Racism in America and in Other Race-Centered Nation-States

Racism in America and in Other Race-Centered Nation-States: Considerations Synchronic JOHN H. STANFIELD, II* ABSTRACT This essay offers a theoretical overview and revision of fundamental concepts essential for understanding racism as a routinized aspect of everyday life in America and in other western and westernized industrial nation-states in which race is a central historical principle of social organization, social stratification, and human values and development. BY SOME, RACISM HAS BEEN called a disease; a horrible moral blight. It cannot be denied that racism does have its mental illness dimensions. But to relegate the causes and dynamics of racism totally to the realm of the mentally imbalanced grossly oversimplifies just what the phenomenon is and how we should go about eradicating it. The conception of racism as being the thought processes and behavior of mentally imbalanced individuals has been joined by a host of other errors in well intentioned and not so well intentioned efforts to get to the root of this most catastrophic problem in modern world history. True, we cannot and should not get away from mental ill health and moralistic explanations of racism. But racism in its various forms and fashions is most fundamentally a synchronized political, economic, and structural problem rooted in complex historical and cultural processes and produced and stabilized through a number of psychological complexes. By synchronized I mean the political, economic, structural, historical, cultural and psychological attributes which occur simultaneously in making racism a special kind of social inequality. In this framework, we can view mental imbalance as a psychological source of racism which cannot be understood adequately without consider- ing the other mentioned attributes. The issue of morality comes in when we are attempting to evaluate the consequences and the meaning of racism in a society professing to be democratic. * Department of Sociology, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185 U.S.A. 244 But what is racism and how can we define it as a synchronized pattern of social inequality? In order to understand racism, we have to first define race. Anthropologically, sociologically, and genetically, races do not exist, they are made. That is, any reputable social or biological scientist will claim without hesitation that race as a basis of human classification is a myth; indeed it is a most dangerous myth (Montagu 1964; Gould 1981; Horsman 1981; Bowser and Hunt 1984). It is a myth in America and in other countries perpetuated through everyday language used to categorized populations; through media- driven labels and phrases; through teaching methods and curriculum in schools; through social policies, and through statistical attempts to detail pop- ulation characteristics (Prewitt and Lewis 1969; Harvey 1973; Gould 1981; Winant and Omi 1986; Van Dijk 1987; Wilson 1987). But what we usually refer to as the so called major races are actually grossly inadequate physical categories which at most minutely relate to geographical location and climate. This geographical and climatical view about race categorization was quite popular among seventeenth and eighteenth century European anthropologists, who were the first serious students of so called racial classification. It was assumed, to be more concrete, that Caucasoids were white because they resided in temperate to cold climates and Negroids were dark skinned due to the intense sun rays of the tropical regions they populated. Period But during the nineteenth century, it was a different story. Race classification became a basis of building massive systems of social inequality both in ideology and practice (Hofstader 1955; Gossett 1963; Montagu 1964; Jordan 1968; Mason 1970; Higginbotham 1978; Greenberg 1980; Ringer 1983; Lauren 1988). More concretely, from the nineteenth century forward, race progressively became defined in the following way: social and cultural mean- ings attached to real or imagined physical human traits (van den Berghe 1967). What this means is that expectations regarding behavior, personality, moral fiber, intellectual ability, and other social and cultural qualities became intrinsically linked to real or imagined physical traits such as skin color, hair texture, body type, eye shape, etc. This linking together of the social and cultural with the physical certainly was done in previous eras to categorize human beings. But in the nineteenth century linking issues such as behavior to the way a per- son looks became more systematic on an unprecedented massive scale as a new source of social inequality. Why? Why did race in the nineteenth century transform from a rather harmless intellectual exercise of human classification into lethal basis of social inequality ? The reasons are complex and are related intrinsically to the paradoxes and contradictions which plagued Europeans and Americans as they aggressively expanded their geographical boundaries into non-white societies. The major political philosophical dilemma was justifying the expansion of European Empires into Africa and Asia and the expansion of the American .

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