Michael Hanchard Marshall Poe Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and this is an episode in the Princeton University Press Ideas Podcast, and we're very lucky today to have Michael Henchard on the show, and we'll be talking about his book The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy. It is out from Princeton University Press in 2018. Michael, welcome to the show. Michael Hanchard Oh, thank you very much for having me on, Marshall. Marshall Poe Absolutely. My pleasure. Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself? Michael Hanchard Sure. I'm currently the Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I run a project called the Marginalized Populations Project which looks at marginalized populations from a comparative perspective. I grew up in New York City and was educated at Tufts, the New School and Princeton for my PhD. Marshall Poe Thank you very much for that. So let me ask you this. Why did you write The Spectre of Race? Michael Hanchard Well, it's a book that had been rattling around in my thoughts for some time now partly since graduate school--trying to make sense of what I learned up until that point and why I had not encountered too many books or even articles at least in political science that addressed questions of race and racism in the discipline and how the discipline itself was constituted. Anthropology’s had those kind of discussions. Sociology’s had those sorts of discussions. Philosophy now has a rich literature and discussion on this topic. Less so up to now in political science, although there are now younger scholars who are putting out very interesting books about the race concept and its effect on the discipline and effect on methodologies. So I felt that it was a book I needed to write in part as a kind of gift to my discipline and so that's what in some sense prompted me to write the book. Marshall Poe Well, it covers a huge amount of territory. You begin with the Greeks and you come all the way up to today. I mean literally almost today. So, it was a huge undertaking and I certainly admire that. In the first page of the book, you introduce the concept of autochthony and you say that it's important to your central claim in the book or one of your central claims in the book. And that is that the concept of race took the place held by autochthony in Athens. Could you explain what autochthony is? Michael Hanchard Sure. Sure. It comes out of the Greek and is loosely translated as the notion of origins of a people and literally those people who are tied to a territory and soil and have that relationship to that to each other through territory and soil. And so autochthony is used really as a kind of political myth after the Persian Wars after 451 BC to make Athenian citizenship more exclusionary because they were afraid given both the number of wars they had been in but also the range of foreigners that were in and traveling through Athens of the time but also the role of women could potentially upend the dominance of the Athenian males. And so, after 451 a law was created to basically eXclude those from citizenship who could not prove that they were descendants of people who literally sprang from the soil, right? And so, but also, it was also patrilineal, not matrilineal. So the idea was that those sprang from the soil and who are eligible to participate in politics as citizens also had to be male. So this eXcluded women, it excluded foreigners, and of course it eXcluded the enslaved, right? So the short version of it, which I detail at length in the book is that we think about by the end of the book I talk about and describe the Trump campaign and then Charlottesville, Virginia and the ways in which many of its proponents and advocates argued that their goal was to create an ethno-state in the United States. That is to say, a state, a nation state that was so-called racially and, in scare quotes, “homogeneous” and that its population was consonant with the rulers, with the ruling class or the governing class of people so that there was this symmetry between the state and the nation and the people and territory. So what that would entail essentially is utilizing instruments, political instruments and coercion to ensure that certain populations don't have access to the right to vote and to participate in the, in the power. And when we think about the campaign that we just went through which produced the 46th president of the United States and all the problems with voter suppression, the tampering of voting machines, the scarcity of voting machines in certain parts of the country many commentators have made of a note of this that many of these dysfunctionalities occurred in predominately black, poor and Latino neighborhoods. In many ways we find a contemporary iteration of the autochthony desired by basically trying to manipulate the outcomes of the vote and suffrage for the purposes of a Trump not only being elected/re-elected, but also in some sense keeping a certain class of people in socioeconomic terms, the elite terms, at the top. And in effect, that's one of the kind of broad continuities between the Athenian past and the contemporary present. Marshall Poe Do we know how the Athenians who invented the concept or criterion of autochthony defended it? Michael Hanchard Well part of it was yeah, so so one of the one of the rationalizations was that that there was a fear that with the presence of foreigners and the indebtedness of male citizens in certain transactions to these foreigners some of them exchanged citizenship to relinquish their debt, right? And so this bartering of citizenship for debt, for debt payment became one of the fears that eventually foreigners could actually overwhelm or outnumber the number of citizens. So it was a way of making a citizenship non-transferable, right? And in gender terms it was you know, it's unfortunately one of the ways so many societies and civilizations forge or try to impose patriarchal structures on given politics in a given polity. And so Athens was no different. Marshall Poe That's fascinating. Yeah, that's really quite fascinating. So, could you explain how autochthony in Greece is different from modern racial thinking in comparative politics? Michael Hanchard Well, this is a great question not just for comparative politics, but for thinking about autochthony and the [inaudible]. There is a pretty intense debate, actually, going on now in several areas of classics and classicists, some of whom claim that that there is enough evidence to demonstrate that there was sort of race concept, an ethno-national concept operative in classical Athens and that it was a way to nationalize citizenship. Others have argued that, in fact, there's no there's no real evidence for the existence of a race concept in classical Athens that resembles in content the contemporary kind of logics which try to impose a racialized view of the world. But again, these are, these are debates that are going on now and a lot of has to do with the direction of the study of the classics and I think an attempt overall to give an impression--to kind of remove the study and examination of Athens as some ideal form and understand it as one political option among many political options. But even that political option was not designed from the outset to produce equality or parity amongst all people who lived in a society. Now, this required the distinction between citizens of a society and society members, right? That is to say, there could be people who are not citizens but actually live in a society and they can make their own impact upon political and social and economic processes, but they would have to basically have to get laws changed in order to in effect restore them or place them at the same level of citizens. Marshall Poe This is a related question and you may not be able to answer it because actual classicists may not be able to answer it. Did the Athenians think of kinds of people in racial terms? That is, according to phenotypic characteristics? Michael Hanchard Yeah--question I can't fully answer. I mean, there's some consideration that [inaudible] and others have looked at this and there were, from my reading, there were conditions of servitude and gestures and behaviors associated with servitude which meant in a sense provided evidence approved that a being or group of people were subordinate to another group of people. But, but whether we would call that race in a contemporary sense is a separate question. But I think it's important to recognize that what the autochthony kind of doctrine has that's similar to contemporary manifestations of certain kinds of bigotry is the effect, in essence, to naturalize the idea of citizenship, right, to say somehow that based on certain characteristics of people and not their behaviors is what determines their ability or capacity for entry into a polity. Marshall Poe Yeah. It's almost an attempt to naturalize it so that yeah, to kind of give it the gloss of somehow biology or science.