The Inquisition strikes: a 15th-century engraving depicts the fate of Jews who refused
to renounce their faith.
The way it was: a slave market in Virginia, circa 1861.
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UNESCO:
Overcoming ignorance
“The great
and terrible war which has now ended was a war made possible by. . .the propagation.
. .through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and
races,” declares UNESCO’s Constitution. For over a half a century, the Organization
has devised strategies aimed at tackling the root causes of racism, essentially through
education and exchange of knowledge. Alongside special UNESCO university chairs and
programmes of anti-racist education, many publications, campaigns and projects have
been employed in the fight against prejudice and cultural bigotry.
It is a long and painstaking task, aimed not only at removing obstacles to mutual
understanding, but also proving that human history is a tale of continuous exchange
such that no people or ethnic group can be deemed “pure.” All culture, in short,
is the fruit of dialogue.
By emphasizing this history of cultural diversity, projects such as the Silk Roads
(launched in 1988), the Slave Route (1994) and the Iron Roads in Africa (1995) have
enabled UNESCO to tackle racism by shedding light on the cultural and spiritual ties
between peoples.
This same approach is employed in a series of comprehensive history works published
by UNESCO that describe the complexity and wealth of contradictions underlying human
development: the History of Humanity, the General History of Africa, the History
of Civilizations of Central Asia, The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture, the General
History of the Caribbean and the General History of Latin America.
Other projects such as Intercultural Dialogue in Everyday Life, M.U.S.I.C (music,
urbanism, social integration and culture), or Culture in the Neighbourhood are more
specifically oriented toward young people.
For the past ten years, UNESCO has turned its attention to momentous developments
in the field of health and life sciences: its International Bioethics Committee,
made up of 55 members (including scientists, jurists, economists, demographers, anthropologists,
philosophers and nutritionists) drew up a Universal Declaration on the Human Genome
and on Human Rights that was adopted in 1997. Two decades after the UNESCO Declaration
on Race and Racial Prejudice (1978), this first international text on bioethics disclaims
once and for all the pseudo-scientific foundations of racism.
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Until
the Middle Ages, communities discriminated against each other and vied for power.
In the following centuries, the Bible, economics and science gave birth to a new
phenomenon: the hierarchy of race
Racism exists when one
ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate
another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable.
An ideological basis for explicit racism, in this sense, came to a unique fruition
in the West during the modern period: no clear and unequivocal evidence of racism
beyond discrimination or rivalry between communities has been found in other cultures
or in Europe before the Middle Ages.
Perhaps the first sign of this racist view of the world appeared in the identification
of the Jews with the devil and witchcraft in the popular mind of the 13th and 14th
centuries. Official sanction for such attitudes came in 16th-century Spain, when
Jews who had converted to Christianity and their descendants became the victims of
a pattern of discrimination and exclusion.
The period of the Renaissance and Reformation was also a time when Europeans were
coming into increasing contact with people of darker pigmentation in Africa, Asia
and the Americas, and were thus making judgements about them. The motive for enslaving
Africans was primarily economic–their labour was needed on the plantations of the
New World–but the official rationale was that they were heathens. Slave traders and
slave owners sometimes interpreted a passage in the book of Genesis as their justification.
Ham, they maintained, committed a sin against his father Noah that condemned his
supposedly black descendants to be “servants unto servants.” When Virginia decreed
in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual
heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude
was thus changed from their religious status to something approaching race. Beginning
in the late 17th century, laws were also passed in British North America forbidding
marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring
of informal liaisons. Without clearly stating so, such laws implied that blacks were
unalterably alien and inferior.
During the Enlightenment, a secular or scientific theory of race moved the subject
away from the Bible’s teachings, with their insistence on the essential unity of
the human race. Eighteenth-century ethnologists such as Linnaeus, Buffon and Blumenbach
began to think of human beings as part of the natural world, and subdivided them
into three to five races, usually considered as varieties of a single human species.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, however, an increasing number of writers,
especially those committed to the defence of slavery, maintained that the races in
fact constituted separate species.
The 19th century was an age of emancipation, nationalism, and imperialism–all of
which contributed to the growth and intensification of ideological racism in Europe
and the United States. Although the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews
from the ghettoes received most of its support from religious or secular believers
in fundamental human equality, the consequence of these reforms was to intensify
rather than diminish racism. Race relations became less rigidly hierarchical and
more competitive. The insecurities of a burgeoning industrial capitalism created
a need for scapegoats. The Darwinian emphasis on “the struggle for existence” and
concern for “the survival of the fittest” was conducive to the development of a new
and more credible scientific racism in an era that increasingly viewed race relations
as an arena for conflict rather than the outcome of a stable ranking.
Moral
revulsion
It
was nationalism, especially a type of romantic cultural nationalism marrying ethnic
heritage (thought of in terms of blood) to a sense of collective identity, that marked
the growth of a new variant of racist thought, especially in Germany. Beginning in
the late 1870s and early 1880s, the coiners of the term “anti-Semitism” made explicit
what some cultural nationalists had previously implied: that to be Jewish in Germany
was not simply to adhere to a set of religious beliefs or cultural practices, but
meant belonging to a race that was the antithesis of the race to which true Germans
belonged.
Western imperialism in the late 19th century, meanwhile, was reaching a climax. The
“scramble for Africa” and forays into parts of Asia and the Pacific represented an
assertion of the competitive ethnic nationalism believed to exist between European
nations (and which, as a result of the Spanish-American War came to include the United
States). It also constituted a claim, allegedly based on science, that Europeans
had a natural-born right to rule over Africans and Asians.
It was nevertheless only in the 20th century that the history of racism reached its
zenith: the rise and fall of overtly racist regimes. In the American South, segregation
laws and restrictions on black voting rights reduced African Americans to lower caste
status. A key feature of this regime was fear of sexual contamination through rape
or intermarriage, which led to efforts to prevent the conjugal union of whites with
those that had any known or discernible African ancestry.
Racist ideology was of course carried to its extreme in Nazi Germany through the
attempted extermination of an entire ethnic group. Hitler, it has been said, gave
racism a bad name. The moral revulsion of people throughout the world against what
the Nazis did, reinforced by scientific studies undermining racist genetics (or eugenics),
served to discredit the scientific racism that had been respectable and influential
in the United States and Europe before World War II.
Explicit racism also came under devastating attack from the new nations created in
the wake of the decolonization of Africa and Asia. The Civil Rights movement in the
United States, which succeeded in outlawing legalized racial segregation and discrimination
in the 1960s, drew crucial support from the growing sense that national interests
were threatened when blacks in the United States were mistreated and abused. In the
competition with the Soviet Union for “the hearts and minds” of independent Africans
and Asians, racial segregation became a national embarrassment with possible strategic
consequences.
“Cultural
racism”
The one racist regime that survived World War II and the Cold War was the South African.
Laws passed in 1948 banning all marriage and sexual relations between different “population
groups,” and requiring separate residential areas for people of mixed race and Africans,
demonstrated a clear obsession with “race purity.” But the climate of world opinion
in the wake of the Holocaust induced apologists for apartheid to rest their case
for “separate development” mainly on cultural rather than physical differences.
The defeat of Nazi Germany, the desegregation of the American South and the establishment
of majority rule in South Africa suggest that regimes based on biological racism
or cultural purity are a thing of the past. But racism does not require the full
and explicit support of the state and the law. Nor does it require an ideology centred
on the concept of biological inequality. Discrimination by institutions and individuals
against those perceived as racially different can long persist and even flourish
under the illusion of non-racism, as historians of Brazil have recently discovered.
The use of allegedly deep-seated cultural differences as a justification for hostility
and discrimination against newcomers from the developing world–whether they be Algerians
in France, Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain, Mexicans in the United States–have
evoked charges of a new “cultural racism” despite the dominant group’s explicit disavowal
of any kind of biological superiority.
Such recent examples of racism are not unprecedented. They rather represent a reversion
to the way that the differences between groups could be readily made to seem indelible
and unbridgeable before the articulation of a scientific or naturalistic conception
of race in the 18th century.
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Our
common blueprint
When scientists
unveiled a blueprint of the human genome about a year ago, the press trumpeted the
potential windfall of new drugs and treatments to remedy inherited diseases, like
certain forms of diabetes. But beyond the potential of medical benefits, the research
also marks a decisive strike against racism by disproving the myth of race. Genetic
research demonstrates that we all descend from a common ancestor in Africa. Furthermore,
most human genetic differences are found in all populations and presumably arose
before modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago and subsequently divided into
ethnic or “racial” groups Indeed, it has been estimated that only 0.012 percent of
the variation between humans in total genetic material can be attributed to differences
between the so-called “races.”
However, the roots of some genetic diseases may lie in this small amount of diversity
that has spawned a major debate in the international scientific community. When collecting
and comparing DNA samples, should geneticists record the ethnicity of the donors?
Those opposed to ethnic labelling point out that this kind of information will probably
not be very helpful because most genetic diseases are linked to variations which
are spread across the entire human population. These critics also point out medical
research related to ethnicity is regularly distorted by racist groups.
On the other side, by tagging or monitoring ethnicity, geneticists can be certain
that they are not inadvertently ignoring a particular group in their surveys. Some
bioethicists also point out that, if handled properly, these population studies could
be used to show people just how much we share genetically and disprove the widespread
belief that some groups are “genetically” more intelligent or advanced than others.
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We
may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.
Martin
Luther King, American civil rights leader (1929-1968)
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