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KEY IDEAS![]()
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ETHNIC ABSOLUTISM
This chapter explores ‘ethnic absolutism’: the idea that humans belong to different ethnic compartments, with biological race regularly taken to be the basis of human differentiation. Gilroy writes extensively about ethnic absolutism because he is consistently opposed to it, and here I will show that ethnic absolutism is not natural but historically produced, and that it leads to violence and irrationality. The examples I use are drawn from separate moments in history, since ethnic absolutism has taken different permutations over time. I will finish by considering the implications of the discovery of DNA and the mapping of the human genome, whether they confirm once and for all that human beings have unyielding racial identities, or whether they underline the bankruptcy of notions of inborn biological race.
Ethnicity does not necessarily refer to racial identity, although it certainly can do. Rather, ethnicity means an identity that you share with the other members of your ethnic group, an identity that you have inherited from your parents and that has been passed down through successive generations. Your ethnicity could be defined by the holidays you observe, the language you speak, the religion you practise, or the food you eat. As the second term in ‘ethnic absolutism’ suggests, this worldview believes separate ethnic compartments to be absolute: indivisible and held tightly together by strong boundaries. For an ethnic absolutist, to compromise these boundaries – perhaps by choosing to marry someone from another ethnic group – is to go against the natural order of things and to jeopardize the purity and future existence of your ethnic group. What if everybody from your ethnic group decided to marry someone outside of it? How would that affect the ethnic identity of your children, and their children, and so on?
Gilroy’s opposition to ethnic absolutism is moral and pragmatic: he opposes ethnic absolutism because it has led to the worst atrocities of the modern era and because culturally and scientifically it is demonstrably false. The British title of Gilroy’s book Against Race is Between Camps, and he invokes the symbol of military camps as a metaphor for ethnically absolutist group identities: they are fortified against outsiders, points of entry are perceived as points of weakness, and physical exercises and strict routines produce a sense of unity. This idea of ‘the ethnic, national, or racial camp’ is not only metaphorical: as Gilroy discusses in relation to the Holocaust and the concentration camps in Europe’s colonies, driving the enemies of your nation or race into actual, physical camps went hand-in-hand with believing that your embattled ethnic camp was under attack (AR 84–5).
While ethnic absolutism’s language of mystic racial belonging is spoken by white supremacists, Gilroy also sees it at work in organizations formed to resist racism against people of colour. The political implications of this are significant: if the racially oppressed see themselves as ethnically pure groups that need to preserve their distinctiveness, aren’t they doing the job of white supremacists by segregating themselves? The political position of Against Race / Between Camps is conveyed by its two titles: Gilroy identifies with a location outside ethnically absolute encampments.
THE DISCOURSE OF RACIOLOGY
The act of defining group identities through physical and mental characteristics goes back thousands of years. The critical theorist of race Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954–present) argues that definitions of racial and ethnic identities can be found in the texts of the ancient Greeks and Hebrews (Appiah 1995: 274–5). Yet the differences between those classical notions of racial difference – where some changeability in what defines a race was conceded – and the modern concept of race are profound. Race-thinking built on earlier explanations of racial and ethnic difference, perhaps from the Judeo-Christian tradition, but race gained its power to account for human difference from historical factors specific to modernity, such as the transatlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the scientific and industrial revolutions. Gilroy’s view of race as a particularly modern phenomenon is shared by many of his academic peers (Goldberg 1993).
The French philosopher Michel Foucault, working from the mid-to-late twentieth century, becomes very important at this point. Massively influential in the humanities and social sciences, few thinkers in the last 50 years have enjoyed the same level of interest and debate as Foucault. Key terms in his work are power, knowledge, discourse and discipline. Foucault conceptualizes the history of the West since the seventeenth century as the move from explicit state power (where you do what the state and society wants you to do because you fear the physical punishment of deviant behaviour) to a more subtle means of control (where you constantly monitor yourself because you keep inside your head powerful definitions of what healthy and unhealthy behaviour is, and you tend towards the healthy). This ‘care for oneself ’is understood in broad terms and defined by the sexual sciences, medicine, psychiatry and penology (the study of crime and punishment). These areas of study are examples of ‘disciplines’. Disciplines constitute knowledge of the self, and as the choice of the term implies, they are simultaneously bodies of knowledge (scholarly disciplines) and exertions of power (their knowledge disciplines people).
How do disciplines gain the authority to prescribe which norms of healthiness are to be abided by? Following Nietzsche, Foucault conceives of truth not as something already existing which humans discover but as something humans produce. Disciplines talk about their subject using a highly specialized form of language, a ‘discourse’, which requires training and expertise to use. Discourses set the limits of what can be understood about the human body and its behaviour (Foucault’s main case studies are taken from the human sciences); discourse categorizes human life as it explains it, dividing and arranging people hierarchically, and bringing those categories into being by imposing a grid of identities onto a vast multitude of human phenomena.
An example will make this clearer: in the late nineteenth century the decision of sexologists to categorize sexual acts as involving either members of the same sex or the opposite sex produced certain types of human being. Rather than, say, making genital and non-genital arousal the key difference around which to categorize human sexual activity, using the sex of one’s object of desire as the dividing line created two types of humans: homosexuals and heterosexuals. The different kinds of sexual acts used in the categorization of the population lead to different conceptions of the human self. Discourses create types of people at the very moment they appear to be objectively discovering and describing differences between them.
Discourse establishes which statements can be considered true and which can be rejected as false. Foucault uses the term ‘in the true’ for statements that adhere to a discipline’s body of knowledge. One ‘might speak the truth in the space of a wild exteriority’ but to gain the institutional authority that comes from speaking within a discipline – to be ‘in the true’ – requires obedience to ‘the rules of a discursive “policing”’ (Foucault 1990: 61). Put simply, discourse establishes the terms by which research in a discipline can take place, and pre-validates (or not) the truth claims that can be made. For a statement to be ‘true’ it must abide by the rules of the discourse and speak through the available concepts.
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926–84)
Foucault was a postwar French thinker whose major works were published from the 1960s to the 1980s. His profound influence on the humanities and social sciences continues to the present day. Foucault made the case that knowledge is always embedded in structures of power and there is no such thing as purely objective truth. More radically, human beings have internalized (absorbed certain ways of looking at the world and, consciously or not, chosen to live their lives according to) the structures by which knowledge and truth are produced, so that when they make decisions in their everyday lives what they think are free choices are not free at all: the options are prescribed by what they conceive are possible choices in the first place. In other words, we can choose from a series of options, but we can’t choose the options themselves.
Foucault’s early books were historical studies of the treatment of mental illness and the growth of modern medicine, Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à L’âge Classique (1961; published in English as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason in 1965) and Naissance de la Clinique: Une Archéologie du Régard Médical (1963; published in English as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception in 1973). With contemporary French scholars such as Jacques Lacan (1901–81) and Roland Barthes (1915–80), Foucault was seen in the vanguard of the academic movement of structuralism, although the complexity and range of his writing rests uneasily in that category. Foucault extended his analysis of how the production of knowledge structures power relations in books such as Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (1975; published in English as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in 1977). He also theorized and historicized the construction of subjectivity in essays such as ‘What is an Author?’ (1969) and his three-volume The History of Sexuality (1976–84).
Gilroy takes from Foucault the idea that modern scientific discourses produced ‘truths’ about the human body, ‘truths’ that were widely influential because of the growing status of scientific institutions and the state’s use of science for population management. Gilroy’s main criticism of Foucault is that he ‘was not really interested in the meaning of racial differences’ (AR 44). Despite looking at the construction of the mentally ill, the criminal, the sick and the homosexual by scientific discourses, Foucault did not look at how scientific categorization produced discrete and sovereign ‘races’ with identifiable characteristics (one cannot say the issue of race was entirely absent from his work though; see Foucault 1976: 149–50).
Gilroy starts to fills this gap in Foucault’s work by identifying ‘the world of discourse that I call “raciology”’ (AR 58). ‘Raciology’ means the scientific disciplines that set out to study race: in the guise of extrapolating racial facts from empirical evidence raciologists manufactured the idea of different, unequal races, and they repeatedly ‘discovered’ that white Europeans were the pinnacle of human development. The fields of raciology included:
• Physiognomy (evaluating character from facial features, especially head profile)
• Anthropology (the study of human relations and their relation to nature)
• Phrenology (reading the shape of the head as a map of intellectual and emotional faculties)
• Craniology (studying the size and shape of the skull)
• Biology
• Eugenics
Raciologists made racial difference credible but their choice of evidence was highly selective (see Gould 1997).
Gilroy stresses that the ‘groups we learn to know as races are not, of course, formed simply and exclusively by the power of racial discourses’ (SA 20); economics, politics and culture all play a part. In addition to the role of racial science modern ideas about race were justified by religion and spirituality. In Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1978), the historian George L. Mosse (1918–99) argues that the Holocaust was a culmination of racist attitudes running through Europe for centuries. Mosse cites the importance of Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), a spiritual thinker who was internationally influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She contended that each separate race was internally unified by a unique collective spirit: a ‘race-soul’. German race-thinkers interpreted this to mean that the German volk (a national community unified by blood and culture) were a privileged race because their mystic connection to the German landscape gave them direct access to ‘the life spirit’ of God’s universe. German raciologists seduced by the idea of a ‘race-soul’ nonetheless remained captivated by scientific evidence, fusing Christianity and mysticism with anthropology and craniometry. Germans and Jews were repeatedly positioned on opposite ends of the racial scale by these race-thinkers (Mosse 1978: 96–7, 106–7). This amalgam of mysticism and racial science is not surprising for Gilroy, for whom the strange marriage of the rational and irrational is one of modernity’s deepest trends. Raciology often strained at and went well beyond the limits of reasoned and evidence-based scientific research. Its findings were irrational, but they came in the shape of rational inquiry: the outlining of hypotheses, the supposedly unbiased interpretation of data, and the drawing of conclusions.
BLACK RACE-THINKING
Race-thinking is not monopolized by white supremacists. In the USA the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), led by the Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), used military uniforms, flags, medals and marching bands as part of Garvey’s project of racial uplift for African Americans in the early twentieth century. Far from distancing his enthusiasm for ritual and pomp from that of the fascist dictators Hitler and Mussolini, Garvey professed he was their inspiration (AR 330). Garvey founded the UNIA in 1914 and it became the ‘largest mass movement among black people that [the USA] has ever seen’. Its paramilitary wing, the African Legions, marched through the streets of Harlem in August 1920, during the First International Convention of the UNIA. They paraded in red and blue uniforms and were organized into military units, waving the UNIA flag and singing their anthem ‘Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers’ (J. H. Clarke 1974: 18). Gilroy interprets Garvey’s efforts at militarizing African Americans as the attempt to ‘purify and standardize’ the race: the ‘martial technologies of racial becoming – drill, uniforms, medals, titles, massed display – [are] set to work to generate these qualities that are not immediately present’ (AR 233). This is characteristic of Gilroy’s suspicion towards racial supremacists, whether the race being aggrandized is black or white: the power (usually expressed in warlike, masculine rhetoric) and uniformity that emanates from a racial collective is actually a product of the group’s military practices. Militarization is not the sign of collective strength, but the means to manufacture it.
Although it trades on fallacious notions of biological race, one might be tempted to support Garvey’s production of black racial identity because the pride it supplied redressed the psychological injuries of American racism. But Garvey’s insistence on a strong black race was accompanied by the persecution of alternative political viewpoints within the African-American community. The African Legions used violence to silence dissent:
the Garvey movement was based not only on personal attraction and appealing ideas; it was also based in a most insidious way on force. Negroes who criticised him were threatened and often viciously attacked. […] Those who complained […] were told to be quiet or else. At meetings, the officers of the African Legion came prepared for trouble with riding crops or swords and made sure none got in without proper tickets of admission.
(Rogers 1955: 162)
The motto of the UNIA does not seem particularly concerned with racial equality. It heralds a ruthless competition where the strongest race exerts its will: ‘No Law but Strength. No Justice but Power’ (Rogers 1955: 159). Gilroy notes the twin attributes of ‘brutalism and masculinism’ represented by Garvey’s political project and Gilroy reads these as two defining principles of fascism. Garvey even met with members of the Ku Klux Klan and described their common goal of keeping the races separate and pure (AR 232–4).
Modern race-thinking repeatedly constructed Africa as a place where history had yet to commence, with white western Europe privileged as the place where humankind’s journey through history was furthest advanced. Africans and their descendants around the Atlantic were perceived to be permanently excluded from North America and Europe’s journey into the future (AR 56–7, 64; Connor 1999: 16–17). Sometimes this version of race-thinking took place to denigrate the achievements of black civilizations, a useful political move when the superiority of European civilization was a major justification for colonial expansion. At other times a variation of this race-thinking hailed the desirable primitiveness of blackness, arguing that the rhythms of black culture provided a space of sanctuary away from the pressures of modern...
