Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology

Colette Guillaumin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134869855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

First Published in 2004. This text argues that there is nothing obvious or natural about our ideas of sex and race and looks at the evolution of these ideas. The author contends that the slow crystallization of ideas on human races over the last few centuries can be grasped through the study of signs and their systems. However, race and sex are in no way purely abstract or symbolic phenomena. They are the hard facts of society. To be a man or woman, black or white are matters of social reality. To be a member of a particular race or sex does not bring with it the same opportunities, the same rights or the same constraints. The author examines how these constraints operate and shape our life experience. From a more theoretical standpoint, the text tackles the particular links between the daily materiality of social relationships and mental conventions. Materiality and ideology (in the sense of the perception of things) are two sides of the same coin. Relationships of sex and race follow an ancient history of physical right of the one over the other. Slavery and patriarchy are defined by direct physical rights which is not without its consequences.

Part I

Chapter 1

The specific characteristics of racist ideology

INTRODUCTION

Racism can be reduced neither to racist theory, nor to racist practice. Theory and practice do not cover the whole field of racism, which extends beyond conscious thought. As an ideology racism is opaque, unconscious of its own meaning.

The aim of this essay is to cast light on the specific characteristics of contemporary racist ideology. After first showing that it cannot be defined simply in terms of aggressivity, stereotyping or ‘doctrine’, we shall set out to delimit the four characteristics which give it its particular form. These characteristics are defined in relation to those which guided perceptions of race in the past, and can only be understood by comparison with them. They are as follows:

1. Race today is a ‘geneticist’ category, whereas in the past it was a legal one.
2. It is altero-referential in nature rather than auto-referential, as it used to be in the old system. In other words, racist thinking is now centred on ‘others’, instead of on the ‘self. The social groups which bear the mark of race are no longer the same as formerly. In the distant past the term ‘race’ was applicable only to ‘noble families’, whereas now it is wider social groups, in a minority or marginal situation in relation to the holders of power, who find themselves so designated.
3. Finally, the concept of race has become spatial in character, and so radically different from earlier temporal perceptions. We are now faced with a synchronic organization instead of a diachronic one.

The hypothesis that the emergence of racism can be traced to a precise point in history is hotly debated. Even if agreement were to be reached on the possibility of such a dating, the actual date chosen would remain controversial. This is primarily because the phenomenon itself has been inadequately defined. Some see it as a form of practical social behaviour, others as a doctrine, and these different views lead to divergent datings.

If we adhere to the notion of a racist ‘practice’, then the hypothesis of a possible dating is undermined by arguments so strong as to appear irrefutable: its existence from time immemorial would seem to be proven by well-known and unquestionable historical facts. The constant presence (or frequent re-appearance) of such facts throughout history does indeed tend to suggest that racism is an omnipresent and constant factor. The long history of slavery, the Greek concept of the ‘barbarian’ peoples, the status of foreigners in ancient societies, the ghettos and the status of Jews in Europe and the Arab world, the widespread tendency to reserve the attribution of human status to one’s own group (national, religious or social), are all facts. So is the feeling, from which few cultures seem exempt, that the customs of foreigners are always strange. Finally, and above all, hatred, exclusion, hostility, aggression and genocide are anything but modern phenomena. All of which contributes to a picture which seems to prove that racism has always existed.

Racism and aggressivity

That is indeed correct, as long as racism is defined solely in terms of aggressivity. But while aggressivity is often associated with racism, in our view that only happens at a secondary stage. Moreover, aggressivity is a form of behaviour which is in no way limited to situations of social alienation. Aggressivity often connotes racism, but does not denote it. It is neither a sufficient condition (aggressivity is not always racist), nor a necessary one (racism exists before overt hostility, in a certain type of relation to the other in society). To confuse racism with aggressivity is to leave out of account both the specificity which it introduces into relations between human groups, and the particular form which it gives to the use of force. Racism is a specific symbolic system operating inside the system of power relations of a particular type of society. It is a signifying system whose key characteristic is the irreversibility which it confers on such a society’s reading of reality, the crystallization of social actors and their practices into essences.¹ Aggressivity as such does not depend on the essentialization of signs which is the specific mark of racism. In the present situation (the one in which we have been living since the first half of the nineteenth century), aggressivity and racism tend increasingly often to coincide, which no doubt explains the widespread confusion between the two. Yet the link is by no means an obligatory one; racism can be, and sometimes is, benevolent and even laudatory. In the absence of any immediately explosive situation (either because power relations are so overwhelmingly unbalanced that there is no possibility of revolt on the horizon, or on the contrary because they are approximately balanced), racism remains ‘pure’, restricted to establishing the other as essentially different. Do we need reminding of the political Far Right’s fascination with the ‘Other’, be it Tibet or Nepal, Judaism, the Eternal Feminine, Islam…?² Fanatics of the esoteric and the ‘vital impulse’, browsers in the flea market of archetypes and essences, all rivet their blind gaze on such fantasy-emblems. This is a cultural phenomenon, which may or may not be accompanied by physical violence, depending on the circumstances: history may have the power to reveal what is latent, to transform ambivalence into aggressivity, but the signifying system of racism, with its notions of ‘essential nature’ and ‘biological specificity’, remains the single necessary ingredient.

Racism and stereotyping

The same is true of stereotyping, which as far as anyone can tell is as old as aggressivity and is often regarded as a specific characteristic of racism. However, we also see it being used both towards those of our own group and within other professional groups, and in general within any activity where over-simplification takes the place of knowledge. Unlike aggressivity, stereotyping is undoubtedly always associated with racism, but not with racism alone, so to that extent it cannot be regarded as an explanation of racism in its specificity.

Racism and racist doctrine

If, in line with the other current approach, racism is regarded as a doctrine and defined as the theory of the inequality of races, then there will be a large measure of agreement about its historical dating. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists and psycho-sociologists concur in situating its origin at a precise moment in the history of the West.³ That the complete theory of the inequality of races coalesced between the end of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth is a hypothesis as difficult to challenge as that which sees aggressivity as an ancient form of behaviour. Bringing together these two conceptions of racism, it is easy to conclude that it is a tendency which has existed since time immemorial, but was theorized in the West during the nineteenth century; that is certainly the position of the human sciences today.

However, that would be to leave out the ideological character of racism. Taking this into account raises the possibility of a third definition which allows its specific features to be more accurately delimited. It involves taking the analysis into a realm where behaviour patterns have not yet evolved beyond being simple mental schemata, the realm in which, well before any explicit theory (which is only the final stage in the process), the specific organization of perceptions within a given culture comes about. This ideological level covers the complete set of meanings, whether empirical or doctrinal, which direct social behaviour. At this level there is much disagreement among experts. Some set the origin of race ideology back in the twelfth century, at the end of medieval feudalism, while for others it began at the time of the first European journeys to the ‘New World’, or again in the sixteenth century with the birth of capitalism; finally, a considerable number of scholars locate its origin in the way other peoples were perceived by the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean region.⁴ To differing degrees these datings still rely on an identification of racism with aggressivity; while such approaches do privilege a certain type of relation to others, they do not distinguish it clearly from aggressivity, which remains a necessary component. Hence the privileging of conflictual periods of active aggression or doctrinal formulation. These divergent interpretations are largely due to the fact that the ideological character of racism has not been clearly defined theoretically.

The search for understanding in which we are now engaged is in fact already heavily mortgaged to the ideology of racism. Research has adopted as one of its basic concepts a notion, that of race, which itself is a specific product of racist ideology, and taken as its field of investigation the very topic in which racist theory situates the problem: aggressivity. In creating and hypostasizing race, racist ideology set up a metaphysics of relations of social heterogeneity which was adopted as it stood by everyone. However, the human sciences have now reached the point where we are starting to realize that if race is indeed real, it is so as a symbolic rather than as a concrete object. It will be granted that this is an important difference, though one which is far from having passed into scientific practice.⁵ Yet this difference opens up the possibility of analysing the meaning of the notion of race, and thereby of gaining access to the ideological core of both racist behaviour and race theory. We shall thus concentrate on the notion of race as the medium of racist ideology, attempting to describe its specificity and discover its origin in time.

HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE BIRTH OF RACE IDEOLOGY

The ideological notion of race was formed in the course of the nineteenth century in Europe. The process by which this came about was part of a wider movement, many aspects of which were then new, and cannot be seen separately from the other mental and social productions of the time; to treat race as a phenomenon closed in on itself, set apart both from other ideological developments and from its own social substrate, would be to reduce it to the status of a ‘psychological trait’ and so mask its singularity and diminish its importance.

History

These new developments took place in a society undergoing radical political and economic change. The socio-economic organization and practice of power were evolving with a rapidity accentuated by the brutal alternation of monarchic and revolutionary regimes (in France: 1789, 1792, 1798, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1852…). By 1789, the traditional governing class had been dispossessed, practically and symbolically, of political power, in favour of a class vastly more numerous than itself. The nobility, which accounted for only 2–3 per cent of the population, was supplanted by a section of the third estate—the bourgeoisie—who, after acquiring a substantial share, if not the entirety, of the economic power, would now take over political power too. Unlike the group that it replaced, which was highly conscious of being a coherent caste, it did not regard itself as an institutional group. In its own eyes, ‘the bourgeoisie [was] so far from being a class that its doors [were] open to anyone wishing either to enter, or to leave’;⁶ it saw itself not as a class, but as a sum of individuals who made up an ‘élite’ and had gained power through their own abilities.⁷ With the growth of industrialization, the third estate also produced the industrial proletariat. The urban and rural poor became the ‘industrial men’ whose consciousness of constituting a working class crystallized in the course of the nineteenth century. A large portion of the population moved in this way from a peasant existence into industry, from a subsistence to a wage economy, from a low—to a high-density living environment. Over a hundred-year period these changes affected more than a third of the population, of whom more than half were peasants; at the turn of the nineteenth century 80 per cent of the population was rural, while a century later the figure had fallen to 41 per cent.⁸ This gives a measure of the scale of the changes, economic, ecological and in type of work. In addition to these changes affecting the socio-economic conditions of the members of each class, the global economy became transformed by the growth of colonization, which from about 1830 led to the world’s being divided up among the western nations, and turned a hitherto indigenous production system into a colonial economy of the type we still have today.⁹

Associated cultural traits

The seizure of political, by way of economic, power by a class which had taken several hundred years to emerge from political non-existence, the birth of the working class, the subjugation of foreign peoples, all bore the hallmarks of individualism, the claim to equality, and nationalism, which formed the background against which the ideology of race made its appearance. These ideological characteristics have remained largely unchanged to the present day. The European nationalisms were born in the revolutionary period and served to cement the desire for popular unity;¹⁰ they embodied a new group consciousness radically different from the organization into ‘orders’ which preceded them. This period was also marked by the spread of an individualistic morality and sensibility,¹¹ which led to the definitive fragmentation of the earlier ‘societal’ identity: the social group lost its referential priority to the individual. Finally, revolutionary aspirations to equality had a profound effect.¹² The striking novelty of this ideological picture is obvious when it is compared to what went before.

These ideological changes were tied term by term to politico-economic developments. The bourgeoisie took over power, and its legitimacy was proclaimed in the doctrine of equality, from the Encyclopédie to the society of the first Revolution. At the same time, among the ruins of those theologically based bastions of community organization that were the orders, individualism was breaking out everywhere in support of an intoxicated but unsure bourgeoisie which regarded itself as a collection of individuals. Initially the fruit of economic success, individualism became an alibi for political domination once power had been acquired; from Protestant free will to the free market (liberal) economy, or the success of those best equipped to succeed, it moved from being a means of laying claim to power, to one of asserting the legitimacy of power. ‘All political power, all privileges, all prerogatives, the whole of government became enclosed and as if heaped up within the boundaries of that one class’, wrote de Tocqueville. Finally, there came into being the ‘nation’, the name given to itself by the ‘people’ as it formed itself into the quasi-caste which it had never been in the past. In a world governed by aristocrats and constrained within jealously guarded boundaries,¹³ the people, from being nothing, entirely without definition, utterly relative (X’s serf, Y’s subject, Z’s Jew…), suddenly started to invent itself, fixing its territory, its language,¹⁴ its constitution, its laws, and affirming its opposition to the hierarchs. (The same phenomenon can be seen today in the opposition of Third World nationalisms to the hierarchs of the West.) Territory, language, laws came in to fill the void left by the people’s earlier status, maintained by subjection, as subjects (a word which, by a striking linguistic paradox, actually means the state of being an object).

Finally, the theory of the inequality of races itself crystallized in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the moment of the bourgeoisie’s triumph and the birth of class consciousness among workers.¹⁵ Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines was published just as the Second Republic, born in 1848, was collapsing to make way for the Bonapartist socio-political order.¹⁶ A few decades later the theory would enter into social practice and become a systematic part of the coun...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: (RE)CONSTRUCTING THE CATEGORIES OF ‘RACE’ AND ‘SEX’: THE WORK OF A PRECURSOR
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III