Racism
A Beginners Guide
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A Oneworld Book
Published by Oneworld Publications 2008
This ebook edition published 2012
Copyright Alana Lentin 2008
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781851685431
ebook ISBN 9781780741765
Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India
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For Partho
Contents
Acknowledgments
Grateful thanks go firstly to Louis Lentin whose comments from a lay readers point of view helped keep me on my toes! I would also like to thank Marsha Filion at Oneworld Publications for thinking of me for this project and for her insightful and practical approach to the editing process.
Introduction
Enter racism into Google and you will be informed that about thirty million websites contain the word. If nothing else, this piece of trivia tells us that racism is alive and well and probably here to stay. If so many pages on the Internet can be filled by the subject, one would be right in asking how a short book like Racism: A Beginners Guide could even start to cover adequately the subject of racism.
Nonetheless, racism is a subject that most people in Western societies at least seem to have an opinion on. Everyday conversations can contain references to racism that can leave us perplexed as to what it really means. The French sociologist, Michel Wieviorka, noted that it is commonplace to hear talk of anti-youth racism, or anti-worker racism. So, is racism just anything that discriminates? Apparently not, because when probed further, racism provokes a dont go there attitude which reveals that it is something we are both deeply familiar with and profoundly troubled by. But do we really know why?
The purpose of this book is to go beyond common-sense or gut feeling reactions to racism that imply that we know all we need to know about it. It aims to reveal the complexity and heterogeneity of racism from its historical, theoretical, contemporary sociological, and most importantly political dimensions. Yet this will be done in a straightforward way that demystifies rather than complicates this perpetually thorny issue.
While it is more and more common to hear that racism is as old as civilization and that no society has been free of it, this book will be based on the argument that the origins of racism are to be found in Europe, in the modern era. This setting of racism in place and time is important because, as the late British sociologist Ivan Hannaford (1996: 4), reminds us:
In the modern world we have become so accustomed to thinking within a framework of race and ethnicity that we are quite unable to conceive of a past that may not have had this framework.
My argument in this book is that, besides being historically inaccurate, seeing racism as perennial is not conducive to imagining a future without it. This should be the aim of those interested in deepening their knowledge of the origins and functions of racism. In addition, by demonstrating how racism developed since the Enlightenment and with the advance of modern nation-state building, I reveal how and why racism continues to be such an important factor in society today.
Isnt racism natural?
When we ask why racism is apparently still so important, despite the end of colonialism, slavery, and the Holocaust, frequently the answer comes back: Its natural, isnt it?, followed often by references to the survival of the fittest and natural selection. The success and longevity of Social Darwinism the extrapolation of Charles Darwins theories on animal behavior and their application to human societies astounds. It also reveals the degree to which the legacy of the racial theory of the nineteenth century is hardwired into our knowledge.
For many, the naturalness, or primordiality, of racism is as obvious as its permanence in time. This is linked to the way in which the word racism has entered into everyday speech and, therefore, our consciousnesses. The idea of racism is so widespread that we easily mistake it for something that is just there: a fact of life. Racism is associated in this way to the fear and even hatred that human beings are commonly expected to have of each other.
A story told to me by a mother who claimed that her child was scared of black men illustrates this. This intrigued me because the mother and child are both black themselves. On enquiring further I learned that the toddler had once been frightened by his grandfather, an African man with a gruff deep voice. Being the child of a single mother, he was unused to seeing men and hearing male voices. The story demonstrates how attitudes are learned through interaction with society and disproves the common-sense idea that racism is a natural human reaction. However, if I had not questioned my colleague further, I may have been left with the impression that fear based on racism is inherent and that, therefore, there is no need to ask why it exists or what causes it to persist.
