This will be a lengthymeditation on such concepts as racism [and sexism, elitism, ageism, classism,etc. etc], which I believe to be much more complicated and problematic than the discussion in class suggests. But first: Mea culpa,mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Bob is absolutely correct. Exodus, Chapter12, Verses 35-36: "And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses;and they borrowedof the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: And the Lord gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians." So much for relying on a memorycorrupted by CecilB. De Mille!
Now, let us turn to more serious matters[though what could be more serious than the Exodusout of Egypt, I don't know.] I willdevelop my analysis in reference to the term, "racism," and will leave it to you to think through analogous analyses for other terms. My aim here, as throughout the course, is two-fold: to get you to think historically, and to get you to think more complicatedly. I want you to learn to bringto bear on highly charged,politically highly inflected matters the care, precision, and analytic skill that you learn to use when writing about arcane mattersof epistemology, metaphysics, logic, or language.
We start with the state of affairs that existed -in late medievalEurope, or in ancient Greece and Rome, or in the United States before the CivilWar, or in South Africatoday. A number of different legal statuses are explicitly definedby statutory or customary law, to which are attacheddifferential benefits and burdens. In the twelfthcentury, in what is now France, if you are a member of the regular clergy [i.e., a member of an order that livesby a rule- is "regular"- such as the Benedictines], legal questions concerning your property, or damages you are accused of having inflicted on another, and so forth, are heard in an ecclesiastical court. If you are a peer of the realm, such matters will be heard by one of the courts of the provincial Estates. If you are a freedman,your case will be heard in a court presidedover by the lord who rules the domain in which you live. If you are unfree - a serf, i.e. "servile"- you will not have the right to have your cause weighed by a court of law. The taxes you owe, the militaryservice you owe, the laborservices you must render, whether you may marry and whom, and many other things as well, will be determined by your legal status. Similarly, in classical Greeceand Rome or ante-bellum United States, such matters will be determined by whetheryou are slaveor free. In the United States, but notin Greece or Rome, all those who are slaves are thought of as belonging to a singlerace of the human species- although that is a concept that isnot in fact as old as the institution of slavery even in the United States.In South Africa, there is a legal system of racial classification on whichrests the right of individuals to reside, own property, vote, marry, travel,hold jobs, and so forth.
The absolutely crucial thing to get clear at the start is that, at this point in the historical development of what will eventually become the conceptof racism, we are talking about legalstatuses, not feelings, attitudes, theories, prejudices, or unacknowledged limitations of perception. In South Africa,for example, each year there are a hundred or more court cases in which individuals are officially reclassified from one racialgroup to another. [It is also the case, on occasion, that members of the same immediate familyare assigned to different racial categories.] Now, there is, of course,a tricky theoretical question whether such legal statuses are descriptive or ascriptive, and my own view is that they are ascriptive. Briefly, what is at issue is the questionwhether the law describes someone's status- discovering it, when operatingcorrectly, or making a mistake when not - or alternatively ascribes a status to an individual by means of a legal procedure. On the ascriptive interpretation, for example,the statement that A killed B is, or purportsto be descriptive, but the statement that A is amurderer is ascriptive. On this view, there is no meaningto the question, "Is A really a murderer, even though the courts have failed to find him guilty?" any more than there is to the question, romanticthough it might sound [to some, but not to Lisa], "Are A and B reallymarried, even though they have never gone through a marriage ceremony?"
Accompanyingthe differential legal statuses may be some rationale or justification that appeals to supposed innate differences among individuals assigned to different statuses
- such as a theory of racial, ethnic, religious, or gender differences. For example, medieval Muslim law treats "people of the book"- i.e., Jews and Christians- differently from infidels, on the ground,supposedly, that Jews and Christians acknowledge portions of the revelation
that Muslims drum to have come from Allah. And the Greeksdeprecated "barbarians" - i.e., those who did not speak Greek, and hence sounded,to the Greeks, as thoughthey were saying "bar bar bar." But in a system of legally ascribedstatuses, how one is treatedis a function of one's legal status,regardless of what others feel or think about one.
The first step in any liberation struggleis, inevitably, the attempt to remove the legal disabilities and instead establishit as a matter of law that the group seeking liberation has the most preferredlegal status, and also, usually,the associated attemptto reduce all legal statuses to a single one. So, the elimination of ecclesiastical courts and aristocratic privileges, along with the elimination of serfdom, results in the single categoryof citizen [which, at any given historical moment, may or may not include everyone in the society, of course]. Once again, although the rationale for such a legal changemay be the rejection of some theory of racialsuperiority, the changeconsists in the alteration in legal status,not in the success in persuading everyone to reject the theorythat justified the old system of differential statuses.
All of this is obvious and well-known. I emphasize it because I want to suggest that all subsequentelaborations and developments of the notionof racism are parasitic on this original notion of legal statuses.
Immediately, of course, it is discovered that the elimination of the legal disabilities does not bring about everything that the liberatedgroup has been seeking. A former slave in Alabamamay be legally permitted to own land, row crops,hire laborers, and sell his produce, but he cannotfind a white man to sell him land, etc. "No Irish need apply." "Coloreds to the back of the bus."There is no question in anyone's mind that differential, discriminatory decisions are being made on the basis of race, even though Negroesand Whites have in law the same right to own land, enter into contracts, and so forth. Now, what is needed is not the removalof laws, but laws positivelydesigned to force people to stop these differential practices. And beyond that, of course,are needed penaltiesto enforce the laws,and law enforcement officials readyand able to carry out the enforcement.
Before, an employercouldn't hire a slave even if she wanted to, for wage labor is a legally enforceable contract, and slaves have no standingin a court of law to make and enforce contracts. How she feels aboutNigras is irrelevant. She may have the warmestof feelings for them. Nor do questions of social pressureand such arise. She is no more legally allowed to hire a slave than an employer today is permittedto hire an alien withouta Green Card (though, of course, they do - and so did employershire slaves in the Old South, but that is neither here nor there.]
The natural thing to say about the situation at this point is that it is one of virtual slavery [see Proudhon's famous remark that property is theft, or the coining of the marvelously powerfulphrase, "wage slavery," the force of which is now lost on those for whom slavery is not even a memory.] In other words, it seems natural to say that these discriminatory practices, designed to single out just exactly those who, under the old regime, suffered from the ascription of a differential legal status, are no different from or in effect the same as theold system of legal slavery.To some extent, this way of speaking is simply campaignrhetoric, but it is also designed to force peoplewhose attention has been focusedon the legal issues to recognize that extra-legal or post-legal ways have been found to perpetuate the disabilities that were originally legally imposed. But of coursesuch a way of speaking involves a shift in the original meaning of the term.
Now, we see a series of further shifts.Even after laws are passed,and even to some extent enforced, one sees two patterns of events or sets of phenomena to which the name "racism" becomes attached. First of all, and very distressingly [it is important to remember this - one must never forget the high hopes with which those fightingagainst the disadvantaged status of some group greet first the elimination of differential legal statuses and then the imposition of laws requiring equal treatment of persons who are equal before the law] it happens again and again that patterns of differential treatment continue, even in the face of laws against such treatment, because people in positions to make decisions - bank managers grantingmortgage loans, landlordsrenting apartments, employershiring workers and then promotingthose who have been hired, college admissions officers, etc. continueto make differential judgments becauseof their privateattitudes toward racialdifferences, either independently of or in contravention of the law. At this point, in the absence of the legal justification of differential legal statuses, these individuals justifysuch behavior to themselves or others by appeal to evaluative stereotypes or even some more general theory of innate racial differences.
Even more difficult to deal with, conceptually, are twofurther forms of differential treatment,neither of which involves a conscious act of discriminatory judgment on the part of any individual. First of all, peoplein positions of decision-making may make judgments that they themselvesbelieve to be objective and unaffected by considerations of race, but which others,looking at them, can see to be based on systematic misperceptions - biases - that shape their evaluations. Calling such behavior"racist," and callingthose who exhibit it "racists," can be understoodin either of two ways, not always distinguished: either it is a way of saying that these peopleunconsciously, subconsciously, or in a self-deceiving manner, actually hold the sorts of beliefsthat would, in those consciously holding them, issue in differential treatment of people on the basis of race; or, somethingquite different, it is a way of saying that it is as though thesepeople held such views or attitudes, even though they don't, and hence that they are no better than, or have the same effectas, someone enforcinga legal system of differential statuses. Secondly, practices of discriminatory treatment may becomeencoded in, built into, the administrative and bureaucratic proceduresof an institution such as a law court, an army, a college, or a corporation, in such a way that discriminatory treatment is reproduced even when noneof theindividuals administering the institution hold, either consciously or unconsciously, discriminatory beliefs. To take a familiar example,colleges may administeran admissions procedurebased heavily on SAT scores,which scores in turn reflectthe degree to which those taking them have had middle class experiences [by way of the sortsof "A is to B as C is to X" examples they use, etc.], with the consequence that the admissions officers will make choices biased toward middle class applicants regardless of whether they themselves have, consciously or otherwise, a bias toward middle class applicants. This last pattern of institutional behavior comes to be dubbed "institutional racism."
Now, clearlythere are very great differences between legal differentiation of statuses and institutional racism [whatever anyone may think about the relative degree of harm each inflicts]. To refer to them all as racism is,once again, eithera polemical device, or else- AND THIS IS WHERE THINGS GET IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING- it implies the claim that there is some essence,which we label racism, the presence of which manifests itself in different ways, but the nature of which is unchanged, and which is the same essencein the SouthAfrican systemof legally defined racial categories, in the antebellum legal system of slavery, in the virulenthatred of lynch mobs, in the deliberate lawevading practices of red-lining insurance companies, and in the admissions practicesof a college whose admissions officersare trying, unsuccessfully, to overcome the built-in bias of their own admissions regulations. Now, this may in fact be true, but it is at least worth pointing out that the very same people who forcefully reject "essentialism" in general are prone to employsuch terms as "racism" in ways that make sense only if one supposesthat the word names some such essence.
There is one last stage in this progressive development, the roots and implications of which are rather curiousand surprising. The accusation of racism is, of course, an example of the sort of ideological critiquethat Mannheim analyses.The accusation of racism makes no sensein the South American context.To accuse someonein South Africaof treating people differentially on the basis of race has about the same force as the accusationin this country that voters are treateddifferently according to whether they are registered or not. The obvious answer is, but of course!It's the law! To accuse someone with a "NoIrish need apply" sign in his front window of discriminating againstthe Irish is fatuous. But to accuse someone of racism who claims to be hiringon the basis of merit is to attackher integrity, her honesty, and thereby to show her up to be somethingother than she claims to be. When accusations of racism are combined with the notion of institutional racism, and the unstatedpremise is invoked of a secretessence present in the same form and virulence in all cases whetheracknowledged or not, then one has indeed a very powerful polemical weapon.
Many people who are extremely eager not to have what they considerto be the morally or politically wrong views developa hypersensitivity to this sort of ideological attack, fearful that they will discover themselves to have been guilty of harboring, unbeknownst to themselves, the hidden virus of the essence, racism. The result is a phenomenon with the most striking affinitiesto the behavior of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Puritans. The Puritans, who had embracedthe doctrine of predestination [accordingto which God, from all eternity, has preordained who is saved and who is damned],were faced with the soul-numbing task of tryingto ascertain whetherthey were among the elect, the saved. At stake was nothing less than eternal salvation, and the question was, by hypothesis, already decided. One'sbehavior therefore could not earn or lose salvation. All it could do was reveal whetherone had in fact been chosen by God to be among the elect.The solution of many Puritans was to adopt thepractice of keepingdiaries, in which they wrote, without planning, editing, or forethought, their thoughts and actions. They would then read the diaries, createdby a kind of free association, for evidences of election or damnation. Inasmuch as an easy confidence in one's salvationcould well be a sign of sinful pride, and thusof damnation, while a too great dejectionand self -deprecation could be evidence that the Holy Spirit was not within, you will see that this practice was destinedto leave one in a state of perpetual uncertainty and torment.
Much the same sort of thing can be seen amongthose who examine themselves and eachother endlessly for signs of racism, sexism,etc. Once again,we see the wisdom of Max Weber's observation that much modern secular behavior is best understood as a secularization of a distinctively Protestant ethic.
Well, where does this leave us? I suggest, at the very least, that it shows us some of
the complexities in the conceptof racism, which is used these days as though it were the name of a familiar vegetable or a well-known rock star. Think now of the compoundword [if I may call it that] "racism, sexism, and classism" that I calledinto question in the last class. At the very least- as Mecke's shrewd intervention shows- it should be obvious that the historical development of the concept of sexism is different from that of racism, and that both are different from the more recent development of the notion of classism [whatever that is - I must say I'm really not sure]. To use that formula is, whether one wants to or not, to buy into the claim that these are the names of three essencesthat may or may not lurk in people, in institutions, in utterances, or in attitudes, the presence of which makes the people, institutions, practices, or attitudes in some way reprehensible. If you don't endorse this appeal to an essence that can meaningfully be said to reside in, or to characterize, a person,an institution, a practice, and an attitude[!!], then you have the task, before using the termsagain, of thinkingthrough what you mean by them, and what you intend to presuppose when you invoke them.
This is just the sort of activity Orwell is trying to get us to engage in. It is also the reason for our spendingmost of the semester on substantive materialsrather than on abstract theorizing. I am goingto try to stop you each time you idly fall into a lazy use of such language as "racism," when talking about a novel or an ethnographical study or an account of the politics or culture of Iraq or Saudi Arabia or the Maghrib.
