IBARW--let's think about the word "race"

[truepenny]

And let's understand that the concept behind the word "race" is completely bogus and likewise invalid, because it's the idea that the human species can be divided up in a pie chart. And the human species can't be divided up like a pie chart. If you had really fancy graphing software that could graph three-dimensional Venn diagrams, you could maybe represent the human species like that. As a species we do not, so to speak, color within the lines.

(I am not saying that ethnic diversity does not exist or shouldn't exist. I'm saying that the word "race" carries with it the baggage of a conceptual framework that does not work.)

And then there's the problem of what constitutes a "race." In the nineteenth century, the English considered the Irish a different (subhuman) race, complete with egregiously simian caricatures that look horrifyingly familiar to anyone who's read--oh, for a random example--Tintin en Afrique. Or pick your pictorial representation of Africans, or persons of African descent, as ape-like. And, mind you, Victorian ideas of "race" were backed with scientific evidence--just like the idea that criminals could be identified by the shape of their ear.

"Race" also, of course, has built into it the assumption that one "race" is superior to another. You don't need to catalogue the ways in which the Irish, or the Africans, or the Jews, or the little green people from Mars are inferior to the fine upstanding Anglos if you aren't setting out to prove that the fine upstanding Anglos are the greatest thing since, well, ever, and are rightly masters of the universe. Hence Manifest Destiny--and, you know, I remember learning about Manifest Destiny in junior high history classes, but I can't remember anyone ever mentioning that it was (a.) complete and utter bullshit and (b.) the direct ideological cause of, hello, GENOCIDE perpetrated by our heroic ancestral Anglos against everybody in their way.

Also, hence the Final Solution and the Holocaust. And even that isn't enough to kill these bogus ideas about "race" and the inherent superiority of one group over another. Because the thing about our dominant culture, all these Anglos striding around like they own the place, is that it seems to need constant reassurance, constant bolstering, and thus the constant demonizing, Othering, oppressing with which all cultures different from itself are greeted.

To be fair, I suspect this insecurity is a characteristic of a culture being dominant, not a culture being Anglo, but it got reversed in classic Freudian fashion (sneaking suspicion that this other group may be cooler than our group transmogrifies into loud assertions that our group is obviously cooler than that other group, and that other group has cooties, as well, so there), and then codified by the Victorian scientists and explorers who were busy making sure it was their, Anglo, culture that dominated, by God. And a lot of the world is still living with the fallout, one way or another.

My point is that the ideas of "race" we're still wrestling with are based on a lot of bogus Victorian pseudo-science. Oh, the Irish have moved up the evolutionary chain to be "white," but the Victorians, both British and American, had equally silly ideas about Jews, Africans, African-Americans, Asians, other non-white people encountered in various parts of the globe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And while we (using "we" to mean the dominant Anglo-American WASP type culture that gets itself proliferated via movies and television) may have ditched the bad science--at least some of us, to some degree--we're still floundering around in a morass of cultural assumptions that they started and nobody's yet managed to dismantle.

This problem is what post-colonialism is about: trying to learn not to see with white Victorians' eyes. The terrible thing, as post-colonial artists and scholars have proved, is that you don't have to be white to be trapped in that very narrow viewpoint. Because they taught their way of seeing to all the native peoples they didn't just kill. And did us all, as a species, a great disservice thereby.

Comments

[redbird]

One minor note, w.r.t. Manifest Destiny: it was justification for a genocide that had been ongoing since long before that odd phrasing was coined. There's some good stuff, if you look for it, on the whole idea of the "virgin continent", with the implications both that nobody lived here until the Europeans arrived, and the weird mappings between sex, marriage, and conquest. misia has stuff on that latter, of course. Note also that that idea wasn't Anglo-only; the Spanish in Mexico had similar imagery. As you say, it's about dominant cultures, not about Anglo ones.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely.

I was just talking about what I was taught in junior high school (which tended to skip over that whole icky genocide thing--except, oddly enough, for the Trail of Tears, which was All Andrew Jackson's Fault. And, come to think of it, the conquistadors. We learned ALL ABOUT the conquistadors exterminating the Incas and Aztecs and Mayas), not about what I know now.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, but see, the conquistadors were Spanish, therefore Not Us.

(For particular viewpoints of "us.")

Thanks for tossing in the acknowledgment that this is a dominant group thing, rather than specifically an Anglo-American one. I'm pretty sure the Han served (or maybe still serve?) that role in the context of Chinese imperialism.

[gillyp.livejournal.com]

I'm more than a little irritated by your use of Anglo, English and British (which in Victorian times actually included the Irish) as some kind of benchmark of ebil.

You're referring to a *very* small sector of *British* society, the so-called upper/ruling classes who lumped the great majority of the English (ie the working classes) into the same sub-human categories that would've included the Irish working class - but not the Irish toffs, of course, who were PLU and every bit as oppressive/racist whateveryoucaretomentionist as their English counterparts.

As an English person, I find your generalisations deeply offensive.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I apologize for offending you.

However, I am not using "Anglo" to refer to English or even British persons. I am using "Anglo" to refer to people of British descent, as in the phrase "Anglo-American" or the phrase "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant." I'm sorry if that was unclear.

I used the word "English" once, because I was talking about a comparison being made between the English and the Irish.

And I used "British" quite specifically, the one place that I did use it, to indicate that I was talking about British people (who yes, of course, were all or mostly upper-class men), not merely English people. And I used it in conjunction with "American" to indicate that I was, quite specifically, not claiming the British Isles as the sole locus of the problem.

Your point about class is perfectly accurate; however, this is not a post about class. It is a post about the word "race."

[aranel.livejournal.com]

It also seems to me that it might be more accurate to describe the 19th-century pseudoscience of race as a Western European/North American thing, rather than "Anglo" or "Victorian," since it obviously had plenty of proponents in German-speaking countries as well. We, in many ways, a more globally dominant culture now than we were then, in spite of everything; I expect WWII had a lot to do with that.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

Er, that should read, "We are, in many ways..." And by "in spite of everything" I meant "in spite of there not being a British Empire to speak of anymore."

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Also Italian.

I chose a term that seemed (a.) to represent the modern cultural phenomenon, i.e., Anglo-American culture and its conceptual artifacts, and (b.) was not so hideously cumbersome that it could not be used in a sentence. And has the connotations of being a word used by non-Western/non-white people to identify Western white people.

(The term "Caucasian" is also a hangover from Victorian pseudoscience and, honestly, if you look at it for five seconds together, MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL.)

[aranel.livejournal.com]

Yes, the terms are all problematic, and Caucasian is especially ridiculous. I find "Anglo" particularly jarring because I'm never quite sure whether it means ethnically "Anglo-Saxon" (and actually most likely also Celtic, Norman, and any number of other things), Anglophone, culturally Anglo-American, or some conflation of all three. It also seems too narrow when one's actually talking about western- Europe-derived people and cultures generally, outside of the U.S. But I don't have a better term to propose.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

And French. Gobineau was an infamous proponent.

[katallen.livejournal.com]

Umm, unless by upper/ruling class you mean the middle class... you'd also be generalising offensively and being more than a little inaccurate.

Racism in the UK is in no way class dependant. Nor is it restricted to dominant cultures.

[gillyp.livejournal.com]

"Racism in the UK is in no way class dependant. Nor is it restricted to dominant cultures."
Of course not, but your statement would be equally applicable in practically any country in the world, not just the UK. My objection is to the use of 'English' and/or WASP (which would include about 80% of the English population) as some sort of benchmark for wickedness. The tendency to paint the English people as the source of all B.A.D is lazy and illustrates an ignorance of history.

[katallen.livejournal.com]

The tendency to paint the English people as the source of all B.A.D is lazy and illustrates an ignorance of history.

Oh most certainly. I'm afraid I pinged at narrowing English to a particular grouping of Englishmen -- I'm growing indifferent to collective blame for everything B.A.D (and the Disney version of world history) :)

From what I can see blaming the English, and the Victorians, allows people to put racism -- and colonialism -- safely in the past, another affectation of those funny people who covered piano legs. Something we're recovering from rather than struggling to understand.

Completely off-topic

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Mirador is keeping me on tenterhooks. Maybe eleventerhooks. Ignore if other people (e.g. reviewers) have taken you to task for an introverted novel after two road novels: I am having a fantastic time and am anguishing over what it's going to be when we get to the Big Reveal. So many possibilities! Almost all of them exquisitely awful!

Re: Completely off-topic

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Hee! Thank you!

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

OK, my color for today is confused.
In that last paragraph, do you mean the non-Anglo groups who were the subject of European and American colonialism learned to despise other ethnic groups from the colonialists? because um, I can't buy that, not even with a bridge (intact) and a subway system (not flooded) thrown in. Or do you mean they internalized the message that their cultural traditions et cet. were inferior to that of the colonialists? Because I can see that line of thought having some validity to it.

WRT the first interpretation, I don't believe anyone needed Europeans or Anglo-Americans to teach them to despise the neighbors or say nasty things about them. This seems to have been a fairly-well established tradition in lots of places. I feel that what the Europeans and Anglo-Americans brought to it in the 19th century was a veneer of "scientific" justification to support an inclination that was there in the first place--they were handing themselves a nice, rational, modern reason to believe what they would have believed anyway.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Second interpretation! Second! Second!

Playing Us vs. Them is (unfortunately) human nature.

Teaching a subjugated people (quite literally, as with the boarding schools for Native American children) that they deserve to be subjugated and that it's really better for everyone if they don't speak their own language and don't maintain their own traditions and DON'T, dear God, try to exercise self-determination--that's colonialism. Or, at least, one of its faces.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Oh, good. Because the other interpretation suggested the latest writing exercise had had worse effects than mere exhaustion, frustration, and exasperation.

Which would be bad.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that up the the 1940s, little children in French colonies were being taught history out a textbook that began, "Our fathers, the Gauls..."

[wl551.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it, racism, will ever be eliminated completely. I feel like until the species homo sapien becomes transcended, there will always be people of any culture, country, background, whatever, (I'm trying not to use the label "race"), who have an inferiority complex and will use bully tactics to boost their own low self-esteem. Unfortunately, some of those with the bully mentality have power, wealth, and/or influence to push their shallow views on others.

I honest to god am sick of the racism and hatred on both sides of the fence, but until humans can stop judging others, I don't believe it'll be eradicated in my lifetime, probably not in my children's either. Pessimistic world view, I realize, but I've seen little to indicate otherwise, overall. :(( Even in this thoughtful journal there are those saying "I'm offended", etc, etc, etc. When will it end?

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

Excellent post. I never thought I'd be enjoying IBARW this much.

Re the Irish becoming White: I was surprised to learn yesterday that the Irish are still despised in England, and that an English friend of mine grew up learning all sorts of jokes in which Irish was a synonym for stupid, much the way I grew up with Polish jokes. :/

And word on the whole Manifest Destiny thing. No one in my school ever pointed out that it was utter poppycock either.

Mitochondrial Descent.....

[selkith.livejournal.com]

The closest humanity actually gets to different "races" is mitochondrial descent, and really if you look at it, it's more like the children of a bunch of different sisters, which means..."DUH" we are ALL kin. We are part of a huge global family. Depending on the region in which our ancestors lived, we have different skin colours, and body types. Even bone structures differ by region. But all of us are descended from quite possibly a few beings that are the mitochondrial "EVES". They are all from one specific genome. This is according to the articles that I have read. I have done some studies on this subject for the purpose of writing research, and it is fascinating. All humans, from the true "Eve" in mitochondrial terms, can be traced to one of about a dozen of her descendants, which have regionally specific traits. Just like different branches of the same family. You have your grandmothers brown eyes, and your cousin looks a lot like your dad. Your brother lookes like your great uncle Teddy. I look like my grandfather, and my father, and William Butler Yeatts. This really brings into focus the idea that we are all variations on the same genetic theme, IE, one people. One species. All cats are cats, regardless of size, shape, etc.... why wouldn't we be the same????

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

<3 I wrote a paper with this thesis on Heidegger last semester. (Heidegger?! No, it totally made sense!)