From: topp8564-AT-mail.usyd.edu.au
Date: Mon,  3 Mar 2003 09:16:25 +1100
Subject: AUT: racism, was:Basque


On 3/3/2003 1:59 AM, "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no> wrote:

> Chris, I am quite sceptical to a term such as "cultural racist".
> Where do you draw the line between cultural conflicts and
> "cultural racism,"  I wonder.  There might not be a clear demarcation
> line here -- there would be those greyzones. (The borderlines
> between nationalism and racism are neither very clear.) But I
> have hard to see how that the turning point could avoid being
> wedded with notions of a biological nature. Which brings out
> another question, has "racism" then existed in almost all
> societies throughout human history.


First of all, I think in asking this question you are generalising something 
that can't be generalised. What is it that is common to all the racisms? It's 
hard to answer. Nazi racism isn't very much like mainstream US racism, which 
are in turn very different from the majority of Brazilian racisms, which in 
turn have little in common with Australian xenophobia, which in turn has 
different roots to Australian anti-aboriginal racism. And these capitalist and 
colonialist ideologies have little in common with, say, the ethnocentrism of 
peoples in PNG or of the ancient Greeks. 

To give you an example, Brazilians don't usually classify people into races by 
descent. They do it by skin tone and physiognomy, using criteria which have 
been demonstrated by research not to pick out descent.  In Brazil, one isn't so 
much non-white as placed into an imaginary (and actually very variable) 
spectrum of racial characteristics. In the US, by contrast, the classification 
is much stricter and much more concerned with descent. In the first instance 
here is such a thing as a non-white person. Secondly, if your grandfather was 
black, you are black. You are black even if in Brazil you would be classified 
as 'pardo' (mixed) or even 'white'. Pierre Bourdieu once wrote an essay about 
this, though I now forget the reference.

Secondly, in actual practice 'cultural' features - in reality, language dialect 
and accent, discourse construction, kinaesthetics (ie. how you move), clothing, 
manners, music, geography, socio-economic position - play a huge role in 
defining who is black and who is white, both in the US systems and in the 
Brazilian systems of racism. 

And while racisms can have little in common, racism a la US and a la Nazi have 
significant shared ground with 'cultural discrimination', with the Arab/Moslem 
standing in for the Jew and the Immigrant for the Black. You might want to give 
some thought to the way the classic structural features of blood and land 
racism pop up in the - supposedly 'milder' - cultural forms of discrimination. 
One is the pervasive concern for pollution: whereas before people worried about 
intermarriage and dilution of strong blood, now they worry about the dilution 
of their culture. Whereas people used to be intolerant of 'inferior negroes', 
now they are intolerant of 'intolerant moslems'. Whereas previously it was ok 
to go in and plunder the Congo because the local inhabitants were brutes who 
had to make way for us, it is now ok to go in and plunder Iraq because the 
local population needs to be taught to be responsible democratic citizens. They 
have a brutish culture which has to make way for ours. Before they weren't 
quite human because they were closer to monkeys than we are, now they aren't 
quite citizens because they supposedly lack the culture of respect for 
democracy we supposedly have. The denials are formally the same, 
behaviouristically their effect is very similar.


Thiago


 








-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP: www-mail.usyd.edu.au


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---