Power And Prejudice

The Politics And Diplomacy Of Racial Discrimination, Second Edition

Paul Gordon Lauren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429972140
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since it first appeared, Power and Prejudice has been hailed as a bold, pioneering work dealing with one of the central and most controversial issues of our time?the relationship between racial prejudice and global conflict. Powerfully written and based on documents from archives on several continents, this award-winning book convincingly demonstrates that the racial issue, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called?the problem of the twentieth century,? has profoundly influenced most major developments in international politics and diplomacy.Lauren begins with a thought-provoking discussion of the heavy burden of history's pattern of conquest and slavery wherin skin color identified master and slave, conqueror and conquered. He then examines bitter twentieth-century conflicts over race, including immigration exclusion and the?Yellow Peril,? the?Final Solution? of the Holocaust, decolonization, the impact of the Cold War on the civil rights movement, and the global struggle against racial prejudice. In this new edition, Lauren adds dimensions about Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, exploring the racial dimensions of immigration exclusion and warfare. He contributes significant new material about international issues regarding indigenous peoples around the world, including self-determination, sovereignty, and discrimination. And finally, he examines the dramatic events surrounding the end of apartheid in South Africa.Eloquent, provocative, and informed by first-rate scholarship, the insights of this highly original work will appeal to general readers as well as to students and scholars from a broad range of disciplines.

1
The Heavy Burden of the Past

When the Europeans chose their slaves from a race differing from their own which many of them considered as inferior to the other races of mankind, and any notion of intimate union with which they all repelled with horror, they must have believed that slavery would last forever, since there is no intermediate state that can be durable between the excessive inequality produced by servitude and the complete equality that originates in independence.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

The Tradition Begins

Discrimination is ancient in its origins. From the earliest periods of human existence, groups developed prejudices toward others and then discriminated against those whom they regarded as different or inferior. In their attempts to maintain or increase power, prestige, or wealth, groups found it easy to invent or accept the idea that others were somehow inferior to them and thus not deserving of equal treatment. Among the many differences that could be (and were) used as a basis for discrimination, people quickly discovered that physical appearance was the easiest to identify. It required no careful contemplation, no subtle analysis, and no agonizing assessment of individual character or worth, but only a superficial glance at those visual, phenotypical features that would later be used to identify "race": the shape of another's nose or skull, skin fold of another's eyes, texture of another's hair, thickness of another's lips, and especially the color of another's skin. This helps to explain the nearly universal nature of what we now would call "racial" consciousness, which has been independently discovered and rediscovered by various white and non-white peoples alike, and has emerged in widely diverse times and places throughout history.

Rudimentary drawings on the walls of prehistoric caves and paintings in Egyptian tombs, for example, readily demonstrate an early awareness of racial differences. The origins of the Hindu caste system indicate that the broad categories of division are based upon symbolic varna, or color. In descending order these include white (Brahmans), red (Kshatriyas), yellow (Vaishyas), and finally black (Shudras), with great preference given to light over dark. Many other cultures in pre-Columbian Asia, Africa, and the Americas show similar and very early patterns of prejudice based upon color and reveal the existence of race thinking long before the emergence of modern racism. Long before any sustained contact with either light-complexioned Europeans or dark-skinned Africans or Indians, the Japanese similarly valued "white" and deprecated "black," associating skin color in both Heian and Nara aesthetics with a whole complex of attractive or objectionable traits that signified degrees of spiritual refinement, chastity, or purity.¹ Systematic ideologies of racial superiority emerged only after the passing of much time, of course, but the experiences of these otherwise widely different societies clearly demonstrate what has been called "the impulse to inequality" as they began a tradition wherein skin color often served to greater or lesser degrees as the badge of master and subject, of the free and enslaved, and of the dominators and dominated.²

Among these many cases of racial prejudice that led to discrimination, however, none has come even close to eclipsing that of the white, Western world in historical or international importance. Here the tradition began in embryonic form at the source of Western civilization itself, the Greeks of antiquity.³ No less an authority than the philosopher Aristotle, for example, asserted in his Politics that inhabitants of the colder regions of Europe were "deficient in skill and intelligence" and those of Asia were lacking "in spirit, and this is why they continue to be peoples of subjects and slaves." "It is nature's intention," wrote Aristotle, "to erect a physical difference between the body of the freeman and that of the slave," thus making some naturally superior to others as man is to an inferior beast. He stated his conclusion directly enough: "It. is clear that just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just."⁴ This position, maintained authority Michael Banton in his highly regarded work on race, represents the beginning of a "racist" feeling of prejudice used for many centuries to justify the status quo and as the "proof' of the natural superiority of the powerful. "Aristotle's doctrine," he wrote incisively, "was thus of major significance as a justification for patterns of racial relations maintained by force."⁵

Doctrines of inherent biological differences gained even wider acceptance in the classical world through the works of historians, geographers, and other commentators when they described races dwelling beyond the boundaries of the Mediterranean area. In this regard, wrote scholar Frank Snowden, "color was obviously uppermost in the minds of the Greeks and the Romans." Black Africans, or Ethiopians, he observed, provided "the yardstick" by which antiquity measured colored peoples everywhere, using skin color "as the most important distinguishing criterion."⁶ The association of color with behavior followed quickly, and although a few favorable references to non-whites occasionally surfaced, most were decidedly negative. None other than the "Father of History," Herodotus, informed his readers that Ethiopians fed on serpents, lizards, and other reptiles, were incapable of speaking any human language, and hence made sounds "like the screeching of bats." Libyans he described as a people who "burn the veins at the top of their heads," and other areas of Africa as inhabited by wild men and women, creatures with dogs' heads or no heads at all with "their eyes in their breasts."⁷ Greeks and Romans held similar views of those who lived in India and Asia.⁸

Such fantastically derogatory images of races to the south and east, accepted uncritically by Roman encyclopedists like Pliny, appeared particularly brutal when contrasted with images of the white-skinned peoples to the north. Even the great Roman historian Tacitus praised the Germans for possessing those physical characteristics "which we so much admire" and for being "not mixed at all with other races through immigration or intercourse" and "free from all taint of intermarriages with foreign nations."⁹ It was this combination admired by Tacitus, like Aristotle before him, of physical criteria, mental qualities, and notions of superiority, wrote scholar Jacques Barzun, that provided "the model" for all subsequent theories of race.¹⁰

Early attitudes such as these extended far beyond the confines of time and place in antiquity. Awed and highly influenced by some of the keenest minds of Greece and Rome, authors who followed in their footsteps readily incorporated conclusions of fantasy having little basis in fact. While reinforcing ideas and myths of the past, they frequently added embellishments of their own, particularly at a time when the human species was not yet clearly defined. The popular third-century geographer, Solinus, for example, wrote in his Collectanea rerum memorabilium that certain black peoples of Africa represented "a bastard people among nations," and described the inhabitants as creatures who "go around like four-footed beasts."¹¹ Still others, he asserted, resembled dogs with "long snouts," whereas some had no noses, no mouths, or no tongues. Although he urged compassion for these unfortunate souls, even Saint Augustine described these strange and grotesque creatures of different colors as "the monstrous races."¹²

Racial distinctions proved to be of even greater importance in Muslim society. According to David Brion Davis in his pioneering works on slavery, Arabs significantly reordered the slave trade patterns of the ancient world and thereby strengthened the growing correlation between color and domination. That is, black African slaves became far more numerous in the Arab world than in the Roman Empire. Although Muslim jurists regarded slavery as an unnatural condition that could be justified only in extraordinary circumstances, they tended to relax their standards as traders moved into the interior of Africa and returned with ever larger numbers of black-skinned captives. Muslims not only began to accept the legitimacy of black enslavement in this process but also to consider Africans as an inferior and contemptible race born to be slaves. Indeed, the Arabic word for slaves, abid, was increasingly confined to blacks alone. The more the Muslims witnessed Africans in captivity, the more they assigned to them a variety of derogatory physical and characterological traits. Arabic literature of the eighth and ninth centuries, for example, revealed black skin color as having been associated with offensive odor, repulsiveness, mental deficiency, uncontrolled sexuality, savagery, and evil. "From these premises," writes Davis, "it followed that the enslavement of blacks was as natural as the domestication of beasts of burden." This led him to conclude in his recent book, Slavery and Human Progress: "The similarity between Muslim and later Christian racial imagery tells us less about black Africans than about the common pressures felt by a 'white' ruling race intent on celebrating its own progressive civilization while keeping slaves or an underclass of freedmen in a state of permanent subordination. Racial stereotypes, in both instances, were clearly nourished by a long-term flow of slave labor from sub-Saharan Africa."¹³

These several ideas and attitudes of the Greco-Roman experience and those transmitted from the Arab world helped to establish in Western civilization a tradition of ways of thinking about race. It is too much to assert that these ideas constituted an elaborate racist ideology or unambiguous and uninterrupted racism in the modern sense of the word. They clearly did not. At least some observers believe that despite their attitudes, a number of Greeks and Romans viewed skin color as simply the effect of environment rather than a biological, defect, and thus practiced little racial discrimination in policy.¹⁴ Their opinions of other races, however dim and sporadic, nevertheless were not colorblind and began a pattern of thought about racial superiority. The fact that these notions found expression not on the fringe, but in the thoughts of the most respected authorities of antiquity like Aristotle, Herodotus, and Tacitus, among many others, gave them unparalleled and unchallenged credibility.

When the classics were rediscovered, revived, and read, the ideas about races passed from one generation to others over centuries. Political treatises, historical essays, literary works, and travel accounts of unknown lands during the medieval period and Renaissance carried the heritage even further. Thus, long before they ever set foot in any significant way on other continents or met other peoples, Europeans possessed an extensive tradition of certain negative images, attitudes, and practices toward other races of the world. As late as the end of the fourteenth century, they still could consult the renowned Catalan Atlas and read that the inhabitants of the Indies comprised "a people different from any other . . . who are black and without rational faculties. They eat white strangers whenever they can."¹⁵ At the same time, the noted historian of Muslim North Africa, Ibn Khaldun, reserved his most pejorative comments for blacks: "To the south of the Nile there is a Negro people called Lamlam. They are unbelievers. . . . The people of Ghana and Takrur invade their country, capture them, and sell them to merchants who transport them to the Maghrib. They constitute the ordinary mass of slaves. Beyond them to the south, there is no civilization in the proper sense. They are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. . . . They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings."¹⁶

Blackness, in fact, began to assume a particular aesthetic and moral meaning. In an age that believed so strongly in symbolism, no other color except white conveyed so much emotional impact: Black came to represent evil, depravity, filth, ugliness, baseness, wickedness, danger, death, and sin. Europeans sometimes referred to the ultimate Christian symbol of evil, the devil, as the "black horseman" or the "great Negro."¹⁷ The black arts, black magic, and the Black Death carried this sinister and dangerous image even further. White, in contrast, consistently denoted purity, cleanliness, beauty, virtue, virginity, beneficence, and holiness. Christianity itself, as did Islam, increasingly became associated with complexion.¹⁸ When Europeans took such emotionally charged and intensely suggestive connotations of color (however abstract, ambiguous, and fantasy-based), applied them to human races, and then combined them with additional preconceptions of foreign peoples, the results often proved to be catastrophic for those who were not white. This could be seen when they set out to discover and explore the wider world.

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If the frontiers of thought regarding race remained constricted and confined during this period, those of geography burst beyond imagination. Equipped with the caravel ship design, magnetic compass, astrolabe, and firearms and possessed with the prospect of commercial gain, curiosity for the unknown, missionary zeal, and the hope of finding an ally against the Turkish enemy, explorers in the fifteenth century sailed off across distant oceans. They set into motion one of the most significant movements in the history of man: the European discovery, exploration, and eventual domination of the farthest parts of the globe. Slowly and cautiously easing out of the familiar coastal waters of the past, Portuguese sailors conducted explorations southward around Africa. In 1434 they passed the dreaded, reef-encrusted Cape Bojador; ten years later they passed Cape Verde, and then the mouth of the Senegal River. The pace quickened, and they crossed the equator in 1473, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and within a few years Vasco da Gama crossed the Indian Ocean, establishing the first direct commercial link between Europe and Asia. Spurred by these successes of their rival, the Spanish sponsored expeditions to the west across the Atlantic, and by 1492 Christopher Columbus brought exciting word of a New World. In less than a single century, the Portuguese reached Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America, thus discovering more territory in seventy-five years than had been discovered in the previous one thousand.

In none of these new territories did Europeans encounter unoccupied territory or whites quite like themselves. Each voyage brought them instead into contact with larger and larger numbers of people scattered across the continents, people with what they considered to be black, brown, yellow, and red skin colors. This fact was to have enormous consequences for the diplomacy of the world. In sharp contrast with the nearly exclusive intra-European and racially homogeneous relationships of Renaissance diplomacy, diplomatic relations now began to expand in geographical scope to become international in fact. Thus, international relations—as we shall see by their very nature—slowly, but increasingly and inextricably came to be interracial relations as well.

Yet despite increased contact with other continents during this first part of the age of discovery, Europeans' attitudes about race demonstrated little change at all. Growing familiarity did not result in greater toleration, compassion, or acceptance, and the old stereotyped images showed tenacious persistence. The chronicler of Prince Henry's discovery, Gomes Eannes de Azurara, continued to write during the fifteenth century of blacks to the south as a tainted, inferior people destined to be slaves: a race that "should be subject to all other races in the world."¹⁹ Editions of Pierre Cardinal d'Ailly's popular Imago Mundi, a compilation of astronomical and geographical knowledge, still asserted the existence in the West of "savage men who eat human flesh and have depraved and fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: "The Problem of the Twentieth Century"
• 1 The Heavy Burden of the Past
• 2 The Rising Tide
• 3 Racial Equality Requested—and Rejected
• 4 From One War to Another
• 5 The Turning Point
• 6 Making a New Beginning
• 7 The End of Empire
• 8 A Decade for Action
• 9 Toward the Future
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index