of nearly all pre-1940 American scholarship, and a great deal that followed, contributed to a distinct lack of critical concern about the conditions prevailing among the poorest Americans, particularly those in the rural South, and no critical examination of the idea of race.

Not everyone had accepted the prevailing outlook over these centuries. John Stuart Mill’s humanism, not scientific evidence, prompted the following observation on the racism of the nineteenth century: “Of all the vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effects of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.”⁴ But it was not until Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon’s book, We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems (1936), followed soon after by Ashley Montagu’s famous lecture, “The Meaninglessness of the Anthropological Conception of Race,” presented to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago, April 1941, and then Montagu’s brilliantly titled book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942), that the debate among social scientists was dramatically changed. The concept of race itself was now deemed bogus. There was no genetic evidence to support it, and, as Montagu argued a few years later, it would be “better if the term ‘race’ were altogether abandoned.”⁵ Biological science gave up the term first. A Dictionary of Biology (1951), while continuing to define species and subspecies, for the first time never mentions the word “race” anywhere.⁶

Though delegitimized by science, for most people racism remains an acceptable pseudo science, a rationale for the irrational, an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable. No established religious institution condones racism, yet none has been able to confront or counteract successfully its ethical and moral consequences in the modern era. Which church, mosque, or synagogue has excommunicated a racist? Too often, religious leaders seem acquiescent to, or complicit with, its offenses. In the age of private property rights, racism has allowed the expropriation of land, labor, and resources that would otherwise seem arbitrary and irrational. Modernity places an emphasis on individualism and individual rights, yet racism assumes and imposes collective human categories. Governments continue to make racial boundaries and distinctions by statute. Courts reaffirm racial divisions by creating categories of “protected” persons or groups, by granting immunities (in South Africa) based on political assumptions. Political decisions are made (and unmade) to establish racially defined “minority” voting districts. Banks, police departments, prison authorities, and insurance companies routinely employ racial categories in policies and practices. Murderous struggles for national civil power are racially genocidal current events. Many otherwise intelligent people shrug as they maintain that racism is simply a part of human nature, fear of the stranger, an expression of natural alienation from the Other. Unfortunately, the same pseudo-scientific reasoning is still found in much of the writing and serious thinking about race. Racism, the notion of innate biologically determined human differences, continues to find empirical defenders in spite of the overwhelming scientific evidence against it. Criticism of racism has been primarily moralistic or even economistic: it is wrong, and it doesn’t pay. Then why, we must ask, does it hang on with such virulence or reemerge from the cultural cellar so fiercely?

This book is devoted to seeking the answer to this question. My answer is based on four related themes. The first of these is that race and nation are interrelated phenomena. Most historians regard the emergence of the expansionist Western nation-state in about 1500 as the beginning of a new era, the modern era. Few have thought about racism as an interrelated, defining part of that same era. In spite of the dangers inherent in any “grand narrative,” a more accurate perspective than the one we have about race and nation will be realized only by looking at the big historical picture. The most important limitation of most studies on the issue of race is their extremely narrow focus. It is a problem typically depicted in the isolation of a single national experience, such as Hitler’s Germany, South African apartheid, or jim crowism in the United States. My contention is that race is not simply a peculiarity of certain nations; it is a phenomenon of expansive nations and the emotional borderlines set by the laws that define and constitute nations. People were turned into races when nations extended and defined their political hegemony through conquest and expropriation. Race and nation were bom and raised together; they are the Siamese twins of modernity.

The second theme is the place of territorial conquest or colonialism in the formation of national identity. The nation-state makes an innovative kind of war, neither traditionally religious and feudal nor dynastically imperial. The war-making nation in the modern world generates powerful emotional ties to its secular power centers. National and racial pride is linked to conquest by loyalty to coercive military authorities on the frontiers of an expanding state. Racism legitimizes not only external wars of conquest but also internal wars of conquest or extraordinary forms of expropriation by the same national authorities, though usually in different uniforms. Like war, and often as part of war, racism legitimizes confiscatory and exploitative practices beyond the scope of existing national laws. Slavery and mass murder are among the most obvious examples of national law legitimized by racism in peace and war. Religious institutions and authorities have not fared well, for the most part, on the issue of race because of their modernist dependency on and relationship with the authority of the nation-state. At times, religious authorities have been able to temper the abuse of subject populations by military powers; for example, in the early semifeudal phases of the Spanish and Portuguese overseas empires. As religious authorities gave up their temporal power, however, they either lent their support to the nation and enjoyed its protection or suffered its wrath.

The third theme is the process of vilification of the victim. In almost every account of the first meeting of two historically unconnected people, Henry Hudson and the Canarsies or Europeans in the South Pacific, for example, we find no opprobrious or defamatory descriptions. Often the native people are described as wondrous, exotic creatures. Conflict is not part of these first encounters. Only after the expropriations of land, labor, or other forms of wealth and the conflict that followed were derisive terms applied to those who were forced to give up what they had. Material expropriation yields human degradation among its practitioners. What is taken by coercion requires rational explanation. This is not to say that prejudicial dislikes or xenophobic suspicions about cultural or ethnic differences cannot exist outside national frameworks or exploitation. But it is the nation–state that turns such sentiments into racism with legally enforced and institutionally encoded national practices of expropriation, coercion, displacement, and death of the formally vilified people.

The fourth theme is the dialectical relationship between those who are racially vilified and those doing the vilifying. Prevailing national sentiments about virtue and vice become racial divisions. Notions of purity require concrete examples of that which is impure. Sexual fear and anxiety are typically projected. The conquered are endowed with the imagined negative behavioral fantasies of their oppressor. Those who become acculturated and accept the codes, laws, and institutionalized practices must adapt to the odd behavioral dichotomies on both sides of the line. Malcolm X often condemned racism not only for treating people as if they were inferior but also for making so many of them truly believe they were. A peculiar duality or divided identity has been described by many, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who called it a “double consciousness”; this is the outlook of those who achieved the cultural standards of the dominant society but still experience the stigma of racial vilification. On the one hand, they reach or exceed the norms set for respect and inclusion into the national culture; on the other hand, aspects of who they are, their full identity, remain either invisible or negated. Those who construct the racial dichotomy and enjoy its benefits deceive themselves as well by assuming a smug though false superiority or an erroneous belief in their racial purity. Sometimes, those who have been racially vilified have been said to possess unusual talents or abilities, intellectual or physical. Jews were maligned for being too clever, others for their imagined extraordinary sexual prowess or physical strength. These fantastic attributes and deficiencies emerge from the emotions and psyche of the oppressor. The racinated (those turned into a race against their will) are described as impure, as lacking civilization, and consequently they are introduced to things like water torture, plantation slavery, or genocide. Similarly, they are permitted to participate freely only in those practices and occupations that reinforce the prevailing racial sentiments.

Within the several broad historical periods I examine in this volume, different nations emerge and stand out for a time as prominent and as innovators. They take the lead in the development of national institutional codes and practices that others adopt and modify. Hence, the narrative follows shifts in those centers of authority where innovation and leadership are preeminent. The discussion begins with an examination of ancient and medieval manifestations of social and cultural division. Early in this study, the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch are my main focus of attention. They were the innovators in exploration and conquest. Later, my attention shifts toward Great Britain, the United States, and the European nations. Finally, the United States becomes the center of the discussion. This is a story of the interrelationship and interdependency of race and nation, not a complete portrait of one or the other. Both are the artifices of modern mythology. Both undergo change and development consistent with dominant institutions and beliefs through the various historical periods. Hence, the chapters are formed to coincide with prevalent themes and place emphasis on preeminent nations. The chapters are built around large historical epochs in which the four themes or hypotheses are elaborated in terms of well-known events and developments.

Chapter 2 looks at human society over the long era before there were any nation-states. We find many forms of social organization among preliterate, ancient, classical, and medieval societies. Human groups have created a wide range of structures from nomadic clan-type formations to elaborate dynastic empires, with much in between. Murderous rampages and brutal wars of conquest certainly existed before the emergence of the modern nation-state system, which took place after about 1500. The chapter seeks answers to the following questions: Were very early human societies racist? Why is there confusion and so much conflict about group distinctions and skin hue in ancient Egypt or India? What, if anything, did Alexander the Great think or do about race? How were cultural distinctions and prejudices a part of early human history? In all the great civilizations in Asia, Africa, and every part of the world there were outsiders, foreigners, and cultural subdivisions now commonly called ethnic groups. Were there racial laws, codes, and beliefs? How were differences in skin hue, physiognomy, and culture accommodated or rejected prior to the secular laws and institutional practices of the modern Western state? A large part of the rest of this book depends on the answers to these questions.

The concept of the nation, of a people unified by certain common adherence to the authorities and boundaries of law, language, geography, or politics external to traditional feudal or universal religious controls, begins in the Western world around 1500. The state came first, before the nation, as a secular administrative structure that facilitated and gave legitimacy to the trading cities that generated their prosperity outside the feudal commune of the Middle Ages. These city-states were antecedent to the nation-state. Chapter 3 explores the correlation between the new nation-states and the emerging concept of race as the Europeans defined their national borders and themselves as distinct from one another. These distinctions emerged in treaties made among themselves in war, and in their colonial conquests of foreign populations abroad. National laws, like the Poor Laws in England, defined and described the political status and the rights of internal populations as colonial laws and codes described conquered peoples. National borders were made in treaties among relative equals; racial boundaries differentiated the conqueror from the conquered. Explorers preceded their national armies and navies and established friendly initial contacts with almost every human group they encountered without regard to either the culture or appearance of those they met. Conquest and subsequent imperial administration brought into place the new laws that defined colonial boundaries claimed by one nation-state over its rivals, and laws within the colonial territory that set apart the conquered from their conquerors. Race and nation were made together in secul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. No Nations, No Races: Premodern Formations of Authority and Cultural Identity
• 3. The European Discovery of Race and Nation, 1500-1650
• 4. The Colors of Gold: Mercantile Empires, Great Nations, Reason and Racism, 1650-1800
• 5. To the Ends of the Earth: Racism and Nationalism Rampant, 1800-1917
• 6. No Holds Barred: Race and Nation, 1918-45
• 7. Cold War Watershed, 1946-90
• 8. Epilogue: Dusk and Dawn, 1991—2000
• Notes
• Bibiliography
• Index