Racism
Racism
THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEOLOGICAL RACISM
PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF RACISM AND REFLECTIONS OF RACISM IN THE PSYCHE
Racism is intertwined with discrimination in two dimensions. On the one hand, discrimination is a specific practice that can arise from racism. On the other hand, racism is a specific form of discrimination directed against a social group that is constructed with regard to physical attributes, for example the color of the skin or the hair type. To these physical attributes specific social features such as behaviors and values are ascribed, thus naturalizing social attributes. Privileges and disadvantages of groups are therefore grounded in nature and gain their legitimacy through this naturalization. The identity of a person is always dependent on the marking, the ascription, and the perception of others. Self and other are defined in a reciprocal relationship: Racism is a specific process of producing self and other (see Darity, Mason, and Stewart 2006). It is the praxis of a dominant group classifying and characterizing an inferior group. Thus some scholars argue that racism transforms political or economical interests into apparently natural facts. Because racism affects social relations, class and race should be examined together (see Hall 1980).
Racism is produced on different levels of societies. On the macro level, racism comes into being through institutional rules, guidelines, and processes of exclusion that are based on and justified by racist discourse. Examples are the Jim Crow laws in the United States, the Nazi regime in Germany, and the apartheid system in South Africa. On the micro level, individual racism comes into being through generalizations, stereotypes, and discrimination against the other’s everyday activities.
The phenomenon of racism existed long before social scientists defined the term. In the 1930s the term racism was first used by the German physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) to describe the ideology upon which the Nazis based their identification of the Jews as members of an alien, subordinate, and dangerous race, providing an ideological foundation for the Holocaust (for a wider analysis see Horkheimer and Adorno 1947).
THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEOLOGICAL RACISM
Ideological racism developed from the processes of construing the human races as apparently homogenous and then building a hierarchy of these races on the basis of ascribed features. These concepts were developed in Europe in the eighteenth century in the context of the Enlightenment and the increased trust in scientific knowledge. Laws of nature were presented as the foundation for differences between social groups, and scientists tried to classify human beings according to categorizations developed in the natural sciences.
Some argue that these classifications based on nature replaced former classifications based on religion, following a trend to secularization. In contrast, Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown argued in Racism (2003) that the clash between the idea of biologically constituted different races and the religious belief that all human species descend from Adam and Eve and are therefore homogenous was harmonized by the claim that in response to human sin God damned the sinners and their descendents by distinctive features, such as black skin.
The main impulse to formulate racism as a theory came from French aristocrats striving to get back the privileges they lost in the French Revolution. According to them, the French aristocrats were descendants of the Franconian conqueror, so any restriction of their privileges was a violation of their inherited rights; this idea was formulated as “the legend of the Franconia” by the French historian Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722). Socially different estates in France became referred to as different “races.” In consequence, the privileges of the aristocracy became legitimized not only by the legal system, but also by what were presented as hereditary, physical traits. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution (1863) provided further justification for this theory of the naturally grounded inequality of human beings. The adaptation of Darwin’s theory of evolution to society is called social Darwinism (see Hawkins 1997, Dickens 2000). Following this theory, disadvantaged races have their social positions because of their inferior qualities, and those inferior qualities are translated to inevitably lower social status in the common struggle for existence. The idea of a racial hierarchy based on nature became important during the colonization period beginning at the end of the fifteenth century when in the process of oppressing and exploiting Africans, Asians, and Native Americans the supposed racial superiority of whites was established (for a discussion of whiteness, see Bonnett 2000 and Allen 1994).
Racial inequality is a matter of scholarly debate. Some academics argue, with the help of recent genetic research, that there are more genetic variations within races than between them. In this view, races do not naturally exist, but instead are powerful social constructions of racist people (see Miles and Brown 2003). Adherents to this theory argue that there are no clear natural borders between the races; racism itself constitutes these borders and tries to maintain them by ignoring any exceptions. Two crucial aspects of the impact of racism emerge: On the one hand, there is the practice of defining an apparently homogenous group of human beings as a race by negating differences between the individual members of the group; on the other hand, it is essential that the differences between the social groups that are constructed as races are emphasized.
Other scholars argue that the reason for racism is not that there are different races. According to them, racism is caused by the ascription of specific attributes to the races, and they hold that by identifying races as an ideological effect the racial solidarity of the disadvantaged race is undermined.
PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF RACISM AND REFLECTIONS OF RACISM IN THE PSYCHE
Racism gets its full power by infiltrating people’s own specific perceptions. In the minds of both victims and perpetrators, racism is produced and reproduced with prejudices and stereotypes from the other and the own. It has been widely demonstrated that from the perspective of whites, blacks are seen as violent and criminal. Studies in psychology illustrate that the same behavior pattern is interpreted differently depending on the race of the actor (see, for example, Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, et al. 2004). From the point of view of whites, a positive action by a black person, like being smart and helpful, often is seen as an atypical event explained by special circumstances, whereas a negative action by a black, like committing a crime or an aggressive behavior, is seen as typical of the genuine personal characteristics of black people. For the actions of whites, the relation is reversed. Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson illustrated the harmful effects of stereotypes when they demonstrated that the mere presence of a question asking the race of those taking an academic test led to a distinct decrease in the scores of participating African American college students: The race question activated negative stereotypes and self-confirming mental representations of poor academic performance. In consequence, the test participants confirmed unwittingly the stereotype that African Americans are intellectually inferior. Different tests showed that the simple activation of race stereotypes had different effects on test performances, depending on the kind of stereotypes (Shih, Ambady, Richeson, et al. 2002).
RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES
Because racism depends on economic and political factors, it is important to point out that racism came into being in different forms depending on the historic epoch and geographical region in which it appeared.
Slavery Slavery came into existence in China, imperial Rome, and West Africa without relying on racist concepts. However, in the colonial period the ideology of racism was useful in circumventing any of the conquerors’ religious or moral considerations that would make all human beings equal before God and thus require that they be treated equally by man. Using racist arguments, white conquerors could justify slavery, the use of slaves as property, the destruction of their social and cultural identities (Patterson 1982), and their exploitation. This was possible because the conceived hierarchy of races presented the whites as superior to other races; from a racist perspective, human beings are not equal and therefore they can be treated unequally.
The main reasons for the growth of slavery were economic. Slaves were used as a cheap labor force and as a profitable trade good. In the United States the profits acquired through slavery were an important factor in the growth of the shipping industry and a source of surplus wealth for early industrialism. Slaves worked in households, in mines, and on sugar and cotton plantations in the southern states of North America, in Brazil, and in the Caribbean. Most of the 4 million slaves in 1860 were the property of a small upper class in the U.S. southern states, and for this elite, their own economic power was bound directly to their property of slaves. They justified slavery by identifying blacks as a weak race that had to be protected by the slave owners, who knew how to treat them according to their natural status.
Before the end of the slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century, between 11 and 15 million Africans were enslaved and transported to Europe and South, Central, and North America. Most of them were enslaved during the eighteenth century, and most came from the West African coast and from central Africa.
After the Civil War After the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) slavery was legally banned in 1870 by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Because there was no land reform most African Americans were solidly concentrated in the southeastern states, nominally free but economically tied to the same cotton lands and the same employers as before the war. Former slaves were still stigmatized and pressed into economic poverty. From the perspective of racist whites in the northern and southern states, African Americans were an inferior race without the right to participate equally in political and social life. After the end of slavery in the United States racism took shape in the oppression of the African American population and in defining them as a subordinated race.
Discriminatory practices continued in the United States; the Jim Crow laws (1890–1912) banned African Americans from public places, curtailed their educational rights, and allowed widespread violence against people of color, including the lynching of more than 3,000 African Americans in the southern states between 1882 and 1936. Clandestine organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan murdered and harassed African Americans.
The Twenty-First Century The civil rights movement in the United States led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending institutionalized racism in the United States. However, racism is still alive; the durability of ideological racism and the idea of naturally based inequality between races still is present in the attribution of social traits to racial groups. In consequence, economic and educational opportunities are still unequal between the races. African Americans are still put into a position of inferiority in the hierarchy of races; an expression of this is segregation in urban ghettos (see Massey and Denton 1993 and Wilson 1987). Racist discourse still exists and reproduces itself in the stereotypes; it is part of everyday discrimination, and it leads to different chances for access and participation in the contemporary United States and elsewhere.
SEE ALSO Discrimination; Economics, Stratification; Hierarchy; IQ Controversy; Prejudice; Race; Stigma; Stratification; White Supremacy; Whiteness; Whites
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Lars Meier