Racism

• 1. The Problem Of The Color Line

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  W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard University, wrote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." That single sentence frames a belief older than the word used to name it. Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits tied to inherited attributes, and that one race or ethnicity stands superior to another. It can also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism aimed at people of a different ethnic background. The word itself is recent, but the idea it names ran through slave ships, segregated water fountains, and the machinery of genocide. How did attempts to dress this belief in the language of science collapse? When did a society's covert hostility replace its open hatred? And why do scholars now insist on speaking of racisms, in the plural, rather than one tidy definition? The answers reach from Aristotle's remarks on slavery to the laws of Nazi Germany, and from a doctrine called cleanliness of blood to a film stock tuned only for white skin.

• 2. When Science Was The Alibi

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  In 1775, Johann Blumenbach divided the world's population into five groups by skin color, casting non-Caucasians as the product of degeneration. This was scientific racism, a name that is itself a misnomer, because no actual science backed its claims. The polygenist Christoph Meiners split mankind into a "beautiful White race" and an "ugly Black race," judging entire peoples by beauty or ugliness and calling the rest inferior, immoral, and animal-like. Anders Retzius, working in the 19th century, demonstrated that neither Europeans nor others form one pure race, since all are of mixed origins. Hans Peder Steensby went further in 1907, arguing that human differences trace extraordinarily far back in time, and guessing the "purest race" today would be the Australian Aboriginals. Human genome research indicates that race is not a meaningful genetic classification of humans, and most biologists, anthropologists, and sociologists reject any taxonomy of races. Yet derivations of Blumenbach's taxonomy are still widely used to classify the population in the United States, a strange afterlife for a discredited idea.

• 3. Cleanliness Of Blood

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  In 1492, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada fell, Ferdinand V and Isabella I rose as Catholic monarchs of Spain, and a doctrine called limpieza de sangre, or cleanliness of blood, took shape. It cast blood as something to be kept pure in a religious and feudal context, designed to block the upward mobility of converted New Christians. Robert Lacey explains that the Spaniards gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. A nobleman proved his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin, proof his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. Following the expulsion of the Moors and most Sephardic Jews, the remaining Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming "New Christians" who were sometimes discriminated against by "Old Christians" in cities including Toledo. The Inquisition, carried out by the Dominican Order, sought to weed out converts who still practiced Judaism and Islam in secret. In Portugal, the legal distinction between New and Old Christian only ended through a decree issued by the Marquis of Pombal in 1772, almost three centuries after the discrimination began.

• 4. Aristotle And The Ancient Question

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  Bernard Lewis has cited Aristotle, who in his discussion of slavery held that Greeks are free by nature while "barbarians" are slaves by nature, more willing to submit to despotic government. Aristotle named no particular races, and he never stated whether he believed this supposed inferiority came from environment and climate or from birth. He even argued that the right kind of souls and bodies do not always go together, suggesting the soul, not the body, was the true measure he had in mind. Historian Dante A. Puzzo drew a sharp line here, writing that racism rests on two assumptions, that physical characteristics correlate with moral qualities, and that mankind divides into superior and inferior stocks. By that definition, Puzzo argued, racism is a modern conception, since prior to the sixteenth century there was virtually nothing in Western thought that could be described as racist. The Ancient Hebrews referring to all others as Gentiles, and the Hellenes calling all non-Hellenes Barbarians, were indulging in ethnocentrism, not racism. Medieval Arab writers cited by Lewis, including Al-Jahiz and Ibn Khaldun, show ethnocentric prejudice developing later, though a number of medieval Arabic authors argued against it and urged respect for all black people.

• 5. Naming The Aryan, Killing The Other

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  The word racism came into widespread use in the Western world in the 1930s, to describe the ideology of Nazism, which treated "race" as a naturally given political unit. The Nazi party, which seized power in the 1933 German elections, deemed Germans part of an Aryan master race with the right to enslave or kill those deemed inferior. Adolf Hitler's 1925 memoir Mein Kampf was full of admiration for America's treatment of "coloreds," and Nazi lawyers advocated the use of American models. Race-based U.S. citizenship laws and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the two principal Nuremberg racial laws, the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. In 1928, Hitler praised Americans for having "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand," and in 1941 he declared, "Our Mississippi must be the Volga." The Nazi scale ran from pure Aryan to subhuman, placing Jews at the very bottom, considered unworthy of life. Approximately six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The regime and its collaborators also killed 2.5 million ethnic Poles, 0.5 million ethnic Serbs, and between 0.2 and 0.5 million Romani. Between June 1941 and January 1942, the Nazis killed an estimated 2.8 million Red Army prisoners they viewed as subhuman.

• 6. The Law Answers Back

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  In 1919, a proposal to include a racial equality provision in the Covenant of the League of Nations won a majority at the Paris Peace Conference, yet it was not adopted. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights changed the footing in 1948, recognizing that everyone is entitled to rights "without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion." In 1950, UNESCO's statement The Race Question, signed by 21 scholars including Ashley Montagu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, and Julian Huxley, urged dropping the term race altogether in favor of "ethnic groups." That statement, alongside Myrdal's 1944 work An American Dilemma, influenced the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The United Nations does not define racism, but its 1965 International Convention defines racial discrimination as any distinction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that impairs human rights on an equal footing. The convention concluded that superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous. In Norway, the word "race" has been removed from national laws on discrimination because its use is considered problematic and unethical.

• 7. The Racism You Cannot See

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  Stokely Carmichael is credited with coining the phrase institutional racism in the late 1960s, defining it as an organization's collective failure to serve people properly because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. This is racism lodged in a power structure rather than in a single hateful act. Aversive racism, a term coined by Joel Kovel, works even more quietly, surfacing as a persistent avoidance of interaction with other racial groups by people who profess egalitarian beliefs. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes a related form, color blind racism, arising from "abstract liberalism, biologization of culture, naturalization of racial matters, and minimization of racism." Its practices are subtle and apparently nonracial, and when race is ignored in predominantly white populations, whiteness becomes the normative standard while others are othered. Jennifer L. Eberhardt of Stanford University, studying how people think about crime, holds that "blackness is so associated with crime you're ready to pick out these crime objects." Economic discrimination can be built into objects themselves, since color photographic film was tuned for white skin, as are automatic soap dispensers and facial recognition systems. Activists have warned that the "Nigerian Prince" stereotype, used for advance-fee scammers, reduces a whole nation to fraudsters and needs to be called out.

• 8. Nations, Folk, And The Master Race

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  After the Napoleonic Wars, Europe faced a new "nationalities question," and the answers it reached for fused race with nation. Ethnic nationalism, advocating hereditary membership of the nation, drew on the Romantic movement of figures like Johann Herder and Johan Fichte, whose Addresses to the German Nation appeared in 1808. It stood opposed to the liberal nationalism of Ernest Renan, who in 1882 called the nation "a daily plebiscite," a community founded on the will to live together rather than on a shared Volk. The Pan-German League, created in 1891, promoted German imperialism and "racial hygiene" and opposed intermarriage with Jews. Members of the Völkisch movement, particularly the Thule Society, helped found the German Workers' Party in Munich in 1918, the predecessor of the Nazi Party. France traced its own path from liberal to ethnic nationalism during the Dreyfus Affair, when the country split over the alleged treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer. Émile Zola wrote J'Accuse in his defense, while Charles Maurras, founder of the Action française, theorized an "anti-France" of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons, and foreigners. According to historian Daniel Richter, Pontiac's Rebellion saw the emergence of the novel idea that all Native people were "Indians" and all Euro-Americans were "Whites," a line drawn so that one side might unite to destroy the other.