Black Face White Racism Despite scientific evidences, the concept of race still hide racial discrimination

By Elias Jefferson

Racism is one of the longest-standing social issues that persist in modern society. A lot of the tension that multi-cultural communities face today comes from our separation into racial categories that have been imposed on one another. Much of our recent history is dominated by race-based struggles. Moving past these ideas would be difficult, but maybe if we can expose their true origins: the racist anthropological books, papers, and theses that have fueled the fires for so long, we can finally end it for good. The ideas of some of the first Anthropologists may have been the leading cause of modern racism. These, rather than some genetic or biological reason, are why racism still exists today.

Race is a false classification of people based on any actual or accurate biological or scientific truth. In other words, the distinction we make between races has nothing to do with scientific fact.

The race is a political construction. A political structure is created by people; that is not a natural development; it is constructed or created for political purposes. The concept of race was created as a classification of human beings to give white people power and legitimize the dominance of white people over non-white people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: vincenzo nappi
• Release date: Aug 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201597856

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human

Charles Mills, The Racial Contract

Introduction

Racial thinking retains a toehold in the academy. Works such as Why Race Matters , by Michael Levin (1997), and The Bell Curve , by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) defend the reality and relevance of race as a biological and political category. These works each defend a view of society and political systems that attributes a powerful causal role to the reality of race. These authors share three basic tenets. First, they contend that despite the conventional wisdom among biologists, ‘race’ is a biologically real concept. Second, they contend that biological differences between the races explain current and predict future racial differences both on tests designed to measure intelligence and in socioeconomic status. Third, they contend that these biological realities justify particular social policies.

Throughout its history, Western society has witnessed many attempts to argue for socially relevant genetic differences between races of humanity. There are good reasons, both biological and social, for rejecting them, yet they persist. Despite scientific evidence and arguments, and the arguments of moral and political philosophy, they persist. Why? Why won’t these tired, old, and discredited arguments go away? They continue to be rehashed and recast under the auspices of biological determinism, sociobiology, IQ theory, race theory, genetics, heritability, and a variety of other doctrines. A particular set of errors and misrepresentations plagues them all, yet they continue to appear in any number of debates about the existence and role of group differences in social policy.

.Tthe persistence of these arguments is due to an adherence to what Charles Mills calls the Racial Contract, and its need to argue for fundamental differences among races to justify differential treatment of those races. A careful examination and analysis of these racialist arguments will show how these arguments attempt to buttress the racial contract and show how they fail.

The Racial Contract

Drawing on traditional political theory and its emphasis on a social contract that is understood as an agreement among persons to limit their liberty in exchange for security, Charles Mills suggests that greater explanatory power can be had by understanding this not as a social contract, but as a racial contract .

Rather than a social contract construed as an agreement among citizens to limit their liberties vis a vis each other, the racial contract is an agreement among citizen persons to limit the liberties of non-citizen sub-persons. Rather than a mechanism for preserving liberty, therefore, the actual social contract is a mechanism for maximizing the liberty of some at the expense of others. The terms of the racial contract mean that non-white sub-personhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.

This difference in liberty was and continues to be defended by arguing that the others in question are not fully capable or worthy of full participation in the society created by the contract.

From Aristotle and his doctrine of the natural slave on, Mills attempts to show how the entire history of European political thought is one in which groups are regularly cast as fully human vs. sub-human. For Aristotle, of course, the natural slave was marked by a deficiency of reason. As we shall see, it is this need for a deficiency in reason that causes the modern racial contractors to ascribe deficient intellect and by extension something less than full membership in society to members of certain races. Beyond what Mills himself argues is necessary for the racial contract, the modern contractors seek to craft ‘scientific’ proof of the sub-personhood of these groups.

The racial contract establishes a fundamental partition in the social ontology of the planet, which could be represented as the divide between persons and sub-persons, Untermenschen. ‘Personhood’ has received a great deal of philosophical attention in recent years because of the revival in Kantian and natural rights moral/political theories and the relative decline of utilitarianism.

Traditional social contract theory treats racism as a minor failure in the application of the system. In reality, however, it is essential to the system. Members of sub-person categories have a different set of rights and obligations than do the contractors. Treating race as a deviation from the social contract is a response to white embarrassment regarding the terms of the contract.

Historically the paradigm indicator of sub-personhood has been deficient rationality, the inability to exercise in full the characteristic classically thought of as distinguishing us from animals. For the social contract, rough equality in men’s cognitive powers or at least a necessary ground floor capability of detecting the immanent moral structuring of the universe (natural law), or what is rationally required for social cooperation, is crucial to the argument. For the racial contract, correspondingly, a basic inequality is asserted in the capacity of different human groups to know the world and to detect natural law. Sub-persons are deemed cognitively inferior, lacking in the essential rationality that would make them fully human.

A key component for justifying the racial contract is to argue that the excluded groups are not fully rational. It is exactly this point that Levin, Herrnstein, and Murray are dedicated to demonstrating, (ab)using modern conceptions of biology, heritability, and IQ to argue that African-Americans are genetically predisposed to criminal behavior, short-sightedness, low educational attainment, and other traits that undermine their capacity to participate fully in civil society.

Mills describes how, on one reading of Kant, skin color is evidence of particular moral traits. According to this interpretation, Europeans are capable of the highest expressions of moral reasoning; Africans, on the other hand, are only suitable to be educated to be servants and slaves. The personhood, and thus moral standing, central to Kant’s position on the infinite value of all human beings, is therefore absent in non-Europeans.

Mills provides a powerful tool for understanding the prevalence of work attempting to defend biological differences between races and can help us to understand why those defenses often include an argument for differences in morally relevant factors among those races. A look at the work of Levin, Murray, and Herrnstein reveals an ideal model of what Mills is discussing. These authors seek to demonstrate that the genetic differences between races manifest themselves as differences in important behavioral and intellectual qualities. Furthermore, they contend that these differences are resistant to change if not immutable and those they leave us little choice but to recognize that some races are not fully capable of participation in the social contract. Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract seeks to explain the western political theory in terms of an implicit racial contract, arguing that, for all the arguments of Hobbes, Locke, Kant, et al of the equality and dignity of persons, they are working against a backdrop of racial bifurcation. The result of this is a political system in which the equality of persons is dependent upon the inequality of non- persons. In Mills’ view, this account can do valuable explanatory work, articulating how and why the European states and their derivatives were able to craft governments dedicated to liberty while at the same time enslaving, exploiting, and oppressing those non-European populations they encountered.

If we are tempted to argue that, whatever the accuracy of Mills’ claims, such matters are ancient history and of no relevance to our modern attempts to bring about social justice, we need to look no further than Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters, or Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and to their attempt to craft a modern version of a very old argument.

In its broad outlines, we can see the ancestry of these modern positions as far back as Johann Blumenbach’s 1775 work De Generis Humani Varietate Natura. The father of anthropology, Blumenbach’s five varieties included Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, Malay, and Caucasian races. By the mid-19th century, Arthur de Gobineau would explain that the adulteration of a people’s blood is a type of degeneration. In 1883 Francis Galton published Inquiries into the Human Faculty and suggested that a society that encouraged the breeding of ifs best citizens would derive great benefits from this policy. Karl Pearson, a contemporary of Galton’s, advocated a national program to breed greater intelligence. Levin picks up this very thread in his 1997 work, suggesting that society might wish to provide cash incentives for desirable (wealthy) families to have more children. More than a hundred years later, the eugenics theme is alive and well in these modern theorists of race.

This emphasis on differences in desirability, wealth, and value as functions of differences in the lineage is exactly what allows the traditional social contract view to claim equality and freedom for some while simultaneously denying it to others. As Mills argues:

In the Lockean state of Nature...Those who show by their actions that they lack or have renounced the reason of natural law and are like wild Savage Beasts, with whom Men can have neither Society nor Security" may licitly be destroyed. But if in the racial polity nonwhites may be regarded as inherently bestial and savage (quite independently of what they happen to be doing at any particular moment) then by extension they can be conceptualized as carrying the state of nature around with them, incarnating wildness and wilderness in their