Anti-racism and Multiculturalism

Studies in International Communication

Mark Alleyne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351531429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

All scholarly books are engagements with the existing literature, often the published scholarly work of one established discipline. This book originated with modest objectives, to produce a work that would be in conversation with the literature of international relations even though not of relevance only to that field. The professed goal of international relations is international peace. The ethical lens of pondering the best means to achieve world peace is used to filter media content in the field of multiculturalism and anti-racism. Although there has been little work on the impact of racial difference on the contours of contemporary international order, there has been a sizeable body of research intended to abolish the credibility of pseudo-scientific racism. Such racism has provided the ideological foundation and justification for imperialism, colonialism, the holocaust, and apartheid. Race has been debunked as a myth. Because of this, racism - the ideology bred of human classification according to racial difference - has been found to be intellectually and morally barren. But the need to communicate egalitarian and scientific sentiments remains. The contributors to this volume consider five questions: How does the literature on antiracism improve our understanding of conflict resolution? How does the analysis of the media's role in racist and anti-racist discourses improve the process of theorizing on hate and war propaganda? How can research on anti-racist discourse improve UN peacekeeping? What implications does this subject have for theory-building and cultural diversity? How and why should the literature on anti-racism expand research in international relations? This is a unique, worthwhile framework for cross-disciplinary research in race and intellectual consensus and conflict.

Part I

Anti-Racism as Naming

Race, Mass Communication, and Modernization: Intellectual Networks and the Flow of Ideas

Hemant Shah

In an overview of the ebbs and flows of the “dynamics of accelerating, uneven, and self-contradictory global change,” Majid Tehranian (1994) provided a penetrating analysis of multiple waves of modernization through world history. He defined modernization as “a process of change that puts a primary value on science, technological, social, economic, political, and cultural innovations in order to achieve progressively higher levels of productivity, democratic participation, and cultural pluralism” (1994, 72). Tehranian identified “seven modernizations,” each with its own temporal, spatial, political-economic, and cultural patterns. The fifth of these modernizations, which began roughly in 1945 at the end of World War II and was characterized by Cold War struggles for the hearts and minds of postcolonial populations, is the focus of this chapter.

Modernization theory was a set of ideas that heavily influenced U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The theory posited a model of societal transformation for poor countries made possible by embracing Western manufacturing technology, political structures, values, and systems of mass communication. As a policy initiative, modernization was the centerpiece of efforts to thwart the spread of Soviet communism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. A package of Western industrial organization, patterns of governance, and general “lifeways” and values was conceived and offered up as a supposedly superior path to entering the modern post-war world. Mass communication was assigned the key task of making the package attractive and irresistible to residents of the postcolonial world.

This chapter examines some of the intellectual history of modernization and mass communication theory, focusing mainly on the 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, the chapter examines closely the ways in which the theory and its assumptions about people, social change, and media effects were inflected by changing ideas about race and race relations. Recent research on modernization has begun to show that racial thinking had an important impact on the formulation of modernization theory in the post-war era (Borstelman 2001; Layton 2000; Robin 2001). To date, however, few have systematically examined why, how, and with what consequences ideas race and race relations made their way into academic work about introducing mass communication into countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (the “Third World”) as important elements of making them “modern.”

The chapter will first review an important dimension of the post-World War II socio-political context. Discussions about race were marked by a discursive shift from “biological racism” to “cultural racism,” which had important implications for the ways American academics and policy makers thought about the postcolonial world, especially in the context of modernization theory. After providing examples of cultural racism within modernization theory and its mass communication component, the chapter will show how the shift occurred institutionally through intellectual networks. Finally, the chapter will discuss the contemporary consequences of bringing cultural racism discourses into modernization theory.

Bible, Biology, Culture and Racism

Racism refers to a system of thought that classifies “races” on the basis of what is thought to be some shared inherent qualities among individuals and then arranges the subsequent racial categories into hierarchies of superiority and inferiority based on those qualities. James Blaut (1992), the radical geographer, has written persuasively about the complicated ways that racist practices persist even as racial theory—a structure of ideas that purport to empirically explain differences of “race”—changes from epoch to epoch. In other words, racist practice is, to a large extent, an historical constant. Racist practices are upheld, justified, and sometimes masked by changing racial theories that are consistent with the changing intellectual environment of the age.

Blaut identifies three major structures of Western racial theory. Religious racism, based on the bible, was dominant in the early 19th century. The dominant racial theory between about 1850 and 1950 was biological racism, which was based on natural science. Contemporary racial theory is cultural racism, based on certain views of cultural history.

Religious racism stated that God had created white people at the headwaters of the Tigris River, near the Caucasus Mountains, which were thought to be the home of the Caucasian race. God gave white people agriculture, cities, arts, etc., and all of pre-Christian history took place among whites in a region between Rome and Mesopotamia. As some people migrated south out of this region, they became dark and degenerate and lost the civilized life and nature of their white ancestors. The Christian Europeans believed that they were favored by their God and were superior to non-whites.

Biological racism became the dominant theory in the mid-19th century. It did not completely supplant religious racism, as oppression by one people by another in the name of religious superiority did (and does) occur even after 1850. Nevertheless, biological racism attained its dominant status based on versions of the biological theories of Mendel and Darwin. Gobineau proposed a widely accepted view that whites were genetically and culturally superior to non-whites and that those differences were persistent and permanent (Hannaford 1996, 264ff). Biological racism began to lose its luster a few years after the end of First World War. Anthropologist Franz Boas and his students advanced theories of historical relativism—the idea that all cultures are changing and evolving—in the early years of the 20th century. They argued against the notion of permanent and persistent biological superiority and inferiority. Their ideas had been marginalized by advocates of the biological view of race, but now found favor as biological racism was increasingly discredited.

Biological racism did not completely fall from dominance, however, until the middle of the 20th century, after World War II. After defeating Nazism, American social theorists were uncomfortable with the “American dilemma,” Gunnar Myrdal’s phrase for the contradiction between the country’s egalitarian ideals and racist practice against African Americans and other minorities. Also, in the area of foreign policy, American leaders were compelled to support struggles for national liberation in the former European colonies. A massive effort was organized in American academic circles, funding centers, government and military agencies, and the foreign policy establishment to develop a framework to explain that non-white peoples of the postcolonial world were only culturally backward, not biologically inferior. Gradually, a new racial theory emerged to counteract the idea that Anglo Americans were innately superior to postcolonial peoples and non-whites were incapable of change. The new theory proposed that any and all non-white societies could realize their potential and capacity by learning how to think rationally, behave in appropriate ways, and commit themselves to a Western set of values and orientations. The obstacles to such advancement were cultural, not biological. This logic allowed Western academics to substitute, as Samir Amin (1989) pointed out, the racial category white with the cultural category European and American, and the idea that whites are racially superior with the notion that whites are merely culturally superior. Thus, since the gap between whites and non-whites was not biological (and therefore not permanent), it was possible for non-whites to “catch up” to whites.

For two main reasons, a cultural theory of race could not have matched the needs of the moment more perfectly for America in the Cold War era. First, post-war academics needed a way to legitimately dispense with the idea that race was immutable. When Harry Truman announced Point Four in his Inauguration speech in 1949, he told the world that the United States was ready and willing to help “develop” the postcolonial world. Introducing this transitive meaning of the idea of development carried with it an important implication. Truman was suggesting that people of postcolonial lands, believed by European colonizers to be persistently and permanently inferior, could, in fact, be taught to change their outlooks, behaviors, and attitudes in ways that could move nations toward modernity (Shah & Wilkins 2004). In terms of racial theory, to allow the idea that postcolonial people could change the mental, psychological, and moral traits associated with their race into academic discourse, the biological race paradigm had to be replaced. Thus, Boas was brought in from the cold, so to speak, and his ideas revived. His notions that each “culture-group” could develop and change over time and that no cultural group was naturally superior to another were embraced (Hannaford 1996; Pierpoint 2004). Toward the close of the Second World War, Margaret Mead, a student of Boas and an eminent anthropologist in her own right, argued in a paper about “national character” that “the differences in race or sub-race membership are irrelevant, that there are no known psychological differences which are dependent upon race as such” (Mead 1943, 1).

Second, the cultural racism paradigm was perfect for changing intellectual needs because it allowed intellectual space for the notion of development—the teleological notion that all countries inevitably advance out of “backwardness”—and also for modernization theory, which proposed that even supposedly culturally inferior people and countries of the postcolonial world could be modern. Cultural racism allowed the West to retain its notion of superiority over the non-West without resorting to largely discredited theories of biological racism. One of the key players in making these arguments was sociologist Edward Shils. In the summer of 1959, after roughly a decade of modernization research by scholars in a number of disciplines, Shils delivered a keynote address at a conference in Dobbs Ferry, New York, on political development in the “new states” of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In the speech, Shils provided a detailed definition of the “modern state.” It entailed democracy, the dethronement of the rich and the traditionally privileged, land reform, steeply progressive income taxation, universal suffrage, universal public education, rational technology, scientific knowledge, industrialization, and a high standard of living. “Modern,” said Shils, “means being western without the onus of following the west. It is the model for the West detached in some way from its geographical origins and locus” (quoted in Gilman 2003, 2). With this speech, Shils created “foundational certainty” among scholars that the purpose of modernization was to create modern nations all over the world and the blueprint for modern states was America (Gilman 2003, 142). Shils advocated the use of the term modernization to describe the transition from “backward” to “modern” nations, because it steered away from implications of Western superiority suggested by the terms Christianization or Westernization (Gilman 2003, 141; see also Shah 1996).

The theoretical bottom line, then, became that internal conditions in the postcolonial states can be improved it they followed the Euro-American model of overcoming backwardness. In other words, the culturally inferior postcolonial states ought to accept guidance and tutelage of culturally evolved Europeans and Americans who now wanted to altruistically share their wisdom and good fortune with the less wise and less fortunate. This argument was at the center of the notion of cultural racism. And cultural racism is at the center of the theory of modernization as it was articulated in the 1950s and 1960s.

Modernization and Culture

Modernization theory rose to prominence in the years after World War II, as U.S. foreign policy experts recommended a cold-war strategy of winning the hearts and minds of residents living in strategically important nations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As we will see in subsequent sections of the paper, the theory came together as social scientists, funding agencies, and government officials worked with one another under the rubric of anti-communism to theorize, operationalize, and implement a model of societal change for the postcolonial states that would bring them into the U.S. orbit of influence.

It would be wrong to characterize the modernization scholars as religious racists or even, strictly speaking, biological racists. In the context of the era in which they were working, their world-views, their sense of privilege to make declarations about what non-Western world ought to do, and their liberal attitudes toward race and race relations were consistent with what many Americans thought (though the Southern segregationists were a major exception on racial liberalism). At the same time, however, there is little doubt that most of these academics believed they were culturally superior to residents of the postcolonial world. It is rare to find examples of explicit references to residents and cultures of postcolonial states that use the vocabulary of biological racism. That is, it is difficult to find the language common to European colonialism that causally links the physical attributes of, say, a man’s hair, skin, and bone, to his mental capabilities, moral temperament, or intelligence. But we can find many, many examples of references to the cultural inferiority of non-whites.

The centrality of cultural racism to modernization theory is demonstrated repeatedly in the writing of the main modernization theorists. The first comprehensive statement of modernization theory is Daniel Lerner’s Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. The book was based on a six-country radio listener survey sponsored by the Voice of America in 1950 and 1951. In Passing of Traditional Society, Lerner proposed a linear theory of modernization: increasing urbanization leading to growth of media (as people would demand news and information) and literacy (as more and more schools are built), which would, in turn, result in economic growth and political participation. Lerner maintained that mass communication was the key factor in helping traditional societies becoming modern. Lerner theorized that radio, television, magazines, and newspapers were important catalysts of the modernization process. The mass media provided information about the modern West and vicarious experiences of modern lifestyles to audiences in the postcolonial world. Audience members with highly empathic personalities—those who could easily imagine themselves in different circumstances—would begin to think and behave in ways that helped transform their countries from tradition societies to modern ones modeled primarily on the United States. In the post-war era and beyond, theory, research, and foreign policy in the mass communication and modernization area were influenced by Lerner’s ideas (see Engerman, et al. 2003; Latham 2000).

Early in Passing of Traditional Society, describing the rationale for the study, Lerner says that to understand what might happen in the Middle East under modernization,

“[W]e remind ourselves of what, historically, happened in the West. For the sequence of current events in the Middle East can be understood as a deviation, in some measure a deliberate deformation, of the Western model. This observational standpoint implies no ethnocentrism. As we shall show, the Western model exhibits certain components and sequences whose relevance is global” (Lerner 1958, 46).

In other comparable passages, Lerner writes that modernization involves “an infusion of a ‘rationalist and positivistic spirit’ against which, scholars seem agreed, Islam is absolutely defenseless” (1958, 46). And further: “modernizers of the Middle East will do well to study the historical sequence of Westernization” (1958, 46). And finally: “A complication of Mid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Anti-Racism as International Communication: An Introduction
• Part I—Anti-Racism as Naming
• Part II—Anti-Racism as Campaigning
• Conclusion: Anti-Racism as International Communication
• Contributors
• Index