Schaub Jean-édéric - Race Is about Politics

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Jean-Frdric Schaub

Translated by Lara Vergnaud

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2019 by Princeton University Press

Editions du Seuil, 2015. Collection La Librairie du XXIe sicle, sous la direction de Maurice Olender. First published in French as Pour une histoire politique de la race by Jean-Frdric Schaub

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Rebecca, Martha, and Jean

Later I came to know this gentleman much better and more closely, and therefore I have involuntarily presented him now more knowingly than then, when he opened the door and came into the room. Though now, too, I would have difficulty saying anything exact or definite about him, because the main thing in these people is precisely their unfinishedness, scatteredness, and indefiniteness.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, THE ADOLESCENT
(TRANS. RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY)

Lepidus: What manner o thing is your crocodile?

Anthony: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.

Lepidus: What colour is it of?

Anthony: Of its own colour too.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ANTHONY
AND CLEOPATRA, ACT 2, SCENE 7

RACE IS ABOUT POLITICS

THIS IS NOT a history book. Or rather, this book does not only provide a history of the formation of racial categories in Europe and its colonies. The reader holds between his or her hands a collection of proposals on the ways historical research can contribute to contemporary debates on the attribution of racial identity to individuals and populations. The racial question looms on a global scale. On the one hand, Western countries, whether or not they led colonial empires in the nineteenth century, must now deal with manifestations of racism, be they instances of police brutality in the United States, torrents of racist speech in a Europe confronting a migrant crisis, or chromatic social hierarchies in Latin America. On the other hand, interethnic violence and social fragmentation into castes based on ideologies of purity and heredity appear to exist on every continent. Nonetheless, this book focuses solely on Western societies, in Europe and the Americas, in order to avoid premature conclusions or approximations about situations that can be observed in Asia and Africa and that call for studies of those places specifically.

This book was initially written for a French-speaking audience with the aim of illustrating to what extent the French case is singular compared to experiences in other countries and to theories developed within other academic traditions. I hope that the American edition of this work will play a similar role for the American case. In the following pages, Anglophone readers will discover an analysis drawn from a historians perspective and should note that my academic background does not mirror the usual approach to these subjects in the United States, and even less so do my proposals.

The method proposed in this work consists of identifying a core, which is specifically racial, within the collection of prejudices, phobias, political programs, and norms that are qualified, somewhat vaguely, as racist. Because Race Is about Politics: Lessons from History is not a history of racial thought, but rather an invitation for open debate to all readers interested in this field of study, its three primary objectives reflect a programmatic dimension. These objectives are as follows:

1. To distinguish racial categories and processes of racialization within a much larger group of xenophobic attitudes and policies;

2. To propose a chronology of the formation of racial categories in the West that dates back to the Middle Ages and is therefore not limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;

3. To prepare students, citizens, and scholars within the social and human sciences to confront any challenges that may be created by the unpredictable outcomes of research in the field of genetic biology. It is, of course, indispensable to continue to denounce the ideological agenda and racist policies espoused by sociobiology. However, we must acknowledge that as the human and social sciences continue to develop their respective expertise, it is critical to monitor what genetic biology may contribute in the future to our understanding of the development of man within society.

This book makes proposals, which I am offering from within a specific time and place. At the same time, these proposals are underpinned by a methodological rejection of relativism. On the critique of relativism, we can go quickly. Suffice it to borrow from the anthropologist Grard Lenclud a logical argument against the idea that there are between human societies incommensurable realities that are therefore incommunicable. When a researcher says that a word, a ritual, a cultural expression, or a social institution is untranslatable into the language of his or her own society, we assume that he or she first has understood these objects in their own context. If we say that social realities are incommensurable, it is because we have been able to measure them. Thus the attribution of untranslatability and immeasurability to any object is a logical contradiction. Nonetheless, as the author of this book I have to clarify what my own historical and social coordinates are. Born, raised, and trained in France, I am a French citizen of second generation by my fathers side and third by my mothers side, both of them having come from Jewish families, one of which migrated to France from Poland, and the other from Germany, before World War II. There is, of course, a direct link between my interest in racial issues and the memory of the Holocaust that has been central in shaping my personality. Knowing this, I do not interpret the whole history of the West as a long-term preparation of the final disaster of the Third Reich. My approach to political processes of early modern and contemporary eras depends on my anchorage in the European experience, particularly in France. I admit, but only to a certain extent, the argument that only those who have experienced some type of phenomenon are able to transcribe it, but not that only a certain type of people is capable of understanding the transcript. My experience in France taught me that there was not necessarily a difference between a Jewish sensibility and a non-Jewish sensibility concerning the memory of the Holocaust.