Welcome, to a sort of multiple choice blog asking which understanding you best identify with. I would be interested to know. Comments, criticisms and commendations welcome as usual.
Four Understandings of ‘Race’
The monthly blog ‘Three Things’ offers Christian commentary on different themes running in our culture, largely from a L’Abri and somewhat American perspective. In January it included the following:
‘When it comes to the use of race as a category for thinking about who we are as persons, there are broadly four camps (according to journalist [rather political scientist] Yascha Mounk):
1. Race is real. Societies will thrive when racially superior groups stay in charge.
2. Race isn’t real. But the idea of race is so deeply baked into our communities and societies that we’re better off seeing ourselves as members of a certain race.
3. Tribalism is bad (see options 1 and 2). Institutions should push against tribalism toward greater solidarity and the formation of multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracies.
4. Individuality is dignifying. We should aim for a society where people do not think of themselves as a member of any ethnic or racial group — and the only way to get there is to start now.’
I have a predilection – for good or ill - for lists, classifications and schemas. I found this one lodged in my mind and stayed with me as a helpful way of provoking thought about my thinking about race. Whilst the first one (poorly stated I think) is largely and rightly out of court in this country, I think the other three all have serious proponents and deserve exploration. I will explore all four, according to my assessment of their ascending order of significance.
1. ‘Race is real. Societies will thrive when racially superior groups stay in charge’.
As written this only applies to overtly racist societies of which apartheid South Africa was an obvious example, but which historically undergirded racist policies in the United States. However, it is not necessary for racial or ethnic (or religious) groups to believe that they are intrinsically superior that justifies them claiming precedence and authority, simply that they have an untrammelled right to rule over their land. Thus in Malaysia, Malay have precedence over all other ethnic groups (perhaps 30-40% of the population). Similarly, and with far more disastrous consequences, Sinhalese have claimed ethnic supremacy in Sri Lanka, leading to a bloody and disastrous civil war against the Tamil minority. In several other countries such as Burma or the Gulf states ethnic/religious groups have claimed the land as theirs, with other groups occupying inferior status on sufferance. Tragically, India seems to be moving that way.
4. ‘Individuality is dignifying. We should aim for a society where people do not think of themselves as a member of any ethnic or racial group — and the only way to get there is to start now.’
Increasingly this viewpoint is disparaged as being ‘colour blind’, but of course it has honourable provenance, not least Martin Luther King’s dream: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But downplaying or ignoring ethnicity usually fails to respond effectively to the realities of racial injustice. Awareness of someone’s ethnicity raises the possibility of them possessing significant cultural characteristics, and more importantly the likelihood of them being disadvantaged through the negative impact of racist policies. Not thinking of these things only compounds injustice. After a survey of Anglican clergy in Birmingham in the 1980’s Renata Wilkinson concluded: Several respondents to the questionnaire made comments like, ‘Black or White, I treat them all the same’. . . however . .when Black and White are treated the same, the outcome is not equality but inequality.” (J Wilkinson, R Wilkinson & James H Evans Jr, p 28). Treating people the same usually carries the implicit assumption ‘the same as me’ and therefore fails to allow for the difference and disadvantage of other peoples’ experience.
Both Old and New Testaments treat ethnicity as a valid category and the signifier of difference which is of more than passing importance. Revelation 21:24 & 26 say of the New Jerusalem that ‘the kings of the earth will being their splendour into it . . . The glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it’ suggesting that ethnicity is more than a passing this-worldly phenomena. Our differences will in some ways be present in the new heaven and the new earth. Thus, whilst the slogan: ‘One Race, the Human Race’ sounds noble and ideal, it unhelpfully side-lines both the enduring richness that comes from our ethnic diversity and the harsh outcomes of racial and ethnic groups being treated unequally.
France is an outlier example of a nation that has sought to ignore ethnicity. It is the only western European nation that keeps any record of ethnicity: we are all French, why bother. For a British visitor to Paris one notable observation is that whilst there are large numbers of people of clearly North African origin, the outward expressions of Islam, such as hijabs or beards, are markedly absent, which reflects the historic French colonial policy that all inhabitants of its empire were French. There are advantages and disadvantages of such an intention to be colour (or ethnicity) blind, creating for some people easier integration into French society, but with others embittered pockets of near total alienation from all that France stands for. On the one hand the Algerian-background politician, Rachida Dati, has said: ‘What troubles me about England is the fact that you say you respect people’s differences, but in fact you go further than that, and you allow people to live in isolation. There is very little social mix. The French model is totally different’. By contrast the Caribbean background footballer, Lilian Thuram, has complained about the greater level of racism in French football compared with England.
Certainly there are situations where skin colour should be treated as irrelevant. An interesting example was the New York Philharmonic’s policy of ‘blind’ auditions, were the candidates were unseen to their assessors, who therefore knew nothing of their ethnicity, gender, age, appearance and the like – simply their musical ability. An article in the New York Times argued that this should be abandoned because the outcome was that there were disproportionately few black musicians in the orchestra, as though cultural preferences ought not to be allowed to have an impact.
The Three Things blog references a ‘Bad Faith podcast’ discussion between host (and Bernie Sanders supporter) Briahna Joy Gray (with a camp 2 approach) and writer (and advocate for camp 4) Thomas Chatterton Williams, who has racially mixed parentage and argues for the side-lining of issues of race and identity. His autobiography ‘Losing My Cool’ has a sub-title which pays tribute to the strong care of his black father and the impact of ‘15,000’ books on leading him to disengage from the ‘cool’ rebel, hip-hop black consciousness that he adopted at school, and seek to be non-racial. Williams and his white wife now live in Paris, the latest in a century-long line of creative black American figures such as Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Lenny Kravitz who have found ‘race unaware’ Paris a welcome balm from race conscious USA.
For some disavowing racial identity brings a sense of freedom and choice, and a means of planting the ideal into the turmoil of the present.
2. Race isn’t real. But the idea of race is so deeply baked into our communities and societies that we’re better off seeing ourselves as members of a certain race.
This I take to be the normative view at present, first in the USA and now in Britain. It recognises what Patricia J Williams describes in the sub-title of her excellent ‘Seeing a Colour-Blind Future’ (1997) as ‘the Paradox of Race’; that is that on the one hand ‘race’ in itself has no meaning as an objective classification of human beings, and yet because humans give it meaning, so that it becomes ‘socially constructed’, therefore it does have meaning. (John L Wilkinson’s stimulating ‘Church in Black and White’ (1993) uses the not dissimilar term ‘dialectical’).
Thus, this view is to recognise that pragmatically we are all products of a history which can only be responded to by accepting the here-and-now provisional reality of ‘race’, and use it as a category to understand our present situation and as a tool to overcoming still-enduring racism and injustice. Only be recognising race as a meaningful, even if artificial category, can we understand the nature of the massive injustices of the past and their continuing survival in the present, and organise to work for societies which do not impose disadvantage on ethnic and racial groups. Amongst other things (and over against France) we do need to do the tricky and elusive work of identifying different racial groups, of making comparisons, identifying injustices and proposing remedial policies. (Even if, re last week’s blog on Thomas Sowell, you recognise that is a far more complex and subtle task than is commonly recognised).
Identities matter. Some sort of organisation on ethnic and racial grounds is necessary to form a coherent enough bloc to argue for change, to claim that black lives do matter, and needs to shape the national policies in government, employment, education and churches.
But there are dangers to this pragmatic move to maintain ethnic consolidation. By gaining strength to achieve racial justice through unity, the ‘race is not real but a social construct’ understanding loses traction, and ‘race is real as an indicator of injustice’ starts to be written in stone. It becomes a permanent, indeed for some, necessary constituent of our society; otherwise those who have made their sense of racial identity central to their very being feel diminished (and in some cases would lose their jobs) if race becomes less salient in our society. It seems to me that our present climate over race can be described in ways that at one and the same time are both paradoxical and valid. On the one hand there is a healthy awakening to the reality of racism, both over the legacy of slavery and also a wide range of injustices; and yet also on the other the burgeoning of a neurotic desire to see race everywhere as an issue. Only thus can Pan Macmillan publishers insane decision to completely obliterate the writings of Kate Clanchy be understood, as a mark of an obsessive, deranged, spuriously ‘anti-racist’ culture.
Approach 2, by baking race too hard into our society can inhibit people’s freedom to shift and change identities. The bizarre tendency has been noted that whilst our society increasingly seeks to undermine the immutable reality of male/female biological difference, at the same time biologically negligible racial differences are increasingly consolidated. So it’s ok for Grayson Perry to wear a dress; but if he wore dreadlocks he would be torn apart in a twitterstorm of accusations of ‘appropriation’.
3. ‘Tribalism is bad. Institutions should push against tribalism toward greater solidarity and the formation of multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracies’.
This can be seen as a loosening rather than a hardening of the emphasis on ethnic identity that approach 2 sees as needful in society as it currently is. That is, it refuses the ‘essentialism’ that can marker the harder expressions of 2 whereby racial or ethnic categories have a strong streak of permanence running through them. They are essential, enduring categories. Approach 1 expresses this view at its most dogmatic – ‘never the twain shall meet’. But in 2 the need to express who we are requires the identification of certain ‘us’ characteristics; for example it seems to me that for Robert Beckford it is a slippery slope that is difficult to stay clear of.
In 1 Corinthians 9:22 Paul writes ‘I have become all things to all people’, specifying the Jew, those under the law, those outside the law and ‘the weak’. Although in Romans 9:3 he could speak in very powerful, emotive terms of his strong identification with ‘my own people, my kindred according to the flesh’, yet that did not hinder him from shifting into a Gentile identity at times that would have been seen as rank betrayal by most of his fellow Jews.
The capacity to either inhabit or at least sympathetically identify with other racial identities is both rooted in Christian anthropology, which sees present ethnic identities as worthwhile but penultimate and always secondary to our primary identity in Christ. Thus even if putting ourselves in approach 2 is seen as being of present-day, strategic value it is always with one eye towards ‘pushing against tribalism’ (perhaps not a good choice of word by Yascha Mounck) and seeking solidarity in forming a multi-ethnic democracy to which all ethnic groups are committed and in which all receive equal justice.
The sociologist Stuart Hall, initially from the Caribbean, identified the strength and enrichment of living across cultures when he spoke of "the experience of being inside and outside, 'the familiar stranger'. We used to call that 'alienation' or deracination. But nowadays it's come to be the archetypal late-modern condition. Increasingly it's what everybody's life is like. . Since migration has turned out to be the world-historical event of late modernity, the classic postmodern experience turns out to be the diasporic experience." A similar point is made by the late Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks: “In a plural society, the modern Jewish condition becomes the human condition tout court”. Sacks portrays the experience in a delightfully elegant phrase: ‘a delicate interplay between our second languages of identity and our first language of common citizenship’.
An ethnically diverse society, with a history of gross injustices as well as cultural differences will always be subject to centrifugal forces which seek to pull it apart. Christian vision is to give energy to the ‘counter-cultural’ centripetal forces which draw people together. Work-places, music and art, sexual attraction, sport, shared media and churches can all work centripetally.
Which category would you put yourself in?
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Add ons
‘Racial Capitalism. What's in a name?’ is the Eric Hobsbawm Memorial Lecture hosted by Birkbeck College on Thursday, February 10th from 6-7.30 pm, that will argue for the need for temporal and spatial specificities in trying to untangle what constitutes the workings of ‘racial capitalism’. See details for on-line participation on the Birkbeck College website.
(I was a student of Eric Hobsbawm at Birkbeck, where he was both a superb and stimulating lecturer and a committed Marxist. I remember him eulogising (circa 1962) on the Soviet’s achievement of putting a man in space. But it is strange that a historian whose intellectual framework has been so demonstrably and rapidly proven to be false, and which left a legacy of millions of deaths from both starvation and state violence, should nonetheless be honoured by a memorial lecture. Humanities academics – like bankers? – seem to inhabit a bubble of mutual support and admiration where you can never lose status for being wrong.)
Thanks John.. this is helpful.. I think I'm mainly 2 but wanting to become 3... That's inflation for you. ;-)