Social Interpretations of Race - Case Studies in The Social Construction of Race - Race in Politics and Ethics

Race in Politics and Ethics

Michel Foucault argued the popular historical and political use of a non-essentialist notion of "race" used in the "race struggle" discourse during the 1688 Glorious Revolution and under Louis XIV's end of reign. In Foucault's view, this discourse developed in two different directions: Marxism, which seized the notion and transformed it into "class struggle" discourse, and racists, biologists and eugenicists, who paved the way for 20th century "state racism".

During the Enlightenment, racial classifications were used to justify enslavement of those deemed to be of "inferior", non-White races, and thus supposedly best fitted for lives of toil under White supervision. These classifications made the distance between races seem nearly as broad as that between species, easing unsettling questions about the appropriateness of such treatment of humans. The practice was at the time generally accepted by both scientific and lay communities.

Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855) was one of the milestones in the new racist discourse, along with Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology" and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who applied race to nationalist theory to develop militant ethnic nationalism. They posited the historical existence of national races such as German and French, branching from basal races supposed to have existed for millennia, such as the Aryan race, and believed political boundaries should mirror these supposed racial ones.

Later, one of Hitler's favorite sayings was, "Politics is applied biology". Hitler's ideas of racial purity led to unprecedented atrocities in Europe. Since then, ethnic cleansing has occurred in Cambodia, the Balkans, Sudan, and Rwanda. In one sense, ethnic cleansing is another name for the tribal warfare and mass murder that has afflicted human society for ages.

Racial inequality has been a concern of United States politicians and legislators since the country's founding. In the 19th century most White Americans (including abolitionists) explained racial inequality as an inevitable consequence of biological differences. Since the mid-20th century, political and civic leaders as well as scientists have debated to what extent racial inequality is cultural in origin. Some argue that current inequalities between Blacks and Whites are primarily cultural and historical, the result of past and present racism, slavery and segregation, and could be redressed through such programs as affirmative action and Head Start. Others work to reduce tax funding of remedial programs for minorities. They have based their advocacy on aptitude test data that, according to them, shows that racial ability differences are biological in origin and cannot be leveled even by intensive educational efforts. In electoral politics, many more ethnic minorities have won important offices in Western nations than in earlier times, although the highest offices tend to remain in the hands of Whites.

In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed:

History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

Dr. King's hope, expressed in his I Have a Dream speech, was that the civil rights struggle would one day produce a society where people were not "judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Because of the identification of the concept of race with political oppression, many natural and social scientists today are wary of using the word "race" to refer to human variation, but instead use less emotive words such as "population" and "ethnicity." Some, however, argue that the concept of race, whatever the term used, is nevertheless of continuing utility and validity in scientific research. Science and politics frequently take opposite sides in debates that relate to human intelligence and biomedicine.

Denise Ferreira da Silva advances a theory of racial analysis that challenges science and history privilege in determining race in her book Toward a Global Idea of Race. Looking to capture how post-Enlightenment modern subjects appear as racially different through overdetermined signification in discourses of science and history, analytics of raciality maps the production of an ontology of racial discourse, tracing strategies of visibility across social, economic, and cultural fields. da Silva’s project employs mapping and tracing as a tool for activating sites of inquiry, trading fixed forms of signification for relational constructs and perpetual motion. Concerning her larger project, da Silva sees analytics of raciality as a productive tool for rethinking difference and humanity. “In tracing the analytics of raciality, I identify the productivity of the racial and how it is tied to the emergence of an ontological context – globality – that fuses particular bodily traits, social configurations, and global regions, in which human difference is reproduced as irreducible and unsublatable. ” In seeking out the apparatus the racial guides, da Silva’s analytics uses object-products of race retrofitted into agents of production. In this way racial detritus is “a productive symbolic regimen that institutes human difference as an effect of the play of universal reason. ”

Read more about this topic:  Social Interpretations Of Race, Case Studies in The Social Construction of Race

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