Interrogating Racism

Jan 16, 2011 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Last year, when I heard that the UN had announced 2011 as “International Year for People of African Descent”, my immediate reaction was, “Uh Uh”. 2011, I already knew was “The Year of Elections in Guyana” and it didn’t take a genius to predict the possibilities for exploitation of the occasion by our political class. And so said, so done; with the year not even launched here as yet. I hope that everyone concerned will collaborate at some level so that we may at long last begin to grapple with the most serious matter of anti-African racism that lurks like a canker in our society. And if the truth be told, in all societies of the world.
Two years ago, I quoted the Black American scholar Cornell West about the condition of the modern African in the “New World”: “there is the lingering effects of slavery and past discrimination in the continued attack on black humanity and racist stereotypes which are designed to destroy black self-image” and in the process keep Africans on the “margins’ of society.
Following the demonstrated inability of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas to withstand the labour demands and diseases of the Spaniards (evidenced by ninety percent of then dying off in the Caribbean within decades of Columbus’ arrival) the Christian Church recommended the importation of Africans as slaves. Unlike the Amerindians, they could discern no sign of a soul in the latter group and deemed beyond salvation. They were fair game for slavery – or extermination for that matter.
The enthusiastic entry of the English, French, Dutch etc, ensured that some 18 million Africans were eventually dragged across the Atlantic, but the fact that only 600,000 survived at “Emancipation” in 1834 offers a clue to their prior living conditions. The appallingly barbaric treatment that included the most brutal physical brutalisation, destruction of families, wrenching away of languages and cultures etc. impelled the creation of some sort of rationalisation since Europeans were supposed to be “civilised” while doing all of this.
In the beginning, slaves who worked alongside white European indentured slaves, were simply defined as “heathens” and could be kept on the margins as such. It was when they started to convert to Christianity that colour became the marker to distinguish them from the “mainstream”. Race was created and transmuted into racist practice that relegated and maintained Africans to the margins of society, especially in the 18th century.
As I wrote in 1993, “Race and racism, as we know them today, are very modern constructs arising out of a European 18th century discourse that ran parallel with the European conquest of the rest of the world, and especially, with the justification of African slavery. Notable names such as Hume, Kant and Hegel were involved in the project, which gave a social significance to physical markers. This is illustrated in Hume’s position that, “negroes… are naturally inferior to the whites”, and Kant’s view, summarised by his comment, “this fellow was quite black …a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”
My contention is that “race and racism” are part and parcel of the “Western Enlightenment,” exported as one weapon in the European arsenal of imperialistic conquest. “African and Black” was constructed as the binary opposite to “European and White” and like all dualities it is not possible to eliminate one without the other. Racism is not a phenomenon that ended with the abolition of slavery – and it has not ended even though many assert that “race” has no objective existence. It persists in the totality of its relations that have become imbricated on the sinews of the civilization that we all practice.
Following Foucault, one can consider racism as a discursive field that incorporates beliefs, descriptions and actions, and the principles on which racist institutions are based. The discursive formation that would include the normative rules and norms – including laws and moral rules about how we “ought” to act towards each other. In the words of, once again, Cornell West, racism discourse is a product of the “structure of modern discourse…the controlling metaphors, notions, categories and norms that shape the predominant conceptions of truth and knowledge in the modern west.”
To appreciate its possible continued impact on the marginalisation of Africans in Guyana, one must inquire into the extent to which the premises of the old discourse of race and racism has survived in our particular socio-historical conjuncture and continued to influence our thinking. To suggest how difficult this project would be is to consider that even the empirical sociological tools we would probably use such as, say, social psychology, are all contaminated with premises of “races”, “racial differences” and “racial attitudes”.
We must begin this inquiry if we are ever to progress as a nation. Racism corrodes our very humanity. There is no better time to begin than this International Year for People of African Descent.

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