Antipode: A Radical Journal of
Geography
Volume 23 (1992) [Pages 289-299]
The Theory of Cultural Racism
By James M. Blaut, Department of
Geography, University of Illinois at Chicago
i. Theory and Practice
Very few academics these days
consider themselves to be racists, and calling someone a
racist is deeply offensive. Yet racism in the universities
is just as pervasive, just as dangerous, as it was a
generation ago. Nowadays we seem to have a lot of racism but very
few racists. How do you explain this paradox?
The place to begin is to notice
the essential difference between racist theory and racist
practice. Racism most
fundamentally is practice: the practice of
discrimination, at all levels, from personal abuse to colonial oppression. Racism
is a form of practice which has been tremendously important in European
society for several hundred years, important in the sense that it
is an essential part of the way the European capitalist
system maintains itself.
Racist practice, like all
practice, is cognized,
rationalized, justified, by a theory, a
belief-system about the nature of reality and the behavior which is appropriate to
this cognized reality. (The word "theory" is better in this
context than the word "ideology," because we are talking
about a system of empirical beliefs, not about the cultural
bindings of belief.) But theory and practice do not have
a one- to-one relationship. One form of practice can be underlain
by various different theories. Since racism-as-practice, that
is, discrimination, is an essential part of the system, we should
not be surprised to discover that it has been supported by a
historical sequence of
different theories, each consistent with the
intellectual environment of a given era. Nor should we be surprised to find
that the sequent theories are so different from one another
that the racist theory of one epoch is in part a refutation of the racist
theory of the preceding epoch.
Putting the matter in a somewhat
over-simplified form, the dominant racist theory of the
early nineteenth century was a biblical argument, grounded in
religion; the dominant racist theory of the period from about
1850 to 1950 was a biological argument, grounded in natural science; the
racist theory of today is mainly a historical argument, grounded
in the idea of culture history or simply culture. Today's racism
is cultural racism.
I will try to show, in this paper,
what cultural racism is all about and how and why it has
largely supplanted biological racism (at least among academics). To start things
off, I'll explain the paradox that, today, in universities, we have
racism but few racists.
Generally, when we call a person a
racist in the academic
world of today we are accusing this person of
believing in the hereditary, biological superiority of people of one so-called
race over people of another so-called race, with the implication that
discrimination is justified, explained, rationalized, by the
underlying biological theory. But hardly anybody believes in this
theory anymore. Most
academics believe that the typical members of
what used to be called inferior races have a capacity equal to that of other
so-called races, but they have not been able to realize this capacity.
They have not learned the things one needs to know to be
treated as an equal. They have not learned how to think rationally,
as mental adults. They have not learned how to behave in
appropriate ways, as social adults. The problem is culture,
not biology. And, naturally, the inequality will disappear in
the course of time. But in the meantime, discrimination is
perfectly justified. Of course it is not called
"discrimination" in this newer theory. It is a matter of
treating each person in a way that is appropriate to his or her
abilities. The people of one race -- pardon me: one ethnic
group -- demonstrate greater abilities than those of other
ethnic groups, abilities in IQ, ACT, and SAT test-taking, in
"need achievement
motivation," in avoidance of criminality,
and so on. Given that they have these higher realized abilities, they should be
given greater rewards. They should be admitted to college, be granted
Ph.D.s and tenure, and the rest. And so racist practice persists
under the guidance of a theory which actually denies the
relevance of race. The differences between humans which justify
discriminatory treatment are differences in acquired
characteristics: in culture.
Another way of putting this is to
say that cultural racism substitutes the cultural
category "European" for the racial category
"white." We no longer have a superior race; we have,
instead, a superior culture. It is "European culture," or
"Western culture," "the West" (see Amin 1989). What counts
is culture, not color.
ii. Religious Racism
The notion of European cultural
superiority is not a new one. Early in the 19th century,
Europeans considered
themselves to be superior because they are
Christians and a Christian god must naturally favor His own followers, particularly
those who worship Him according to the proper sacrament. He will take
care of such matters as hereditary abilities, thus making it easier
for His followers to
thrive, multiply, progress, conquer the world.
He will even make certain that the physical environment in which Christians
live is more favorable than the environment surrounding heathens:
hence Europe's climate is neither too hot nor too cold, not
"torrid" nor "frigid" but nicely "temperate."
In a word: it was believed that the people of Europe, traditional
Christendom, possess cultural superiority, biological
superiority, even environmental superiority, but all of this
flows from a supernatural cause. This was the theory
which, in the period up to roughly the middle of the 19th
century, underlay most racist practice.
Note that the religious theory of
racism was an empirical argument. The cause was
supernatural, but the effects were straightforward facts. God had
created white people, in a region which Europeans considered
to be their own cultural hearth: the "Bible
Lands." The Garden of Eden was thought by many scholars to have
been located somewhere around the headwaters of the Tigris river,
in the healthful, temperate, mountains of Armenia, not far
from Mt. Ararat, where Noah landed, not far from the
Caucasus Mountains which were known to be the home of the Caucasian
race, and (as was often pointed out) in the same
temperate latitude as Greece and Rome (see, e.g., Lord 1869).
There was no such thing as early cultural evolution, since
Man was given agriculture, cities, and civilization in the
days of Genesis. All of pre-Christian history took place
among white people in a small piece of the earth's
surface, roughly between Rome and Mesopotamia. The rest of the
world was uninhabited. People migrated from this hearth to,
and so populated, Asia and Africa. During the course of
this exodus they became non-white, and they degenerated
(Bowler 1989), and lost the arts of civilization (although
Asians retained some of these arts).1 All of this was
considered to be historical fact. It followed, then, that the
white race has always been superior and still remains superior, and
for very evident reasons. In short: an empirical theory,
giving scientific justification for racist practice.
iii. Biological Racism
Toward the end of the 19th
century, naturalistic arguments had displaced biblical and
theological arguments in most scholarly discourse. But it
should not be thought that religious racism (as theory) had
entirely disappeared. In many contexts thereafter, this
theory was (and still is) used to justify racist practice
in which people of one
religion oppress people of another on grounds
of this, or some very similar, theory. An obvious contemporary example is
Israeli expansionism. God gave all of Palestine (and more)
to the Jews long ago, so the Jews have overriding rights to all of the
God-given land, and can expel anyone else from that land on
the basis of this absolute principle. It is quibbling to object
that this is not racism because Jews are not a race. It is
religious racism.
The secularization of thought
after about 1850 made it necessary to rest racist
practice in a new and different theory. Religious racism had
already established the causality by which God gives
better heredity to Christians, and this argument could now be
adapted to assert the genetic superiority of the so-called
white race, grounding this argument now in the immensely
influential biological
theories of the period, notably Darwinism and
(later) Mendelianism. The genetic superiority of the so-called
white race was now believed in axiomatically by nearly all social theorists.
The cultural superiority of Europeans (a category vaguely identified with
the white race) was also believed in, also axiomatically. Cultural
superiority was mainly, though not entirely, considered
to be an effect of racial superiority. (I say not entirely
because various other sorts of naturalistic causality were
also invoked: Europe's
environment is superior. Or Europe's cultural
priority originated in the mysterious and impenetrable mists of prehistory.
Or no causation was postulated because none was thought to be needed. For
some thinkers, among them Max Weber, all of these arguments
were heaped together in a melange of race, culture, and
geography.) But it is fair to say that the hereditary
superiority of the white race was considered to be the single most
important explanati multipart fon for the white man's obvious superiority in culture.
This was the era of classical or biological racism.
After the First World War, the
theory of white biological superiority began to lose force
in the scholarly communities of most (not all) European
countries. This reflected several causes. Some were internal to
intellectual progress, in, for instance, culture theory (e.g.,
Boas, Radin), psychological theory (e.g., Lewin),
philosophies grounded in experience rather than the
Cartesian-Kantian a priori (e.g., Dewey, Whitehead, Mead). One
external causes was the rise of egalitarian values, notably
socialism, which militatated against theories of innate
superiority and inferiority. A second external cause, a very
powerful one, was opposition to Nazism, which almost
necessarily meant opposition to doctrines of biological
superiority and inferiority.
iv. Cultural Racism
All of this notwithstanding,
biological racism remained somewhat respectable until the
1950s and 1960s, the
classical era of national liberation and civil
rights struggles. Racist practice now needed a new theory. At this time,
mainstream scholarship was being assigned -- quite literally:
with funds and jobs provided -- the task of formulating a theoretical
structure which would rationalize continued dominance of
communities of color in the Third World and at home. Such a theory
would have to accept two anti-biological-racist
propositions which were axiomatic in Non-European communities:
that Europeans are not innately superior, and that economic
development can bring
non-Europeans to the same level as Europeans.
The problem was to show that non-Europeans, though equal to Europeans
in innate capacity, cannot develop economically to the
European level unless these societies voluntarily accept the continued
domination by European countries and corporations, that
is, neocolonialism.
The outcome of this truly massive
theory- building effort was the theory of
"modernization." This theory argued, in essence, that
non-Europeans are not racially, but rather culturally backward in
comparison to Europeans because of their history: their lesser
cultural evolution. And it is for this reason that they are
poor. So they must follow, under European guidance and
"tutelage," the path already trodden by Europeans as
the only means of overcoming backwardness. Non-Europeans were
thereby defined as inferior in attained level of
achievement, not potential for achievement. This was the real
essence of cultural racism.
One of the most interesting and
important aspects of this theory-building campaign was the
deification of Max Weber by various groups of social
scientists, among them the Parsonian structural-
functionalists (see Peet 1991) and "traditional mind"
theorists like McClelland, most of whom were involved directly or
indirectly in the modernization-theory construction project. Weber himself, a half-century
before, had expressed the then-dominant European views concerning
non-Europeans, with some small improvements. Weber's argument,
though partially grounded in biological racism (see, e.g.,
Weber 1958: 30; 1967: 387; 1981: 299, 379; 1951: 231-232),
could easily be detached from that grounding because most
of what he wrote about
European superiority was axiomatic
argumentation about the uniqueness of the European mind
-- its rationality, its spiritual capacity -- and
historical argumentation about the unique rise within Europe, and
Europe alone, of institutions and structures which were the
source of modernity. (See in particular Weber 1951; 1958;
1981.) Neither rationality nor structure was (in general)
connected backward to race, as effect of a prime cause. Thus
the Weberian argument could be, and was, detached from race
and presented as a theory of modernization grounded in the
uniqueness of European
mentality and culture, permanent qualities
which throughout history gave Europeans a continuously more rapid course toward
modernity than non-Europeans.2 Those who think that Weber
became popular in the 1950s and 1960s because of his well-known
opposition to the Marxist theory of the rise of capitalism are missing
the bigger picture. Weber, and Weberianism, became important at
that time mainly because Weber provided contemporary
social scientists with a theory of modernization, essentially an
elegant and scholarly
restatement of colonial-era ideas about the
uniqueness of European rationality and the uniqueness of European culture history.
Weber was to neocolonialism what Marx was to socialism. In a manner of
speaking, Weber was the godfather of cultural racism.
Cultural racism, as a theory,
needs to prove the superiority of Europeans, and needs to do so
without recourse to the older arguments from religion
and from biology. How does it do this? By recourse to history
-- by constructing a
characteristic theory of cultural (and
intellectual) history. The claim is simply made that nearly all of the important
cultural innovations which historically generate cultural progress
occurred first in Europe, then, later, diffused to the
non-European peoples (Blaut forthcoming 1992). Therefore, at each
moment in history Europeans are more advanced than non-
Europeans in overall cultural development (though not
necessarily in each particular culture trait), and they are
more progressive than
non-Europeans. This is asserted as a great
bundle of apparently empirical facts about invention and innovation, not
only of material and technological traits but of political and social
traits like the state, the market, the family. The tellers of
this tale saturate history with European inventions, European
progressiveness, European progress.
This massive bundle of purportedly
empirical, factual statements was woven together by means of a modern form of the
19th-century theory of Eurocentric diffusionism (Blaut 1987a;
1987b). This theory evolved as a justification and rationalization
for classical colonialism. It asserted, in essence, the following
propositions about the world as a whole and throughout all of
history. (1) The world has a permanent center, or core, and a
permanent periphery. The center is Greater Europe, that
is, the continent of Europe plus, for ancient times, the
Bible Lands and, for modern times, the countries of European
settlement overseas. The core sector, Greater Europe, is
naturally inventive,
innovative, progressive. (2) The periphery,
the non-European world, naturally remains traditional, culturally sluggish
or stagnant. (3) The basic reason why Europe is progressive, innovative,
etc., is some quality of mind or spirit, some "rationality,"
peculiar to Europeans. (4) Progress occurs in the periphery as a result
of the diffusion, the outward spread, of new and innovative
traits from the core to the periphery. The diffusion process
itself is natural. It
consists of the spread of European ideas,
European colonialism, European settlers, and European commodities. Notice
that the basic theory can be driven by religious, biological, or cultural
motors. In the modern, post-1945 form of the theory, the motor
was culture, or rather culture history. The theory itself was
softened in some ways, for instance conceding that some
progress takes place in non-Europe (in spite of cultural
"blockages"), but the structure remained basically the
same.
Modern diffusionism therefore
depicts a world in which Europeans have always been the
most progressive people, and non-Europeans are backward, and
permanently the recipients of progressive ideas, things,
and people from Europe. It follows that progress for the
periphery, today as always in the past, must consist of the
continued diffusion of
European "rationality" and
institutions, European culture and control. The periphery,
today, includes the Third World, along with Third World
minorities embedded in the European-dominated countries
like the United States, in ghettos, reservations, prisons,
migrant-labor camps.
The main proposition here is a
kind of Eurocentric historical tunnel-vision which can be called "tunnel history."
Historical causation occurs, basically, in Europe and its self-proclaimed
culture hearth, the ancient Near East. (Examples: the origin of
agriculture, cities, states, science, democracy, feudalism,
private property, discovery, capitalism, industry...)
Non-Europe participates in history mainly as recipient of
diffusions from Europe. The most important part of tunnel history
concerns the world before 1492. (And 1992 is a peculiarly
appropriate year in which to point this out.) The essential
argument is this: Europe was advancing more rapidly than the
other civilizations of the world, and was more advanced
than these other civilizations, at the very beginning of the
modern era, prior to the rise of capitalism and modernization,
and prior to the beginnings of colonialism. Therefore, the
superiority of Europeans as individuals and of European
culture has very, very old roots and, by inference, is natural
and fundamental. This
proposition accomplishes everything that
biological racism accomplished and more; indeed, there is a structural as
well as functional parallelism between this doctrine and biological
racism. It argues, in essence, that a cultural, not genetic, superiority
appeared in the European cultural pool very long ago and, just
like genetic superiority, it has led ever since to a greater
rate of development for Europe and to a level of
development which, at each moment in history, is higher than that
of non-European cultures. Something occurred long ago in
European culture which pushed it into rapid progress. This
something then continued to operate to generate progress
throughout all of later history. In effect: a cultural
gene, or cultural mutation. But cultural racism claims that
a vast number of these
European cultural causes of progress, cultural
mutations, occurred, throughout history, one after another, each
adding further impetus to the progress of Europe, each pushing Europe
farther ahead of all other civilizations.
v. A Few Examples
Before I give a few illustrative
examples of modern cultural-racist theories, I have to offer two introductory comments
to avoid misunderstanding -- serious misunderstanding. First:
Precisely for the reason that we have, these days, so much racism
yet so few racists, cultural racism is not, in most cases, propagated by people whom
we would want to label "racists." The doctrine is theory,
not prejudice. Those scholars who advocate one or another form of it are
people who believe that they are dealing with facts, and with the
policy implications of
these facts. Most of them reject prejudice and
are not prejudiced. They simply believe that there are straightforward
empirical reasons, grounded in cultural differences, which
explain why some groups and individuals are backward.
Secondly, it is very important to
distinguish between those statements which merely assert
that some culture traits survive for long periods of time
and those statements which assert that some ancient, or at
any rate tenacious, culture traits explain the superiority
of this culture and the inferiority of that one. Change
is the normal condition in human cultures. If there is lack
of change, it is either because the members of a culture
do not want to discard some cherished traits or have no
choice because of impinging circumstances. No human group is
so stupid as to cherish misery, want, and death. Culture
traits which generate or worsen such things are
discarded, and quite deliberately so. (There are exceptions to
this generalization, but they are very rare, though much
publicized, particularly in freshman textbooks.) Cultural
ecologists speak of a "culture core" consisting of those
traits and institutions which lie close to the realm of human
survival: matters of life and death (see in particular Steward
1955). This part of culture is very plastic, very adaptive.
People resist change in other parts of their culture (such as
religion). But it is very questionable to infer that human
groups will retain any
traits if doing so is destructive to their
livelihood and survival. Therefore, whenever you hear a statement like "this
group is unprogressive because of its religious values," or
"that group is poor because its members are tradition-minded and
opposed to innovation," you should be on the lookout for
cultural racism. It is one thing to respect culture, and to
appreciate cultural differences, and quite another thing to
rank human groups on cultural criteria, and to claim then that
you have explained history.
Now some examples.
1. Many historians, today as in
the past, claim to find a uniqueness in the culture of
very early Europe, something which they connect with the
early Indo-Europeans (e.g., Lelekov 1985; Baechler 1988) or
the Germans (e.g., Macfarlane 1978; 1986; Crone 1989) or the Iron-Age peasants (Mann
1986; 1988), and quite regularly attach to the ancient Greeks
as contradistinct from their non-Indo-European neighbors (see the
analysis of this matter in Bernal 1987). In Marx's Germany, the
conventional wisdom was that ancient Germans were uniquely
freedom-loving, innovative, individualistic, aggressive, and
rational; the modern form of the doctrine does not depart
much from this formulation except as it admits Celts and
Greeks to membership; no modern evidence adds support.
Here, now, are some of the historical theories built upon
the doctrine. (i) Ancient Europeans were uniquely
inventive and technologically innovative, and thereafter
remained so (Jones 1981). (ii) Ancient Europeans acquired a
unique love of freedom, which matured then into a democratic
state (Mann 1986; Hall, 1985). (iii) Ancient Europeans,
because of or in close
association with their individualism, adopted
a unique family type which then acted to favor progressiveness, innovativeness,
and, incipiently, capitalism (Jones 1981; Macfarlane 1986; Todd
1985).
2. Many theories begin Europe's
uniqueness with Roman times, or slightly earlier, often
focusing on the Church, or the partly pre-Christian
"Judeo- Christian tradition," or the later Western Church.
Different theories find different causes for the emergence of the
new, and unique, and
uniquely progressive culture. The effects also
are manifold. For instance: (i) Lynn White, Jr,. argues that the Judeo-Christian
teleology explains Western technological inventiveness and
innovativeness (see Blaut forthcoming 1992); (ii) Anderson
(1974) sees something uniquely scientific and intellectual in
the cultural heirs to the Greeks and Romans; (iii) Werner
(1988) believes that
European s became uniquely progressive because
Christianity alone gave prominence to the individual.
3. A great many present-day
historians believe that Europeans long ago acquired an
ability to resist the
Malthusian disasters which supposedly blocked
development in every other culture, some of the arguments starting with
the ancient Iron Age folk, some with an amalgam of Germanic and Christian
elements, some with medieval Northwest-Europeans (see Mann 1986;
Macfarlane 1986; Jones 1981; Stone 1977; Crone 1989 and many
others). This then becomes a general theory explaining what
some call the "European miracle," by arguing that the
(mythically unique) European family, nuclear, late-marrying,
companionate, led to population control (Hall [1985: 131] speaks
of "the relative continence of the European family");
led also to a capitalist mentality (Macfarlane 1986; Laslett 1988);
even led unmarried European men to go forth and conquer the
world because of their
sexual frustration (Stone 1977: 54).
4. Paralleling all of these
arguments is a set of arguments to the effect that
non-Europeans, long ago, acquired cultural qualities which blocked
development, or -- this is perhaps the more common
formulation -- such qualities are "traditional," and
therefore have always been present in non-European cultures.
Todd (1985: 192) thinks that Africans and African-Americans do
not progress because the African family has always lacked the
father-figure. Many other scholars point either to
specific old traits in specific cultures as causes of
non-change, or else depict a world-wide zone of
"traditional cultures" -- including almost all non-European
cultures -- which "traditionally" lacked rationality, or
achievement motivation, or sexual continence, or some other
quality necessary to forward historical motion. It must be
added that this argument is also used very routinely to
explain the poverty of minority people in countries like the
United States. When, for instance, lack of progress among
Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in this country is attributed to
the "traditional culture," its supposed
"fatalistic attitudes," "docility," etc., etc., this
is still cultural racism even though the source of the cultural
argument is not ancient but rather a kind of undated "traditional
society."
Cultural racism is rooted most
fundamentally in historical mythology about the priority of
Europe and thus the supposedly more mature, evolved, rational character of Europeans,
today, at home and abroad. By way of closing this short paper I will simply
note that, even if all of the roots are torn out, the vine
will not wither: it will grow other roots, a new theory of
racism, unless racism is attacked, not as theory but as
practice.
NOTES
1 A minority of scholars accepted
the theory of polygenesis, according to which non-white
people are not descendants of Adam and Eve, and did not
migrate to Africa and Asia but were placed there by God along
with the beasts. See Bowler (1989).
2 Weber also, here and there,
invoked the natural environment. He argued, for instance, the already traditional
contrast, aridity-irrigation-Oriental- despotism versus "rainfed
farming"-European- democracy-rationality: see Weber 1976: 84, 131,
157; 1951: 16, 21, 25; 1981: 56-57.
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Copyright (c) 1992-2001 James M.
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