How has the idea of race and practice of racism changed over time? What historical challenges have people presented to racism? Using only the document attack below.

\fRacism: A Very Short Introduction Very Short Introductions available now: AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone ANARCHISM Colin Ward ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas ANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom ANGLICANISM Mark Chapman THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes ART HISTORY Dana Arnold ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin Atheism Julian Baggini Augustine Henry Chadwick BARTHES Jonathan Culler THE BIBLE John Riches THE BRAIN Michael O'Shea BRITISH POLITICS Anthony Wright Buddha Michael Carrithers BUDDHISM Damien Keown BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown CAPITALISM James Fulcher THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe CHAOS Leonard Smith CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard THE COLD WAR Robert McMahon CONSCIOUSNESS Susan Blackmore CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass Continental Philosophy Simon Critchley COSMOLOGY Peter Coles THE CRUSADES Christopher Tyerman CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy DADA AND SURREALISM David Hopkins Darwin Jonathan Howard THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS Timothy Lim Democracy Bernard Crick DESCARTES Tom Sorell DESIGN John Heskett DINOSAURS David Norman DREAMING J. Allan Hobson DRUGS Leslie Iversen THE EARTH Martin Redfern ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta EGYPTIAN MYTH Geraldine Pinch EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball EMOTION Dylan Evans EMPIRE Stephen Howe ENGELS Terrell Carver Ethics Simon Blackburn The European Union John Pinder EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn FASCISM Kevin Passmore FEMINISM Margaret Walters THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard FOSSILS Keith Thomson FOUCAULT Gary Gutting THE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle FREE WILL Thomas Pink Freud Anthony Storr FUNDAMENTALISM Malise Ruthven Galileo Stillman Drake Gandhi Bhikhu Parekh GLOBAL CATASTROPHES Bill McGuire GLOBALIZATION Manfred Steger GLOBAL WARMING Mark Maslin HABERMAS James Gordon Finlayson HEGEL Peter Singer HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson HINDUISM Kim Knott HISTORY John H. Arnold HOBBES Richard Tuck HUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood HUME A. J. Ayer IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden Indian Philosophy Sue Hamilton Intelligence Ian J. Deary INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION Khalid Koser ISLAM Malise Ruthven JOURNALISM Ian Hargreaves JUDAISM Norman Solomon Jung Anthony Stevens KAFKA Ritchie Robertson KANT Roger Scruton KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner THE KORAN Michael Cook LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler LOCKE John Dunn LOGIC Graham Priest MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner THE MARQUIS DE SADE John Phillips MARX Peter Singer MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Grifths MODERN ART David Cottington MODERN IRELAND Senia Paseta MOLECULES Philip Ball MUSIC Nicholas Cook Myth Robert A. Segal NATIONALISM Steven Grosby NEWTON Robert Iliffe NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland PARTICLE PHYSICS Frank Close paul E. P. Sanders Philosophy Edward Craig PHILOSOPHY OF LAW Raymond Wacks PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Samir Okasha PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards PLATO Julia Annas POLITICS Kenneth Minogue POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY David Miller POSTCOLONIALISM Robert Young POSTMODERNISM Christopher Butler POSTSTRUCTURALISM Catherine Belsey PREHISTORY Chris Gosden PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne Psychology Gillian Butler and Freda McManus PSYCHIATRY Tom Burns QUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne RACISM Ali Rattansi THE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton RENAISSANCE ART Geraldine A. Johnson ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway THE ROMAN EMPIRE Christopher Kelly ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler RUSSELL A. C. Grayling RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway SHAKESPEARE Germaine Greer SIKHISM Eleanor Nesbitt SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just SOCIALISM Michael Newman SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce Socrates C. C. W. Taylor THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham SPINOZA Roger Scruton STUART BRITAIN John Morrill TERRORISM Charles Townshend THEOLOGY David F. Ford THE HISTORY OF TIME Leofranc Holford-Strevens TRAGEDY Adrian Poole THE TUDORS John Guy TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan THE VIKINGS Julian D. Richards Wittgenstein A. C. Grayling WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION Amrita Narlikar Available soon: 1066 George Garnett ANTISEMITISM Steven Beller CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY Helen Morales EXPRESSIONISM Katerina Reed-Tsocha GEOPOLITICS Klaus Dodds GERMAN LITERATURE Nicholas Boyle HUMAN RIGHTS Andrew Clapham INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Paul Wilkinson MEMORY Jonathan Foster MODERN CHINA Rana Mitter SCIENCE AND RELIGION Thomas Dixon TYPOGRAPHY Paul Luna For more information visit our web site www.oup.co.uk/general/vsi/ Ali Rattansi RACISM A Very Short Introduction 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Ali Rattansi 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a Very Short Introduction 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by ReneCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire ISBN 978-0-19-280590-4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Contents Acknowledgements x List of illustrations xi Introduction 1 2 3 1 Racism and racists: some conundrums 4 Fear of the dark?: blacks, Jews, and barbarians 13 Beyond the pale: scientic racism, the nation, and the politics of colour 4 5 6 7 Imperialism, eugenics, and the Holocaust 45 The case against scientic racism 69 New racisms? 86 Racist identities: ambivalence, contradiction, and commitment 8 20 114 Beyond institutional racism: 'race', class, and gender in the USA and Britain 132 Conclusions: prospects for a post-racial future 161 References 175 Further reading 178 Index 183 For Shobhna Acknowledgements This book would have been difcult to complete without the generosity of friends and family. Discussions with Avtar Brah, Phil Cohen, Jagdish Gundara, Maxine Molyneux, and Bhikhu Parekh have been a constant source of stimulation and support. My brother Aziz brought his acute intelligence to bear on many of the issues discussed here and gave up much time to enable me to write. Sisters Parin and Zubeida and my mother Nurbanu have been unfailingly encouraging. And Shobhna's love and help have been simply indispensable. I am deeply grateful to them all. List of illustrations 1 Linnaean types 26 2006 Fotomas/Topfoto.co.uk 2 Classical Greek prole juxtaposed with those of Negro and ape 29 4 Steatopygia in an Italian prostitute 40 2006 HIP/Topfoto.co.uk 34 35 6 Equating blacks and Irish 41 7 Gossages' Magical Soap 53 8 Nazi propaganda BIUM, Paris/Museum Images 3 A 'Hottentot Venus' 5 Anti-Irish cartoon 58 Courtesy of US Holocaust Memorial Museum The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity. This page intentionally left blank Introduction 'An important subject about which clear thinking is generally avoided.' (Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 1954) A reader expecting easy, cut and dried answers to the questions of what is racism, how it developed, and why it stubbornly continues to survive may be disappointed. But deservedly so. These are large, complex, and contentious issues. Racism is not easy to dene, for reasons that will become clear. Short, tight denitions mislead, although in some contexts they are unavoidable. Even in a short book of this kind - perhaps especially in a book that might expect a wide readership - the question of racism requires relatively sophisticated treatment. Brevity and accessibility are not good enough excuses for oversimplication. Although racism is a multidimensional phenomenon, it has suffered from formulaic and clichd thinking from all sides of the political spectrum. Professional social scientists and historians have been as liable to succumb to the seductions of oversimplication as political activists seeking to mobilize their various constituencies. My research and writing in this area have been particularly concerned to move discussions of racism away from over-hasty denitions, lazy generalizations, and sloppy analysis. In particular, 1 it is my view that public and academic debates should move away from simplistic attempts to divide racism from non-racism and racists from non-racists. At the risk of exaggeration, I would suggest that one of the main impediments to progress in understanding racism has been the willingness of all involved to propose short, supposedly water-tight denitions of racism and to identify quickly and with more or less complete certainty who is really racist and who is not. Racism Later in the book, I will discuss a number of denitions, including the disastrously confused and unworkable formula popular with many anti-racists: 'Prejudice + Power = Racism'. I will also argue that the idea of institutional racism has outlived its usefulness. This book, despite being only a very short introduction, is an attempt to present a more nuanced understanding. It also differs from most other introductions to the subject by treating antiSemitism and anti-Irish sentiments as important elements of any account of racism, and does not assume that racism is simply a property of white cultures and individuals. And it gives due recognition to the fact that racism has always been bound up with a myriad other divisions, especially those of class and gender. Of course, I have not diluted the many brutal and painful realities that the subject forces us to confront. Millions have died as a result of explicitly racist acts. The injuries and injustices perpetrated in its name continue. However, most people are nowadays liable to disavow racism. Indeed, the concept of race, as we shall see, has been subject to comprehensive critique within the biological sciences. In the wake of the defeat of Nazism, a great many nation-states have put in place legislative, political, and educative measures to combat racism. Some have introduced programmes such as 'positive action' and 'afrmative action' to undo the effects of past racial discrimination. In its turn, this has provoked a backlash, but which denies any racist 2 intent. On the contrary, the afrmative and positive action programmes have themselves been accused of racism, albeit in reverse. Confusion abounds. Many accused of racism respond with the argument that their actions and aspirations are to do with patriotism, or that their claims revolve around matters of ethnic or national culture, not race. To which others add the view that everyone is racist. But contrary to the common-sense belief that the stranger or outsider inevitably provokes what the French philosopher PierreAndre Taguieff calls 'heterophobia', or negative evaluation of the different, the historical and anthropological evidence suggests that outsiders and strangers are not inevitably subjected to hostility. Empathy, curiosity, tolerance, dialogue, and co-operation are human traits that are as common as hostility and prejudice. Outsiders are not automatically feared or hated; they are as likely to be admired, found sexually attractive, to provoke ambivalence, or be envied (as we shall see). And nothing akin to the modern idea of race has been a human universal. This subject is a mineeld indeed. I hope that the reader will emerge a great deal clearer about ways of moving beyond present confusions and unproductive polarizations of position around questions of race and racism. 3 Introduction However, it is important to bear in mind a distinction between general 'prejudice' and racism properly so-called. That is, no one doubts that humans have always lived in groups and that these collectivities have had some sense of common belonging. The sense of belonging has usually been dened by language, territory, and other markers, which have been used to draw boundaries around the group. They have thus also served to dene outsiders and strangers. Chapter 1 Racism and racists: some conundrums The term 'racism' was coined in the 1930s, primarily as a response to the Nazi project of making Germany judenrein, or 'clean of Jews'. The Nazis were in no doubt that Jews were a distinct race and posed a threat to the Aryan race to which authentic Germans supposedly belonged. With hindsight, it is possible to see that many of the dilemmas that have accompanied the proliferation of the notion of racism were present from the beginning. The idea that Jews were a distinct race was given currency by Nazi racial science. But before that, there was little consensus that Jews were a distinct race. Does that make it inappropriate to describe the long-standing hostility to Jews in Christian Europe as racist? Or is it the case that racism has to be seen as a broader phenomenon that has long been part of human history? Indeed, that it is part of 'human nature', and does not necessarily require technical or scientically sanctioned denitions of 'race' to be identied as racism? After all, it can be argued that the Nazi project was only one stage in a very long history of anti-Semitism. And that anti-Semitism is one of the oldest racisms, indeed the 'longest hatred', as it has been called. However, complications immediately arise. The term 4 'anti-Semitism' only came into being in the late 1870s, when the German Wilhelm Marr used it to characterize his anti-Jewish movement, the Anti-Semitic League, and he used it specically to differentiate his project from earlier, more diffuse forms of Christian anti-Judaism, more popularly known as Judenhass, or 'Jew hatred'. His was a self-conscious racism that required that Jews be dened as a distinct race. And 'Anti-Semitism' had the advantage of sounding like a new, scientic concept separate from simple religious bigotry. Was Marr justied in insisting on distinguishing his version of anti-Jewishness from other historical forms? Is racism properly so-called something totally distinct from the hostility that many would argue is a universal form of suspicion of all 'strangers' and those who have distinct cultural identities? It is after all not uncommon to hear the view that Jews have been particularly prone to victimization because of their own attempts to retain a distinct identity and their refusal to assimilate (one version of the so-called 'Jewish problem'), a type of argument that is often used against other ethnic minorities in European nation-states. The underlying logic of this sort of viewpoint is that racism is simply part of a continuum that includes, at one end, perfectly understandable and benign collective identications that are essential for the survival of all cultural groups. At the other end, the 5 Racism and racists: some conundrums Thus, the key assertion of his little book was that Semitic racial (that is, biological) traits were systematically associated with Jewish character (their culture and behaviour). Jews, according to Marr, could not help but be materialistic and scheming, and these traits meant an inevitable clash with German racial culture, which could not be anything but idealistic and generous. Marr entitled his pamphlet The Victory of the Jews over the Germans, because he thought that German racial characteristics meant that Germans would be unable to resist being completely overwhelmed by Jewish cunning. He blamed his own loss of a job on Jewish inuence. Holocaust and other genocides are therefore to be regarded as unfortunate but inevitable episodes, varying in supercial ways but united by an essential similarity stemming from the very nature of humans as biological and cultural beings who live only in groups, are held together by common feelings of identity, and are thus impelled to maintain their collective identities. Racism Also, the idea of making the German nation judenrein seems close to the notion that has now come to be called 'ethnic cleansing'. But is all 'ethnic cleansing' racist? Or is there something distinctive about racist acts of hatred, expulsion, and violence? In which case, how exactly are we to distinguish between hostility based on ethnicity and that based on race? What is the difference between an ethnic group and a race? To put it somewhat differently, but making the same point, should we distinguish between ethnocentrism and racism? It is clear that even the briefest inquiry into the meaning of the term 'racism' throws up a number of perplexing questions and various cognate terms - ethnicity and ethnocentrism; nation, nationalism and xenophobia; hostility to 'outsiders' and 'strangers', or heterophobia; and so forth - which require clarication. There is a further issue that derives from the example of Nazism with which I began. Who exactly is to count as Jewish against whom anti-Semitism could be ofcially sanctioned? Is there an unambiguous denition? Talmudic law and the immigration policies of the Israeli state accept only those who have Jewish mothers as authentic Jews. This is a strictly biological denition. In Nazi Germany, one had to have three Jewish grandparents to be classied unambiguously as a Jew. Those who were one-fourth and sometimes even half-Jewish could be allowed to be considered to be German citizens provided they did not practise Judaism or marry Jews or other part-Jews. In the absence of clear biological evidence, a cultural practice, commitment to Judaism, functioned as a racial marker. 6 It has come to light recently that men of partial Jewish descent, Mischlinge in Nazi terminology, were allowed with Hitler's explicit permission to serve in the German armed forces during the Second World War. Even more surprisingly, in the postwar period some of these Mischlinge went to Israel and served in the Israeli army. But who is to count as 'black'? The history of US debates and legislation reveals consistent difculties in dening the black population. A famous 'one drop' rule was adopted in many Southern states, which implied that any black ancestry, however far back, consigned an individual to the wrong side of the white/black divide, determining (disadvantaging) where s/he could live, what kind of work was available, and whether marriage or even relationships could take place with a white partner. One drop of 'white blood', though, did not carry the same weight in dening racial status. The idea of racism is obviously closely tied to the concept of race, but it should be clear by now that the more one delves into the history of both notions, the more puzzling they turn out to be. Several important points emerge from considering the examples of Jews and the Irish, and some of the other groups that are discussed later. Firstly, the idea of 'race' contains both biological and cultural elements, for example skin colour, religion, and behaviour. Secondly, the biological and cultural appear to combine in variable 7 Racism and racists: some conundrums To complicate matters even more, it is worth remembering that historically there has been an ambiguity surrounding Jewish 'whiteness' which still persists to some degree. As we will see, the 'whiteness' of Jews, especially in the USA, as of the Italians and the Irish too, has actually been gradually achieved in the 20th century as part of a social and political process of inclusion. As 'Semites', Jews were often regarded as not belonging to white races, while it was not uncommon in the 19th century for the English and Americans to regard the Irish as 'black', and for Italians to have an ambiguous status between white and black in the USA. proportions in any denition of a racial group, depending upon the group and the historical period in question. And racial status, as in the 'whitening' of Jews, Irish, and others, is subject to political negotiation and transformation. Racism Inevitably, therefore, the term 'racism' has also become subject to social forces and political conict. The idea of race has been in retreat in the second half of the 20th century in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism and discoveries in the science of genetics. Nowadays, there is a tendency to regard inter-communal hostilities as stemming from issues of cultural rather than racial difference. Many commentators argue that the justication of hostility and discrimination on grounds of culture rather than race is mostly a rhetorical ploy to get round the taboo around racism that has gradually been established in the Western liberal democracies. There is, they contend, a new 'cultural racism' that has increasingly supplanted an older biological racism. 'Islamophobia' has been identied as one of the most recent forms of this new racism. But can a combination of religious and other cultural antipathy be described as 'racist'? Is this not to rob the idea of racism of any analytical specicity and open the oodgates to a conceptual ination that simply undermines the legitimacy of the idea? These issues are discussed later in the book. Fewer and fewer people in Western societies will nowadays openly describe themselves as racist. Yet social scientists, politicians, journalists, and members of various communities are apt to claim that these societies are deeply racist. Government agencies continue to collect statistical and other evidence of racial discrimination and use a variety of laws and other instruments to attempt to enforce non-discriminatory codes of conduct. In Britain, considerable controversy was ignited in 1999 when Lord Macpherson's inquiry into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence branded the London Metropolitan Police as 8 institutionally racist, thus propelling yet another denition into the public domain (although one well known to social scientists and the subject of controversy in an earlier ofcial report, from the Scarman Inquiry into disorders in the London borough of Brixton in 1981). This has been only one in a whole series of other investigations that has documented systematic and long-standing discrimination against Britain's ethnic minorities in spheres such as housing, and private and public sector employment. Although greeted with disbelief in some quarters, to many this came as no surprise. In 1984, a Commission for Racial Equality investigation had already revealed that London's highly respected St George's Medical School's admission procedures, inscribed into the School's computer software, had systematically penalized British applicants with non-Christian surnames. Just prior to my starting work on this book, Britain was (again) convulsed by accusations of racism and counter-accusations of 'political correctness' (a regular occurrence in British public life), when Robert Kilroy-Silk, a well known breakfast television presenter and former Labour MP, was suspended by the BBC for publishing derogatory remarks about 'Arabs'. And one Ron Atkins, a noted football commentator, resigned after he made ferociously 9 Racism and racists: some conundrums To take just one instance, the British Medical Association published evidence in 2004 that doctors of South Asian origin had been consistently passed over in terms of recruitment, training opportunities, merit awards, and promotion. One medical specialist of Indian origin was paid nearly 1 million in compensation in March 2004 by an industrial tribunal for racial discrimination by the National Health Service. Moreover, another ofcial report in 2004 revealed that black and Asian British citizens do not experience equal treatment with whites as patients of the National Health Service. Racism anti-black remarks about a footballer during a period when Atkins thought the microphone was switched off. Interestingly, black and white alike were divided as to whether Atkins was really a racist, given that he had been an important gure in promoting the cause of black footballers. I shall examine both cases in greater detail later in the book. Similarly, problematic recent cases can be documented in most Western European nation-states and the USA. In Italy, Prime Minister Berlusconi was forced to apologize after describing a German member of the European Parliament as someone who would have made a suitable actor in a lm about Nazi concentration camps. Whether the offence caused to the EMP and the German nation could be described as racist was never claried, but there seemed general agreement that it had racist connotations, especially after Berlusconi's tourism minister subsequently described Germans as 'blonde hyper-nationalists' whose sense of superiority would not survive an intelligence test. However, in Germany, revulsion against the Nazi past has meant that 'xenophobia' (Auslanderfeindlichkeit) rather than racism is the preferred term in German public discourse, raising yet more questions. What is the relationship between 'hostility towards foreigners' and racism? In the USA, of course, there are continuing examples of controversy over 'race' and racism, in different guises. In 2004, a long-standing member of the Senate, Trent Lotte, had to resign after publicly expressing nostalgia for a previous period of racial segregation. Two criminal trials found the population strongly divided on 'black/white' lines. Prior to his trial and consideration of the evidence by the jury, O. J. Simpson, a well known sportsman, was believed by most whites to be guilty and most blacks not guilty of the murder of his white wife, a verdict in which the jury acquitted him. The acquittal of white police ofcers seen on camera beating a black motorist, Rodney King, led to widespread 'race' rioting in 10 Los Angeles in 1992 and the subsequent retrial and conviction of several ofcers. And controversy continues over the justication for afrmative action policies that can discriminate in favour of black applicants, especially for higher education, to remedy for past unjust discrimination against the black population. How exactly is racism involved in these events and debates in American public life? Moreover, consider the case of an Englishman, David Tovey, convicted in October 2002 of rearms and explosives offences. His home in rural Oxfordshire was found to contain various types of guns, explosives, and books and videos on how to make bombs, including nailbombs. He had also hidden a sketch map of a mosque, lists of number plates of cars belonging to black and Asian people, sometimes with 'Paki' and 'nigger' scrawled alongside, and correspondence with the far-right British National Party about asylum seekers. He had rst come to police attention as the person daubing anti-white grafti in local areas. Police concluded that the slogans were designed to stir up whites and that he was on the point of conducting a 'one-man race war'. In denying that he was a racist, Tovey pointed to the fact that he had been married for a number of years to a woman of Chinese descent and had also had a 16-year relationship with a woman of Jamaican origin. The police, though, were in no doubt that Tovey would at 11 Racism and racists: some conundrums It is even more difcult to decide exactly how racism might be involved in, say, the fact that in the USA black men are 10 times more likely to go to prison than whites, and 1 in 20 over the age of 18 is in jail. Or, as revealed in an Amnesty International report of 2004, why black defendants convicted of killing whites have been sentenced to death 15 times more often than white defendants convicted of killing blacks. Also, blacks convicted of killing other blacks in the USA are only half as likely to suffer the death penalty as when they are convicted of killing whites. Is this racism at work? Where does this and similar instances t into the American, and indeed general, narrative of racism? some point have used his weapons, presumably against black and Asian people. Is it the case that the peculiarity of the private life of Tovey is simply an aberration in an otherwise seamless racist identity, or does it contain clues as to complexities in racist identities in general? Racism Finally, let us return to the notorious anti-Semite Wilhelm Marr, discussed earlier. He had failed to mention in his book that three out of his four wives had been Jewish and that he had a son by one of them. But in the 1890s he broke with the anti-Jewish movements he had done so much to inspire and asked for forgiveness from the Jewish people. In attempting to interpret these and other puzzles about racism, we must rst confront the history of the idea of race. In doing so, we must pay close attention to the ways in which the notion of race, and its associations with skin colour, facial features, and other aspects of physiognomy, has been intertwined, amongst other things, with issues of class, masculinity and femininity, sexuality, religion, mental illness, and the idea of the nation. And, crucially, with the development of science. 12 Chapter 2 Fear of the dark?: blacks, Jews, and barbarians By the time Marr penned his diatribe against the Jews in the 1870s, most of the elements of the modern concept of race were already in place. The idea that human biological characteristics such as skin colour, shape of nose, type of hair, and size of skull were associated with ingrained cultural and behavioural traits was well established. It was widely held that level of ability to use reason, capacity for 'civilization' and the arts, and tendencies towards sexual lasciviousness, for example, could all be read off from a study of the outward appearance of human beings. There was also considerable speculation about the relation between humans, the 'lower races', and apes. Assertions that inferior races were either born of sexual relations between humans and apes, or interbred with apes, or were closer to apes than other humans were commonplace. But how far back can one trace racial ideas? The ancient civilizations Egypt In Egyptian representational art, non-Egyptians, usually Africans and Asians, are depicted as distinct. Differences are particularly evident in hairstyles and clothes. Some physical differences are also 13 evident. Nubians from further south in Africa are often painted in darker colours. However, there is no evidence that colour was used in an evaluative sense. Nubians were respected for their achievements, especially as skilled archers and military leaders. The Greeks Racism It was common practice to distinguish between Greeks and 'barbarians'. 'Barbarian', although a disparaging term, simply denoted someone who did not speak Greek, someone who babbled, could only speak 'barbar'. The key distinction between Greeks and barbarians had nothing to do with physical appearance, still less something as supercial as skin colour. It represented the difference between people who, like the Greeks, accepted an ideal of the political or politikos, a combination of citizenship and civic virtue, and those who preferred to live under authoritarian rule. Perhaps most interesting is Greek political and environmental determinism, well represented in the writings of Aristotle. Aristotle thought it possible that cold climates produced populations 'full of spirit but decient in skill and intelligence', and therefore incapable of ruling others, while Asians displayed skill and intelligence but no spirit, and this explained their predisposition to live in subjection and slavery. 'Greek stock' was lucky to occupy an intermediate geographical location, enabling it to combine skill, intelligence, and spirit, and thus the capacity to govern others. But this also appears to carry the implication that Asiatics and northern Europeans, were they to live for any length of time in favourable conditions, could develop a character that would allow them to practise Greek-style political organization. This is rather different from the biological determinism of modern racial theories. The Roman Empire Unlike the Greek empires which it gradually replaced, the Roman Empire (c. 250 bc to 400 ad) came increasingly to be staffed and run by non-Romans from a wide variety of regions and cultural 14 backgrounds. It is also striking that the Emperor Septemus Severus (193-211 ad) was black, as evidenced by a contemporary portrait. Christianity, anti-Semitism, and the European Middle Ages It is generally accepted that in the Greek and Roman civilizations, despite some clashes between Jews and non-Jews, especially in Alexandria, there was no systematic persecution of Jews. Jewish communities ourished in North Africa and the Mediterranean. A more virulent Christian anti-Judaism is apparent from the 8th century. It is around this period that the charge that Jews sought ways to torture and kill individual Christians acquires greater currency. And notions such as the infamous 'Blood Libel' (the belief that Jews used Christian blood, especially from children, for matzos, or unleavened bread, at Passover) also became more widespread. Two of the greatest disasters to befall European Jews in the medieval period were, rstly, the massacres of 1096 in parts of France and Germany - and subsequently in England - that followed the declaration of the First Crusade in 1095; secondly, their expulsion from Spain in 1492 after the defeat of the Islamic powers by the Christian crusaders. Although Jews had been practising a variety of occupations, it was the massacres following the Crusades that gradually conned signicant proportions of them to usury. In conditions of physical 15 Fear of the dark?: blacks, Jews, and barbarians Christian antipathy to Jews developed only gradually. What some have called 'theological anti-Semitism' rst took root in the Byzantine East from the 4th century ad onwards. Notions of Jews as lewd and gluttonous, 'murderers of the Lord' and 'companions of the devil', began to be propounded by Christian preachers. danger and the scarcity of legal tender, Jews found money-lending a convenient means of livelihood. Lending to barons, clergy, and monarchs who craved a luxurious lifestyle made many Jews wealthy. Racism Medieval and early modern Europe was characterized by frequent, violent popular outbursts against the Jewish communities. The disorders allowed many Christians to rob Jews of their wealth and renege on debts. The disastrous Black Death, the plague that decimated European populations in the 14th century, was often blamed on Jews. The culmination of the Crusades was the defeat of the Islamic dynasties that had ruled over the Iberian Peninsula for 700 years. Muslim rule had created tolerant, culturally mixed, vibrant cities, the most famous being Cordoba, Seville, and Granada. Jews had thrived in the new climate of cultural dialogue, scholarship, and trade. But on 31 March 1492, the triumphant Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, signed the edict expelling Jews. Expulsion from Spain led to a new scattering, with Jewish communities dispersing to other Muslim-ruled territories in the Mediterranean. Some migrated to European territories. However, there is little evidence throughout this long period of any kind of biological determinism. Jewish cultural practices were not seen to be inevitably bound up with Jewish physiology. The fascination with stereotypical Jewish features, that infamous nose, even the Jewish foot, that was common in later centuries seems to have few if any precursors in medieval and early modern Europe. Nevertheless, Jews who had converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spain, the so-called conversos, fell foul of the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), which is certainly a proto-racial notion. In the 16th century, certicates of pure blood 16 were often required for membership of a variety of religious and secular associations. Wildness and blackness in the European imagination The medieval popular imagination had also been much exercised by notions of monstrous peoples with bizarre physical features. And anxieties also focused on Wild Men and Wild Women, beings covered in hair and leaves, highly sexed and licentious, and prone to seduce the unwary. It is important to note how the gure of Wild populations allowed the coalescence of proto-racial themes with those of social class. Wildness, often associated with the lower orders, came to be seen as part of a more general issue of 'breeding', 'stock', and blood. In particular, the aristocracy, threatened by the crumbling of the feudal order, superimposed doctrines of the innate superiority of those with superior breeding and (blue) blood upon other popular anxieties. An early version of the conation of biology and culture can be seen at work here. Islam For the Christian West, Islam's military successes meant its representation as a potent, indeed terrifying, enemy. The image of Islam as a barbaric Other was signicant in creating the notion of 17 Fear of the dark?: blacks, Jews, and barbarians The Middle Ages were characterized by a symbolism that associated otherness with blackness, wildness, and the monstrous. In Christianity, there had developed associations between darkness and evil. Noah's curse that Canaan, his grandson from Ham, would be fated to a life of servitude was one such instance. Ham derives from the Hebrew Ch'm, associated with being black and burnt. The story was subsequently used to underpin theories of the origin of Africans and to justify their enslavement. Europe as Christian and civilized. But at this stage the opposition to Islam was not racial. Racism Of course, Islam had its own conceptions of its neighbours. The Arabs were well acquainted with fairer-skinned peoples to the north and relatively darker southern populations. But the various Islamic currents had little by way of specic racial beliefs. Slavery was common in Arab societies where Islam took hold, and while stereotypes of slaves as stupid can be found, these did not appear to have led to any specic identication of particular cultural and territorial populations as naturally inferior and therefore suitable for permanent servitude. Disparaging conceptions of other peoples and a colour symbolism associating whiteness with goodness and blackness with negative qualities are evident in many Arab and Islamic texts and practices. But no consistent conations of colour, culture, and physiology have been found to exist. China Recent scholarship suggests that attitudes to skin colour and bodily characteristics have a long-standing place in Chinese culture. There is evidence that some groups of non-Chinese peoples were regarded as barbarians. Moreover, the Chinese appear to have had some conception of themselves as being yellow or white. But it is not clear that the colour consciousness of the ancient Chinese can be said to resemble modern racial thinking. The conation of physical oddity with absence of culture co-existed with the notion that barbarians could acquire civilization with the adoption of appropriate Chinese customs. 18 South Asia Modern India, though, is often regarded as one of the most colourconscious nations on earth. And it has been tempting to ascribe this to the very long-established tradition of caste, which prescribes boundaries of purity and pollution between communities and contains doctrines which restrict occupations to specic groups over generations. However, recent scholarship suggests a more complex picture. Especially, the idea of a single, wholesale invasion by lighterskinned peoples at some specic period has now been replaced by a view that sees the formation of ancient Indian culture by a very gradual process of mixing with a variety of populations originating from the northern and western regions outside what is now the Indian nation-state. It is now accepted by serious historians that the distinction between the Aryan varna and the dasa varna revolved primarily around language, setting the Sanskrit-speaking populations apart from other linguistic groups. The fact that in crucial later texts, such as the Mahabharata, key gures are described as having dark complexions also suggests that the race-thinking that was often attributed to early India has little foundation in historical reality. 19 Fear of the dark?: blacks, Jews, and barbarians The notion of varna, or caste, as used in the oldest Indian text, the Veda, does carry implications of colour. And interpretations of ancient India as having been formed by the invasion of lighterskinned Aryans who subjugated darker Dravidians, also referred to as Dasyus, adds some plausibility to the idea of some form of race consciousness, especially because a term used to describe the Dasyus, dasa, later became the word for slave. Chapter 3 Beyond the pale: scientic racism, the nation, and the politics of colour When Columbus set out on his momentous journey to what he thought was Asia, the signicance of the year, 1492, was not lost on him. He wrote at the head of the rst journal of his travels: In this present year 1492, after your Highnesses have brought to an end the war against the Moors . . . in this very month . . . your Highnesses . . . determined to send me . . . to the said regions of India . . . Thus after having driven all the Jews out of your realms and dominions, Your Highnesses . . . commanded me to set out with a sufcient Armada to . . . India. The year that is often regarded as marking the birth of Western modernity was one symbolized by the expulsion of internal Others and the beginning of the conquest and pillage of those beyond the Christian, 'civilized' world. The signicance of the fact that the modern era can be said to begin with acts of proto-racial aggression should not be lost on us. The modernity inaugurated by the voyages has yet to escape fully the shadows cast by the conquests of Spain and the Americas. The 'Indians' encounter Columbus The shores on which Columbus landed, as we now know, were far from the 'Indies'. But he was convinced that he had found what he was looking for. 20 One of the lessons of the history of 'race' is an appreciation of the extent to which European colonizers saw not the cultures of the colonized as they were, but as they expected them to be. Hence the signicance of the discussion of European nightmares of monsters and wild tribes, heathens, and those of impure blood. Columbus was a man of his times. He believed in the one-eyed and men with tails, and mermaids. He claimed to have seen the mermaids on his journeys. Columbus, though, saw a primitive people, unclothed and dark, and therefore close to nature and uncivilized. He recognized they had names for the lands they occupied, but immediately proceeded to give them names of his choosing. They told him they occupied islands. Columbus dismissed this as predictable ignorance, for he had found the continent he had come looking for. He had a passionate double mission: he had come looking for gold and to spread the word of the Christian God. But contrary to much writing about Europeans' early encounters with the aboriginal populations of the lands they 'discovered', Columbus's reactions were by no means entirely negative. In the absence of knowing their languages, and by reading emotions into their facial expressions according to his conceptions and wishful thinking, Columbus oscillated between seeing the natives as either completely and extraordinarily good or essentially wicked. For the subsequent history of racism, it is vital to note this constitutive duality and ambivalence, and to understand its characteristically tangential relation to what these strangers might really be like. 21 Beyond the pale: scientic racism, the nation, and the politics of colour The Caribs and Arawaks who occupied the islands Columbus chanced upon were sophisticated peoples. They were familiar with agriculture, could make pottery of various designs, and were skilled mariners. Racism The duality was played out in a famous dispute in 16th-century Spain between Bartolome de Las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda, both of whom had been involved in the settlements in the Indies. The dispute attempted to establish which of Columbus's conceptions was correct. The central point at issue concerned the Indians' possession of reason and thus their status as humans. The issue arose because of the signicance of the Christian religion in the way all others were perceived. If the natives were fully human, they needed to be converted and treated, if not as equals, at least as belonging to the same species and therefore as capable not only of reason but emotions and pain in the same way as the conquerors. For Sepulveda, the Indians were non-rational and closer to apes, and could therefore only be useful to the Spanish if they were enslaved. Casas, more sympathetic to the Indians, argued that they possessed reason and could therefore be converted to Christianity. The Spanish could employ them as subjects of the crown. The dispute was important in deciding the fate of the Indians. The ofcial position of the Catholic Church and the Spanish monarchy was closer to that of Casas. For them, a distinction had to be made between indels such as the Jews and Muslims, and the Indians, who had never encountered the Gospel and therefore could not be regarded as inherently incapable of Christianity. The Casas position that 'all the world's races are men' held sway. Note, however, that Casas did not object to Africans being enslaved and brought to work in the mines and plantations (although he was later to change his mind and condemn the enslavement of blacks). Here we can see also an early version of different attitudes to the Other, one that has persuaded many subsequent students of the subject to insist on the idea that there are a variety of racisms rather than a singular, monolithic combination of discriminatory doctrine and practice. 22 More importantly, both the Casas and the Sepulveda perspective involved the potential annihilation of the culture of the Indians, for as the French historian Todorov has argued, the Indians were caught in a double-bind built into the logic of this particular either/ or. If they were indeed human, their fate was to be converted to Christianity and be provided with an alternative civilization. If they were not fully human, they would be enslaved and their own indigenous culture deemed worthless and expendable. It is now generally acknowledged that the term 'race' entered English early in the 16th century. This was also the time when the term was acquiring currency in other European languages, for example 'rassa' and 'race' in French, 'razza' in Italian, 'raca' in Portuguese, and 'raza' in Spanish. By the middle of the 16th century, one common meaning was beginning to gain ground. Race began to refer to family, lineage, and breed. In this there was some continuity with the later Middle Ages, for the term had come to signify continuity over generations in aristocratic and royal families. It was in the 18th-century period of great intellectual fervour and social change, generally referred to as the Enlightenment, that the idea of race began to be incorporated into more systematic meditations on the nature of the world. Europe made a decisive transition to a distinctly modern age, beyond Columbus's Christianity, with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is usually dubbed the Age of Reason. It is regarded as one that enthroned rationality as the highest human capacity. But the emphasis on reason was counter-balanced by an appreciation of pleasure, passion, and the role of emotions, especially in opposition to Christian doctrines. Subsequent opinion became particularly deeply divided on what 23 Beyond the pale: scientic racism, the nation, and the politics of colour Race, nature, and gender: the ambiguous legacies of the Enlightenment was regarded as the scientism of the Enlightenment, with some latter-day critics seeing the period as one that led to the characteristic modern contempt for less technologically advanced cultures and a freeing of science from morality which ultimately nourished the Holocaust. A key issue here concerns the Enlightenment attitude to 'nature', seen to be one in which the human task was to penetrate its secrets and bend it to human interests. Nature, like the savage, was 'wild' and had to be 'tamed' by the use of technologies derived from the natural sciences. Racism However, a counter-discourse, particularly concerned with social and political transformation, also proposed that the real task facing modern humans was to learn how to live harmoniously with nature rather than in opposition to it. This was incorporated into what later came to be called the idea of the 'noble savage'. The period was also characterized, on the part of some of its leading gures, by veneration for the wisdom and civilization of the Orient. China, especially, was admired for its wisdom, technical achievements, and civilization. The great French Enlightenment intellectual Voltaire (1694-1778) went so far as to argue that the civilization of the West 'owes everything' to the East. Chinoiserie and Sinophilia were notable features of the mid-18th century in France. It became fashionable to have Chinese gardens, porcelain, and even mock Chinese villages. The 'noble savage' While most Europeans of the 18th century regarded themselves the most civilized and rened peoples on earth, there were many intellectuals during the same period who found the increasing development of commerce, a rising upper class that had prospered on the backs of this growing trade, and a tendency for conspicuous consumption in the main cities distasteful and supercial. They 24 drew upon depictions of the life of American Indians as a form of paradise before the Fall. Mundus Novus (1503) by Amerigo Vespucci, from whom America took its name, was particularly inuential. Amerigo's noble savage, as he came to be called, was characterized by a number of unique freedoms: from clothes, private property, hierarchy or subordination, sexual taboos, and religion. This added up to a perfect 'state of nature'. Racial classication and the Enlightenment The form of rationality that predominated in the Enlightenment was primarily classicatory and the manner in which the idea of race was increasingly pressed into service to make sense of natural variety reected this classicatory zeal. The central issue that framed the various classicatory schemes was whether all humans were one species. The most inuential of the classicatory systems of the 18th century was produced by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. In the volumes of his Systema Naturae, published from 1735 onwards, Linnaeus extended his classication of plants and animals to include humans into the animal variety. Homo sapiens was united by the ability to mate with all other kinds of humanity, and Linnaeus proposed a four-fold classication of humans: americanus (red, choleric, and erect), europaeus (white and 25 Beyond the pale: scientic racism, the nation, and the politics of colour The idea of the noble savage, though, remained a minority discourse overwhelmed by descriptions of bestiality and ideas of the closeness of American Indians and Africans to wild apes. It was also overshadowed by the Enlightenment's strong belief in what has come to be called 'The Idea of Progress', the belief that humankind had progressed from a 'rude' and barbaric stage to the contemporary stage of renement, political liberty, freedom from superstitious forms of religion, and commercial prosperity. muscular), asiaticus (yellow, melancholic, and inexible), and afer (black, phlegmatic, indulgent). Linnaeus's attempt to nd connections between appearance and temperament can also be gauged from the following passages from the 1792 English edition: H. Europaei. Of fair complexion, sanguine temperament, and brawny form . . . Of gentle manners, acute in judgement, of quick invention, and governed by xed laws . . . H. Afri. Of black complexion, phlegmatic temperament, and relaxed bre . . . Of crafty, indolent, and careless disposition, and are governed in their Racism actions by caprice. The classication has clear evaluative judgements built into it. Nevertheless, the concept of race does not have a privileged status in Linnaeus's work and is not used with any consistency. This was true of the period more generally, when ideas of 'race', 'variety', and 'nation' were often used interchangeably. 1. Troglodyte and Pygmy: examples of Linnaean types 26 Blackness, sexuality, and aesthetics The two greatest philosophers of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant - now regarded by some as the rst proper theorist of race - and David Hume, were equally prone to evaluating the moral and intellectual worth of different peoples classied especially by skin colour. Kant proclaimed in 1764: 'This fellow was quite black . . . a clear proof that what he said was stupid.' I am apt to suspect the negroes in general and all species of men (for there are four or ve different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white . . . No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars have still something eminent about them . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen . . . if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Kant and Hume's acquaintance with black people was negligible. But from early in the 16th century, Portuguese, Spanish, and English adventurers had started bringing West Africans to Europe; 1555 is a momentous date in black-white relations in England, nine years before the birth of Shakespeare, and before England had potatoes, tobacco, or tea. That year, one John Lok brought slaves from Guinea. It soon became fashionable to have black servants at court and in aristocratic households, dressed in the nest clothes to display the wealth of the masters. But by the 1590s, the black presence had become a pawn in domestic politics. During a period of famine and economic recession, Elizabeth I, having herself had a number 27 Beyond the pale: scientic racism, the nation, and the politics of colour Kant drew explicitly on the revised version of David Hume's On National Characters (1754), in which the Scottish philosopher condently announces: of black servants, wrote to the lord mayors of the country's main cities 'that there are of late divers blackamores brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already here to manie . . . those kinds of people should be sente forth of the land'. Racism Elizabeth's attempted expulsion of blacks was singularly unsuccessful. By the middle of the 18th century, there were perhaps some 20,000 black people living in Scotland and England, including a well-organized community of 10,000 in London, composed of ex-slaves, servants, musicians, and exseamen. By the end of the 18th century, several black writers had published books. One of them, Ignatius Sancho, was friendly with a number of prominent literary gures, including Samuel Johnson. Nevertheless, the dominant image of the black was that of brutishness and bestiality. And the sexual anxieties and repressed desires of the age were projected onto the black male, as in Shakespeare's Othello. The myth of the African's large penis was born during this period. There was, especially, an association between blackness and ugliness, and between beauty and moral virtue. Aesthetics during the 17th and 18th centuries was dominated by the assumption that the ideal form of all human beauty could be found in Greek and Roman art. The most inuential historian of art in the 18th century, Johann Joachim Wincklemann, devised a scale of beauty that highlighted certain features of antique sculptures as the embodiment of beauty. Winckelmann regarded the depressed nose as particularly ugly. The African could not but fall foul of this European ideal of beauty and moral worth. 28 2. A classical Greek prole juxtaposed with those of 'Negro' and ape, purporting to show the similarity between the 'facial angles' of the 'Negro' and those of the ape (1824) The question of slavery The question of exactly how much slavery contributed to doctrines of race is a matter of dispute. Racism British involvement in the slave trade began to take off in the middle of the 17th century, with the formation of the Royal African Company. This trade reinforced the view that the African was sub-human. Thus, African slavery was legitimized by already existing views of Africans as inferior, which were then developed once the institution of African slavery became rmly established. The growing appetite for sugar, to sweeten the newly popular but bitter beverages of tea, coffee, and chocolate, and the popularity of rum punch fuelled the demand for slave labour on British-owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The infamous triangular trade involved ships sailing from Liverpool, Bristol, and London carrying textiles, guns, cutlery, glass, beads, beer, and other British manufactures. These were bartered for slaves on the African coast. Estimates suggest that at least 20 million able-bodied Africans were crammed into these sailing ships during the whole period of slavery. They were transported across the Atlantic to Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere - the notorious 'Middle Passage' - in the most inhumane and oppressive conditions. Large numbers perished in these harsh conditions before they reached their destination and were thrown overboard. The survivors were exchanged for sugar, rum, tobacco, and spices, which were brought back and sold in Britain. Slavery generated huge amounts of wealth for British traders and planters, and was crucial to the growth of Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Large fortunes were amassed by slave traders and planters, and played a signicant part in ensuring that Britain became the pre-eminent industrial economy, banking centre, and the dominant political and military power in the world. 30 The science of race In the 19th century there emerged a whole range of theories that explained all human variation on the basis of innate racial characteristics. The theories of Robert Knox - who believed that 'race is everything' - published in The Races of Men (1850), and the Frenchman Count Arthur de Gobineau, who published his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in 1854, may be taken as typical examples. Such views were united by a variety of assumptions. Firstly, that humankind could be divided into a limited number of distinct and permanent races, and that race was the key concept for an understanding of human variation. Secondly, that there were distinct physical markers that characterized the different races, especially skin colour, facial features, texture of hair, and, with the growing inuence of phrenology, size and shape of skull. Thirdly, that each race was innately associated with distinct social, cultural, and moral traits. Fourthly, that the races could be graded in a coherent hierarchy of talent and beauty, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. A consideration of Gobineau's views highlights other important 31 Beyond the pale: scientic racism, the nation, and the politics of colour Slave traders and plantation owners had a crucial interest in representing the black as t for no other fate. And they claimed a special knowledge of blacks. Edward Long, the son of a Jamaican planter, was typical. He was convinced that 'the lower class of women in England . . . are remarkably fond of the blacks' and worried that 'in the course of a few generations more, the English blood will become so contaminated . . . till the whole nation resembles the Portuguese and Moviscoes in complexion of skin and baseness of mind'. These passages capture the combination of the anxieties posed by class, gender, and race for upper-class males in the 18th century. Long also believed that blacks were a separate species. Unsurprisingly, he drew the conclusion that slavery civilized the African. themes in scientic racism. A reactionary aristocratic critic of the egalitarianism of the French Revolution, Gobineau regarded history as the account of a struggle between different races, white, yellow, and black, but conates race with class so that the history of every 'social order' is the result of conquest by a dominant race, which then forms the nobility, a bourgeois class that is of mixed origins, and a lower class, 'the common people': 'These last belong to a lower race which came about in the south through miscegenation with the negroes and in the north with the Finns.' Racism The issues of conquest and the racial origins of different classes fed into important streams of hierarchical thinking in the 19th century. There were long-standing beliefs in England, for example, regarding the injustice perpetrated on the Anglo-Saxon people by the Norman invasion. And in France, a popular narrative saw the country as divided between Gauls and the Franks who had invaded in the 5th century Robert Knox (1791-1862) wanted to convince his contemporaries that the main political conicts in Europe had an underlying racial basis. He distinguished between Scandinavians, who were supposedly innately democratic, but were incapable of extending democracy to the peoples they subjugated; Celts, who were good ghters but with little political virtue; Slavonians, who had potential but lacked leadership; and the Sarmatians or Russ, who were incapable of real progress in science or literature. True to the principles of the racial theories of the day, though, Knox regarded the darker races as being furthest away from the fair Saxons, and posited that the greatest degree of natural animosity would prevail between these two races. For the present, two other features of this phase of scientic racism should be noticed. Firstly, many of those involved in trying to prove the inferiority of black and yellow populations were not only against the egalitarian current unleashed with the French Revolution, but were also trying to nd scientic justication for the inferiority of 32 women. With the growing popularity of the measurement of skull and brain size, it was often claimed that women's low brain weight and decient brain structures were similar to those of lower races, and this explained their inferior intellectual abilities. Science and pathology A related phenomenon was the medicalization of racial analysis, again with strong overtones of sexuality. The two elements combined in the study of black women and prostitutes. The 19th century's scientic racism sought external signs of the black woman's excessive, animal-like sexuality in the supposedly distinctive appearance of her sexual organs. In 1815, an autopsy was performed on a Saartje Bartmaan, also known as Sarah Bartmann, and more popularly as the 'Hottentot Venus', to reveal more clearly her buttocks and her genitalia. Before her death she had been exhibited to European audiences so that they could gape at her steatopygia, or protruding buttocks. The dissected body was shown so that the lay and medical gaze could also focus on the supposed peculiarities of her genitals. Medical discourses began to relate studies of the physiology and physiognomy of white prostitutes to analyses of black female bodies to create a powerful chain of association connecting blackness and women's innately pathological sexuality. 33 Beyond the pale: scientic racism, the nation, an