Race in North America

Origin and Evolution of a Worldview

Audrey Smedley, Brian D. Smedley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367097462
• eBook ISBN: 9780429974410
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This sweeping work traces the idea of race for more than three centuries to show that 'race' is not a product of science but a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Updated throughout, the fourth edition of this renowned text includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and its implications for the meaning of race in America and the future of our racial ideology.

CHAPTER 1

Some Theoretical Considerations

This work presents an anthropological perspective on history, one that seeks the interconnections among cultural features and events over time and the ideologies that humans use to embrace their cultural developments, to explain present-day realities. It is an analytic study and should not be read as conventional history.

The theoretical premises and assumptions of this volume are outlined in this chapter. I hold that there is indeed a meaning to the term race, but it is not to be found in the physical features of differing human populations, and it does not rest in the lists of taxa of biological scientists. Rather than looking inward for some esoteric genesis, we must peel away the intricate layers of Western cultural history and look at the material conditions, cultural and naturalistic knowledge, motivations and objectives, and levels of consciousness and comprehension of those who first imposed the classifications of race on the human community. It is important that we understand race as its meaning unfolded in the cognitive world of its creators and first formulators, in part because subsequent formulations have been so ambiguous and elusive. A major goal of this book is to help eliminate some of the existing confusion about the concept and to analytically examine its constituent elements.

In this chapter I first offer a historical perspective that is now held by many scholars, who see race as a sociocultural phenomenon that appeared only within the past several hundred years. Next I explain the theoretical context in which it is useful to conceptualize, define, and analyze the components of race. Race is treated as a reality whose ingredients can be ascertained through historical and social analysis. It is not a unitary phenomenon, but rather a synthesis of a number of identifiable elements that, bound together, constitute a particular way of viewing human differences. I then briefly describe the social reality of race in North American culture, emphasizing what I think are often unacknowledged realities, and show how one derives the analytic components of race ideology from the social behavior of different categories or groups of people in the United States.

Because the vast majority of people equate visible physical variations with race, I next address this relationship. To comprehend the real meaning and nature of race in American society, it is necessary and essential to distinguish naturally occurring physical diversity in the human species from culturally based perceptions and interpretations of this diversity; that is, we must separate in our minds variations in skin color, hair texture, body size and shape, eye formation, and so forth from prevailing cultural attitudes and beliefs about people with these different physical features. The cognitive leap that this requires is not easy, but I have found that as students learn accurate information about both of these realities, most experience an epiphany, a jolt of sudden awakening and understanding that surprises them.

The position taken here is not without its detractors, and a stream of scholars in the biological and social sciences have argued that the human perception of phenotypic differences as race is universal. I therefore present the arguments and a brief critique of the “primordialists,” those who would preserve the term race for what we might call psychosocial reasons, not necessarily related to the evidence and arguments of contemporary biologists. The next section offers the theoretical perspective of this book, defining race as a worldview and specifying its minimal basic components. Undergraduate students sometimes find this material a bit daunting. However, as they read into the history, ideas that at first seem abstract and incomprehensible often become very real, and many find it clarifying to re-read this first chapter.

Finally, I differentiate race from ethnicity, a concept that has too often served to complicate the more general and profound issues of accounting for variability in both biology and behavior. Throughout history, ethnocentric portrayals of other peoples in the written literature have often denigrated the “alien others.” If the alien others were physically different, this sometimes led to negative and derogatory statements about those physical features. But negative comments, pejorative descriptions, and even associations of such people with animals are not the same as the phenomenon that we call race in American society. Negative aesthetic judgments of both negroid-looking and paleskinned people can be found in some ancient literature, and our immediate reaction is to consider them racist. But the institutionalized foundations for racism require much more than that.

The approach of this book has been inspired in part by studies in the sociology of knowledge and the history of ideas. Concepts such as race can appropriately be conceived as a composite of elements, each of which may have had certain distinct functions or cultural meanings in earlier times. These elements, such as the idea of human inequality, had their origins in historical circumstances and do not alone constitute the meaning of race. When the beliefs and attitudes were conjoined and gave rise to a new perspective on human beings, which I call the racial worldview, the term race became a shorthand method of expressing this new synthesis.

Many other concepts are open to the same sort of exploration, whereby one can separate out specific components. Concepts such as democracy, fundamentalism, evolutionism, and socialism represent widespread and diffuse ideas that have become integrated into a systematic body of knowledge and thought, ways of looking at things, and understandings that constitute part of our cultural repertoire. Such terms thus become shorthand methods of expressing a particular worldview. Race is a shorthand term for, as well as a symbol of, a “knowledge system,” a way of knowing, perceiving, and interpreting the world, and of rationalizing its contents (in this case, other human beings) in terms that are derived from previous cultural-historical experience and reflect contemporary social values, relationships, and conditions. Every culture has its own ways of perceiving the world; race is the kaleidoscope through which Americans have been conditioned to view other human beings. But the concept itself and its substantive meanings are clearly not confined to Americans.

RACE AS A MODERN IDEA

It is significant that many contemporary scholars have concluded that race is a relatively recent concept in human history. The cultural structuring of a racial worldview coincides with the colonial expansion of certain western European nations during the past five centuries, their encountering of populations very different from themselves, and the creation of a unique form of slavery.¹ Expansion, conquest, exploitation, and enslavement have characterized much of human history over the past five thousand years or so, but before the modern era, none of these events resulted in the development of ideologies or social systems based on race. Dante Puzzo put it explicitly: “Racism … is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist” (1964, 579). Though referring only to the West, this view unambiguously challenges the claim that race classifications and ideologies were or are universal or have deep historical roots.

In one of the most recent publications on the history of the idea of race, Ivan Hannaford states: “In the sixteenth century dynastic ambitions and religious issues were of such great consequence that there was little room for the growth of a conscious idea of race as we understand it today” (1996, 182). He identifies the first stage in the development of race as taking place between 1684 and 1815, with two other stages occurring during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (187). Although he derives most of his data from the works of a wide range of philosophers and early scientists, his time frame coincides with that of Theodore Allen (1994, 1997) and other writers who examine material, economic, political, and social conditions for their explanations of the emergence of race. This is the context in which I also have investigated the causal factors for the rise of such an extraordinary view of humankind.

During the age of exploration and European expansion, rising competitiveness among the European nations and consciousness of their power to dominate others affected the way Europeans perceived indigenous peoples; these elements were factored early into their methods of dealing with all aliens. Race as a mode of describing and categorizing human beings appeared in the languages of the Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, French, Germans, Dutch, and English as these groups established colonial empires in the New World and Asia and set about dealing with their heterogeneous populations. However, conceptions of and references to race varied greatly among the colonizing powers. The English in North America developed the most rigid and exclusionist form of race ideology, and it is on this racial worldview that this book focuses.

Reviewing this history helps to make us aware of certain facts that, for the most part, have often escaped analysis. The peoples of the conquered areas of the New World, and the other “colored” peoples of what is now called the Third World, did not participate in the invention of race or in the compilation of racial classifications imposed upon them and others. To the extent that these peoples utilize the idiom today and operate within its strictures, they have inherited and acquiesced in the system of racial divisions created for them by the dominant Europeans (Banton 1977). As a paradigm for portraying the social reality of inequality, the racial worldview has spread around the globe, and its use often exacerbates already existing interethnic animosities (Barzun 1965). Some of this development is discussed in later chapters.

Accepting the fact that race is a cultural construct invented by human beings, it is easy to understand that it emerged out of a set of definable historical circumstances and is thus amenable to analysis, as are other elements of culture. No amount of comparative definition and synchronic exploration of modern race relations will lead us to more refined definitions and understandings of race. On the contrary, race is a complex of elements whose significance and meanings lie in the historical settings in which attitudes and values were first formed. We should be able to isolate the central components, investigate their probable genesis, and comprehend how they evolved over time.

This approach is different from that of scholars who have written about the history of the idea of race in the past. Louis Snyder, Earl Count, Thomas Gossett, and others have documented the various definitions of races and the numerous classifications that early taxonomists invented. Historians such as Gossett, John Hope Franklin, John Haller, Gary Nash, Winthrop Jordan, David Brion Davis, C. Vann Woodward, Carter G. Woodson, Eugene Genovese, Robert Berkhofer, Roy Pearce, and George Fredrickson, as well as many other experts on slavery and race in the New World, have explored the attitudes of Europeans in the Americas toward peoples whom they identified as racially different from themselves. My concern in this volume is not to repeat these well-known studies, but to specify and analyze the ideological ingredients of which the idea of race itself was composed and identify the cultural contexts that nourished those ingredients.

IDEAS, IDEOLOGIES, AND WORLDVIEWS

By exploring the probable origin and history of the idea of race, dissecting it into its component elements, and attempting to relate these to their sociohistorical contexts, I am not reifying the concept or elevating ideas into a realm of absolute autonomy. Ideas should not be viewed as prime movers of the cultural process, nor should they be considered mere secondary phenomena of cultural developments in other arenas. Ideas are critical, necessary aspects of culture that may vary in strength and form of expression over time and space, but they invariably meet some cultural need or advance the interests of those who hold them. From this perspective, ideas cannot even be interpreted or analyzed apart from their cultural matrices. They arise out of specific material and social circumstances and are constituted of individual and group perceptions, understandings, and decisions made by human beings who inevitably have an imperfect comprehension of the complexity of the situations that confront them. The human animal has the capacity to come to conclusions and make decisions out of self-interest, devotion to some abstract principle, or his or her perception of the larger interests of the group, however defined. Multiple individual decisions may well accumulate and become entrenched as cultural orientations that persist through time and space.

As such decisions become incremental parts of the cultural order, they reflect specific understandings of the world and its environmental and social realities. They provide explanations for, and often a means of controlling, social and natural forces. As their usefulness is realized, they become established as givens, as worldviews or ideologies; thus institutionalized, they feed back into human thought and actions. By worldview I mean a culturally structured, systematic way of looking at, perceiving, and interpreting various world realities, a society’s weltanschauung, to use a term made popular in sociological studies. Once established and conventionalized, worldviews become enthroned in individuals as mind-sets. They may even achieve the state of involuntary cognitive processes, actively if not consciously molding the behavior of their bearers.

I define race as such a worldview. In the United States, Australia, South Africa, and many other areas of the world, race is a cosmological ordering system that divides the world’s peoples into what are thought to be biologically discrete and exclusive groups. The racial worldview holds that these groups are by nature unequal and can be ranked along a gradient of superiority–inferiority. My use of the term worldview depicts the deep-seated nature of this essentially folk vision of the human species and the often unconscious processes of perception or imagery that it generates. Worldview also contains and reflects a variety of folk beliefs about human differences that in the United States we see as stereotypes of various populations. Because these are cultural beliefs to which we Americans are all more or less conditioned, their truth or falsity is rarely questioned. In this volume I call them ideologies.

Race as a worldview can be understood as composed of specific ideological components. By ideologies I mean sets of beliefs, values, and assumptions, held on faith alone and generally unrelated to empirical facts, that act as guidelines or prescriptions for individual and group behavior. Substantive beliefs about human differences tend to vary in time and space, depending on the values, histories, and experiences of the colonizing powers. We can use the terms worldview and ideology interchangeably, with the recognition that there is a high level of correspondence between them. I tend to think of a worldview as a more systematic and comprehensive set of ideological beliefs that have an integral relationship to one another. When I speak of the concept of race, I am referring to the fundamental worldview, including its basic ideological components and all of the adhesions that each culture may add to it. The ideological elements in this worldview can be confirmed by empirical research. Where necessary, varying ideologies within societies can be compared for their similarities and differences, as some historians do, for example, for North and South America or for the United States and South Africa.

Some worldviews are highly flexible and generalizable, capable of being diffused to and adopted by other societies. Their adaptability and usefulness must be perceived by other culture bearers, who may modify the components to fit their own group’s needs, fears, beliefs, biases, ambitions, and goals. The ideological components of race have been eminently adaptable to a wide variety of sociopolitical situations, as this history reveals.

THE SOCIAL REALITY OF RACE IN AMERICA

There is a kind of intellectual or cognitive paradox posed by some contemporary scientists’ abandoning use of the term race, while in most Western cultures, South Africa, and much of the rest of the world, it is taken for granted as part of folk belief that everyone belongs to a race. If modern science has not been able to produce studies that can confirm the reality of race; if indeed some scientists are increasingly arguing that races do not exist, then it can be legitimately asked: How can public attitudes and understandings retain the notion of their verity and the belief that science has proved their reality?

I think the facts will show that among the general public, the fundamental belief that races exist is unaffected by contradictions or inconsistencies. We do not discard the basic patterns of thought or question the need for racial classifications when we are faced with great variation and complexity in physical traits and ambiguous realities and uncertainties about the racial identity of an individual or group. There are important reasons for the deeply ingrained sense of racial reality that we inherit as part of our cultural baggage. As I show in the following chapters, race is the major mode of social differentiation in American society; it cuts across and takes priority over social class, education, occupation, gender, age, religion, culture (ethnicity), and other differences. It is essential, then, to understand race as a sociocultural reality independent of the history and uses of the concept in science and distinct from whether or not scientists can agree on a common biological definition. In this sense, race is a social principle by which society allocates desired rewards and status. It belongs, as Joel Kovel has argued, to “the regulative aspects of our culture” (1970, 26) and is intricately involved in all relations of power.

For some scientists to deny the existence or reality of biophysical races seems to challenge, perhaps inadvertently, one of the most powerful, deeply entrenched canons of Western thought and belief. The “no-races” position calls into question fundamental truisms that have been accepted for more than two centuries. For most people, race is a given, a biological reality that does not require great leaps of consciousness or intellect to comprehend. They see it (or so they believe) in the phenotypic variability experienced in interactions with heterogeneous populations like those in the New World. Moreover, even those scientists who have taken the no-races position are very much aware of the social reality of race in Western societies. Even as they deny its existence, they cannot avoid it.

There is, then, a great disjunction between the no-races position of modern scientists on the matter of biological races and the social parameters of race by which we conduct our lives and structure our institutions. Experts in many fields who have g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
• Introduction
• 1. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 2. The Etymology of the Term Race in the English Language
• 3. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview
• 4. The Growth of the English Ideology About Human Differences in America
• 5. The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery
• 6. Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude
• 7. Eighteenth-Century Thought and the Crystallization of the Ideology of Race
• 8. Antislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial Worldview
• 9. The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism
• 10. Growth of the Racial Worldview in Nineteenth-Century America
• 11. Science and the Expansion of Race Ideology Beyond the United States
• 12. Twentieth-Century Developments in Race Ideology
• 13. Changing Perspectives on Human Variation in Science
• 14. Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: Transformations of an Ideology
• 15. The Health and Other Consequences of the Racial Worldview
• REFERENCES
• INDEX