history of race

history of race meaning

involved in understanding history of racism, but also in understanding issues such as:

• Imperialism

• Migration

• Cultural Hybridity

• Economy

• Nationalism

• Citizenship

racial relations in islands of Zanzibar

Islands of Zanzibar attached to trade movements in Indian Ocean. Local peoples therefore traded with different communities eg South Asia, as a result becomes a hybrid place.
December 1963 gained independence, new Tanzinia after independence:

• Created solidarity between peoples of Africa, Asia and Americas who shared a history of colonisation.

• In Zanzibar, race relations were tense. In January 1964 police forces overpowered by supporters of group, many killed and about 10,000 fled Zanzibar.

mamdani why race relations so tense in zanzibar

Mahmood Mamdani argues is due to legacy of colonialism. Distinction between natives vs non-natives, and how colonialism pitted different groups against each other and continued to create ideas even after independence.

racism definition

differences that are seen to be rooted in unchanging traits, can manifest in theory, practices, institutions and structures.

race definition

is no objective genetic reality of race, is not a human constant but rather shifting perceptions about humans' physical or cultural differences.

history of race emergence

History of race emerged in conjunction with European expansion:

• Main category of differentiation in prior ages was civilisation and not skin colour eg Ancient Greece, contemporaries distinguished between their own group and foreigners.

• Would call foreigners 'barbarians'.

• European conquests focused contemporaries on question of racial differences.

• Rise of Atlantic slave trade led to rise in idea of scientific racism. Carl Linnaeus split humans up into 4 groups, giving most negative traits to Africans.

• Descendants of enslaved Africans rejected this, using history to illustrate their points.

• Eg W.E.B DuBois used history and evidence to demonstrate that both black and white Philadelphians contributed to the city's progress.

historians wanting to understand race relations

Next phase was historians wanting to understand how race relations effected commodity world:

• Eg Eric Williams wrote Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, first scholar to argue that Industrial Revolution made possible by slave trade and labour of enslaved individuals.

• Frantz Fanon working on histories of race as psychology, and how racism has detrimental effect on both its victims and perpetrators.

• Race an objective reality that existed in societies, accepted as an organising factor of modern society. But this changed in the following decades as a result of new scientific findings on race and process of decolonisation.

• Race began to be seen as a concept - histories of race as intellectual and cultural history.

ethnicity vs indigeneity

Categories of identity in local societies important in understanding race relations.
Indigeneity - denotes that a community is original to a given area and thus distinguishes natives from others.
Ethnicity - belief in coherence of a community through culture, language etc.

mamdani 2001 legacy of colonial rule

Argues that cultural and political identities are different.

• Institutional legacy of colonial rule remains in Africa.

• Colonial state made a distinction in law between race and ethnicity - was an entire racial hierarchy, with Europeans at the top, followed by 'Coloureds', then Asians, Arabs, Hamites.

• Population divided into races and ethnicities, each lived in a different legal universe - races governed through civil law ie considered members of civil society.

• Civil society excluded ethnicities, ethnicities governed through customary laws ie language of tradition, authenticity.

mamdani 2001 distinction between race and ethnicities in colonial times

Natives had to live according to custom - nationalism was a struggle of natives to be recognised as a transethnic identity.

• Customary law was not racially specific, was ethnically specific. Legal distinction, not cultural.

• Each ethnic group had to have its own law.

• Races reflect a civilizational hierarchy - some races said to be more civilised than others, and therefore said to have a claim to higher rights.

• Races have their own customary law, but all races constituted within a single legal domain, that of civil law - but civil law full of discriminations.

• Distinction between races and ethnicities was not the same as the distinctions between colonizers and colonized.

• Hierarchy of races includes both colonizers and colonized, colonized divided into those indigenous and not, all natives were colonized but not all nonnatives were colonizers.

mamdani 2001 result of race and ethnicities distinction colonialism

ndigeneity was turned into the litmus test for rights and entitlements, and postcolonial states continue to treat many of their own citizens as settlers or immigrants based on their ancestry.

• Must rethink the institutional legacy of colonialism, and thus to challenge the idea that we must define political identity, political rights, and political justice first and foremost in relation to indigeneity. Let us reconsider the colonial legacy that each of us is either a native or a settler.

• Must go beyond the conventional thought that the real crime of colonialism was to expropriate the indigenous, and consider that colonialism perpetrated an even greater crime - to politicize indigeneity, first as a settler libel against the native, and then as a native self-assertion.

glassman 2004 response to mamdani

Opposes Mamdani idea that racialisation goes back to a single source - actions of the colonial state:

• The result is a view of colonial intellectual history in which Europeans are the only actors, inventing and imposing identities as prompted by administrative needs.

• New racisms demonstrate that racial thought doesnt need to be a scientific idiom or ranking of racial categories - is now a racism without races, the theme of which is not biological heredity but insurmountability of cultural differences.

• If race is assumed to arise solely from scientific doctrines, then its presence in the non-Western world must be traced solely to the West.

Is wide consensus that race was invented in the west and carried to the rest of the world with colonial rulers.

• Some scholars dismiss ethnic thought as little more than a European invention, accepted by Africans in order to secure access to resources controlled by missionaries and the colonial state.

glassman 2004 issue with view of racism being western

Nations are defined as much by exclusion as they are inclusion - who does not belong.

• Is no firm line between racial thought and national thought, a racial paradigm of exclusion and dehumanization is implicit in virtually all nationalist projects.

• Was a role played by African intellectuals, who cast ethnic appeals to resonate with concerns regarding labour migration, clientelism, and construction of the colonial political economy.

• The result is a history written from the perspective of nationalists who took control of the state from the departing colonial powers.

• Concept of civilisation became an effective tool of nationalist mobilisation when it was used to define barbarians to be purged.

balibar, wallerstein 1991 arg about racism and nationalism

Racist organisations refuse to be designated as such, claim to be nationalist instead.

• Discourses of race and nation never very far apart.

• Some historians argue that racism develops within the field of nationalism - in this view nationalism would be the cause or determining condition of the production of racism.

• Ruth Benedict argues that racism has nothing to do with the existence of objective biological races.

• Shows that racism is a historical or cultural product.

balibar, wallerstein 1991 eg of racism and nationalism

Theoretical thinking on the models of already seen racism eg Nazi anti-semitism, has produced a series of distinctions which form our conception of racism:

• Between theoretical and spontaneous racism.

• Between internal and external racism.

• Confronting questions of Nazism and colonial racisms has forced distinction between a racism of extermination/elimination and a racism of oppression or exploitation.

• Neither of these forms ever exists in the pure state - Nazism combined extermination and deportation, and slavery has practiced both forced labour, establishment of caste regimes, ethnic segregation.

• Racism is a social relation, not mere ravings of racist subjects.

dubow 2007 question of ethnicity and identity

Question of ethnicity and identity has forced itself onto political and intellectual agenda.

• Due to collapse of communism, upsurge of nationalist conflict in Eastern Europe, increasing visibility of racism in the West - have given new focus to problems of race, nation and identity.

• Ethnicity cannot be explained as a form of irrational false consciousness anymore.

• Is a question of it is possible to exercise claims to ethnic identity without tending to chauvinism or exclusivity.

dubow 2007 ethnicity and race

Argues that ethnicity serves a "euphemistic substitute" or "surrogate term" for "race":

• The term shifted from a tool used by liberal academics to challenge biological racism into a mechanism used by the apartheid state to justify segregation and political division.

• Liberal academics like I.D. MacCrone and Hilda Kuper introduced "ethnic" to downplay biological heredity and emphasize the role of culture and environment in human behaviour.