RACISM

Etymology

According to the CNRTL, the word racism appeared in 1902 while the word racist dates from 1892.

According to Charles Maurras, Gaston Méry (1866-1909), pamphleteer, journalist and contributor to La Libre Parole — Édouard Drumont's anti-Semitic and polemicist newspaper — was the first person known to have used the word "racist" in 1894.

However, the adjective "racist" and the noun "racism" did not become part of the general vocabulary in France until the 1930s. Leon Trotsky used it in 1930 in his History of the Russian Revolution, to qualify the supporters modern racist theories, which he would further develop in 1933 with regard to Nazism.

The two words entered the French dictionary Larousse for the first time in 1932.

Ideologies, perception and practice

In the 19th century, literature highlighted the multidimensional nature of racism. We can distinguish :

its conceptual and ideological dimension: it is based on systems of discourse which claim to be scientific; its perceptual dimension: it constitutes a gaze, a prism which orients and instructs our perception of the “Other”; its practical dimension: the Actual racism manifests itself through individual actions (violence, insults, etc.) or institutionalized systems of domination (apartheid, segregation, colonization, slavery, etc.).

Race as a social construct

If the notion of "human race" and the concept of racism are linked, the study of their relationships requires making a first distinction between race as a biological concept and race as a social constructivism that we can be defined as “a sign or a set of signs by which a group, a community, a human whole is identified, in certain specific historical contexts, this socially constructed appearance varying according to societies and periods”.

Throughout history, social definitions of “race” have often been based on presuppositions of biological nature. Race (as a social construction) has, however, become largely independent of the work carried out on the biological classification of human beings which has shown that the notion of human race is not relevant for characterizing the different geographical subgroups of the species. human, because the genetic variability between individuals of the same subgroup is greater than the average genetic variability between geographical subgroups.

This conclusion is however contested by AWF Edwards who criticizes, in his article Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Error (2003), the argument, presented in 1972 by Richard C. Lewontin The Apportionment of Human Diversity (The distribution of human diversity), arguing that the division of humanity into races is taxonomically invalid.

The current scientific consensus rejects the existence of biological arguments which could legitimize the notion of race, relegated to an arbitrary representation according to morphological, ethno-social, cultural or political criteria. This autonomy has been fully manifested since the second half of the 20th century where the effects of the racist perception system persist despite less frequent use, and despite the rejection of the concept of race by the scientific community.

Focus

Racism is based on the racist's focus on a difference, often anatomical. It can be “visible” – the pigmentation of the skin – but is not necessarily: the racist gaze can exist without relying on obvious visual differences. Anti-Semitic literature has thus extensively sought, without success, to define the criteria which could make it possible to visually recognize Jews and has finally had to highlight invisible differences, imperceptible to the human eye.

Totalization

Racism associates physical characteristics with moral and cultural characteristics. It constitutes a system of perception, a “syncretic vision where all these traits are organically linked and in any case indistinguishable from each other”. The identification of physical features or the recognition of the distinctive sign (the Jewish star for example) immediately generates in the racializer an association with a system of preconceived ideas. In the view of the racialist, “the man precedes his actions”. If the focus of the racist gaze makes the targeted body more visible than the others, it therefore also has the effect of making individuality disappear behind the general category of race.

Essentialization and limitation

The racist considers the properties attached to a group as permanent and transmissible, most often biologically. The racist gaze is an activity of categorization and closure of the group on itself.

Prioritization

Racism is often accompanied by a deterioration of the characteristics of the targeted group. Racist speech is not necessarily pejorative, however. For Colette Guillaumin, “good characteristics are, in the same way as bad characteristics, part of the racist perceptual organization”. The phrase “Black people run fast” thus constitutes a racist statement despite its ameliorative appearance.

Racist discourse can evoke the physical superiority of the targeted groups (thus the vigor or sensuality of Black people) to emphasize by contrast their intellectual inferiority. The qualities attributed to them (the financial skill of the Jews for example) are the counterpart of their immorality or fuel the fear of their underground power.

But even more, beyond the content — positive or negative — of racist stereotypes, the activity of categorization, totalization and limitation of the individual to preconceived properties is in itself not a neutral activity from the point of view values. From this perspective, seeing and thinking about the social world in the categories of race is already a racist attitude.

Origins

Historians and ethnologists disagree on the question of the origin of racism; two main conceptions oppose each other on this subject. The first considers that racism is a by-product of European capitalism, linked to colonialism. The second is that different forms of racism have followed one another throughout history in Europe, since Antiquity.

The term “race”, applied to human beings, was written for the first time in 1684 by François Bernier, in an article in the Journal des Sçavans. He writes there “four or five species or races of men whose difference is so notable that it can serve as the basis for a new division of the Earth”.

Since the second half of the 20th century, there has been a relatively broad consensus among historians that the use of the notion of racism in Antiquity is an anachronism. Indeed, all ancient and primitive societies are, from our contemporary point of view, racist and xenophobic societies.

The Ancient Greeks distinguished the peoples of Hellas from other peoples whom they called barbarians. Almost all other ancient peoples had the same dual representation of the World in two races, related peoples, and foreign or enemy peoples; this opposition between two collectives is what defines the political domain and the rights of people. Among the peoples considered foreign, however, not all are enemies: military, commercial and diplomatic relations established friendly peoples, clients, allies or guests who could then be fictitiously reconsidered as related peoples.

The use of the term "race" as an integral synonym for people/nationality continued until the end of the 19th century. Thus, the literary works of Jules Verne abound with stereotypical formulas such as “the Germans, an industrious and organized race”, “the French, a romantic and gallant race” or “the Americans, an enterprising and dynamic race”, even in conversations between good friends. of different origins, without the slightest negative intention in the use of the word.

Race and parentage

Kinship structures, and therefore questions of race, are always fundamental and founding in the representation that ancient or primitive peoples have of themselves and of other peoples. The entire system of obligation and social solidarity of ancient or primitive societies is based on belonging to the family group, and on greater or lesser proximity of kinship: affiliation (phylai).

We note that this is not necessarily biological, but can be the fiction resulting from an adhesion or an adoption, and from connections of convenience. Alongside Greek society with its genes and its phratries, we find clan political structures among other peoples such as the Celts with the notions of related/allied peoples. This conception lasted throughout the Middle Ages and part of modern times.

Mythology and religious prescriptions set the rules of exogamy which favor alliances outside the consanguineous group, while prohibiting those with members of foreign peoples. As a result, from ancient times until recent centuries, the peoples of the world have remained extremely endogamous, whether they are sedentary and without contact with foreigners, or whether they are, on the contrary, nomadic among foreign peoples. . In the latter case, the identity of the group is maintained by social or religious prescriptions prohibiting too great proximity of life and foreign alliances which would ultimately cause its assimilation.

This is why, the further back in history we go, the more we notice that peoples who are traditionally migrants or create a colony continue to marry in the half of the genome from which they separated, and not in the people among whom they live. It should be noted that at these times, these rules concern immigration which is not done individually, but as with the Phoenician, Greek or Carthaginian colonies, by complete groups capable of recreating elsewhere a new identical and closed society.

Questions of war and peace between tribes or peoples begin with refusals or ruptures of matrimonial alliances, and end with alliances, or sequences of alliances, between the lineages of chiefs, and from there the possibility of relationship and alliance between all other families. It is important to specify that these prescriptions apply to groups, but not to isolated individuals or disaffiliated families.

Bible

The biblical story restarts the history of Humanity after the flood, with the three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, from whom the three lineages that populate the shores of the Mediterranean descend. The Table of Peoples in Genesis gives, with the descent of these three brothers, the genealogical origin of all the peoples of the Earth who are presented both as genealogically distinct peoples, and at the same time related. This last trait, which recalls the uniqueness of the human kingdom, monogenism, is an originality that is not found among many primitive peoples who reserve the appellation of man for themselves, rejecting others in the animal world.

An interpretation of the curse of Canaan in the Book of Genesis and the “Table of Peoples” which derives from it, may be the origin of racist ideologies in this region of the world or for believers drawing inspiration from the Bible .

The destruction of the temple of Jerusalem by Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, was accompanied by a destruction of genealogies, which for the Jewish people would be the cause of their dispersion and great dismay regarding their identity. This kind of totalizing genealogical representation of the different known ethnic groups is often found in ethnological descriptions of primitive peoples.

Greco-Roman antiquity

The conception according to which the use of the notion of racism in Antiquity is an anachronism is called into question by the work of the historian Benjamin Isaac who proposes the notion of "proto-racism" spanning Greek and then Roman Antiquity. , a notion which already relates to a “conceptualized racism, based on a scientific-looking argument which is intended to be demonstrative”. Proto-racist thought, which will obviously evolve over the centuries and the shifts of centers of influence and power, is based, according to the historian, on two theories which will be little questioned: on the one hand, following the treatise Airs, Waters, Places dating from the 5th century BC. BC and attributed to Hippocrates, a deterministic classification of human groups based on geography which would define “immutable collective character traits”, in a conception which quickly induced a hierarchy of peoples.

Maurice Sartre, however, qualifies the point, explaining that there are divergent, even opposing, conceptions of this representation, citing in particular the ancient explorer and historian Herodotus or the geographer Strabo who “shows with equally convincing force the limits of the environmentalist theory” which he does not use in his description of people and their customs.

The philosopher Christian Delacampagne perceives, for his part, in the pagan attitude – Egyptian, Greek then Roman – towards the Jews and in the partition between free men on one side, women, children and slaves on the other, “classifications biological”, of “racist type”.

It should nevertheless be noted that although racist arguments may have been used to justify the domination of the Greeks and Romans, they never led to policies of exclusion or – a fortiori – extermination. On the contrary, the capacity for integration, assimilation and even promotion of foreigners in the Greco-Roman Empire – with relative respect for their culture and traditions – is well known to historians.

Nevertheless, we can see a link between ancient proto-racism and contemporary racist theories in a common "negation of evidence in favor of preconceived theories whose scientific merit does not matter as long as they justify the dominant situation and the privileged status of a group”.

Middle Ages

It is above all the Middle Ages which gives arguments to those in favor of the existence of racism prior to modernity. For the historian specializing in anti-Semitism Gavin I. Langmuir, one of its manifestations would be the crystallization of the anti-Judaism of the first Christian theologians into Christian anti-Semitism from the 13th century. Others see the first manifestations at the end of the 11th century and the first pogroms which marked the first popular crusade led by Peter the Hermit.

In the 13th century, the crisis encountered by the Catholic Church, threatened by the Cathar, Albigensian and Waldensian heresies, led to a rigidification of its doctrine which was manifested in particular by the creation of the Inquisition in the 1230s and by what Delacampagne designated like the “demonization” of “infidels”.

According to Delacampagne, the idea that conversion absolves the Jew then gives way to the belief that Jewishness is a hereditary and intangible condition. This movement does not spare other categories of the population. Its most convincing manifestation is the progressive establishment from 1449 of a system of blood purity certificates (limpieza de sangre) in the Iberian Peninsula to access certain corporations or be admitted to universities or orders. This movement, which resulted in the Alhambra Decree of 1492, concerned four specific groups: Jews, converted Muslims (Moriscos), penitentiaries of the Inquisition and the cagots, that is to say the descendants suspected lepers.

Delacampagne mentions the segregation which affects this last category of population as a major stage in the constitution of modern racism. According to him, it is the first time that the discrimination of a social group received a justification based on the conclusions of science in the 14th century. Surgeons, such as Ambroise Paré, indeed support the idea that the cagots, presumed descendants of lepers, continue to carry leprosy even though they do not show the external signs.

In non-European societies

European slaves whipped by an Arab (1815). Muslim slavery has often been much less discussed than that of the West, pushing certain authors to speak of a “well-kept taboo”.

Several studies have highlighted the existence of attitudes that their authors consider racist in societies outside the European cultural area. In Japan, the hereditary transmission of membership in the burakumin caste until the beginning of the Meiji era could be analyzed as the product of a symbolic construction of a racist type.

The work carried out by the historian Bernard Lewis on the representations developed by Muslim civilization with regard to other human beings concludes on the existence of a perceptual system which he describes as racist, particularly with regard to black populations. .

In the Middle Ages, the racism of Arabs against blacks, particularly non-Muslim blacks, based on the myth of the curse of Ham, the father of Canaan, pronounced by Noah, served as a pretext for the slave trade and slavery, which, according to them, applied to blacks, descendants of Ham who had seen Noah naked during his drunkenness (another interpretation links them to Kush). (Story taken from the Bible). Black people were therefore considered “inferior” and “doomed” to slavery. Several Arab authors compared them to animals.

The poet al-Mutanabbi despised the 10th-century Egyptian governor Abu al-Misk Kafur because of the color of his skin. The Arabic word aabd عبد (pl. aabid عبيد) which meant slave became from the 8th century more or less synonymous with "Black", taking on a meaning similar to the term "negro" in the French language of the 20th century. As for the Arabic word zanj, it designated black people in a pejorative way, with an official racial connotation found in racialist texts and speeches. These racist judgments were recurrent in the works of Arab historians and geographers: thus, Ibn Khaldoun was able to write in the 14th century: "The only peoples to truly accept slavery without hope of return are the Negroes, due to a degree lower in humanity, their place being closer to the animal stage. At the same period, the Egyptian scholar Al-Abshibi wrote: “When he [the black] is hungry, he steals and when he is full, he fornicates.” Arabs on the eastern coast of Africa used the word "Kaffir" to refer to black people from the interior and the South. This word comes from kāfir which means “infidel” or “unbeliever”.

Racism modern

The different authors who view racism as a specificity of European modernity agree to highlight the combination of three factors in the genesis of this new attitude:

The development of modern science. It inaugurates a system of essentialist perception of otherness and a system of justification of racist behavior which is based on scientific theories of race. The development of anti-Christian free thought which opposes the monogenism which supports the Catholic Church. European expansion which began in the 15th century. It led to the establishment of an economic and social system of slavery, and slave trades to the colonies; at the same time, it was accompanied by the development of a colonial attitude towards non-European populations which gradually penetrated the metropolis.

Biologization you social

For Colette Guillaumin, racism is contemporary with the birth of a new outlook on otherness; it is constituted by the development of modern science and the substitution of an internal causality, typical of modernity, for an external definition of man which prevailed before the modern period.

While the unity of humanity previously found its principle outside of man, in his relationship to God, man now refers only to himself to determine himself. As evidenced by the theological debates on the souls of Indians or women, the rejection of difference and social hierarchies were based on religious justification or based on a sacred order (caste); they now adorn themselves with the clothes of biological justification, referring to the order of nature. The conception of this Nature itself is undergoing a profound change: it becomes measurable, quantifiable, reducible to laws accessible to human reason.

This change of outlook generates an essentialist perceptual system: heterogeneity within the human species owes its existence only to a difference lodged in the body of man, which European scientists will strive to highlight at all times. throughout the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. For Pierre-Henri Boulle, we can perceive in France from the end of the 17th century the first expressions of this mode of perception. It was in the 18th century that it spread among the political, administrative and scientific elites, before becoming widespread among the majority during the 19th century.

For Colette Guillaumin, this mode of perception became widespread at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the first part of her work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt dates the appearance of anti-Semitism, which she differentiates from anti-Judaism, to the beginning of the 19th century; it is also the date of origin that the philosopher Gilbert Varet assigns to “expressly so-called racist phenomena”.

The spread outside Europe appears from this perspective as a product of European influence: André Béteille thus develops the thesis of a “racialization” of the caste system in India after British colonization. In Japan, work carried out by John Price, Georges De Vos, Hiroshi Wagatsuma and Ian Neary on the subject of the Burakumin reached identical conclusions.

Colonization and slavery

Parisian brand in 1890

The question of the anteriority or posterity of racism to the development of slavery in the European colonies is the subject of numerous debates. Consensus is nevertheless established regarding the role played by the development of slavery in the hardening and diffusion of racial attitudes. Colonial slavery indeed developed, paradoxically, at a time when, in Europe, humanism, the philosophy of the Enlightenment (philosophy) and the theory of natural law should logically lead to its condemnation. Racism could be the product (conscious or not) of this contradiction, the only artifice making it possible to deny certain populations the benefit of fundamental rights recognized to Man in general consisting of believing in the existence of a hierarchy between races .

According to American historian Isaac Saney, "historical records attest to the general absence of universalized racial prejudices and notions of racial superiority and inferiority before the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade. If notions of otherness and superiority existed, they were not based on a racialized worldview.”

Development of slavery and modern science interacted closely in the construction of modern racism. The category of “nosopolitics” qualifies for the philosopher Elsa Dorlin the use of the categories of “healthy” and “unhealthy” by medical discourse applied initially to women, then to slaves. While the White, considered “naturally” superior by doctors, is defined as the standard of health, the temperament of Blacks is by contrast declared “pathological”; he carries specific illnesses, which only submission to the work regime imposed by the settlers can alleviate, but which is difficult to cure, as they seem intrinsically linked to his nature.

Scientific racism

“Scientific racism”, or “racialism” (or “raciology”), classifies human beings according to their morphological differences using a method inherited from zoology.

Theorists of racialism include people such as the German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the French Georges Vacher de Lapouge, a supporter of eugenics, the French writer Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, famous for his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races , published in 1853, the German-speaking Briton Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose work theorizes the historical role of the Aryan race as a catalyst for the Indo-European ruling classes, and the Frenchman of Swiss origin George Montandon, author of a taxonomy of races in his work La race, les races. Development of somatic ethnology, published in 1933.

Ideology

In Europe and the United States, the racial paradigm became closely articulated from the 19th century onwards, externally with imperialist policy and, internally, with the political management of minority populations. For Hannah Arendt, “racial thinking” thus became an ideology with the era of imperialism beginning at the end of the 19th century. Racist ideology then becomes a “political project” which “generates and reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race”. Racism, she explains, is first of all the transformation of peoples into races, human diversity no longer being explained by the cultural influences acquired by each person after their arrival in the world, but on the contrary by origin.

Like the diversity of racist positions in the academic world, the forms of racism and therefore the political uses of race have varied greatly depending on the national contexts and the position occupied by their promoters in the political space.