Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses: Picking holes in ‘culture’ and ‘human rights’

Racial States, Anti-Racist ResponsesPicking Holes in ‘Culture’ and ‘HumanRights’

Alana LentinUNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, UK

AbstractThis article seeks to re-examine two major assumptions in mainstream anti-racist thought of the post-war era. These are culturalism, on the one hand,and human rights on the other, both of which have been offered as potentialsolutions to the ongoing problem of racism. I argue that both fail to copewith racism as it has been institutionalized in the political and social struc-tures of European societies because they inaccurately theorize ‘race’. Racismis treated as an individual attitude born of prejudice and ignorance and notas a political project that emerged under specific conditions within thecontext of the European nation-state. A re-examination of this legacy ofmodernity and a questioning of the structuring principles of anti-racism isnecessary in the current context of racism against migrants, asylum seekersand refugees.

Key words■ anti-racism ■ culturalism ■ human rights ■ ‘race’ ■ state

Introduction

The racially configured nature of the nation-state is a notion that has beensuccessfully theorized by a significant body of authors from the German philoso-pher Eric Voegelin in 1933 to the present day (Voegelin, 1933; Arendt, 1966;Mosse, 1978; Balibar, 1991b; Traverso, 1996; Foucault, 1997; Goldberg, 2002).Nevertheless, the relationship of ‘reciprocal determination’ between ‘race’ andnation (Balibar, 1991b) entered into by western states at precise periods in thehistory of modernity (most emphatically from the mid-nineteenth centuryonwards) has been almost completely removed from mainstream academicaccounts and, consequently, from so-called common sense. Moreover, since theaftermath of the Holocaust, in Europe and the West, the discussion of racism asa social evil has been widespread. Yet despite the general agreement in the

European Journal of Social Theory 7(4): 427–443

Copyright © 2004 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431004046699

01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 427

www.sagepublications.com

democratic public spheres of western Europe that racism represents a problem tobe expunged from society at all costs, it is seldom related in such discourse to thehistorical or contemporary actions of European states themselves. On thecontrary, racism is typically described as an individual problem, often in psycho-logical terms, that connects between ‘attitudes’ and ‘prejudices’ based, it is said,on ‘ignorance’. Racism is, therefore, generally described as the problem of thosewith little exposure to the positive qualities associated with ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’difference; and too much exposure to the, mainly economic, disadvantages thatsuch ‘difference’ is said to bring with it. The solution to the persistence of racismin post-war European societies was often conceived in terms of the striking of abalance between knowledge of the Other and the restriction of their arrival intoo great numbers. Under rare circumstances, in this dominant package of diag-nosis and cure, is racism ever considered to be a problem of elites; and even moreseldom, despite the work of the authors I cite above, is it considered to beembedded in the very structures of the nation-state.

This article intends to unpack the reasons why racism continues to be dealtwith in such a way. I shall do so by offering an analysis of what can be thoughtof as ‘dominant anti-racism’ from the 1950s on – that practised by institutionsand many mainstream associations – and its impact upon the construction ofexplanations of racism still in use today, both in everyday language and in thesocial sciences. While, as Bonnett (2000) reminds us, racism has been widelystudied from a variety of often conflicting disciplinary and political standpoints,anti-racism has rarely been the object of study. This is despite the fact that themajority of the conceptualizations of racism available to social scientists since the1930s have been developed in an anti-racist perspective. It is my intention tosubmit anti-racism, or at least one dominant trend in anti-racist discourse, to asociological analysis that refuses to see it, merely and unproblematically, as theopposite of racism. The complicity of dominant and institutional anti-racistdiscourses in upholding the vision of the state as neutral, despite the persistenceof racism at the level of the state, is long overdue the serious attention of socialscientists committed to anti-racism.

In order to reconstruct the argument that leads us to seeing the full extent ofanti-racism’s own problematic relationship with the link between ‘race’ and state,a few steps shall be taken. I shall argue that a dominant current within anti-racistthinking, that continues to occupy an important place in European anti-racismtoday, neglected to historicize the growth of racism as a political idea used bystates, for example, under the conditions of colonialism, in the treatment of theworking classes, the development of modern political antisemitism and the regu-lation of European-bound immigration. However, in order to show moreprecisely what it is that such anti-racism fails to treat and explain in its discourse,the first section deals with some of the main historical and theoretical conse-quences of the political relationship between the idea of ‘race’ and the politicalneeds of modern states. In particular, I shall focus on the apparently paradoxicaldevelopment of modern racism in parallel with the rise of a heretofore unknownequality in European societies. Modern racism, it will be suggested, following

European Journal of Social Theory 7(4)4 2 8

01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 428

Balibar (1991a, 1991b), cannot be fully understood without a concomitantengagement with the history of the development of the notion of universalismand the project of conceiving a general ‘idea of man’. Furthermore, the histori-cist or progressivist racism that succeeds and at times coexists with its more crude‘naturalist’ variant (Goldberg, 2002) establishes the conditions under whichracism becomes inextricable from a civilizing mission whose racist origins aremore easily concealed when applied to the post-colonial metropolis.

The continued widespread understanding of racism as part of a ‘natural’human propensity towards discrimination in a ‘survival of the fittest’ perspectivepopularized since the advent of social Darwinism is in part due to the efforts ofearly institutional responses to racism. Historicizing the development of anti-racist arguments by institutions such as UNESCO and their infiltration into stateand non-governmental discourse as well as everyday parlance, from the 1950sonwards, points to the reasons for this. In the second section, I shall trace two ofthe founding principles of the UNESCO tradition in anti-racism which, Isuggest, are still central to much of the anti-racist rhetoric proposed by Europeangovernments, supranational organizations and mainstream anti-racist organiz-ations. These are first, the necessity of refuting racism on its own terms, namelyas a science; and second, the proposal of an alternative explanation of humandifference to that of ‘race’. Both these elements are central to anti-racism’s prin-cipal role: to explain racism. Yet neither deals seriously with racism’s historicalencounter with the nation-state and therefore with ‘race’ as a political idea: ‘oneof the elements producing political communities’ (Vögelin, 1933: 1). The conse-quences of this dominant tradition in anti-racism, that promotes the ‘reconcil-ing of fidelity to oneself with openness to others’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1983), rather thana state-centred critique of racism as structuring the conditions of domination andexploitation in contemporary societies, will be illustrated in the final section. Thecontemporary preoccupation with the language of rights and the rule of law,rooted in the legacy of ‘European universals’ (Hesse, 1999: 211), and its appli-cation to the fight against racism further compounds the dominant consensus tonaturalize and depoliticize the origins of modern racism.

‘Race’, Modernity and the State

In the second section I shall argue that the mainstream anti-racism of the post-war period that grounds much of present-day responses to racism fails to effec-tively counter racism because it neglects to engage with the history of therelationship between ‘race’ and state. In order to be able to construct such anargument, it is necessary, first, to make sense of that relationship. While thisarticle does not leave me the scope to elucidate this historical relationship in itsfull detail, in this section I shall deal with the interstices of ‘race’ and state fromone, very significant, point of view. Building on the understanding of ‘race’ as apolitical idea and racism as a political project as wholly modern phenomena, itis necessary to ask why racism emerges at a time of unparalleled equality in the

Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses 4 2 9

01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 429

history of Europe, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In order for therelationship between racism and equality – or democracy – to be explored, it isalso important to ask what the relationship between racism and universalism is.In other words, how does the idea of a general conceptualization of humanityintersect with the concomitant need to categorize human beings upon whichracism is based?

The Modernity of ‘Race’

One of the hardest tasks facing the theorist of ‘race’ and racism is to convince theaudience that these are modern phenomena. So ingrained has the idea that racismis a matter of individual prejudice become – a notion largely attributable to main-stream discourses of anti-racism as will be later shown – that it is difficult to insistthat its widespread acceptance can be traced back only as far as the mid-nineteenth century. Although theories proposing the division of the humanspecies into ‘races’ can be traced back to the late seventeenth century,1 the fulldevelopment of racism in its modern form cannot be said to have come aboutbefore the mid- to late nineteenth century. The period known as the Golden Ageof racism (1870–1914) is that which marks the emergence of the ‘race state’, thebirth of modern antisemitism, rampant imperialism and the belief withinpolitics, exemplified by Benjamin Disraeli, that ‘race is everything; there is noother truth’ (Hannaford, 1996: 352).

‘Race’ as the political idea which underpins the emergence of the politicalideology of racism can be said to be wholly modern for two reasons. First, this isbecause it relies on a methodological shift, created by Enlightenment interests inrationality and progress that enables the envisaging of humanity as polygenetic.This represents a radical shift from the previously overriding belief in Creationand therefore monogenesis. However, the refutation of the notion that all peopleare directly created by one God does not immediately follow Enlightenment andrequires also the increase in travel that enabled the observation of non-European,non-white Others over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The second reason for racism’s modernity is based on its entry into a relation-ship of ‘reciprocal determination’ (Balibar, 1991b) with nationalism, itself amodern phenomenon coming to dominance in the nineteenth century, withoutwhich it could not rise beyond the status of pseudo-scientific theory. Balibardefies the distinction between nation and nationalism by showing how the latterinvents the former and, moreover, creates racism as a political tool to uphold itsprinciples and goals. ‘Race’ and nation work in tandem, rather than in a relation-ship of causality, to bring about the objectives of nationalism that, over time,become increasingly fused with those of racism. As Nicholson (1999: 7) remindsus, understanding the modernity of racism cannot be divorced from the particu-lar ambitions of modern, competitive and above all expanding nation-states:

[R]ace is not simply a peculiarity of certain nations; it is a phenomenon of expansivenations and the emotional borderlines set by the laws that define and constitutenations. People were turned into races when nations extended and defined their


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 430

political hegemony through conquest and expropriation. Race and nation were bornand raised together; they are the Siamese twins of modernity.

To succeed politically, racism requires both scientific legitimation and the frame-work of nationalism. Ultimately, it is elevated through a combination of ration-ality and political romanticist ideals which favoured the theorization of nations(like individuals) as naturally conceived and innately superior or inferior to eachother.

It is important to recall that precise political reasons made it expedient todevelop racism as a political ideology. As Balibar (1991c), Foucault (1997) andMacMaster (2001) all remind us, the discourse of ‘race’ is first applied to theworking classes whose new internationalist political consciousness in the Europeof the nineteenth century is perceived as a threat by a weakened aristocratic orruling class.2 In such a conceptualization the poverty of the working class –presented as a natural condition – was seen as disabling its participation in thestrengthening of the ‘race’. Moreover, working-class adhesion to an internation-alist anti-capitalism threatened the foundations of the nation-state as the solevessel in which the ‘race’ could flourish. The nascent eugenics movement initiallyheld the ‘degenerate’ working classes in its sight, proposing the halting of publicand private charity which would lead to their gradual demise (MacMaster, 2001).Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twentieth century racism’s target shifts,mirroring the consolidation of the idea of the seamlessness of ‘race’ and nation,to focus on the external. Now proponents of racist ideals are concerned withstrengthening all classes by extending welfare nationalism in the aim of the ‘tech-nocratic and biological engineering of the unified race-nation’ (MacMaster, 2001:56). This shift must be understood within the wholly modern constraints of thetime, namely the pressure of inter-national competition whose stakes were placedever higher during this period of rampant imperialism. The necessity for nationalstrength – increasingly translated in terms of racial purity – was never more neces-sary than during the First World War and the onset of mass conscription. Racismthen and now is a ‘a plastic and chameleon-like phenomenon’ (MacMaster, 2001:2) which perfectly adapted itself to the growing pressures created by increasinglycompetitive modern nation-states.

Racism and the Paradoxes of Equality

David Goldberg (2002) sees racism as divided into two conceptions: one natu-ralist and one historicist or progressivist. The development of the latter, moreambivalent and entirely political, form of racism is at the core of racism’s relation-ship with equality. Briefly, naturalism and historicism can be distinguished thus:the former lasted from the seventeenth to approximately the mid-nineteenthcentury and was defined by the idea that racial inferiority was inherent andscientifically provable. Historicist racism, altogether more complicated, cameto dominate from the mid-nineteenth century on. It continues toinform-neoconservative ideas such as ‘colour blindness’ and what Goldberg calls,‘raceless states’.3 Emerging mainly under conditions of the administration of


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 431

colonial rule, and later of immigration, it relies on the assumption, based on theposited need for ‘racial realism’ (Goldberg, 2002: 82), that ‘inferior’ others maybecome ‘civilized’ through a process of assimilation. Despite the progress that thisapparently signifies, when compared to the rampant excesses of naturalism,Goldberg reminds us that historicist views have not brought with them thedemise of racism. On the contrary, it is the elaboration of historicism that perhapsenabled racism to be perpetuated within today’s state rationalities.

The naturalist–historicist distinction helps us to see how racism becomesarticulated politically at a time of increasing equality among populations ofwestern European nation-states from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.Outside of the colonial administrations that came increasingly to rely on a histori-cist vision in order to ensure the self-regulation of European rule over colonized‘subjects’, no case better illustrates the ‘paradox’ of equality on European terri-tory than that of Jewish emancipation. Modern antisemitism – as opposed to pre-modern Jew hatred (Arendt, 1966; Bauman, 1989) – emerged as a political forcetowards the end of the nineteenth century accompanying the spread of Jewishemancipation across Europe.4 The permission granted to Jews to exit the ghettosand live among their Christian co-nationals transformed Judeophobia. From thenaturalness with which the Jews’ distinctiveness was viewed while they livedseparately and enclosed, their assimilation into mainstream society now led totheir difference being rendered artificial (Bauman, 1989). Jews were now seen asthe dangerous ‘race’ among all ‘races’ (Foucault, 1997) which, in order tomaintain the rationally preserved order of modern societies, had to be weededout. Under the conditions of equality, when it was increasingly hard to tell Jewfrom Gentile, racial theory, ancient religious myth and conspiratorial rumour allhad to be manipulated for the political aim of proving the Jews’ inherent foreign-ness.

It is the condition of assimilation that leads to the fascination with the Jews’place in society as either ‘pariahs’ or ‘parvenus’ at the core of social antisemitism(Arendt, 1966). Assimilation functioned as a type of trap. On the one hand, therefusal to relinquish a particular communal lifestyle meant ‘a life-sentence ofstrangerhood’ (Bauman, 1991: 112). On the other, by choosing to adopt thecultural hierarchy imposed by the state that saw Judaism as inferior to national(Christian) culture, Jews and other outcasts helped to prove both its superiorityand its universal validity. The assimilation brought about by Jewish emancipationin practice meant that Jews were forced to give up their particularism in order togain full membership of the nation. But both the inability of many to amalga-mate seamlessly and the overwhelming desire of others to do so, by publiclyturning their backs on Judaism, were seen as signs of the Jews’ undeniable other-ness. Emancipation assisted in creating social and political antisemitism byimposing itself upon Jews, just as the call for immigrants to assimilate todaycreates discriminatory exasperation at their seeming unwillingness to do so.Traverso (1996), noting that the Jewish emancipation that followed the FrenchRevolution was accompanied by a Jacobin insistence on the outlawing of publicdemonstrations of religiosity, claims that many Jews experienced emancipation


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 432

as a ‘revolution from above’ (1996: 24). The demand to assimilate accompaniedby the political manipulation of a social mistrust of Jewish intentions is symbolicof the problem that defines modern racism: an antidote to the spread of greaterequality.

Racism and Universalism

The failure to regard modern racism as functioning within the logic of an expan-sionist, modernizing and increasingly competitive European nation-state isgrounded in a generalized belief in the overriding value of the project ofmodernity. In other words, its secular, universalistic and emancipatory elements,upheld as the foundations of present-day democracy, have been taken at facevalue, often in the absence of a problematization of the course they have takenin history. In reality, as the ultimate impossibility of assimilation shows us, thepower of racism is in its ability to define ‘the frontiers of an ideal humanity’(Balibar, 1991b: 61) into which individuals either fit or do not. Balibar arguesthat racism takes on the status of a ‘supra-nationalism’ that acquires meaning atthe universal level beyond the realm of individuals or even of the singular ‘racenation’. Racism sustained the passage into the post-colonial era because of theuniversal appeal of ‘racial signifiers’ which constructed the European, rather thanthe individual nation, as the dominant and therefore ideal, human type. This wasachieved by means of the emphasis placed on the degrees of difference that sepa-rated ‘man’ from the ‘savage’, so that ‘all nationalisms were defined against thesame foil, the same “stateless other”, and this has been a component of the veryidea of Europe as the land of “modern” nation-states or, in other words, civilisa-tion’ (Balibar, 1991b: 62).

Although racism and universalism cannot be reduced to each other, Balibar seesthem as ‘determinate contraries’ that are ‘bound to affect the other from the inside’(Balibar, 1994: 198). Because universalist philosophy is based upon the premisethat moral equality is a natural entitlement of the ‘brotherhood of man’, racism(like sexism) becomes the prism through which we may understand the very possi-bility of talking about a universalist ideal. In other words, both racism and sexismserve to justify the fact that there are always exemptions to inclusion in universalhumanity. Racism is therefore inseparable from the task of creating a ‘general ideaof man’ because of its implicit invocations of superiority and inferiority. Theconstruction of universally rational man necessitates a definition in relation to anOther that also calls for a hierarchization of human beings, ranked in relation tothe universal ideal. Racism functions at the level of universals, however, becauseit struggles against universalism’s impetus to homogenize us. By claiming ‘race’ asthe universal system for the organization of humankind, the space for uniquenessthat racism and nationalism crave is ensured. The consolidation of the idea of ‘race’within politics brought with it a universalized system of ‘races’ to one of whicheach individual must belong. As the notion of ‘race’ was invented by Europeansand applied to themselves as superior and to others as inferior to various degrees,the violence that accompanies racism was grounded in the concomitant need to


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 433

preserve the hierarchical order of things. This order was beneficial solely for thosewho invented the racial classification of humanity: the Europeans.

The universalism of racism sits uneasily with the extension of humanism thataccompanies historicism well into the post-colonial era. The idea that includingmore peoples in a general idea of humanity will render racism impossible – theidea at the core of human rights – is negated by the extent to which a universal-ized vision of humanity has relied on racism’s provision of a dehumanized Otheragainst which humanity itself can be defined. Such an idea is dismissed by Césaireas a ‘pseudo humanism’, based on a partial interpretation of the ‘rights of man’that is ‘narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered,sordidly racist’ (Césaire, 1972, cited in Gilroy, 2000: 62). The attempt to under-stand racism within the contemporary hegemony of the human rights discoursenecessitates tracing the history that links historicist racism to the ideologicalrequirements of an expanding modern nation-state, to the quest for an ideal ofhumanity and to the refutation of ‘race’ that enables the continued dominanceof Eurocentrism. Behind this veneer, racialization and racist discriminationscontinue but are facilitated by the appearance of equality that was first institutedat the time of racism’s Golden Age. The following section elucidates the part thatearly post-war discourses of mainstream, institutionally sanctioned anti-racismhad to play in enabling the persistent coexistence of historicist racism with aregime of rights.

The Role of Anti-Racism

Examining the role played by anti-racism as a political discourse and a form ofcollective action can reveal the reasons why there has been a failure to effectivelyhistoricize the relationship between ‘race’ and state. However, treating anti-racismseriously from either an historical or a sociological point of view has beenhindered by the predominance of polemics and prescriptions, arising from thetendency to mobilize a common sense depiction of anti-racism as simply theinverse of racism. As noted by Bonnett (2000: 2), ‘Racism and ethnic discrimi-nations are under continuous historical and sociological examination. But anti-racism is consigned to the status of a “cause”, fit only for platitudes of supportor denouncement.’

In fact, anti-racism is essentially a heterogeneous phenomenon whose variantsreveal differing political allegiances, political aims and representative functions.Based upon my research into the political sociology of European anti-racistdiscourse and praxis (Lentin, 2004), I shall argue that by examining one particu-lar and central variant of anti-racism it is possible to demonstrate the collusionbetween this discourse and the circumvention of the historical relationshipbetween ‘race’ and state. This anti-racist discourse emerges from the post-warproject of institutions such as UNESCO and is subscribed to by western govern-ments, to explain and suggest remedies for racism in the aftermath of the Holo-caust. This mainstream form of anti-racism stands in opposition to the


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 434

state-centred critique that developed out of the anti-colonialist movement toinform a self-determined anti-racism.5 Instead it focuses on racism as aconsequence of individual prejudices, replacing political explanations withpsychological ones and advocates cultural rather than politicized responses to it.Moreover, the hegemony of this form of anti-racism has played a vital role inbringing about the dominance of a discourse of universal human rights whichconstructs racism unilaterally as discrimination.

By focusing on the development of the UNESCO ‘tradition’ of anti-racism(Barker, 1983), it is possible to see how the mainstream anti-racist practices thatit endorsed have avoided the theorization of the racial nature of the Europeanstate. Two main components of the tradition have led to this neglect of the politi-cized origins and implications of ‘race’. First, UNESCO, in its ‘DeclarationAgainst Race and Racial Prejudice’, first published in 1950, attempts to defeatracism on what was seen as being its own terms, namely as a science to beunproven. Second, it proposed that ‘race’, an inadequate term because it was anunscientific way of categorizing human beings, be replaced by culture. However,because the thinking that informed UNESCO’s work denied the political natureof ‘race’, choosing to see it as purely pseudo-scientific in origin, the alternative ofculture failed to eradicate the hierarchical organization of humankind thatembodies the real perniciousness of racism. The misconception, in both popularand academic discourse, that because ‘race’ does not objectively exist that racismcannot do so either belies the fact that racism has always mobilized both ‘racial’(e.g. phenotypical) and cultural (e.g. ethnic/religious) differences for its expres-sion.6 By separating between ‘race’ and what it called ‘racial prejudice’ in this way,UNESCO ignored the power of racialization to determine relationships betweendominant and subordinate groups.

How did the UNESCO project go about disproving racism and suggestingthe means to overcome it? The work carried out by the ‘world panel of experts’brought together by the organization for the first time in 1950 was heavily influ-enced by anthropology and genetics, and to a lesser extent psychology and soci-ology. Geneticists mainly influenced the reasons for approaching racism as ascience, rather than a political ideology, in the efforts to explain it while anthro-pologists, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, can largely be accredited for ensuring theculturalist perspective from which the solutions to racism were formulated.

The treatment of racism as a science was based on the perceived need to defeatracism on what was seen as being its own terms, namely as a scientific discipline,grounded in genetics and physical anthropology, known as racial science. Thefailure of ‘race’ to stand up to scientific scrutiny was summed up in the assertionthat:

The division of the human species into ‘races’ is partly conventional and partlyarbitrary and does not imply any hierarchy whatsoever. Many anthropologists stressthe importance of human variation, but believe that ‘racial’ divisions have limitedscientific interest and may even carry the risk of inviting abusive generalisation.(UNESCO, 1968: 270)

This component of the declaration is emblematic of the apolitical nature of its


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 435

drafting. It demonstrates how the recourse made to ‘convention’ and ‘arbitrari-ness’ naturalizes racism and disconnects it from the political processes with whichhistorical analysis reveals that it is bound. This circumvention of ‘race’ as apolitical invention, as ideology rather than science or mere common sense, waslargely due to the role played by geneticists and physical anthropologists in thedeclaration’s drafting. Indeed, the declaration in its original form was deemed toosociological in approach and was supplemented by an additional ‘Statement onthe Nature of Race and Racial Difference’ (1951) that further informed theUNESCO position. The statement’s authors called for the social phenomenonof racism to be distinguished from ‘race’ as a biological ‘fact’, considered to be ascientifically useful concept (Comas, 1961). Their position is summed up thus:

In its anthropological sense, the word ‘race’ should be reserved for groups of mankindpossessing well-developed and primarily heritable physical differences from othergroups . . . National, religious, geographical, linguistic and cultural groups do notnecessarily coincide with racial groups. (UNESCO, 1951; cited in Comas, 1961: 304)

What of the solutions to the admittedly persistent problem of racism despite therefutation of ‘race’ as good science? These too led to a framing of the problem ofracism as separate from the political usage made of ‘race’ by states both histori-cally and in the aftermath of colonialism and the Holocaust. The stronger influ-ence of anthropologists, rather than geneticists, upon UNESCO’s work led tothe search for an alternative to ‘race’ as a means of explaining human differences.The need for such explanation became greater with the onset of European-boundimmigration in higher numbers in the post-war period, and therefore the actualmeeting of different populations. Culture and terms such as ethnicity came toreplace ‘race’ as markers of human difference. This was based on the belief thatthey were stripped of any implication of superiority or inferiority at the core ofthe idea of ‘race’. Different cultures were now seen as relative to each other andany variations in the levels of progress across groups worldwide were put downto the extent to which cultural groups had interacted during the course of history(Lévi-Strauss, 1975). According to Lévi-Strauss in ‘Race and History’, a key textpublished initially by UNESCO, only seldom can cultures develop in isolation.The overcoming of racism, or what it is suggested should be known as ‘ethno-centrism’, is understood by UNESCO as being possible through greater inter-cultural knowledge. This is summed up in the notion of ‘reconciling fidelity tooneself with openness to others’. This approach is rooted in a vision of racism asa problem of individual attitudes of ‘prejudice’ that may be overcome through anincreased tolerance to those different to ourselves. A direct link is made betweenthe proposal of culture as an alternative to ‘race’ and the idea that persistingracism is a problem of individuals who lack intercultural knowledge. Emphasiz-ing the importance of re-educating prejudiced individuals results in a neglect ofthe racism that persists at the level of the state by releasing it from its historicalresponsibility in constructing racism as common sense through the dominanceof the politics of ‘race is all’.

This individualizing and psychologizing of the problem of racism are entirely


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 436

consistent with the historicist racism that Goldberg (2002) shows exists inparallel with, and eventually becoming more powerful than, its naturalistpredecessor. According to the UNESCO view adhered to in the policies of post-war states, different cultural groups, previously barred from participating in theprogress enjoyed by western societies, are gradually admitted to this processthrough both the international community and western-bound immigration. Indomestic policies, this view is translated to terms of assimilation; the need forimmigrants to give up their cultural specificities in order to become a seamlesspart of the national whole. It is only through such a process that the members ofdifferent so-called cultural groups may develop and progress: so far, so consistentwith colonialist historicism. However, it is important to note that Lévi-Strausshimself, despite being used as a primary theorist of the UNESCO position, didnot agree with the aims of assimilation. His altogether more ambivalentapproach, which he revised in 1971 in reaction to what he saw as the failures ofthe UNESCO tradition,7 resisted the dilution of cultural specificities which hefelt would be brought about by greater proximity between peoples.

To some extent Lévi-Strauss’s ideas are consistent with the multiculturalismthat came to replace assimilatory policies in many western states. This shiftrepresents a further culturalization of difference that coexists with the ongoinginstitutionalization of racism. Specifically, the politics of multiculturalism, towhich the UNESCO project may be seen as a vital precursor, have largely beenresponsible for the reification of groups of non-European origins which areculturally determined and viewed as internally homogeneous. The identificationof communities with apparent leaderships who could be called upon to liaise withgovernments about their members’ needs has led to a misrepresentation of thoseneeds, often based more on the interests of such leaders than arising from thoseof their purported membership. Such a system, often referred to as a cultural‘mosaic’, has permitted states to positively present the richness of their society’sdiverse make-up without addressing the imbalances of political and administra-tive power which permit the continuity of racist and class-based exclusion. Theapproach taken by the official, state-endorsed response to racism – to condemnit as the bad science of darker times – fails to challenge the effects of so-calledracism without ‘race’ because it misdiagnoses racism’s origins and mistreats itssymptoms. Racism becomes a problem of cultural misunderstanding, adjustablethrough the adequate representation of ‘difference’.

Conclusion: The Problem of Human Rights

A re-analysis of the role played by what I am calling a mainstream strand of anti-racist thought in the way we understand racism today is vital for those who areinterested in the theorization of racism and anti-racism. Anti-racism as a politicaldiscourse has all too often not been adequately historicized. Most importantly,it is not generally understood explicitly that the way mainstream anti-racistthought has evolved is largely responsible for the ways in which it is possible to


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 437

make sense of ‘race’ and racism today. In other words, the explanations of racismoffered by some anti-racist thinkers and activists are those that have entered intocommon-sense understandings today. I refer to some thinkers and activistsbecause despite the success of self-organized anti-racists in bringing about publicand institutional recognition of the phenomenon of institutional racism, forexample, this is often confused with the much more widespread understandingof racism as a matter of individual prejudicial attitudes and lack of education.The reason for which this view is the more common one is because it was largelythat promoted by institutions such as UNESCO, adopted by governments andfurthered by an anti-racism that did not promote an active state-centred critiqueof racism.

It is important to show that states have been involved in ensuring this failureto historicize the relationship between their evolution into nations, with increas-ingly imperialist ideals and needs for bio-political control, and the political ideaof ‘race’. As Goldberg (2002) shows us, in the post-war period the persistence ofracism is not the result of some agreed-upon policy but rather of the continu-ation of a logic of racial historicism that remains undisturbed despite the atroc-ities of the Holocaust. Whereas these events led to the call to arms to eradicatenaturalist racism ‘wherever it raises its ugly head’, they did not by associationresult in the targeting of what may appear to be its more subtle or ambivalentvariant. On the contrary, because of the readiness to dismiss naturalism asirrational and unscientific ‘racism persists behind the façade of a historicismparading itself as uncommitted to racist expression in its traditional sense’(Goldberg, 2002: 210). This state of affairs leads Goldberg to describe thecondition of post-war western states as being one of ‘racelessness’: because ‘race’does not exist, neither, by association, does racism as a problem that deservespolitical attention. In fact, it is precisely this that is at the core of the historicistvision according to Goldberg:

[Racelessness] is achievable only by the presumptive elevation of whiteness silently as(setting) the desirable standards, the teleological norms of civilised social life, even asit seeks to erase the traces of exclusions necessary to its achievement along the way.(2002: 206)

The racelessness of whiteness8 and its standardization as the norm have led to theinstallation of so-called colour blindness as a system for making possible thedenial of racism as a real experience while ensuring the de facto persistence ofdiscrimination against those who in fact cannot be whitened. As defined byGoldberg:

Racially understood, colourblindness is committed to seeing and not seeing all aswhite, though not all as ever quite, while claiming to see those traditionally conceivedas ‘of colour’ and yet colourless. (2002: 223)

It is impossible to ignore the role that the discourse and practice of mainstreamanti-racism have played in bringing this to bear. As I demonstrated in theprevious section, the widely influential UNESCO tradition of anti-racism


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 438

individualizes racism as a problem of pseudo-science and proposes alternativedefinitions of difference such as culture and ethnicity. It thus succeeds in circum-venting the problem of racism by denying the role played by the state in its originsand perpetuation or, in Goldberg’s terms, by refusing to recognize the growinghegemony of historicist views of unquestioned universalism, racelessness andcolour blindness. This failure is not confined to the authors of the UNESCODeclaration but has become the dominant view supporting state action againstracism and the activity of one, and in some contexts dominant, type of anti-racism: one which denies the importance of grounding its actions in the livedexperience of the racialized and promotes a universalized vision of equality thatindividualizes humanity without seeing how racism refuses the individuality, andthus the humanity, of non-white, non-Europeans.

It is to this problem in anti-racist discourse as the basis for action that I wishto turn in concluding this article. This is a thorny subject because it could, bybeing misread, be confused with the ideological stances against anti-racism takenby authors such as Pierre-André Taguieff (1989, 1991, 1995). It must thereforebe stressed that, as a rule, the failure of certain forms of anti-racism to ignore therelationship between ‘race’ and state and to deny the importance of racializationby stressing the primacy of individual rights emanates from a will to do ‘good’and bring about change. The problem with many solidaristic movements ingeneral, however, is precisely this; because by wanting to bring about justice theyalso assume that they are privy to knowledge about the roots of discriminationthat does not necessitate consulting with those primarily affected by it. Further-more, the hegemony of rights-based solutions to discrimination including racismis such that it is increasingly being adopted by black and ‘minority’-led groups asthe only means of having their voices heard. In particular, the paradigm which Iargue must today be submitted to serious scrutiny is that of ‘human rights’ aspromoted through the activism of a wide variety of organizations including thosewith an anti-racist agenda.

Human rights discourse cannot be divorced from the regime of racial histori-cism governing the practices of western states towards non-whites and non-Europeans. It is ultimately, although in many cases certainly unknowingly,compliant with this system because it accepts the notion of racelessness andpromotes a universalistic vision of humanity that fails to question its relationshipwith racism (Balibar, 1991a, 1991b). These two problems cannot be separatedfrom each other. The discourse of human rights seems to accept racelessness byemphasizing the primacy of the individual, separated from the context. In otherwords, it equates the admittance of ‘race’ as a factor with discrimination on racialgrounds itself, rather than revealing how racism continues to operate under theguise of historicist progress, which in turn relies on promoting the belief that‘race’ has no meaning. It thus succumbs to the view that historicism promotesunder the auspices of racelessness, that ‘racial histories’ and the injustices theyengender (Goldberg, 2002) can be passed over on the way to an era defined onlyby individual access to opportunity.

This problem is compounded by the second interrelated one, namely that


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 439

human rights’ promotion of a universalized individualism fails to deal with therelationship between universalism and racism demonstrated by Balibar (1991a,1991b). As Goldberg reveals, the ideal of racelessness is not extended to includewhiteness, which is de-raced. Therefore, the aims of colour-blind policy, forexample, hold only those of colour in their sight, ‘conjur[ing] people of colouras a problem in virtue of their being of colour, in so far as they are not white’(Goldberg, 2002: 223). Like racelessness, universalistic human rights also fail toquestion the standards set by the very people they see as irrelevant, namely‘whites’ or westerners. They are the setters of standards because their hegemonyis assured; it is assured because the standards have been set in their own image.It is this that Balibar speaks of when he describes racism and universalism as eachcontaining the other inside itself: a universal vision of humanity cannot beconstructed without reference being made to that which it excludes, and so theuniversalism of Europeans was constructed in their own image yet set as norm.

Human rights is in many respects a naïve discourse but one which has severalquestionable repercussions. It both avoids and compounds the problem posed byfailing to problematize whiteness and seeing it as inextricably bound up with theideal vision of humanity which we are all encouraged to attain in the interests ofgreater equality and liberty. By avoiding a discussion of how this norm was insti-tutionalized, namely through the historical practice of racism which ensured thedominance of the ‘Anglo-European moral tradition’ (Goldberg, 2002: 224),human rights participates in compounding the logic of racial historicism. It doesso also by refusing to admit the impossibility of equality as premised on theassumption that each and every individual has the opportunity to attain thehumanity encapsulated by the universalist vision. Simply, if the universalisticideal of humanity is founded upon the European, white model, it will simply notbe possible for the Others that human rights seek to protect to gain entrance tothat community of individuals. This is not to say that individual freedom andthe equality of rights do not constitute a noble cause and that rather we shouldfall back on a cultural relativism that also ignores the heterogeneity and internalconflicts within so-called cultures. On the contrary, I am arguing that the choicebetween human rights and cultural relativism is a wholly artificial one becauseboth rely on a view of humanity as organized according to differential levels ofprogress. While cultural relativists non-problematically accept that this situationof diversity may remain a permanent one, human rights advocates seek to bringabout a uniformity of humanity predicated on the ideal of equal rights. Whatneither position sees is that they both tacitly assume the existence of a (superior)model of humanness against which those conceived of either as culturallydifferent or fundamentally subordinate can be perceived and towards which theymay, it is assumed, progress over time.

As the West is plunged into yet another phase of obsession with the ‘spectre’of immigration, fuelled by the addition of the dimension of terrorism to theasylum nexus, the issues raised here take on greater importance. The solutionsproposed to racism in the post-war period have engendered a number ofpolicies, from assimilation to multiculturalism and from integration to


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 440

diversity-management, none of which has grappled with the problem that definesthe persistence of racism, namely the relationship between ‘race’ and stateperpetuated by historicism. Even the recognition of institutional racism broughtto light by the MacPherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in theUK (1999) has failed, for obvious reasons, to go beyond admitting failures at thelevel of practices and organizational cultures. The facility with which theseproblems have been separated from the racial histories of the British state arehardly surprising given the way in which racelessness, as Goldberg so expertlydemonstrates, allows for the condemnation of racism to coexist with the assump-tions about human capabilities or desirabilities implied by ‘race’. In order toactually work towards the equal rights of all in a time of acute racism at the levelof state and society across the West, it will be necessary to reveal the fact that suchrights come neither with an absence of historical baggage nor are they politicallyneutral. By revealing the role that mainstream anti-racism has played in cultur-alizing and ethnicizing the language of difference thereby obscuring theirrefutable reciprocity between racism and the modern nation-state, it may beseen how the campaign against racism itself cannot be left out of this vital andfar from complete reflection.

Notes

1 Hannaford (1996) claims that the idea of ‘race’ emerges initially with François Bernier’s(1684) publication of Nouvelle division de la terre par des espèces ou races qui l’habitent.

2 Note that among the most vociferous of the proponents of racism at this time werethose such as Gobineau who, although using the title of ‘Comte’, was an aristocraticaspirant rather than a true noble. Gobineau and those like him were rather moreroyalist in their political agenda than royal by birth.

3 Goldberg shows that a historicist view informed abolitionist movements (and, I wouldadd, mainstream anti-racist ideas). These movements posited ‘racelessness’ as theobvious response to racism, a view that became common sense in post-war state ration-ality. However, the failure of historicism to eradicate racism, but rather its replacementof naturalism with ‘the infuriating subtleties of a legally fashioned racial order’(Goldberg, 2002: 203) meant that many of the old racisms remained while beingglossed over with apparently progressive attitudes that favoured nurture over nature.

4 Whereas in France, the Jews were emancipated in 1790 and 1791 and Napoleon’s armyemancipated Jews in many of the countries it conquered (Traverso, 1996), in Germanythey were not granted full emancipation until 1869 with Bismarck’s rise to power(Meyer and Brenner, 1996).

5 By self-determined anti-racism I mean the opposition to racism developed by the actualor potential victims of racism themselves in collaboration with others such as thatrooted in the legacy of the American Civil Rights movement and taking different formsin its application in various national contexts (e.g. the French Mouvement beur, theBritish monitoring groups, etc.).

6 This argument counters that of authors (cf. Taguieff, 1991; Stolcke, 1995) for a newculturalist or differentialist racism. These authors claim that contemporary, post-warracism no longer relies on phenotypical or biological explanations of difference and has


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 441

fully accepted the scientific refutation of the validity of ‘race’. Taguieff cites theexamples of the French Front national which speaks in terms of the right of the Frenchto maintain their culture in the face of the proliferation of immigrants, seen to belongto incompatible cultural groups who too would be more greatly fulfilled in their ‘home’environments. However, as Balibar (1991a) has shown, ‘differentialist’ racism, orracism without ‘race’, existed long before the advent of so-called neo-racism in the guiseof modern antisemitism. Antisemitism is a form of differentialist racism par excellencewhich could describe all forms of contemporary neo-racism, in particular Islamophobiawhich is based upon the perception of Islam as a ‘world-view’ that is incompatible withEuropeanness.

7 Lévi-Strauss’s adjustment of his position with regards to the UNESCO project cameabout in the context of a controversial speech he made, at the invitation of UNESCO,on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the Declaration. It is reproduced as ‘Race etculture’ in Le Regard éloigné (1983).

8 It is important to note that while whiteness in opposition to blackness may be used byGoldberg and others in the context of the United States, in Europe it has a moresymbolic meaning. This is especially important to point out in the contemporaryperiod where the growth in racism against white migrants and asylum seekers, forexample, from Eastern Europe, has led to the questioning of the black–whitedichotomy often employed in writing on racism.

References

Arendt, Hannah (1966) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich.

Balibar, Etienne (1991a) ‘Is There a “Neo-Racism”?’, in Etienne Balibar and ImmanuelWallerstein Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, pp. 17–28.

—— (1991b) ‘Racism and Nationalism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel WallersteinRace, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, pp. 37–67.

—— (1991c) ‘Class Racism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein Race, Nation,Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, pp. 204–16.

—— (1994) Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx.New York: Routledge.

Barker, Martin (1983) ‘Empiricism and Racism’, Radical Philosophy, Spring: 6–15.Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press.—— (1991): Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Bonnett, Alastair (2000) Anti-Racism. London: Routledge.Comas, Juan (1961) ‘ “Scientific” Racism Again?’, Current Anthropology 2(4): 3010–340.Foucault, Michel (1997) Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1976. Paris:

Gallimard Seuil.Gilroy, Paul (2000) Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London:

Allen Lane.Goldberg, David Theo (2002) The Racial State. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Hannaford, Ivan (1996) Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press.Hesse, Barnor (1999) ‘ “It’s Your World”: Discrepant M/multiculturalisms’, in Phil Cohen

(ed.) New Ethnicities, Old Racism. London: Zed Books.


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 442

Lentin, Alana (2004) Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe. London and Ann Arbor: PlutoPress.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1975) ‘Race and History’, in L.C. Dunn et al. (eds) Race, Scienceand Society. New York: Whiteside and Morrow, for UNESCO.

—— (1983) ‘Race et culture’, in Le Regard éloigné. Paris: PLON.MacMaster, Neil (2001) Racism in Europe 1870–2000. Houndmills: Palgrave.Meyer, Michael A. and Brenner, Michael (1996) German-Jewish History in Modern Times,

Vol. II. New York: Columbia University Press.Mosse, George (1978) Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. London:

J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.Nicholson, Philip Yale (1999) Who Do We Think We Are? Race and Nation in the Modern

World. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.‘The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry’ (1999) ‘Report of an Inquiry by Sir William MacPher-

son of Cluny, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Depart-ment by Command of Her Majesty’. London: The Stationery Office.

Stolcke, Verena (1995) ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusionin Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–24.

Taguieff, Pierre-André (1989) La Force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles. Paris:La Découverte.

—— (1995) Les Fins de l’antiracisme. Paris: Michalon.Taguieff, Pierre-André, ed. (1991) Face au racisme 1: Les moyens d’agir. Paris: La Décou-

verte.Traverso, Enzo (1996) Pour une critique de la barbarie moderne: Ecrits sur l’histoire des Juifs

et de l’antisémitisme. Lausanne: Editions Page Deux.UNESCO (1968) ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’, Current Anthro-

pology 9(4): 270–2.Voegelin, Eric ([1933] 2000) Race and State, trans. Ruth Heim. Baton Rouge: Louisiana

State University Press.

■ Alana Lentin is currently EC Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre,University of Oxford. Her first book Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe is publishedby Pluto Press in 2004. Address: Queen Elizabeth House, 21 St Giles, Oxford OX13LA, UK. [email: [email protected]]


01 046699 (jr/d) 21/9/04 11:30 am Page 443

Documents

Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses: Picking holes in ‘culture’ and ‘human rights’