30 years ago, in the fall semester of 1991, I taught a graduate seminar at the University of Massachusetts on the subject of ideological critique to a lively, engaged, very bright group of students. Not long after the seminar began, one of the students in a discussion made an offhand reference to "racism, sexism, and classism." The words rolled off her tongue easily and she clearly expected no objection to them but a very bright German student, Mecke Nagel (now a senior professor at SUNY Cortland), spoke up and objected, saying that she was opposed to racism and sexism but not to classism. The students were stunned into silence. They had never encountered anybody who objected to that formulation and they did not know what to say.
I was enchanted and decided to write something briefly about the subject of racism to distribute to the students before the next class. While sorting out my books brought home from Paris, I came across a copy of the 2600 word essay that I wrote and distributed. It occurred to me that some of you might be interested in reading it so here it is, dictated into my computer with my Dragon Naturally Speaking Program.
I will develop my analysis in reference to the term “racism”
and leave it to you to think through analogous analyses for other terms. My aim
here, as throughout the course, is twofold: to get you to think historically,
and to get you to think more complicatedly. I want you to learn to bring to
bear on highly charged, politically highly inflected matters the care,
precision, and analytical skill that you learn to use when writing about arcane
matters of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, or language.
We start with the state of affairs that existed in late
medieval Europe or in ancient Greece and Rome, or in the United States before
the Civil War, or in South Africa today. A number of different legal statuses
are explicitly defined by statutory or customary law, to which are attached
differential benefits and burdens. In the 12th century, in what is
now France, if you are a member of the regular clergy (i.e., A member of an
order that lives by a rule – is “regular” – such as the Benedictines), legal
questions concerning your property or damages you are accused of having
inflicted on another, and so forth, are heard in an ecclesiastical court. If
you are a peer of the realm, such matters will be heard by one of the courts of
the provincial Estate. If you are a freedmen,
your case will be heard in the court presided over by the Lord who rules the
domain in which you live. If you are unfree – a serf, i.e. “servile” – you will
not have the right to have your cause weighed by a court of law. The taxes you
owe, the military service you owe, the labor services you must tender, whether
you may marry and whom, and many other things as well, will be determined by
your legal status. Similarly, in classical Greece and Rome or antebellum United
States, such matters will be determined by whether you are slave or free. In
the United States, but not in Greece or Rome, all those who are slaves are
thought of as belonging to a single race of the human species – although that
is a concept that is not in fact as old as the institution of slavery even in
the United States. In South Africa, there is a legal system of racial
classification on which rests the rights of individuals to reside, own
property, vote, marry, travel, hold jobs, and so forth.
The absolutely crucial thing to get clear at the start is
that, at this point in the historical development of what will eventually
become the concept of racism, we are talking about legal statuses, not
feelings, attitudes, theories, prejudices, or unacknowledged limitations of
perception. In South Africa, for example each year there are 100 or more court
cases in which individuals are officially reclassified from one racial group to
another. (It is also the case, on occasion, that members of the same immediate
family are assigned to different racial categories.) Now there is, of course, a
tricky theoretical question whether such legal statuses re descriptive or ascriptive,
and my own view is that they are ascriptive. Briefly, what is at issue is the question
whether the law describes someone’s status – discovering it, when operating
correctly or making a mistake when not – or alternatively ascribes a status to
an individual by means of a legal procedure. On the ascriptive interpretation for example, the statement that
A killed B is, or purports to be descriptive, but the statement that A is a
murderer is ascriptive. On this view, there is no meaning to the question, “is
A really a murderer, even though the courts have failed to find him guilty?” any
more than there is to the question, romantic though it might sound, “Are A and B really married, even though they have never
gone through a marriage ceremony?”
Accompanying the differential legal statuses may be some
rationale or justification that appeals to supposed innate differences among
individuals assigned to different statuses – such as a theory of racial,
ethnic, religious, or gender differences. For example, medieval Muslim law
treats “people of the book” – i.e. Jews and Christians – differently from
infidels, on the ground, supposedly, that Jews and Christians acknowledge
portions of the revelation that Muslims claim to have come from Allah. And the
Greeks deprecated “barbarians” – i.e., those who did not speak Greek, and hence
sounded, to the Greeks as though they were saying “bar bar bar.” But in a
system of legally ascribed statuses, how one is treated is a function of one’s
legal status, regardless of what others feel or think about one.
The first step in any liberation struggle is, inevitably,
the attempt to remove the legal disabilities and instead establish it as a
matter of law that the group seeking liberation has the most preferred legal
status, and also, usually, the associated attempt to reduce all legal statuses
to a single one. So, the elimination of ecclesiastical courts and aristocratic
privileges, along with the elimination of serfdom, results in the single
category of citizen (which, at any given historical moment, may or may not
include everyone in the society, of course). Once again, although the rationale
for such a legal change may be the rejection of some theory of racial
superiority, the change consists in the alteration in legal status, not in the
success in persuading everyone to reject the theory that justified the old
system of differential statuses.
All of this is obvious and well-known. I emphasize it
because I want to suggest that all subsequent elaborations and developments of
the notion of racism are parasitic on this original notion of legal statuses.
Immediately, of course, it is discovered that the
elimination of the legal disabilities does not bring about everything that the
liberated group has been seeking. A former slave in Alabama may be legally
permitted to own land, grow crops, hire laborers, and sell his produce, but he
cannot find a white man to sell him land, etc. “No Irish need apply.” “Coloreds
to the back of the bus.” There is no question in anyone’s mind that
differential discriminatory decisions are being made on the basis of race, even
though Negroes and whites have in law the same right to own land, enter into
contracts, and so forth. Now, what is needed is not the removal of laws but
laws positively designed to force people to stop these differential practices.
And beyond that, of course, are needed penalties to enforce the laws, and law
enforcement officials ready and able to carry out the enforcement.
Before, an employer could not hire a slave even if she
wanted to, for wage labor is a legally enforceable contract, and slaves have no
standing in a court of law to make and enforce contracts. How she feels about “Nigras”
is irrelevant. She may have the warmest of feelings for them. Nor do questions
of social pressure and such arise. She is no more legally allowed to hire a
slave than an employer today is permitted to hire an alien without a green card
(though of course they do – and so did employers hire slaves in the old South,
but that is neither here nor there.)
The natural thing to say about the situation at this point
is that it is one of virtual slavery (see Proudhon’s famous remark that
property is theft, or the coining of the marvelously powerful phrase, “wage
slavery,” the force of which is now lost on those for whom slavery is not even
a memory.) In other words, it seems natural to say that these discriminatory
practices, designed to single out just exactly those who, under the old regime,
suffered from the ascription of differential legal status, are no different
from or in effect the same as the old system of legal slavery. To some extent,
this way of speaking is simply campaign rhetoric, but it is also designed to
force people whose attention has been focused on the legal issues to recognize
that extralegal or post-legal ways have been found to perpetuate the
disabilities that were originally legally imposed. But of course such a way of
speaking involves a shift in the original meaning of the term.
Now, we see a series of further shifts. Even after laws are
passed, and even to some extent enforced, one sees two patterns of events or
sets of phenomena to which the name “racism” becomes attached. First of all,
and very distressingly (it is important to remember this – one must never
forget the high hopes with which those fighting against the disadvantaged
status of some group greet the first elimination of differential legal statuses
and then the imposition of laws requiring equal treatment of persons who are
equal before the law) it happens again and again that patterns of differential
treatment continue, even in the face of laws against such treatment, because
people in positions to make decisions – bank managers granting mortgage loans,
landlords renting apartments, employers hiring workers and then promoting those
who have been hired, college admissions officers, etc. continue to make
differential judgments because of their private attitudes toward racial
differences, either independently of or in contravention of the law. At this
point, in the absence of the legal justification of differential legal
statuses, these individuals justify such behavior to themselves or others by
appeal to evaluative stereotypes or even some more general theory of innate
racial differences.
Even more difficult to deal with, conceptually, are two
further forms of differential treatment, neither of which involves a conscious
act of discriminatory judgment on the part of any individual. First of all,
people in positions of decision-making may make judgments that they themselves
believed to be objective and unaffected by considerations of race, but which others,
looking at them, can see to be based on systematic misperceptions – biases –
that shape their evaluations. Calling such behavior “racist,” and calling those
who exhibit it “racist,” can be understood in either of two ways not always
distinguished: either it is a way of saying that these people unconsciously,
subconsciously, or in a self deceiving manner, actually hold the sorts of
beliefs that would, in those consciously holding them, issue in differential
treatment of people on the basis of race; or, something quite different, it is
a way of saying that it is as though these people held such views or attitudes,
even though they do not, and hence that they are no better than, or have the
same effect as, someone enforcing a legal system of differential statuses.
Secondly, practices of discriminatory treatment may become encoded in, built
into, the administrative and bureaucratic procedures of an institution such as
a law court, an army, a college, or a corporation, in such a way that
discriminatory treatment is reproduced even when none of the individuals
administering the institution hold, either consciously or unconsciously,
discriminatory beliefs. To take a familiar example, colleges may administered
admissions procedure based heavily on SAT scores, which scores in turn reflect
the degree to which those taking them have had middle-class experiences (by way
of the sorts of “A is to B as C is to X” examples they use, etc.), with the
consequences that the admissions officers make choices biased toward
middle-class applicants regardless of whether they themselves have, consciously
or otherwise, a bias toward middle-class applicants. This last pattern of
institutional behavior comes to be dubbed “institutional racism.”
Now, clearly there are very great differences between legal
differentiation of statuses and institutional racism (whatever anyone may think
about the relative degree of harm each inflicts). To refer to them all as
racism is, once again, either a polemical device, or else – and this is where
things get important and interesting – it implies the claim that there is some
essence, which we label racism, the presence of which manifests itself in
different ways, but the nature of which is unchanged, and which is the same essence
in the South African system of legally defined racial categories, in the
antebellum legal system of slavery, in the virulent hatred of lynch mobs, in
the deliberate law evading practices of redlining insurance companies, and in
the admissions practices of a college whose admissions officers are trying,
unsuccessfully, to overcome the built-in bias of their own admissions
regulations. Now, this may in fact be true, but it is at least worth pointing
out that the very same people who forcefully reject “essentialism” in general
are prone to employ such terms as “racism” in ways that make sense only if one
supposes that the word names some such essence.
There is one last stage in this progressive development, the
roots and implications of which are rather curious and surprising. The
accusation of racism is, of course, an example of the sort of ideological
critique that Mannheim analyzes. The accusation of racism makes no sense in the
South African context. To accuse someone in South Africa of treating people
differently on the basis of race has about the same force as the accusation in
this country that voters are treated differently according to whether they are
registered or not. The obvious answer is, but of course! It is the law! To
accuse someone with a “no Irish need apply” sign in his front window of
discriminating against the Irish is fatuous. To accuse someone of racism who
claims to be hiring on the basis of merit is to attack her integrity, her
honesty, and thereby to show her up to be something other than what she claims
to be. When accusations of racism are combined with the notion of institutional
racism, and the unstated premises is invoked of a secret essence present in the
same form and virulence in all cases whether acknowledged or not, then one has
indeed a very powerful polemical weapon.
Many people who are extremely eager not to have what they
consider to be the morally or politically wrong views develop a
hypersensitivity to this sort of ideological attack, fearful that they will
discover themselves to have been guilty of harboring, unbeknownst to
themselves, the hidden virus of the essence, racism.
Well, where does this leave us? I suggest, at the very
least, that it shows us some of the complexities in the concept of racism,
which is used these days as though it were the name of a familiar vegetable or
well-known rock star. Think now of the compound word “racism, sexism, and
classism” that I called into question in the last class. At the very least it
should be obvious that the historical development of the concept of sexism is
different from that of racism, that both are different from the more recent
development of the notion of classism (whatever that is – I must say I am not
really sure). To use that formula is, whether one wants to or not, to buy into
the claim that these are the names of three essences that may or may not work
in people, institutions, in utterances, or in attitudes, presence of which
makes the people, institutions, practices, or attitudes in some way
reprehensible. If you do not endorse this appeal to an essence that can
meaningfully be said to reside in or characterize a person, an institution,
practice, and an attitude, then you have the task, before using the terms again
of thinking through what you mean by them and what you intend to presuppose
when you invoke them.
This is just the sort of activity Orwell was trying to get
us to engage in. It is also the reason
for spending most of the semester on substantive materials rather than on
abstract theorizing. I am going to try to stop you each time you idly fall into
a lazy use of such language as “racism,” when talking about a novel or an
ethnographical study or an account of the politics or culture of Iraq or Saudi
Arabia or the Maghrib.
