WHAT has become abundantly clear from the foregoing discussion is that the whiteman’s researchers are paid to distort the truth and this raises a stink.
They are paid to advance ethnocentrism: “A view of things in which one’s group is the centre of everything and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it…each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boast itself superior, exalts its own divinities and looks with contempt on outsiders.” (Sumner cited in Preiswerk and Perrot: 1978: 14)
Sumner’s definition grasps the duality of ethnocentrism but seems to imply that hostility toward the out-group is the only attitude that goes along self-glorification.
The latter is ethnocentrism by commission. It proceeds from the desire to distort the history of other people.
This would be less serious if it were not compounded by ethnocentrism through omission which consists of rejection, conscious or not, of the history of others. (ibid: 219)
The Enlightenment philosophers’ arguments are ethnocentric racism which claims monopoly of reason and attribute to other cultures mystical knowledge or irrationality.
The implications of their racist discourse seem quite obvious: Their intention is captured in Albert Memmi’s definition of racism: “The generalised and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accusers’ benefit and at his victims’ expense, in order to justify the former’s own privilege or aggression.” (cited in Shohat and Stam: 1994:18)
Admittedly, racism is hardly unique to the West and is not necessarily limited to the colonial situation, but it has historically been both an ally and the partial inspiration to colonialism.
As shown by the ‘logic’ of Hume, Kant and their allies, racist thinking is circular and absurd: “We are powerful because we are right, and we are right because we are powerful.” (Shohat and Stam: 1994: 19)
In reality racial categories are not natural but artificial constructs, not absolutes but relative products of historical processes of differentiation.
Shohat and Stam (1994) further argue that racism is a systematic hierarchisation ‘anchored in material structures and embedded in historical configuration(s) of power’. (Ibid: 19)
In fact it is a complex hierarchical system; a structured ensemble of social and institutional practices and discourses.
I hasten to emphasise that individuals do not have to express or practise it to be its beneficiaries.
For example, as it is, present day whites, including those who claim to be liberals, whatever their attitudes to racism, are enjoying the comfort of its legacies or present practice.
Eric Williams (1994) punctures the myth of racism by exposing the duplicity of its application in the slave mode of production (slavery) in the Caribbean and the Americas.
He argues that slavery was essentially an economic institution which had also been the basis of the Greek and Roman Empire economies. (Williams: 1964:05) Williams’ analysis puts paid to claims that slavery (and later colonisation) was driven by moral imperatives to bring civilisation to the ‘dark’ continents.
Williams demonstrates that the fact that the first slaves were fellow whites (service convicts), followed by local Indians and later by the Africans who were preferred because one negro ‘was valued worth four Indians’ and that they were deemed ‘a race robust for labour, instead of natives’, (ibid:12) makes the racial argument nonsensical.
To date, the term racism is now attributed to a type of behaviour which consists in the display of contempt or aggressiveness towards other people on account of physical differences between them and oneself.
However, etymologically, no such value is loaded in the meaning of race from which racism is derived.
Originally, race simply referred to a ‘gene pool; a group of people who share a number of physical characteristics because they are part of the gene pool’. (Phillips: 1984:12).
Satnam Virdee and others also observe that it was during the 17th Century Englishmen interested in their historical origins developed a view that they were descendents of a German ‘race’ to prove that the Norman invasions of the 11th Century amounted to alien dominations.
That is when an historical dimension was added to the prior common-place neutral conception of ‘race’.
It is important to observe that even at this juncture; distinction of race was still based on separate history and culture rather than on biological difference.
Virdee and others argue that it was only during the 18th and early 19th centuries that the term ‘race’ came to be associated with physical traits, both within the boundaries of Europe and beyond.
By the end of the 19th Century, the concept had become an ideology which Britain used to distinguish its colonial subjects whom it branded racially inferior to its own citizens.
In fact, racism had been used much earlier to justify slavery.
It is only too apparent that the racial twist was only a justification for subjecting a fellow race to the tyranny of toil for economic reasons. Cubbon Wakefield (Cited in Williams: 1964:06) sums up Williams’ thesis: “The reason for slavery is not moral, but economic circumstances. They relate not to vice and virtue, but to production.”
He further argues: “Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was born out of slavery” (ibid:1964:07).
Both Wakefield’s and Williams’ arguments appear efficacious.
They are authenticated by the fact that when the consumption of the multiplying slave population surpassed production margins, slavery ceased to make economic sense and was consequently abandoned in preference to its modified form, capitalism.
My argument here is not to obscure debates about other ‘Enlightenment’ thinker and politician’s contribution to the abolition of slavery but, as the discussion on ‘Enlightenment’ has shown, even some of these thinkers were as guilty of racism as their predecessors.
The primary argument here is that in essence, racism was a rationalising ideology in support of the capitalist mode of production associated with the practice of slavery.
Ideology is (and has always been) an important matrix in the politics of domination as well as the arts of resistance. In the Fanonian sense, ideology can be perceived in terms of ‘oppressive’ ideology and ‘liberative’ ideology where the former is the oppressor’s tool of mental colonisation, and the latter is the oppressed’s instrument of mental decolonisation. (Fanon:1982)
However, for the present practical purpose, ideology refers to a set of especially political beliefs, a system of theoretical institutions (mainly artificially designed) at the service of the European imperial politics during slavery, colonisation and neo-colonialism.
You need to understand their ideology as a system of ideas manufactured with a clear purpose to misinform, conquer and control.