Race Is about Politics: Lessons from History

RACE IS ABOUT POLITICS

Race Is about Politics

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Jean-Frédéric Schaub

Translated by Lara Vergnaud

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press

© Editions du Seuil, 2015. Collection La Librairie du XXIe siècle, sous la direction de Maurice Olender. First published in French as Pour une histoire politique de la race by Jean-Frédéric Schaub

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

LCCN 2018930582

ISBN 978-0-691-17161-6

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Brigitta van Rheinberg and Amanda Peery

Production Editorial: Sara Lerner

Production: Jacqueline Poirier

Publicity: Jodi Price

This book has been composed in Miller

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Rebecca, Martha, and Jean

Later I came to know this gentleman much better and more closely, and therefore I have involuntarily presented him now more knowingly than then, when he opened the door and came into the room. Though now, too, I would have difficulty saying anything exact or definite about him, because the main thing in these people is precisely their unfinishedness, scatteredness, and indefiniteness.¹

—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, THE ADOLESCENT

(TRANS. RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY)

Lepidus: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?

Anthony: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.

Lepidus: What colour is it of?

Anthony: Of its own colour too.²

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ANTHONY

AND CLEOPATRA, ACT 2, SCENE 7

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments • 179

Notes • 181

Index • 199

RACE IS ABOUT POLITICS

INTRODUCTION

The Current Moment

THIS IS NOT a history book. Or rather, this book does not only provide a history of the formation of racial categories in Europe and its colonies. The reader holds between his or her hands a collection of proposals on the ways historical research can contribute to contemporary debates on the attribution of racial identity to individuals and populations. The racial question looms on a global scale.¹ On the one hand, Western countries, whether or not they led colonial empires in the nineteenth century, must now deal with manifestations of racism, be they instances of police brutality in the United States, torrents of racist speech in a Europe confronting a migrant crisis, or chromatic social hierarchies in Latin America. On the other hand, interethnic violence and social fragmentation into castes based on ideologies of purity and heredity appear to exist on every continent. Nonetheless, this book focuses solely on Western societies, in Europe and the Americas, in order to avoid premature conclusions or approximations about situations that can be observed in Asia and Africa and that call for studies of those places specifically.

This book was initially written for a French-speaking audience with the aim of illustrating to what extent the French case is singular compared to experiences in other countries and to theories developed within other academic traditions. I hope that the American edition of this work will play a similar role for the American case. In the following pages, Anglophone readers will discover an analysis drawn from a historian’s perspective and should note that my academic background does not mirror the usual approach to these subjects in the United States, and even less so do my proposals.

The method proposed in this work consists of identifying a core, which is specifically racial, within the collection of prejudices, phobias, political programs, and norms that are qualified, somewhat vaguely, as racist. Because Race Is about Politics: Lessons from History is not a history of racial thought, but rather an invitation for open debate to all readers interested in this field of study, its three primary objectives reflect a programmatic dimension. These objectives are as follows:

1.  To distinguish racial categories and processes of racialization within a much larger group of xenophobic attitudes and policies;

2.  To propose a chronology of the formation of racial categories in the West that dates back to the Middle Ages and is therefore not limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;

3.  To prepare students, citizens, and scholars within the social and human sciences to confront any challenges that may be created by the unpredictable outcomes of research in the field of genetic biology. It is, of course, indispensable to continue to denounce the ideological agenda and racist policies espoused by sociobiology. However, we must acknowledge that as the human and social sciences continue to develop their respective expertise, it is critical to monitor what genetic biology may contribute in the future to our understanding of the development of man within society.

A Situated Perspective

This book makes proposals, which I am offering from within a specific time and place. At the same time, these proposals are underpinned by a methodological rejection of relativism. On the critique of relativism, we can go quickly. Suffice it to borrow from the anthropologist Gérard Lenclud a logical argument against the idea that there are between human societies incommensurable realities that are therefore incommunicable. When a researcher says that a word, a ritual, a cultural expression, or a social institution is untranslatable into the language of his or her own society, we assume that he or she first has understood these objects in their own context. If we say that social realities are incommensurable, it is because we have been able to measure them.² Thus the attribution of untranslatability and immeasurability to any object is a logical contradiction. Nonetheless, as the author of this book I have to clarify what my own historical and social coordinates are. Born, raised, and trained in France, I am a French citizen of second generation by my father’s side and third by my mother’s side, both of them having come from Jewish families, one of which migrated to France from Poland, and the other from Germany, before World War II. There is, of course, a direct link between my interest in racial issues and the memory of the Holocaust that has been central in shaping my personality. Knowing this, I do not interpret the whole history of the West as a long-term preparation of the final disaster of the Third Reich. My approach to political processes of early modern and contemporary eras depends on my anchorage in the European experience, particularly in France. I admit, but only to a certain extent, the argument that only those who have experienced some type of phenomenon are able to transcribe it, but not that only a certain type of people is capable of understanding the transcript. My experience in France taught me that there was not necessarily a difference between a Jewish sensibility and a non-Jewish sensibility concerning the memory of the Holocaust.

A recent book has shown it was exaggerated or even false to claim that silence was imposed in France concerning the Holocaust just after World War II, before the historical research on the genocide of the Jews changed the intellectual landscape starting in the 1970s.³ It is necessary, in fact, not to be deceived by the retrospective illusion that past experience is made of silences, occultations, and amnesia. For those who have being willing to read testimonies, books, and articles, neither the genocide of the Jews nor the extreme brutality of the colonial wars was unknown in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Some historians of the late twentieth century composed inventories of silences that never existed. Thus, the practice of slavery until its abolition by Victor Schoelcher in 1848, the brutality of colonization in Africa (denounced by Albert Londres, André Gide, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Léopold Sedar-Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Albert Memmi), the anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime, the practice of torture in Algeria, racist killings committed in metropolitan France during the three decades following the end of the War of Algeria: none of these historical realities was hidden by a State’s censorship. Undoubtedly, restrictions have been imposed, particularly in school curricula and television broadcasting. The main reason some historians have fabricated the narrative of occultations is that they wanted a set of themes not taught at university and in high schools to be explained, as opposed to other phenomena that cause less tension.

For those who wished to accept it, it was possible to be exposed to the revelation of all that in the history of France related to racist practices. It is also true that, for those who did not want to hear about it, these realities could have emerged from the individual and collective consciousness. That is why, after I have placed myself for the readers within a time, a place, and a family heritage, I think the critical work that is at the heart of the humanities and social sciences on an essentially open field carries much more weight in the work that I lead than what comes to me from my personal existence. I assume that the antirelativist flavor of the above remarks may fall within the scope of a universalist paradigm, which some critics have identified as the mask of political domination. For now, suffice it to say that there is no correlation between the radicalism of claims for equal rights and adherence to a relativistic rhetoric. Frantz Fanon’s universalistic perspective, as a thinker and as an activist, still remains an admirable demonstration of this.

As I write this in 2016, France suffers from a number of internal tensions. This historical situation encourages researchers in the humanities and social sciences, including historians, to think about the shaping of racial categories. An incident that occurred on television on September 26, 2015, during a popular talk show seems indicative of what is now at stake in France. A politician, Nadine Morano, former minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, explained three times that France was a Judeo-Christian country and a white race country. A member of the neo-Gaullist party, she sheltered behind the authority of General de Gaulle, presenting her definition of France as a white race country as a quote from de Gaulle. Obviously, this phrase immediately aroused great indignation even in her own party. The racist far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen applauded these remarks. The expression white race belongs to the vocabulary of only small groups of racist activists, called today Identitaires, but not the neo-Gaullist party nor the National Front itself. In reality, the reference to de Gaulle was not straightforward: the supposed quote was reported by an assistant of the general over thirty years after it was delivered to him during a private conversation. As the conversation was later described by de Gaulle’s biographer, the French president would have defined France as a white race society shaped by a Christian tradition.⁴ But in 1959, this idea specifically meant that a country like France could not offer citizenship and nationality to the Arab and Muslim masses of Algeria. Therefore, if de Gaulle expressed this sentiment, it was meant as a mental preparation for the inevitability of the independence of Algeria. For de Gaulle, in a typically Jefferso-nian move, the independence of Algeria was better for France than was the integration of native Algerians into French citizenship. Therefore, de Gaulle was preparing public opinion for the idea that the independence of Algeria was inevitable, or rather desirable. Since then, for far-right activists, France was ultimately humiliated when, after recognizing the victory of Algerian nationalists in 1962, it didn’t avoid the presence of millions of citizens and inhabitants coming from Muslim North Africa. If one can draw an analogy, this is similar to the permanence of African Americans on US soil after the abolition of chattel slavery in 1865. In the current context, Morano, then, has deliberately created an amalgam between the current response to jihadist terrorism, the Islamophobia that is itself closely linked to the detestation of Algerian immigrants since the French defeat in Algeria, and the anguish caused by the arrival of Syrian migrants in the summer of 2015. In the time since these lines were written for the French edition of the book, political developments in Poland, Great Britain, and the United States have brought xenophobic and racist opinions out of the margins, and politicians have legitimized them in elections, conducting openly xenophobic campaigns.

Historians do not direct their research on the racial question according to the latest news. However, regardless of their preferred period of study, historians cannot approach questions of race without considering the triad of Jim Crow laws, Nazism, and apartheid. All scholars who explore racism share these points of reference whether they are explicitly recognized or whether they remain implicit and sometimes even unconscious. This is why, when applying the best historical methods, these historical phenomena should not be considered as the inevitable outcome of a long history that scholars attempt to unravel by following the thread backward. We should, on the contrary, consider the Jim Crow–Nazism–apartheid triad as the point of departure for any critical approach to a historical legacy—in other words, the political and intellectual context—that has concerned scholars of the human and social sciences even before they began studying race and racism. When historians of any period compare their specific case with contemporary racism, in order to demonstrate how their respective case resembles it or, on the contrary, is distinct from it, it’s better to possess an in-depth understanding of how contemporary racist policies were established and developed. Consequently, historians of questions of race must be specialists in their respective periods and, at the same time, be equipped with a consequential knowledge and understanding of Jim Crow laws, Nazism, and apartheid. That is not always the case.

Racism as Politics

Broadly speaking, racism is distinct from all other expressions of hostility toward others by the fact that it identifies people and groups by what they are and not by what they do. Pirates, heretics, rebels, and hereditary enemies are typically victims of segregation and persecution because of the way they act or because of what they have done. Yet the distinction between being and doing, once examined within the context of the humanities and social sciences, appears quite fragile. One wonders in the name of which analytical method it is possible to separate what people do from what they are, that is, as two distinct planes of human existence, if not precisely within a framework of racist thought. Nonetheless, it’s worth contemplating what this use of the verb to be (what someone is) signifies. Here, it implies a collection of attributes as disparate as: phenotype or physical resemblance to one’s forebears; gender; native language; sexual preference; place of birth or upbringing; socioeconomic milieu; and, a recent phenomenon in the history of human societies, allegiance to a nation. These attributes share two characteristics: First, almost all these features are inherited, which is to say they are the result of a more or less perfect process of reproduction from one generation to the next. Second, attributes thus received at birth are difficult to change, in the sense that people cannot easily reject them or be painlessly stripped of them.

In other words, judging people for what they are equates to defining them by that which appears to be, at first glance, scarcely modifiable, if modifiable at all. What’s more, once you define what people are through a process of identification—understood here as an externally imposed action—you are solidifying the inalterable, unmoving nature of their traits. The persons who define others in this way often do so for their own political ends, because they are simultaneously molding a self-serving hierarchy of elements that the identity of the other must include: gender, genealogy, religion, language, sexual preference, phenotype, accent, and so on. Little wonder, then, that mechanisms that characterize human beings according to race, or if preferred, genealogy and appearance, are often compared to mechanisms used to assign identity according to gender, class, and sexual preference. All these attributes benefit (or suffer, depending on the perspective) from limited alterability.

However, the aim of this book is not to examine the historical evolution of definitions of being, that is, what people are, even within a precisely situated social group, as that would entail engaging the entire spectrum of the humanities and social sciences and perhaps beyond. On the contrary, the current period can be characterized by the confrontation between defenders of the mutable character of individual attributes and those who maintain that some level of inalterability exists. This unique historical context necessitates a few preliminary remarks. The notion that some part of what individuals inherit at birth can remain fixed is now strongly disputed. Indeed, the constructivist approach to human existence, which has been included in humanities and social sciences curricula for over a century, seems to have finally gained favor