African Images

Racism and the End of Anthropology

Peter Rigby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859731024
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180657
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This controversial book is an impassioned African response to the racial stereotyping of African people and people of African descent by prominent white scholars. It highlights how the media contributes to the growth of racist ideas, particularly in reporting current events in Africa, and demonstrates how some of America's most revered intellectuals cloak racist ideologies in ostensibly egalitarian discourses. The author seeks to rewrite the image of 'race' in order to show the damage racism can cause serious scholarship.

PART ONE

Of Niam-Niams, Troglodytes, and Unicorns

In 1851, a Frenchman called Francis de Castelnau published a book in which he claimed scientific evidence that there was a “tribe” in central Africa called “Niam-Niam” who had tails, and whose sole piece of furniture consisted of wooden benches with a hole in them to accommodate the tail (Cohen 1980:242; Miller 1985:3–4). This “evidence” was soon to be confirmed by another French gentleman, Louis Du Couret, who not only claimed to have traveled in the country of the Niam-Niams, but also provided an “eye-witness” picture of a Niam-Niam with his tail (Du Couret 1854). Du Couret was later exposed as a total charlatan; but this appellation should as well apply to Castelnau and his scientific colleagues in the Société de géographie de Paris, the Académie des sciences, and the Société orientale, for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us that a charlatan is “an empiric who claims to possess wonderful secrets” as well as “an assuming empty pretender to knowledge or skill; a pretentious impostor.” The Bulletin de la société de géographie even published an article by de Castelnau entitled “Sur les Niam-Niam ou hommes queues,” also in 1851.

Castelnau’s evidence, prior to Du Couret’s “eye-witness account,” was based upon. reports attributed to “Negroes of the Sudan.” This attribution was convenient for the distinguished academicians of Paris for, when this evidence was shown to be completely false, it could be blamed upon the “Negroes of the Sudan.” Indeed, many years later, social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard noted (1958:98) that the term Niam-Niam was sometimes used to describe the Azande people of southern Sudan and Zaire, and he comments, “The term ‘Niam-Niam,’ a foreign, perhaps Dinka, designation, is best avoided as it has been used by Arabs and Europeans without much discrimination to refer not only to both Azande and their subject-peoples but also to almost any people in the area under consideration. It was for some of them a very confused representation – cannibals, men with tails, etc.” (my emphasis; cf. Bovin 1972:64–5).

This displacement (projection?) on to Africans of categorical terms propagated by Europeans (and Arabs) one hundred years before Evans-Pritchard’s own gloss was repeated endlessly by European commentators on Africa; further examples are examined in Part II of this book. Here I must turn to definitions of the other mythical entities in the title of this section that have at times fired the European imagination.

A troglodyte, as every Westerner knows, is “one of various races or tribes of men … inhabiting caves or dens,” as well as “anthropoid apes of the genus Troglodytes, as a gorilla or chimpanzee” (OED: my emphasis). Niam-Niams were, then, most likely troglodytes who, perhaps, hunted, or tried to domesticate, the unicorn. This animal, we learn from our trusty OED, is “a fabulous and legendary animal usually regarded as having the body of a horse with a single horn projecting from its forehead.” One hopes, however, that the Niam-Niam-troglodytes never themselves suffered the indignity of being too closely associated with the unicorns they pursued: for the word also designated a cuckold.

CHAPTER ONE

The “Nightmare Republic” and the “Problem of the Underclass”

In an article, published in Newsweek on 17 June 1991, and entitled “Nature and the Male Sex,” columnist George F. Will, nationally syndicated in the United States, waxed eloquent on a talk given by political scientist, James Q. Wilson. This lecture, on “Human Nature and Social Progress,” was delivered at the American Enterprise Institute, and purported to “explain” the problems posed by contemporary urban youth. His piece, as well as the almost entire corpus of James Q. Wilson’s other works, is representative of the barrage of racist prejudice and ideology, masquerading as “science” both physical (biological) and social (in this case, political), directed against “non-whites,” particularly African Americans, by prominent whites in the United States and elsewhere in Western capitalist society.

The burden of the lecture by James Q. Wilson, at least according to Will, was that science had shown that “nature blundered badly in designing males,” and hence that “socialization must contend against biology”; or, as Will prefaces his argument, “Uh oh. There is bad news on the nature-vs-nurture front.” But this, of course, does not apply to all males, for, Wilson/Will avers, “the underclass problem arises from the incomplete and increasingly difficult task of socializing some males” (my emphasis). And we do not have to wait too long to see who these “some” are: young urban African Americans, although not identified in so many words. For it is here that Wilson’s “social science” is brought into play.

We are told that the “ethic of character” embodied in nineteenth-century Victorian morality (a theme that James Wilson explores at length in a 1991 book: see below) was abandoned at a crucial moment in United States history. This moment was distinguished by two “epochal events: the great migration of Southern rural blacks to Northern cities and creation of a welfare state that made survival not dependent on work or charity … We have reproduced the historic conditions for a warrior class: separation of economic activity from family maintenance; children reared apart from fathers; wealth subject to predation; male status determined by combat and conquest.”

The reader who begins to anticipate that the latter two features of contemporary historical conditions will lead Will (or Wilson) to a disquisition on the Savings and Loan scandal and the “Gulf War” is sadly mistaken. Instead, Will informs Newsweek readers that “The problems of the underclass, particularly male joblessness and illegitimate births, have been unresponsive to social policies.” But not only that, because James Wilson says, “if mere incentives were the problem, low-income blacks would not be displaced from day labor by low-income Latinos; black-owned businesses would not be replaced by Korean-owned businesses in the same neighborhoods; low-income white women would become welfare recipients at the same rate as low-income black women; the average young black male would not be 10 times more likely to commit murder than a young white male.” So what is “the problem”?

The apparently biological determination of sex differences (“natural science”) in socialization, together with such ostensibly harmless social events as (black) population movements, conjoined in unholy intellectual matrimony to form the (unmentioned) scientific synthesis of sociobiology, not only “explains” for the Wills and Wilsons of the world the creation of an underclass in the United States, but also vitiates any recourse to socio-economic policies in solving its problems. Why this underclass has “not benefitted from our society’s generally successful strategies for habituation of human beings through the do’s and don’ts of daily life” (emphasis added) is apparently left open; but it is not really so. We do not have to go too far to uncover the insidious racism underlying James Wilson’s argument, and Will knows it.

Although Will does not say it in so many words, and J.Q. Wilson is equally circumspect in his recent book (1991), their argument about crime, illegitimacy, and economic failure in the city is based upon an extensive literature and practice of a racist pseudo-science that maintains that African Americans are genetically inferior in every way to whites and Asians. Here, the “science” of gender differentiation in socialization is not so subtly transmuted into a blatant racist dogma; elsewhere in the work of Wilson and his associates and followers, the racism is more explicit, and I return to it in considerable detail. But the immediate question is: why are the other intellectuals, particularly anthropologists, silent?

In Will’s article, Wilson is billed as president of the American Political Science Association at the time of his talk, to which distinction Mr. Will adds the accolade: “If James Q. Wilson is right, and memory runneth not to when he was not, the problem is that males are not naturally suited to civilization.” But Will is too modest in his claims on behalf of Professor Wilson’s reputation. Wilson’s recent book (1991:209) puts the matter straight, for there we learn (if we did not know it already) that he has advised four U.S. presidents on crime, drug abuse, education, and other “crises in American culture.” James Q. Wilson, “in addition to the 1981 Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime … served on the 1985–1990 President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the Commission on Presidential Scholars. He is Chairman of the Police Foundation.” Wilson was Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University for twenty-six years and then went on to be James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles; he is also chairman of the American Enterprise Institute’s Council of Academic Advisers and a Member of its Board of Trustees.

So, it might be thought scandalous to accuse so distinguished an intellectual and public figure of racism. But this would be so only if the accusation were untrue; and it is not. It might also be asked why I have spent so much time and space on the undeserving case of James Q. Wilson. In fact, I intend to spend some more of both on him, for reasons that will become clear. We will see that we do not need the Ku Klux Klan or the “bad” skinheads to tell us about the illusion of a hierarchy of “races” and their supposedly different forms of social and cultural behavior, varied propensities towards criminality and sexuality, or inferiority-superiority in “intelligence.” The job is being much more effectively done, certainly in terms of powerful influences upon the public psyche, by the respectable establishment of leading scientists, intellectuals, and public figures (see Montagu 1974) as illustrated in the Newsweek exposure already discussed.

Although a significant part of James Q. Wilson’s academic career has been devoted to furthering the cause of biologically reductionist arguments for explaining the ills (particularly crime) of contemporary United States society, these arguments are carefully arrayed in an objective style, scientific language, and sophistry. Not so those of his colleagues, who espouse the same ideology and do the basic dirty work of “research,” as we shall see. But first I must say some more on Wilson himself.

In the latest formulation of his argument, the first step is to assert that crime and criminality, while perhaps having economic links in the past, no longer have any relationship to socio-economic forces and politics in contemporary capitalist society. Here is this formulation (Wilson 1991:28):

One can perhaps put the matter … strongly: whereas in the nineteenth century property crime was linked to the business cycle, today it is not. If true, that represents a profound change in the relationship between human behavior and historical forces. Criminality has been decoupled from the economy (emphasis added).

One may be excused for showing some surprise that Wilson equates “the economy” (or at least its most important aspects) with “the business cycle,” even if it is bourgeois capitalist society he is talking about. But he wants to make it absolutely clear that he is not making a mistake. He states emphatically that, “Even the scholars who find evidence that economic factors have some effect on contemporary crime rates concede that the ‘major movements in crime rates during the last half century cannot be attributed to the business cycle’,” and to clinch this he refers to the work of Cook and Zarkin (1985) and, of course, himself and Cook (1978).

Next, we are told that the apotheosis of “civilization” is represented by the nineteenth century, presumably in Europe and the United States (although this is left unsaid), which, according to Norbert Elias (“the German sociologist”), “witnessed the full flowering of the civilizing process, that is, the acceptance of an ethos that attached great importance to the control of self-indulgent impulses.” Today, alas, “matters could scarcely be more different” (Wilson 1991:28–9, 31). This collapse of “middle-class values” allegedly began in the 1920s and, with a short recess (“time out for a depression and a war”; neither, apparently, caused by this very lapse in moral values), resumed with a vengeance in the late 1960s (Wilson 1991:31–2).

We are to believe, according to James Wilson, that all through the nineteenth century and until the 1920s, (white) Euro-Americans of all classes demonstrated the “great importance [of] the control of self-indulgent impulses.” Conveniently forgotten here, of course, is the fact that the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth were the period of the greatest Western imperialist expansion ever known, during which the colonized (“darker,” “non-white”) peoples of the world were subjected to the most horrifying and uncountable number of often capricious atrocities and uncontrolled violence by these paragons of the “control of self-indulgent impulses.” A history of these atrocities would fill a library were it to be properly told, and I mention but a handful: the slaughter of Indians during the so-called “Indian Mutiny” of 1857; the massacres of Jamaicans of African descent in the ‘Jamaican Rebellion” of 1865; and the wanton slaying of the Amazulu people in southern Africa in 1879.

The case of Haiti is also instructive, both for the racist notions generated and strengthened during the nineteenth-century and for its continuing “uses” in late twentieth-century racist discourses and foreign policy decisions in the United States and other Western countries.

Haiti became the first “Black Republic” in the western hemisphere after a historic revolution against the French-ruled plantation slave colony of Saint-Domingue, a struggle sparked by the French revolution of 1789 itself. The French were decisively expelled in 1803, and the revolution consolidated in 1804 (James 1963 [1938]). This event in itself, combined with the fact that the Haitian African slaves had triumphed over the intervention of the mighty Napoleon Bonaparte’s army and the imperialist interests of the British and the Spanish in the area, not only made Haiti the target of continual military interventions from Western capitalist countries (particularly the United States), but also became, for nineteenth-century white racists, a symbol of an African/Black “Other,” whose freedom might inspire other insurrections and revolutions by peoples of African descent in the Caribbean and the United States itself. Haiti therefore had to be incessantly attacked and misrepresented. After tricking Toussaint L’Ouverture into being arrested, the French transported him to a prison in France where, owing to brutal ill treatment, he died on 7 April 1803. The French had attempted to break the incredible bravery and fortitude of the Haitian revolutionaries by demonizing Toussaint; they failed, and the revolution, though irreparably damaged, was successful (James 1963 (1938)).

Throughout the nineteenth century and up to the present, the Western capitalist powers have tried to destroy the potential of the Haitian revolution as well as to vilify the people themselves. As James phrases it (1963 [1938]:362), “The balked greed of Bonaparte and the French bourgeoisie, their hatred of the ‘revolted slave’ who had ruined their plans, can be judged from the brutality with which they persecuted [Toussaint].”

But the real point at issue is that the racist attitudes displayed towards Haiti and Haitians by the white, Western, capitalist world from the beginning of the nineteenth century remain in force today, albeit in modified form. This “symbolic function” of Haiti as a despised Black Republic in the Western world, challenging the latter’s global supremacy, took on greater and greater importance and continues to justify cruel and racist treatment of Haitians. In his excellent study of the Haitian predicament, Paul Farmer expresses these issues as follows (Farmer 1994:226):

From the arrival of Columbus to the coup of 1991 [when Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected President Haiti had ever had, was overthrown after seven months in office], Haiti has had many uses. Some of these are obvious. Certainly, the plantations established by the French, the great extractive machines that transformed sweat and blood into sugar and gold, did little but turn chattel labor into exportable wealth … Independence changed much, but not all. The land itself, the poor who tilled it, continued to yield the same bounty, and if the profits were not as great, they were hardly shared in a more equitab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Of Niam-Niams, Troglodytes, and Unicorns
• PART II Africa Unchained: Anthropology, Ideology, and Consciousness in Contemporary Praxis
• PART III Theoretical Coda
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index