'It's good to be different' might be the motto of our times. The celebration
of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics - these
are regarded the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook. At least
in part, the antiracist embrace of difference is fuelled by a hostility to
universalism. For most antiracists today, the Enlightenment project of pursuing
a rational, scientific understanding of the natural and social world, and
of deriving certain universal principles from fragmented experience, is not
only a fantasy, but a racist fantasy. It is a fantasy because the world is
too complex and too heterogeneous to be subsumed under a single totalising
theory. It is racist because universalism has become a means of imposing Euro-American
ideas of rationality and objectivity on other peoples and of denying the possibility
of non-Western viewpoints. For many antiracists, the intellectual arrogance
of universalism has led to the attempt to eliminate not just non-Western thought,
but non-Aryan peoples too. The road that began with Enlightenment universalism
ended in the Nazi death camps.
I want in this paper to show this to be a naive and dangerous view. Far from
establishing a critique of racial thinking, the politics of difference appropriates
many of its themes and reproduces the very assumptions upon which racism has
historically been based. Most critically, the embrace of difference has undermined
the capacity to defend equality. The very title of the final debate at the
Frontlines/ Backyards conference - 'Equalities and the politics of difference'
- expresses the problem. Equality cannot have any meaning in the plural. Equality
cannot be relative, with different meanings for different social, cultural
or sexual groups. If so it ceases to be equality at all, or rather becomes
equality in the way racists used to define it - 'equal but different' - in
defending segregation or apartheid. Equality requires a common yardstick,
or measure of judgement, not a plurality of meanings.
Richard Rorty has observed that the embrace of diversity and the desire for
equality are not easily compatible. For Rorty, those whom he calls 'Enlightenment
liberals' face a seemingly irresolvable dilemma in their pursuit of both equality
and diversity:
Their liberalism forces them to call any doubts about human equality a result of irrational bias. Yet their connoisseurship [of diversity] forces them to realise that most of the globe's inhabitants do not believe in equality, that such a belief is a Western eccentricity. Since they think it would be shockingly ethnocentric to say 'So what? We Western liberals do believe in it, and so much the better for us', they are stuck.1
Rorty himself, a self-avowed 'postmodern bourgeois liberal', solves the problem
by suggesting that equality may be good for 'us' but not necessarily for 'them'.
While few would go as far as this, nonetheless Rorty's relativist vision of
equality has become an implicit part of antiracist theory and practice. The
meaning of equality has been rewritten in the cause of diversity. We cannot
afford, however, to be so careless with equality, not because it is a concept
that 'we Western liberals believe in', but because it is at the heart of any
form of emancipatory politics. Abandoning equality means in effect to abandon
the possibility of emancipation. The debate between pluralism and universalism
is more than simply of theoretical concern; it relates to fundamental issues
about political and social change and it is in this context that I want to
discuss the meaning of 'difference' in contemporary society.
There are three basic points I want to argue in this paper. First, I want
to show that 'difference' has always been at the heart, not of the antiracist,
but of the racist agenda. Second, I want to argue that cultural pluralism,
far from being a means to liberate the voice of the oppressed, is rooted in
the same philosophy that gave rise to the discourse of race. Finally, I want
to show that in a world that is profoundly unequal, the pursuit of difference
inevitably leads to the accommodation to, and exacerbation of, such inequalities.
The irony in the contemporary embrace of difference is that antiracist hostility
to universalism mirrors that of traditional racial theorists. Nineteenth century
racial thinkers despised what they regarded as the abstract universalism of
Enlightenment thinkers which they believed denied, and even undermined, the
concrete reality of human differences. In its stead racial theorists embraced
the relative and the particular. Dismissing claims of a universal humanity,
they advocated instead the notion that human groups are in profound ways distinct
and should be treated accordingly.
French historian and racial thinker Hippolyte Taine mocked the Enlightenment
belief that 'men of every race and century were all but identical: the Greek,
the barbarian, the Hindoo, the man of the Renaissance, and the man of the
eighteenth century as if they had been turned out of a common mould, and all
in conformity to a certain abstract conception, which served for the human
race.' Echoing the jibe of Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre that 'I
have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on... but I must say, as for
man, I have never come across him anywhere', Taine believed that Enlightenment
philosophes 'knew man, but not men': 'They did not know that the moral
constitution of a people or an age is as particular or as distinct as the
physical structure of a family of plants or an order of animals.' Or, as the
French psychologist and racial scientist Gustav LeBon put it, 'the substitution
of relative ideas for abstract notions' was 'one of the greatest conquests
of science'.2
The discourse of race arose out of the degradation of Enlightenment universalism,
and in particular the espousal of Romantic notions of difference: the belief
that humanity can be divided into discrete groups; that each group should
be considered in its own terms; that each is incommensurate with the others;
that the important relationships in society arise in some way out of the differences
between groups; and that equality is a meaningless abstract term. It developed
in response to a central contradiction in post-Enlightenment society - the
contradiction between an abstract belief in equality and the reality of unequal
society.
Before the modern concept of race could develop, the modern concepts of equality
and humanity had to develop too. Racial difference and inequality can only
have meaning in a world which has accepted the possibility of social equality
and a common humanity. The achievement of the Enlightenment was that it helped
produce just such a world. Whatever their other differences most Enlightenment
thinkers held that humans were by nature rational and sociable, and that there
existed a common human nature. Implicit in these beliefs was the idea that
all humans were potentially equal. Through Enlightenment philosophy humanity
had for the first time a concept of universality that could transcend perceived
differences.
What is striking about Enlightenment discourse is the lack of any discussion
of race. Compared to writings both before and after, eighteenth century writings
show a remarkable disdain for racial arguments. When in 1800 the French anthropologist
Joseph-Marie Degerando wrote a methodological text for the Société
des Observateurs de l'Homme, the principal anthropological society of its
time, he did not think it necessary to deal with the question of race.3
Again, the debate about slavery that raged through the eighteenth century
was rarely a debate about race. With one or two notable exceptions, those
who defended of slavery did so not on racial grounds but as a defence of the
sanctity of property.4
Of course Enlightenment thinkers clearly held racist views, some very openly
and overtly. It would have been astonishing if it had been otherwise. The
racial comments of the likes of Kant, Hume and Voltaire are well known.5
But what was absent at this time was any sustained discourse of race. Michael
Banton, Robert Miles and Anthony Barker, in their various surveys of racial
thinking, have all argued, in Banton's words, that 'though there was a substantial
literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth century about Africans and other
non-European peoples, the word "race" was rarely used either to
describe peoples or in accounts of differences between them.'6
The Enlightenment, however, was not simply an intellectual movement. The belief
in equality and a common humanity was the ideological embodiment of a wider
social and political movement through which the feudal order crumbled and
a new society - capitalism - emerged. Out of the complex interaction between
the ideology of equality and developing capitalist social relations emerged
the discourse of race.
The tolerance, egalitarianism and optimism that characterised the Enlightenment
derived, at least in part, from the relative stability of Europe in the first
part of the eighteenth century. There existed an almost universal conviction
that the social order was static, or at least that change would be orderly
and contained. The social upheaval created by coming of market relations upset
such convictions and brought into focus the immanent contradictory attitudes
of the bourgeoisie towards the idea of equality. Belief in equality was at
the heart of the bourgeois political programme. Yet the pursuit of equality
threatened to undermine that very political programme, for, as Adam Smith
suggested, the defence of private property seemed to require a defence of
inequality.7
At the same time the emerging capitalist social relations placed constraints
upon the extension of equality. Capitalist ideology expressed hostility to
the parochial, irrational, nature of feudalism and proclaimed a belief in
human equality and a universal society. In practice, however, the particular
forms of capitalist society placed limits on the expression of equality. Capitalism
destroyed the parochialism of feudal society but it created divisions anew;
divisions which, moreover, seemed as permanent as the old feudal ones. As
social inequalities persisted in the new society, and acquired the stamp of
permanence, so these inequalities began to present themselves as if they were
natural, not social.
The discourse of race emerged as a means of reconciling the conflict between
the ideology of equality and the reality of the persistence of inequality.
From the racial viewpoint, inequality persisted because society was by nature
unequal. The destiny of different social groups was shaped, at least in part,
by their intrinsic properties. Humanity was divided into discrete groups,
each with particular properties, and the divisions between the groups were
immutable and unchanging. Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the
persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had
accepted the concept of equality. Race came to be the way through which people
made sense of the world around them.8
There are two important points here. First, the concept of race was not implicit
in Enlightenment categories. It emerged out of the interaction between Enlightenment
categories and the social relations of emergent capitalist society. The Enlightenment
helped establish for the first time, in theory at least, the possibility of
human emancipation. But it did so in social circumstances that limited the
expression of its emancipatory potential. Where social forces drawing on the
logic of Enlightenment discourse had sufficient strength - as, for instance,
in the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint l’Ouverture - they could
pursue the goal of equality beyond that envisaged by those who drew up the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, or the American Declaration of Independence.
But where such forces were weak, the contradictory attitude of the capitalist
class towards equality ensured that increasing limits were placed upon its
expression. The narrative of race is thus also the narrative of the containment
of the movements for social emancipation.
The second point that emerges from this discussion is that universalism did
not give rise to race; rather the discourse of race developed in opposition
to the notions of universalism and rationalism. It was through the Romantic
reaction to the Enlightenment that racial ideology first found expression.
Romantics rejected what they saw as the abstract nature of Enlightenment universalism,
and championed instead particularist accounts of human difference. They considered
every people to be unique, and that such uniqueness was expressed through
a its volksgeist, the unchanging spirit of a people refined through
history. The idea of volksgeist became transformed into the concept
of racial make-up, an unchanging substance, the foundation of all physical
appearance and mental potential and the basis for division and difference
within humankind. At the root of modern racism, therefore, lie not Enlightenment
concepts of universality but Romantic visions of human differences.
Understanding the historical and intellectual roots of the idea of race is
important because Romantic notions of human differences also lie at the heart
of contemporary visions of cultural pluralism. Racial theory and cultural
pluralism both display a hostility to Enlightenment universalism, but in different
ways. Ernest Gellner has pointed out that there are two sets of questions
that arise from the debate between universalism and relativism: 'Is there
but one kind of man, or are there many? Is there but one world, or are there
many?'9 While the first questions the biological unity of
humankind, the second questions the very idea of a single truth or objective
understanding of the world.
Belief in a single world assumes that common laws and values operate across
all societies but that different people respond in different ways to them.
The nineteenth-century social Darwinist Herbert Spencer expressed this idea
well when he explained how his views differed from that of Enlightenment philosophers:
In early life we have been taught that human nature is everywhere the same... This error we must replace by the truth that the laws of thought are everywhere the same.10
For Spencer, therefore, the same, objective social laws operate in every
society and culture, but different peoples respond to these objective laws
in different ways, the nature of the response being determined by the racial
make-up of any given people.
Belief in many worlds, on the other hand, denies a common objective understanding
of the world and in its place posits a plurality of ways of understanding
and evaluating the world around us. Since the social world is constructed
by the people who inhabit that society not given in nature, so every world
is specific to the people who inhabit it and incommensurate with the social
worlds that other people inhabit.
Schematically, one may say that the discourse of race (or more specifically
the discourse of scientific racism) holds that there is one world but that
it is inhabited by different types of humanity, while the discourse of culture
holds that there is one type of humanity, but it inhabits different worlds.
Of course the distinction between the two is not a clear cut or straightforward
one. Many racial formalists have also denied the possibility of a single truth,
while cultural relativists have often accepted the idea of biological differences
within humankind. Nevertheless we can perceive in the last decades of the
nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth a shift from the
discourse of race to the discourse of culture which is largely embodied in
a shift from a belief in a single world inhabited by different types of humanity
to a belief in a single type of humanity inhabiting different cultural or
symbolic worlds.
The discourse of race and the discourse of culture both emerged out of the
degradation of universalism, but they did so in different ways. Nineteenth
century racial theorists, for all their disdain of universalist ideas, maintained
nevertheless a belief in the idea of reason as a weapon of social transformation
and of social progress as the companion of a teleological history. Given this
belief in inevitable social progress, the growing gulf between 'civilised
man' and the 'primitives' that was evident both within and without European
society led many to see such differences in natural, and hence in racial,
terms. Victorian social evolutionists were led to posit a hierarchical view
of humanity, seeing different groups of peoples as arrested at different point
along the evolutionary scale and believing that progress and reason were the
prerogative only of certain races.
The discourse of culture, on the other hand, reflected a disenchantment with
the notion of social evolution, a disbelief in the doctrine of inevitable
social progress and a disillusionment with the values of one's own culture.
It was the emergence of such trends in the early part of this century, and
in particular in the wake of the First World War, gave rise to relativist
theories of culture. In the context of a general pessimism about social progress,
the idea of difference was transformed from the notion of 'many men in a single
world' to a 'single type of man inhabiting many worlds'. If social development
had not overcome the vast gulfs that separated different peoples, many argued,
then perhaps that was because such differences reflected the fact that different
peoples inhabited different social worlds, each of which was as valid and
as real as the other.
The main force in the shift from a racial to a cultural view of human differences
was the science of anthropology. Anthropology had always been the most particularist
of the human sciences. In the context of Victorian positivism and social evolutionism,
this manifested itself through physical anthropology and theories of biological
differences. As the positivist outlook disintegrated along with the long nineteenth
century, so anthropological particularism re-expressed itself in cultural
terms.
The central figure in the story of the remaking of anthropology was the German
American Franz Boas. It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Boas,
not simply on anthropology, but on our everyday perceptions of race, culture
and difference. Contemporary ideas of pluralism and multiculturalism, of respect
for other cultures, and of the importance of tradition and history are all
significant themes in Boas' work.11 His legacy, however,
like that of pluralism itself, remains an ambiguous one. Boas, and his students
such as Melville Herskovitz, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, played a prominent
part in the replacement of racial theories of human differences with cultural
theories, and in so doing helped undermine the power of scientific racism.
Yet the concept of culture Boas helped develop to a large extent rearticulated
the themes of racial theory in a different guise. Influenced both by the German
Romantic tradition and by a liberal egalitarian view, the problem facing Boas,
as the historian George Stocking observes, was how to define the Romantic
notion of 'the genius of the people' in terms other than racial heredity.12
His answer, ultimately, was the anthropological concept of culture.
Boas' philosophical egalitarianism and cultural relativism arose from his
disillusionment with 'Western' values. He related in a letter the impact of
meeting the Inuit on a field trip to the Arctic:
I often ask myself what advantages our 'good society' possesses over that of the 'savages'. The more I see of their customs the more I realise we have no right to look down on them... As a thinking person, for me the most important result of this trip lies in the strengthening of my point of view that the idea of a 'cultured' person is merely relative.13
Boas' disillusionment was at the root of the ambiguity in his treatment of
the idea of equality. The revolutionary egalitarianism that arose out of the
Enlightenment was positive and forward-looking. From Condorcet to Marx, such
egalitarians held that social progress could overcome artificial divisions
and differences and reveal our essential commonality. Boas' egalitarianism
arose, on the contrary, from the belief that such progress was not possible.
Humanity was equal, not because differences could be overcome, but because
every difference was equally valid. But this approach elided 'differences'
and 'inequalities'. What were considered differences between individuals and
peoples were in reality the product of social inequalities. For Boas 'equality'
meant the acceptance of the actual inequalities of society but the regarding
of these inequalities as different manifestations of a common humanity.
We can see the way in which the new anthropology reframed the meaning of inequality
by looking at the development of pluralism in the colonial context. The concept
of a plural society first emerged through anthropological analyses of colonial
societies in the first decades of this century. In a study of Indonesia and
Burma, the anthropologist JS Furnival wrote that 'the first thing that strikes
the visitor is the medley of peoples - European, Chinese, Indian and native'
that constitute the society. The different groups, Furnival wrote, 'mix but
do not combine'. Each group 'holds by its own religion, its own culture and
language, its ideas and ways'. The result was a 'plural society, with different
sections of the society living side by side but separately within the same
political unit'.14
This concept of a plural society proved attractive to both colonial administrators,
grappling with the problem of imposing law and order on the territories, and
to Western liberals keen to protect colonial subjects from the ravages of
imperialism. Pluralism quickly moved from being a description of colonial
society to an explanation for it. The inequalities of colonial society were
rationalised as products of the different cultural outlooks and lifestyles
of the various groups that constituted that society. Through this process
inequality became reframed as difference. Like racial theory, plural theory
provided an apology for social inequalities, portraying them as the inevitable
result, not of natural variations, but of cultural differences.
Pluralism effectively turned on its side the evolutionary ladder of Victorian
racial theory: pluralists conceived of humanity as horizontally, rather than
vertically, segmented. Humanity was not arranged at different points along
an ever-rising vertical axis, as the social evolutionists had believed, but
at different points along a stationary horizontal axis. Humanity was composed
of a multitude of peoples each inhabiting their own symbolic and cultural
worlds. But whether differences were seen as biological or cultural, whether
they were seen in terms of inferiority and superiority or not, racial theory
and cultural pluralism were characterised by a common hostility to universalism,
a disdain for humanism and a philosophical, and occasionally epistemological,
relativism.
The consequence of all this can be seen in the debate about race and difference
in the postwar world. Following the experience of Nazism, the Holocaust and
the Final Solution, biological theories of human differences became discredited.
But if racial science was buried in the postwar world, racial thinking was
not. While the biological arguments for racial superiority were thrown into
disrepute and overt expressions of racism were discredited, many of the assumptions
of racial thinking were maintained intact - in particular the belief that
humanity can be divided into discrete groups, that each groups should be considered
in its own terms, and that differences, not commonalities, shaped human interaction.
These assumption, however, were cast not in biological terms but in the language
of cultural pluralism. Pluralism provided a vocabulary with which to articulate
social differences without having to refer to the discredited discourse of
race. It provided both a sense of continuity with prewar racial discourse
and a means of asserting the aversion to racism that exemplified the postwar
years.
We have seen how the concept of a plural society developed in the prewar years
out of anthropological studies of colonial society. In the postwar world it
became refashioned in response to the impact of mass immigration into Western
societies. Eleven million workers came to Europe in the fifties and sixties,
encouraged by an economic boom. In the USA a different kind of mass migration
took place - the huge movement of African Americans to the Northern cities
in the fifties and sixties. In both cases the newcomers found themselves on
the margins of society, subject to racism and discrimination, and unable to
gain access to levers of power. The ideology of pluralism developed as an
accommodation to the persistence of inequalities despite the rhetoric of integration,
assimilation and equality. As immigrant and black communities remained ghettoised,
excluded from mainstream society, subject to discrimination and clinging to
old habits and lifestyles as a familiar anchor in a hostile world, so such
differences became rationalised not as the negative product of racism or discrimination
but as the positive result of a plural society. In the nineteenth century,
the persistence of inequalities had led to the emergence of the discourse
of race, in which economic, social and technological differences between groups
were attributed to natural distinctions. In the postwar years the persistence
of inequalities in the context of mass immigration led to the development
of a pluralist outlook, in which differences were welcomed as expressions
of cultural diversity.
In the America of the sixties, for instance, most commentators, both black
and white, hoped and expected that African-American migrants to the North
would eventually integrate into US society, as fully as had European immigrants.
The title of a 1966 article by Irving Kristol in the New York Times
captured that hope - 'The Negro Today is like the Immigrant Yesterday'.15
Three decades later it has become obvious how misplaced were such claims.
Virtually every social statistic - from housing segregation to rates of intermarriage,
from infant mortality rates to language use - shows that African Americans
live very different lives to the rest of America. The experience even of Hispanic
Americans is far closer to that of American whites than it is to that of African
Americans.16
As the possibilities of equality seemed more and more constrained, so there
was an increasing tendency to celebrate 'difference'. The black American critic
bell hooks observes that 'civil rights reform reinforced the idea that black
liberation should be defined by the degree to which black people gained equal
access to material opportunities and privileges to whites - jobs, housing,
schooling etc.' This strategy could never bring about liberation, argues hooks,
because such 'ideas of "freedom" were informed by efforts to imitate
the behaviour, lifestyles and most importantly the values and consciousness
of white colonisers.'17 The failure of equality has led
radical critics like hooks to declare that equality itself is problematic
because African Americans are 'different' from whites.
Politicians and policy-makers have responded to such arguments by reinventing
America as a 'plural' or 'multicultural' nation. Pluralism is premised on
the idea that America is a nation composed of many different cultural groups
and peoples. But in reality it is the product of the continued exclusion of
one group: African Americans. The promotion of pluralism is a tacit admission
that the barriers that separate blacks and whites cannot be breached and that
equality has been abandoned as a social policy goal. 'Multiculturalism', Nathan
Glazer has written, 'is the price America is paying for the inability or unwillingness
to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to
the same degree it has incorporated so many other groups'.18
The real price, however, is being paid by African Americans themselves. For
in truth America is not plural or multicultural; it is simply unequal. And
the promotion of pluralism is an acknowledgement of the inevitability of that
inequality. Indeed, in his own way, Glazer himself recognises this. 'We must
pass through a period in which we recognise difference, we celebrate difference',
he writes, because of 'our failure to integrate blacks.'19
The 'apartness' of black and immigrant communities in Western Europe is probably
not so great as that of African Americas in the USA. Nevertheless, here too
pluralism has become a means to avoid debate about the failure of equality.
Many young people in Marseilles or East London call themselves Muslim, for
instance, less because of religious faith or cultural habits, than because
in the face of a hostile, anti-Muslim society, calling oneself Muslim is a
way of defending the dignity of one's community. Young Muslims are often not
religious; they have mores and outlooks and habits little different from that
of their white peers. But racism imposes difference upon them and forces them
to adopt difference themselves. Their Islam is not the free celebration of
an identity, but an attempt to negotiate a difficult relationship with a hostile
society as best they can. In celebrating such cultural differences, we are
danger of celebrating the differences imposed by a racist society, not identities
freely chosen by those communities.
I am not, of course, objecting to pluralism in the sense of a society in which
there exists the right to free and open political, cultural and religious
expression. Rather, what I fear is the one-sided embrace of 'difference' and
denigration of universalistic concepts. The irony is that the blind pursuit
of pluralism undermines our capacity to defend those very rights of free expression.
Such rights can only be defended through a defence of equality. In an equal
society, our universal capacity to act as political subjects can take a myriad
of forms, and hence can become the basis of true difference. Indeed, only
in an equal society, can difference have any meaning, because it is only here
that difference can be freely chosen. In an unequal society, however, the
pursuit of difference all too often means the entrenching of inequalities.
Inequalities simply become reframed through the discourse of difference. In
such circumstances, there is little possibility of true freedom to express
one’s political, cultural or religious identities.
A pluralist might reply that the principle of 'difference' implies a truly
radical egalitarianism, because it recognises no standard by which one individual
or group can be judged as better than another. But the point is that this
principle of difference cannot provide any standards which oblige us to respect
the 'difference' of others. At best, it invites our indifference to the fate
of the Other. At worst, it licenses us to hate and abuse those who are different.
Why, after all, should we not abuse and hate them? On what basis can they
demand our respect or we demand theirs? It is very difficult to support respect
for difference without appealing to some universalistic principles of equality
or social justice. And it is the possibility of establishing just such universalistic
principle that has been undermined by the embrace of a pluralistic outlook.
The dangers of a pluralist outlook are much more acute today. Through much
of the postwar period, the pernicious impact of pluralism upon the struggle
for equality was kept in check. From liberation struggles in the third world
to the civil rights movement in the USA, there were vigorous social struggles
for equality. The demise of such struggles over the past decade, however,
has sapped the morale of antiracists. Campaigning for equality means challenging
accepted practices, being willing to march against the grain, to believe in
the possibility of social transformation. Conversely, celebrating differences
between peoples allows us to accept society as it is - it says little more
than 'We live in a diverse world, enjoy it'.
The social changes that have swept the world over the past decade have intensified
this sense of pessimism. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the left,
the fragmentation of the postwar order, the defeat of most liberation movements
in the third world and the demise of social movements in the West, have all
transformed political consciousness. In particular, they have thrown into
question the possibility of social transformation. In this context the quest
for equality has increasingly been abandoned in favour of the claim to a diverse
society. I suggested previously that the narrative of race was also the narrative
of the containment of movements for social emancipation. Much the same may
be said about pluralism. The celebration of difference is an intellectual
outlook that has been forged out of the seeming impossibility of transforming
social relations. It is the product of political defeat, and in particular
the product of the defeat of movements for social equality. But the very pursuit
of pluralism has itself helped constrain the possibilities of social change,
for, in the absence of a universalistic outlook, and in an increasingly fragmented
world, the promise of any form of collective action becomes increasingly chimerical.
Unless we challenge the blind pursuit of difference, our capacity for meaningful
social change will continue to become ever more diminished.
References
1. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p207
2. Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature (Philadelphia:
Gebbie Publishing 1897 [first pub 1864]), vol1, p8; Gustav LeBon, The Psychology
of Peoples ((New York: GE Stechert, 1912 [first pub 1894]), pp216-217
3. Joseph-Marie Degerando, Observation of Savage Peoples (Berkeley,
California: University of California Press, 1969 [first pub 1800])
4. See for example, Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery,
1776-1884 (London: Verso, 1988); David Brion Davis, The Problem of
Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British mobilisation
in comparative perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Anthony
Barker, The African Link: British attitudes to the negro in the age of
the Atlantic slave trade, 1550-1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1978)
5. See David Hume, 'Of National Characters', in Essays Political
and Literary (London: Longman Green & Co 1889 [first pub 1748]); Immanuel
Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Berkeley,
California: University of California Press, 1960 [first pub 1764]); Francois
Marie Arouet Voltaire, 'Essays on the Customs and Spirit of the Nations' in
The Age of Louis XIV and Other Selected Writings (New York: Washington
Square Press, 1963 [first pub 1756-1775).
6. Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), pp8-9; Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989);
Barker, op cit.
7. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [first pub 1776]), p408
8. For an extended analysis of the making of the discourse of race,
see Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western
Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan / New York: New York University Press,
1996), esp chs 2-4
9. Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), p83
10. Cited in George Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays
in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), p117
11. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Free Press,
1965 [first pub 1911]); Melville J Herskovits, Franz Boas: The Science
of Man in the Making (San Francisco: American Anthropological Society,
Memoir No 89, 1959)
12. Stocking, op cit, p214
13. ibid, p148
14. JS Furnival, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study
of Burma, Netherlands and India (New York: New York University Press,
1956), p304
15. Irving Kristol, 'The Negro today is like the immigrant yesterday',
New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1966
16. See, for example, Douglas S Massey and Nancy A Denton, American
Apartheid: American Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Melvin L Oliver and Thomas M Schapiro,
Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality
(London: Routledge 1995); Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Separate, Hostile,
Unequal (New York: Scribner's, 1992)
17. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics
(London: Turnabout Books, 1991), p15
18. Nathan Glazer, We're All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p147
19. ibid, p15
This paper was published in New Formations, No 33 (Spring 1998)