Kindle Notes & Highlights
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May 5 - May 10, 2019
and alienation is most clearly and dramatically expressed in laws forbidding interracial marriage.
Third, social segregation is mandated by law and not merely the product of custom or private acts of discrimination that are tolerated by the state.
Fourth, to the extent that the polity is formally democratic, outgroup members are excluded from holding public office or even exercising the franchise.
Fifth, the access that they have to resources and economic opportunities is so limited that most of those in the stigmatized category are either kept in poverty or deliberately impoverished.
Negative feeling about blacks or Jews in the preindustrial era were undoubtedly
stronger and more salient in the countries or regions that constructed overtly racist regimes than in those that did not.
the extent to which the racial Other came to be identified with national defeat and humiliation.
The fear of sexual pollution or violation by the allegedly subhuman race is close to the heart of murderous or genocidal racism whenever and wherever it appears.
“Soul means race viewed from within: And vice versa, race is the externalization of Soul”
“The life of a race does not represent a logically-developed philosophy nor even the unfolding of a pattern according to law, but rather the development of a mystical synthesis, an activity of soul.”38
His international and domestic achievements of the mid-1930s—putting Germans back to work, building the autobahn, occupying the Rhineland, staging and winning the Olympics—created the “unshaken faith” in him that “brought with it widespread acceptance, passive or not, of the measures against the Jews.”40 Antisemitic policies thus became part of a package that could be accepted only in its totality.
The most important reason for the repudiation of eugenic racism, one prominent geneticist concluded, was “the revulsion of educated people in the United States and England to Nazi race doctrines and their use in justifying the extermination of the Jews.”49
An exclusive emphasis on reasons of state as the motivation for egalitarian reform risks overlooking the moral dimension—the extent to which racism conflicts with other values that Americans are supposed to hold.
The ace in the hole that South Africa’s leaders believed they possessed at the height of the Cold War was the role they thought they could play as a bastion of anticommunism on a continent endangered by the red menace. On that basis they could expect Western aid and tacit support—which in fact they received in relative abundance between the late ’40s and the late ’70s.
The basic idea, which could have come directly from Herder, was that each Volk was programmed to develop a unique and worthy culture. But to do so, it had to be protected from contamination by other cultures; this required a significant degree of isolation and “separate development.”
cultural relativism rather than hierarchical racism
would have to be acknowledged as the essence of apartheid.
the essence of racism is not biological determinism per se but the positing, on whatever basis, of unbridgeable differences between ethnic or descent groups—distinctions that are then used to justify their differential treatment.
When the South African regime could no longer expect aid or even toleration
from the West for its role in the defense of capitalism, and the disintegrating Soviet Union cut off aid to the African National Congress, the two sides in the struggle went to the bargaining table to resolve a conflict in which neither could anticipate total victory.
The moral condemnation of the world and the economic sanctions to which it eventually gave rise undermined the willingness of white South Africans to defend apartheid at all costs.
The revulsion against official racism that inspired the international campaign to free Mandela and end apartheid can be traced ultimately to the antiracist fallout from the Holocaust, activated and reinforced in relation to people of color by the success of decolonization and the civil rights movements elsewhere in the world during the decades immediately after the war.
The marks or identifiers usually associated with ethnicity are language, religion, customs, and physical characteristics (inborn or acquired). One or more (sometimes all) may serve as sources of ethnic divisiveness; any one of them can provoke disdain, discrimination, or violence on the part of another group that does not share the trait or traits that have come to define ethnic Otherness.
essence of racism as ethnicity made hierarchical,
the presence and articulation of a belief that the defining traits are innate or unchangeable.
Xenophobia (literally the fear of strangers) is an ancient and virtually
universal phenomenon, while racism, I have argued, is a historical construction with a traceable career covering the period between the fourteenth century and the twenty-first.
group inequalities associated with what are taken to be indelible marks of inferior or unworthy ancestry can exist without having the full apparatus of the modern state to sustain them.
Histories of slavery, Jim Crow, apartheid, or colonization have left many members of previously stigmatized and legally disadvantaged groups in an economically and psychologically vulnerable situation, which may make it difficult for them to compete with those
whose families and forebears have not had to undergo such shattering experiences.
The damage left behind by “overtly racist regimes” may also encourage antisocial or self-destructive behavior. The failures and “pathologies” that can result seem to confirm negative stereotypes about the group that persist despite the removal of the full ideological scaffolding that once sustained them.
Although it takes much more than rational persuasion to overcome racism, the fact that its foundations are subject to empirical falsification does make it more fragile than the incontrovertible and unquestioning faith demanded by sectarian or fundamentalist religion.
Racism, as we have seen, offers material and psychological rewards to an ethnic group that has the power and the will to dominate or eliminate another ethnic group that it defines as inherently different from itself in ways justifying the treatment it receives.
race. A de facto color line remains because the non-Europeans of the world are, as a result of slavery, colonialism, or a late start on the path of modernization, on the average poorer and more disadvantaged than people of white or European ancestry.
Alienation from the course of local or world development can provoke either racism or religious fanaticism, depending on the cultural and social situation. Grasping for one’s identity in a world that threatens to reduce everyone who is not part of the elite to a low-paid worker or a consumer of cheap, mass-produced commodities creates a hunger for meaning and a sense of self-worth that can most easily be satisfied by consciousness of race or religion.
racialism as the
belief “that there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race.”3
Racialists do not become racists until they make such convictions the basis for claiming special privileges for members of what they consider to be their own race, and for disparaging and doing harm to those deemed racially Other.
But when groups whose differing ancestry is culturally and/or physically marked come into adversarial contact, there is a powerful temptation, especially on the part of the more powerful group, to justify aggression, domination, or extermination by invoking differences defined as “racial”—meaning that they are intrinsic and unchangeable.
Race can therefore be described as what happens when ethnicity is deemed essential or indelible and made hierarchical.
One is more likely to find tolerant or egalitarian racialism among stigmatized groups: they may embrace and reevaluate some of the differences traditionally attributed to them, attempting to change them from defects into virtues, thus affirming a positive cultural identity and making the case that difference does not mean inferiority.
Our understanding of the core function of racism—its assigning of fixed or permanent differences among human descent groups and using this attribution of difference
to justify their differential treatment—
