Race, Racism and Psychology

Towards a Reflexive History

Graham Richards

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136475764
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the ways in which Psychology has engaged with 'race' and racism issues since the late 19th century. It emphasizes the complexities and convolutions of the story and attempts to elucidate the subtleties and occasional paradoxes that have arisen as a result.

This new edition updates the research contained in the first edition and includes brand new chapters. These additional chapters draw attention to the importance of the South African Black Consciousness movement and 'Post-colonial' Psychology, explore recent additional historical research on the fears of 'hybridisation', contain new material on French colonial psychiatry, and discuss the awkward status of virtually all the language and terms currently used for discussion of the topic.

This important and controversial book has proved to be a vital text, both as a point of departure for more in-depth inquiries, and also as an essential reference tool.The additional up-to-date material included in this new edition makes the book an even more valuable resource to those working in and studying psychology, and also for anyone concerned with the 'race' issue either professionally or personally.

1 The Pre-Evolutionary Background and the Roots of Scientific Racism

The Psychological story proper begins with the rise of Spencerian and Darwinian evolutionary theory in the 1850s, when Herbert Spencer and Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton opened the Psychological discussion. This chapter is confined to identifying some relevant aspects of the topic’s previous history, necessary for an understanding of Spencer’s and Galton’s views. For fuller coverage readers are referred to the numerous histories of the topic that have appeared in recent decades.¹

The Christian View

In traditional Christian cosmology, ‘Mankind’s’ basic unity was an article of faith: we are all descendants of Noah’s sons and daughters-in-law. This seemingly explained the main varieties of physique and colour with which Europeans were familiar—white Europeans, brown Asians and black Africans.² Since the Bible reports that Ham was cursed (for seeing his drunken father naked) our ‘common humanity’ was reconcilable with the view that Ham’s descendants (those with black skin) were eternally ordained to be inferior ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’.³ This argument was used by Christian racists down to recent times (for example, among sections of the South African Dutch Reform Church). Religious belief systems do not simply determine attitudes, their complexity often supplies a resource for justifying them. ‘Christian’ arguments can be deployed to oppress as well as humanise. (Interestingly, H.G. Locke (1994) argues that contrary to the popular liberal intellectual assumption that extreme conservative and fundamentalist religious belief correlates with proneness to prejudice and bigotry, the opposite has been true in the cases of Nazi-era German Christian resistance to anti-Semitism and US black anti-Semitism. In both cases it was the ‘liberals’ who succumbed most readily. This is not perhaps generalisable, but does indicate the danger of uncritically accepting such assumptions.)

Prior to Linnaeus (founder of modern biological taxonomy in the 1730s), typological classification barely extended beyond this tripartite division. From the early 16th century, writers tried to fit the indigenous peoples of the New World into this scheme (for example, Sir Walter Raleigh⁴). Their efforts were never satisfactory, but this was seen as due to human inability to interpret the biblical account correctly.⁵ The savagery of ‘savages’ and barbarity of ‘barbarians’ was usually viewed in cultural rather than biological terms as arising from ignorance, wickedness, folly and lack of exposure to the message of holy scripture, although the humanity of South American Indians was questioned in Spain late in the 16th century.⁶ Excepting the numerous legendary dog-headed cynocephali, tailed, air-eating or one-footed peoples whom nobody had ever closely encountered, biological features (such, notably, as blackness of skin) symbolised rather than caused their possessors’ inferiority. They had, as it were, fallen further since the Fall. Most authorities agree that the negative symbolic association of blackness with sin and death in Christian cultures was a factor in pre-modern European attitudes towards Africans, though, as we will see, this symbolism is not clear-cut. It is largely anachronistic to ascribe the kinds of ‘racial’ concepts that later become commonplace to anyone prior to the late 18th century. These require more complex political and biological notions of human equality, classification and human–animal relations, which only emerged later. Africans and indigenous Americans were cast as bestial, cannibalistic savages, Asians as jaded barbarians and Europeans became in some sense ‘racially conscious’, but no ideological or scientific racialist rationale underlay all this. (See Chapter 12 for a brief look at Weizmann (2004), an excellent recent overview of the history of the concept of ‘race’.)

The Noble Savage

The 18th century also saw the advent of a new image, the ‘Noble Savage’, spontaneously generous, happy and sin-free, ignorant of civilisation’s corrupting pleasures, pains and temptations, and in harmony with a beneficent Nature supplying all life’s wants.⁷ Combined with a general philosophical assumption of universal psychological uniformity, this promoted a fairly open-minded and tolerant attitude towards other cultures among many (but not all) European intellectuals and travellers until the latter end of the century. Only with a subsequent shift towards ‘diversificationism’ among natural historians, bolstering a zoological classificatory approach to human variety, did the human status of Africans and other ‘savages’ become a matter of widespread controversy. While Lord Monboddo (who had never seen one) was prepared to grant this status to the orangutan, his contemporary, Lord Kames, denied it to blacks.⁸ David Hume was also contemptuous of Africans. While many devout Christians and Enlightenment social philosophers previously supported egalitarianism, new developments in ‘scientific’ anthropology and zoology slowly undermined the credibility of the orthodox Christian classification and the creationist 6,000-odd year time scale. The ‘Noble Savage’ nonetheless persisted in early 19th-century anti-slavery rhetoric.

White Superiority

By 1800 the broader European perspective had fundamentally altered. Imperial expansion, and accelerating technological sophistication, gave ideas of intrinsic European superiority ever more credibility. The Enlightenment notion of history as progressive and directional made it inevitable that differences between peoples and cultures would eventually be construed evaluatively as reflecting relative levels of advancement. Yet the most influential late Enlightenment writer on race, who introduced the term ‘Caucasian’ to refer to white Europeans, Baron J.F. Blumenbach, was far from sharing such sentiments, writing in 1806:

there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro.

(1865, p. 312, italics in original)⁹

Respect for even the complex literate civilisations of India and China waned after the 1820s. Convinced of the objective rectitude of their own beliefs and values, the presence of anything warranting the name of ‘culture’ among native Americans, Africans or Aborigines became simply invisible to Europeans. Such ‘lesser breeds’ possessed nothing of value but their worth as potential labour and the material resources of their lands—which they either could not use, did not appreciate or did not know existed. Even the most humanitarian anti-slavery campaigners rarely defended the cultures of those they championed, and few seriously argued that Africans and American Indians were the intellectual, aesthetic or emotional equals of Europeans. Their case relied primarily on religious and moral arguments, a reliance that became a major weakness from the mid-1840s when confronting the growing weight of ostensibly ‘scientific’ evidence being invoked by the opposition.

Confusion of Views of Race

At any period between 1500 and 1800 we can identify antecedents of later divisions between humanitarians and exploiters, egalitarians and inegalitarians, monogenists (holding humanity to be a single species) and polygenists (holding races to be separate species), enslavers and liberators. The conceptual frameworks that structured European thought were all, nevertheless, radically different from those that have dominated the last century and a half. Heredity, time-scale, methods of cross-cultural study, and zoological classification appear in retrospect matters on which even the most sophisticated natural philosophers were utterly confused. Their data were restricted, their methodologies crude, their grasp of underlying conceptual issues hazy. Not that this was how savants saw their condition, far from it—they saw themselves as hacking progressively through the jungle of ignorance as effectively as their fellow empire-builders were similarly hacking away (and not only at foliage) for real.

The roots of racial thinking as it subsequently developed lie not in ‘scientific’ texts alone but in the settings where they were produced. Proto-racism certainly infused European perceptions of Chinese, Indians and native Americans, but the epicentre of the entire issue was the ‘Negro’ and the moral issues constellating around slavery.¹⁰ The most cited British proto-racist text is the Jamaican planter E. Long’s History of Jamaica (1774), in which the possibility that Africans are a different species is enthusiastically advocated, followed in 1799 by Charles White’s Account of the Regular Gradation in Man. Their immediate influence appears nonetheless to have been limited, and Long’s position contrasts with the American Professor of Moral Philosophy, S. Stanhope Smith’s¹¹An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1965 [1785]), which offered a thoroughly environmentalist account. The legacy of the slavery issue has largely continued to determine the agenda, especially in the USA, later supplemented by that of Nazi anti-Semitism and, in Britain and other ex-colonial European countries, immigration from former possessions. While racial thinking may be directed towards virtually any non-European people (and indeed some European ones as well, such as the Irish or Slavs), Africans have, historically, occupied centre-stage, and it is interesting that anti-Jewish racism acquired a separate name, ‘anti-Semitism’, as if it were somehow important to differentiate it from racism in general.¹² Although the ‘negro’s’ physical appearance facilitated white racism, whites’ attitudes to Africans were, initially, primarily a function of their view of slavery, which, as such things usually are, were in turn a function of economic and cultural circumstances.

The ‘Racism’ Question

Although mentioned in the Introduction, a little more should be said about ‘racism’ prior to 1850. It would be pure sophistry to deny that before 1850 Europeans oppressed and denigrated others on grounds of colour and/or physiognomy, rationalising such behaviour on all kinds of grounds that seem to us spurious. To all practical intents and purposes this was clearly racism. Yet simply to assimilate this behaviour into the modern category ‘racism’ obscures the extent of historical change in how human differences have been conceptualised and explained. It gives a misleading impression of stasis, masking the degree to which current racisms are very specific products of late 19th- and 20th-century economic, cultural, colonial and scientific history. Ironically, the unchangeability of human nature is a common racist dogma; we all allegedly possess an instinctive and legitimate dislike of people of other ‘races’, and if we do not we are ipso facto degenerate mongrels. One can then see the danger: if we perceive no differences between Elizabethan, Enlightenment and modern ‘racisms’ we may come to view ‘racism’ as some inherent feature of white human nature—a not unracist conclusion in itself, entailing perhaps unwarranted gloom regarding the possibility of its elimination.

While it would sidetrack us too far to discuss the matter in detail here, it should be noted that as far as 18th- and early 19th-century Britain is concerned the historical picture is far from straightforward. While slavery officially persisted legally until the Somersett case of 1772, and de facto to some extent for a long time thereafter, there is, for example, surprisingly little evidence that inter-marriage was viewed with any special horror, as later became the case. It has in fact proved rather difficult to disentangle the roles of race and social class in determining the black person’s lot during this period. The number of black people in Britain was probably well into five figures (in a population rising from c.7 to 10 million by 1800). Some managed to achieve a degree of social success.¹³ It is easy to get bogged down in the precise details of the level of ‘racism’ in Georgian Britain. My point here is that however ‘racist’ white treatment of blacks often was, it would be anachronistic to say that most whites, at this time, actually saw blacks (or anybody else) as a ‘race’ in the modern sense. Rather they saw them as a strange exotic ‘tribe’, as the cursed descendants of Ham, or as Noble Savages. The African, the Turk, the Indian, the Chinese, the ‘Moor’—all elicited reactions in accord with the multitude of long-standing myths, stereotypes, folk-lore and traveller’s tales that had accreted to them over a millennium. Each bore their unique blend of exotic vices and virtues, habits and character traits—and insofar as these were negative, whites reacted accordingly. But if exotic, they were, for the English, only further out along the same scale of social distance whereon the Irish, French, Italians, Spanish and Russians were also located.

That it is from this matrix that more explicit, self-conscious racism and racialism developed is not in dispute. What I query is whether, before 1800 at least, we have anything like genuine ‘racial’ thinking such as came so rapidly to the fore in the 1840s. Racism is an absolutist doctrine if nothing else; in countering it prudence surely dictates that we stress the extent to which it arises from ultimately transient constellations of cultural and economic forces, even if these then enable it to exploit more enduring psychological mechanisms. Joel Kovel (1988) hints at, but does not explore, a curious sense in which racist racialism replaced slavery as a means of maintaining African American subjugation. While naked force backed with a blend of legalistic arguments around the nature of ‘property’, theological casuistry and straightforward scaremongering were sufficient to sustain white hegemony, there was no need for racialist theory. Only when these ceased to prevail did a quasi-scientific theory centred on the ‘race’ concept become necessary to rationalise white supremacy in a way that whites could find morally acceptable.¹⁴ The period from around 1800–1850 is the gestation phase of that first form of ‘Scientific Racism’, which swept to dominance immediately prior to, and following, the American Civil War.

Whether we should deploy the term ‘racism’ in writing about the pre-1850 period cannot then be empirically decided. It genuinely depends on what you mean (or want to mean) by ‘racism’, which will vary with the goals and circumstances of your discourse. If defined so as to cover every case of someone’s treatment being negatively affected by their ethnicity or genetically determined visible physical traits (other than those related to gender and health), it ceases to tell us very much and the distinctive features of modern whi...