The Undivided Past
Page 26
This breathtaking survey of events might seem to vindicate the view that the house of cards constructed on racialist thought and racial identities had finally collapsed after the Second World War. But the underlying thinking did not melt away so easily. As the historian David Reynolds has noted, the extra-European assault on white racism after 1945 was “mounted in the name of another invented category, ‘blackness,’ ” with “the ironic effect of entrenching racial conceptions still further.”131 Many African nationalist leaders of the postwar period, fighting for freedom against imperial dominion, were concerned to proclaim racial identities, to raise black consciousness, and to urge white Europeans to get out of their countries. It was the same in the United States, where Malcolm X propounded the doctrine of “black nationalism” while castigating the “devil race” of white men and “angrily” demanding black power and black separation, and where many American universities established departments of African American studies that sought to explore (and help create?) a shared sense of transatlantic African American identity and black consciousness. Even Martin Luther King Jr. sometimes spoke of the “marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the negro community,” while Nelson Mandela for a time embraced violence as the only way to bring apartheid to an end.132 In Africa and the United States, the color line remained strongly in evidence, and demands for independence and civil rights looked like the declaration of a race war the blacks in America and Africa were determined to win.
Yet the claim that there was a single, united, all-encompassing black consciousness being mobilized against European colonial oppression in Africa and white supremacists in America was belied and contradicted by much of the evidence. It bears repeating that many of the “black” agitations against imperial rule in Africa were fissured by divisions between different tribes, between those who lived in the countryside and the town, and between the traditional forces of collaborating authority and the new forces of middle-class nationalism: in the case of Southern Rhodesia, for example, there were deep divisions between those Africans led by Robert Mugabe and those who followed Joshua Nkomo. The result was that independence often ushered in more divisive battles as rival tribes, parties, and factions struggled over who would obtain the spoils of the postcolonial state: as in the former Belgian Congo, where the province of Katanga soon broke away, and where civil war continues to this day; as in Rwanda, where in the 1994 genocide between half a million and one million Tutsi were exterminated by the Hutu; and as in the Sudan, where the south broke away from the north, but where another long-running civil war nevertheless continued.133 Moreover, the struggles for independence against the “white” European empires were not only carried on by “black” Africans but also by Arabs in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as by the inhabitants of South Asia and Indochina, none of whom could possibly be described as black.
In the deimperializing twentieth century, as in the imperializing nineteenth, there was no one single global color line dividing all the peoples of the world into blacks and whites. The same was true in the United States, where by the 1950s the range of black circumstances was more varied than ever, divided between North and South, country and town, working class and middle class. Some blacks, trapped in the ghettoes of big cities, rioted and rampaged; others joined the nonviolent protests against segregation in the South. Some of them, such as the parents of Condoleezza Rice, did not buy into arguments about collective mobilization, but preferred to embrace the individual ethic of self-help and accommodationism; and whether black civil rights leaders were confrontationalist or conciliatory, they were invariably male, and they gave very little recognition to the role of women.134 And after a generation in which university departments had been devoted to tracing and studying (and often proclaiming) the unity, coherence, and victimhood of the African American experience and identity, that experience and identity, fissured by geography and gender, class and culture, had turned out to be very difficult to discern. The result, in the words of Cornel West, was that “there is no such thing as having one identity or of there being one essential identity that fundamentally defines who we actually are.” Reginald McKnight agreed: “we are not a race,” he wrote, “not even simply an agglomeration of individuals.” Depending on the circumstances or purposes, he argued, “we are at times a ‘We’ and a ‘Them,’ an ‘Us’ and ‘The Other.’ ”135
But while such claims to an all-encompassing black identity and consciousness were in some ways too inflated, they were also too limited, for like the white supremacists against whom they were mobilizing, they denied the common humanity that was more than ever being scientifically verified.136 Two figures, inspired by Gandhi, embraced this broader picture—not always, and not always successfully, but in ways that were nevertheless inspirational and transformative. The first was Martin Luther King Jr., who drew on the Christian teachings of the unity of humankind and sought to stress human connections and affinities in a “network of mutuality.” “Many of our white brothers,” he declared in Washington, D.C., in August 1963, “have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.” So he dreamed of a time when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood,” when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” and when there would be a redeemed America encompassing “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics.”137 The second figure was Nelson Mandela, whose views were close to King’s, though he was not a practicing Christian. He espoused “harmony” between “all persons,” in conversation and operation across the boundaries of racial identity, and in the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation in the postapartheid South Africa, which should be a country “of which all humanity will be proud.” He recognized the greater and more compelling identity of “the entire human race,” and he personified it with such charisma and moral force that he became someone who “transcended colour” and was “above race.”138
BEYOND RACE?
As with the solidarities of class, so with the identities of race, the twentieth century ended very differently from how it began. The destruction of Nazi Germany, the fall of the European colonial empires, the de-racing of civil rights in the United States, and the end of apartheid in South Africa were as much a repudiation of the view that “race is everything” as the collapse of the Communist regimes was a rejection of the proposition that the history of all hitherto existing societies had been primarily one of class identity and class struggle. The passing of those regimes based on racial identities and hierarchies lent credibility to Barack Obama’s assertion in 2004 that “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”139 In so saying, Obama was also acknowledging a significant development in the American academy since the 1980s, namely the proposition that race was of “declining significance.” One explanation, associated with the work of William Julius Wilson, to which Obama was indebted, was that the continued growth and consolidation of a black bourgeoisie meant race had become less important than class in explaining blacks’ life chances; another was the increased number of interracial marriages; and the result was a plethora of books asserting that race as a form of collective identity mattered less in American society than before.140 Here was a new “postracial” America, of which Obama was, appropriately, the first “postracial” president.
Yet the notion of race lingers as a form of identity and ranking that stubbornly refuses to die. Since the 1960s, there have been sporadic efforts to rehabilitate the nineteenth-century notion that races can be identified and ordered.141 African leaders such as Robert Mugabe continue to play the “race card,” denouncing white Western colonialism and neoimperialism. Some Americans lament that the color line persists, and that the country has by no means gotten beyond race; Obama’s position is more equivocal than his eloq
uent exhortations to get beyond a black-and-white view of the United States suggests; and Randall Kennedy is surely correct to argue that everything about Obama’s alleged “postracial presidency” is “widely, insistently, almost unavoidably interpreted through the prism of race.”142 One indication of the persistence of race as a category of human identity, but also of the serious doubts concerning its validity, can be found in the U.S. Census, which requires respondents to declare their racial identity from a list of options that in recent decades has changed frequently, inexplicably, and arbitrarily. In the 1930 census, Mexicans were deemed to belong to a separate race, but not in subsequent ones. In the same census and again in 1940, “Hindu” appeared as a separate race category, but then it too disappeared. In 1970, Indian Americans and Pakistani Americans were declared to be “white,” but in 1980 they were reclassified as “Asian.” In 2000, respondents were asked to describe themselves as belonging to one or more of fifteen “racial” identities, and if they refused to do so, their racial identity would be imputed and assigned by the Census Bureau.143
Thus, however mutably, does race persist; but as these taxonomical fluctuations suggest, it has significantly declined in plausibility as the most all-embracing category of human identity—not just in the United States but around the world. For the sustained undermining of racial solidarities and rankings by anthropologists has been corroborated (as Jacques Barzun presciently anticipated) by geneticists, building on the discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of the structure of DNA. According to the findings of the Human Genome Project, people of all backgrounds, locations, and “races” share more than 99.9 percent of their DNA, and in the case of the remaining 0.1 percent, there is more variation within stereotypical racial groups than between them. This means that 99.9 percent of the genes of a “black” person are the same as those of a “white” person, and that the genes of any “black” person may be more similar to the genes of a “white” person than to another “black” person. Thus understood, race is a biologically meaningless concept and category, literally no more than skin deep. It is also neither innate nor permanent, for skin color can change dramatically from one generation to another as the result of mixed-race marriages.144
Thus has scientific research undermined those who urged that humanity had many, polygenic origins, which explained why there were so many different (and unequal) races, and thus has it supported earlier biblical arguments built around the belief in a monogenic creation, which stressed the essential unity and equality of humankind.145 Nor is this the only way in which, as President Bill Clinton puts it, “modern science” has corroborated “ancient faiths,” for many paleoanthropologists insist that Homo sapiens evolved once, in Africa, between 120,000 and 150,000 years ago. Thereafter, the new species migrated “out of Africa” (as this theory is known), and eventually spread across the whole of the habitable globe. If this is right (the argument is persuasive, but not conclusive), then it follows, as Stephen Jay Gould has written, that “all modern humans,” regardless of their skin color, “form an entity united by physical bonds of descent from a recent African root,” which reinforces the view that the idea of common humanity and the reality of human unity “is no idle political slogan or tenet of mushy romanticism.”146 Like the competing identities allegedly constructed around religion, nation, class, and gender, the claims of race to be the most important way of understanding who we are do not survive serious scrutiny. What, then, of the claims made by President Clinton’s successor, who insisted that the abiding division of peoples into different and antagonistic civilizations was the most all-encompassing and the most important collective identity of all?
SIX
Civilization
Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unites together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.
—Winston Churchill, “Civilisation,” in R. S. Churchill, ed.,
Into Battle: Speeches of the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill CH, MP
When we look at the history of the world, it is very important to recognize that we are not looking at the history of different civilizations truncated and separated from each other. Civilizations have a huge amount of contact, and there is a kind of inter-connectedness. I have always thought of the history of the world, not as a history of civilizations, but as a history of world civilizations evolving in often similar, often diverse, ways, always interacting with each other.
—Amartya Sen, quoted in N. MacGregor,
A History of the World in 100 Objects
IN 1749, almost exactly one hundred years before Robert Knox went on his lecture tour in the north of England touting the overwhelming significance of racial identities, the British philosopher David Hartley published his Observations on Man, in which he contrasted “barbarity and ignorance” on the one side with “instruction and civilization” on the other.1 So far as is known, this is the first time these two identities, which would soon be regarded as the ultimate form of collective aggregation and human antagonism, had been thus juxtaposed and contrasted. Almost a quarter of a century later, on March 23, 1772, James Boswell made an entry in his diary. That morning, he had found his friend Samuel Johnson working on a revised edition of his celebrated dictionary, and they had discussed a new word by then in circulation that the “great lexicographer” had been considering for possible inclusion, but which he had on reflection decided to reject. “He would,” Boswell regretfully noted, “not admit civilization, but only civility”; yet with “great deference” to Johnson, Boswell “thought civilization, from to civilize, better in the sense [that it was] opposed to barbarity, than civility.”2 Samuel Johnson may have rejected the word “civilization,” but it soon received a kind of formal recognition, in the pages of Ash’s Dictionary, in 1775. By then, “civilization” was being freely used in polite and educated circles in England and Scotland, both as a description of the highest state to which society might aspire and as a collective identity opposed to the more venerable solidarity of barbarism.
From the very outset, “civilization” as a noun, a concept, and an identity was a word that had behind it what the cultural critic Raymond Williams termed “the general spirit of the Enlightenment.” It had come into common currency in France at an even earlier date, and its subsequent adoption seems to have been a clear example of British cultural borrowing, so it was scarcely surprising that the patriotically insular Dr. Johnson was not exactly enamored of it.3 But even without his enthusiasm for it, “civilization” soon became established as part of the everyday vocabulary on both sides of the Channel, and in France as in Britain, it was often deployed to indicate the highest stage of collective human identity, development, and achievement, not only in politics but also in culture and society. Yet in the German-speaking lands of Europe, where the word “Zivilisation” also came into use at this time, it did not signify such an exalted state of existence or group identity: it was a “second-rank term,” referring to external appearances and superficialities, which were subordinate to the more weighty German concept of “Kultur.” So while the British and the French might see themselves as the embodiment of a cosmopolitan European civilization, German speakers knew better, and while the British and the French (and later the Italians) came to contrast the accomplishments and identities of their civilization with barbarism, the Germans related to both of these concepts and identities rather differently and more circumspectly.4
This Enlightenment antithesis, between the embattled collectivities of civilization and barbarism, was historically asymmetrical, for while “civilization” was a relatively recent concept, the term “barbarism,” to which it was now contrasted, had been common currency on the continent for more than two millennia.5 It had originally been used by the ancient Greeks to describe those aliens who spoke some other language: indeed, “barbarian” was an onomatopoeic rendering
of what sounded to the Greek ear as their inane babbling (“bar bar”), and “barbarian” was taken up in due course by the Romans to identify those savage unfortunates who resided outside their empire and did not speak Latin. Thereafter, the word was employed as a commonplace derision by western Christians who regarded themselves as cultivated, superior, and refined, in contrast to those aliens beyond their ken whom they loathed as crude, violent, heathen, inferior, and ill-educated; and it was in this sense that “barbarian” was widely used in medieval and early modern Europe, when it was variously applied to the Slavs, Magyars, Vikings, Saracens, Arabs, Tartars, and Turks.6 It was later adopted by the ruling elites of Renaissance Italy, who saw themselves as the heirs of imperial Rome, to denounce the “northern barbarians” invading from France and Germany during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (The sack of Rome by the German soldiers of the emperor Charles V in 1527 was likened to the alleged fall of the city to the Goths in 476 CE, and the last chapter of Machiavelli’s The Prince was famously entitled “Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians.”)7