Being Sociological

Chapter 9Racializing

BackgroundSince the 1960s a majority of Western democracies ( for example Britain, Germany, France, Australia, the United States of America) have taken for granted that the political organisation of their state is based on the acceptance of a multicultural society. This is reinforced by the almost universal acceptance of the various UN Covenants on Human Rights.

• The constituent divisions of these multicultural societies are generally seen as different ethnic groups and multiculturalism has become a code for ethnic groups.

• These examples taking place in different parts of the globe are all contemporary manifestations of race, although neither the terms race nor ethnicity are used.

• Of particular significance is the fact that they all refer to aspects of culture, or in the case of multiculturalism, define ‘ethnic’ groups in terms of culture. Race or ethnicity has been transformed into a narrative about cultural practices and signifiers.

The ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983)

• In June 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France argued that the burqa was ‘not welcome’ on French soil. He argued that it was not a problem of religion but of a conflict with the secular values, liberty and freedom, of the French republic. The burqa deprived women of identity and the ability to fully engage in the life of the society. With this statement he linked the wearing of the burqa with failure to integrate into French culture and accept French identity.

• Sarkozy was attempting to define what it is to be French.

Such arguments are all based primarily on visible markers of cultural practices such as appearance or colour, or material practices such as wearing the burqa, language use or religious observance.

Multiculturalism vs. Assimilation• The problem facing multicultural states today is

how to create or maintain unity while allowing for and incorporating diversity.

• Reasons why challenges to the viability of multi-ethnic states emerged at this historical juncture are:• partly historical (increasing globalisation); • partly economic (global recession);• partly cultural (particularly the ‘war on terror’).

Race Is An Idea• Race is socially constructed; • Race provides a powerful system of symbolic

representations that influence behaviour and our perceptions of the world we live in.

• The vocabulary of race is an element of everyday language despite the fact there is no scientifically verifiable category of race.

• Race defines membership of a social group and always presupposes another group against which we define ourselves and are defined in turn, so it refers to a collective.

• Racial identities are negotiated, contested and defined in a process of oppositional interaction with ‘the other’.

• These racially constructed groups are hierarchically ranked in society. It is in this process, which can take place through institutional, cultural, economic or social structures and which influences access to resources, patterns of marginalization and exclusion, and determines power structures, that race becomes racism.

• Race, as part of culture, provides a set of ideas through which we interpret our world, a guide to behaviour and a set of moral imperatives we use to evaluate our behaviour (Worley, 1984).

• The cultural dimensions of race mean that although it is often an elusive, multidimensional and ambiguous idea, it has real consequences in everyday life. Actions are taken in accordance with these ideas, both within and between states. Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Apartheid and ethnic cleansing all testify to this fact.

• Further, in a globalized world the construction of a ‘national identity’ drawing on these cultural elements functions to define the boundaries of states and maintain unity. The paradox of race/ethnicity is that at the same time it legitimates challenges to that unity.

Race and Early Sociology• Largely unconcerned with the concept of race

and its consequent social effects, their focus was to explore the evolving capitalist industrial world they lived in and understand its emerging class structures and political institutions.

• However, the problems of ‘race’ and the issues of racialization are quite central to sociology today.

Race is part of the process by which we order and give meaning to our everyday

world.

Race, Ethnicity and Nationality• These are three problematic concepts.• They share, with the concept of citizenship, a

common reference point in that they are all used to order collective identities, although citizenship always refers to membership of a political collective, the state.

• However, as Steve Fenton (2003) argues, we give no clear consistent meanings to these terms, or the distinctions between them, and we often slip from one usage to another both in everyday life and in sociological analysis.

The process of constructing and ordering social groups entails recognition of similarity with those accepted as

belonging to the same ethnic/racial group and differentiation from other groups.

• Membership of the group is ascribed on the basis of a variety of assumed shared characteristics, which identify and differentiate them from other groups.

• The most important common characteristic of the three terms, race, ethnicity and nationality, is the assumption that members of the group share biological descent, historical or mythical, a common ancestry or genealogy at some point in time.

• These elements are used to distinguish them from other groups sharing the same or adjoining social space.

• However, no discrete racial or ethnic group exists in which all recognised members share these same core characteristics.

• Mobility and inter-marriage have ensured this, and many individuals can claim membership of several ethnic groups.

Steve Fenton (2003)It is more useful to identify the contexts in which one or the other of these ideas becomes the basis for social action, whether the term race, ethnicity, nationality or today, culture, is used in the public discourse.

Until the 1960s, New Zealand government policy assumed assimilation and mono-culturalism. The acceptance of biculturalism was a slow process that began in the 1960s with the Maori renaissance and movement for Māori rights guaranteed under the Treaty of Waitangi (Sorrenson, 1977).

Naming• Race has frequently been used in everyday

discourse to refer to larger groups or populations rather than social groups, such as ‘the European race’ or the ‘white race’ as opposed to the ‘black race’.

• Whiteness became the focus of studies as a consequence of the black civil rights movements in the USA.

• ‘Racial’ differences were inscribed in New Zealand from 1840 when the country became a British colony through the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the representatives of the British Crown and Māori chiefs.

• Race has tended to be used for larger groupings; • Ethnic has been used mainly for smaller

constituent groupings within the larger group; • However, today, as Fenton (2003) has noted,

the term race is disappearing from the discourse.

• But racism and racist are both still part of our vocabulary and used to describe unacceptable behaviour towards a particular ‘other’.

• Ethnicity has become equated with cultural distinctiveness and seen as positive.

Terminology and Social Context• The Holocaust, and its rationale in the supposed

purification of the ‘Aryan’ race is referred to as ‘racial cleansing’ but the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda were termed ‘ethnic cleansing’.

• In New Zealand, people from the Pacific Islands, for example Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, are collectively called Pacific Islanders. Whether this is seen as a racial or ethnic category is unclear but it denies the cultural or historical differences between the groups.

• In Britain in the 1960s and early 70s migrants from Pakistan were called ‘Pakis’ and Paki bashing occurred. Yet Pakistani refers to membership of the state of Pakistan, the name being an acronym of the constituent provinces that make up the state. There is no such historical racial or ethnic grouping.

The major difference between race/ethnicity and national identity is that the latter is

associated with the ‘nation’ state so it includes a political dimension and rights of citizenship in

a given political territory.Today no totally ethnically homogeneous states

exist.

National Identity and the Imagined Community

National identity is always constructed and involves the melding together of different groups into an “imagined” community under the umbrella of one dominant culture. The idea of nationalism provides governments with a simple and relatively inexpensive method of creating solidarity, cohesion and commitment (Nairn, 1975). Within a given territory it is an inclusive concept, as opposed to race or ethnicity which is based on distinctions between groups.

• Benedict Anderson (1983, p. 6): a nation is ‘an imagined political community’ - and imagined as inherently limited and sovereign. In this imagined community individuals do not ever know all members of the community but nevertheless feel an identity with them.

• States, as opposed to ethnic and racially based groups, control political power and legitimate means of force, such as the police, army and penal system, within a defined territory.

• National identity is the identity acquired by membership of the political community. This is the basis for citizenship with its associated rights: political, civil and social.

United Nations 1948 Declaration of Human Rights

• Theoretically provided a mechanism for legal integration within a multicultural state;

• Allows for the recognition of diversity but aims to achieve cohesion through equal rights for all citizens;

• The Declaration asserts the universality of rights for all individuals equally without distinction of ‘race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, social origin, property, birth or other status’. The 1965 UN Covenant on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination added ethnic origin to the list;

• However, it specifically maintained the rights of states to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and their right to determine processes of naturalization, provided they did not discriminate against a particular nationality.

The Sociological Analysis of Race• An overlapping set of contested ideas:• Race and gender; • Race and class; • Race and national identity; • Race and violence.

• Despite the lack of an explicit concern with race in the work of the founding fathers many of their more general insights provide the starting point for sociological work in this area. Theorists of particular significance are Karl Marx and Max Weber.

• Studies exploring race, inequality and the racialization of social relations have their origins in the work of Marx.

Marxism and Race• An analysis of race as ideology, considering the

ways in which ideas of race are embedded in the economic historical conditions and so vary over time.

• In this approach, nationalism and race, as part of the superstructure of society, reflect material conditions rather than acting as causal factors.

• This focus camouflages ethnic inequality and marginalisation while privileging aspects of local culture as a form of folklore.

Max Weber (1864-1920)Ideas in social action:Culture was not purely reflective of the material conditions but had a degree of autonomy and interacted with economic conditions to influence perception and action. This focus on the role of ideas in social action has proved useful in analysing the global re-emergence of racial/ethnic conflicts.

Status groups:Weber viewed ethnic groups as akin to status groups. They were bounded groups, defined by life style and consumption patterns as opposed to classes defined by their position in the capitalist mode of production. He identified the potential of these groups to mobilise for social political action.

Robert Miles (1993)• Argued that races are purely ideological

constructs that hide underlying economic reality. If there are no races there can be no race relations.

• Focussing on them reifies them and gives them legitimacy. There is not a race problem but a problem of ‘racism’.

• He argued that the institutional and legal systems put in place in states and regional organisations such as the European Union to combat racism actually reinforce the idea of race.

• He proposed instead that we focus on racialization, and in a later work, on racism.

RacializationRacialization is the process through which ideas and beliefs about race, together with class and gender, shape social relationships; in other words, it is the social construction of race. Racism applies to the set of ideas involved in this process.

Racialization and IdentityThe problem of identity in contemporary multi-ethnic societies is to reconcile the competing claims of diversity and unity. National identity can provide a mechanism for ordering and integrating this multiplicity. However, the movement from policies of assimilation to multiculturalism from about the 1960s onwards has created greater relativity and the assumed uniformity of cultural beliefs has lost its ‘taken for granted’ quality.

Therefore, establishing the ‘essence’ of a national identity, regretting its absence or

questioning its existence has become a central problem of contemporary

consciousness.

Race and IdentityZygmunt Bauman (1992) argues that the relativity inherent in post-modernity accentuates the dilemma for the individual. It gives them responsibility for moral choice but deprives them of universal norms to guide conduct. Individuals must rely on their own subjectivity and take responsibility for their own choice. This means that the choice of a particular identity is always contextual and social rather than purely individual or personal. Its referent is always a group to which the individual is claiming membership and it is established and validated through a continuing process of negotiation with ‘the other’ through a discourse of difference and mutual recognition.

Hall (1991a, p. 13) argues that a return to the local is often a response to this relativity inherent in the global. In this context the idea of race/ethnicity provides a powerful system of symbolic representations through which groups of individuals can ground their identity and validate, through a process of contested negotiation, a claim to belonging within a social political space.

In this process of recognition of similarities and differences, individuals locate themselves in

relation to others and interpret their own experience as racialized ‘others’. At the same

time they also racialize ‘the other’.

The break -up of the ex -Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and of Czechoslovakia saw the emergence of new states based on supposed ethnic homogeneity. The failure of the Kurdish populations in Turkey and Iraq demonstrate the reverse. In all of these cases the particular global historical context was a significant factor and the fight for recognition had persisted over the centuries. It demonstrates the emotional power attached to an identity grounded in a notion of belonging based on assumptions of common descent, kinship, and shared tradition and historical memory.

‘Indigenous’ Minorities• Resnick (2005) argues the basic demand of

minority groups is for recognition of their unique national identity. Similarly the majority nationalities feel their distinct national identity is threatened. The outcome is a trade-off which results in either a form of federalism, a degree of political and/or legal recognition, or of regional autonomy.

• He notes, however, that the solutions are never final or complete but on-going. So the relationship between nationality and identity in the multinational state is not unproblematic. It gives rise to a continuing dialectical process and is an inevitable element of our contemporary reality.

The ‘Idea’ of Race• There is no unitary phenomenon we can define

as race and no single theory to address it. • In the global world of today we confront multiple

racisms. It may function as ideology and serve to validate discrimination and thereby maintain dominant economic and political interests. Equally it may reinforce and legitimate conservative traditional values and provide the source of conflict with the dominant values. Alternatively it may provide a basis for resistance and political mobilization and the basis for the construction of identity in a multi-ethnic society.

Discussion Point 1: Adopting an Ethnic Identity

• An affiliative ethnic identity is one that an individual is not connected with by ancestry but adopts through deployment of, and identification with becomes theirs both in their own mind and in the minds of others.

• Would adopting an affiliative ethnicity necessarily mean the individual was rejecting their own origins or simply demonstrate that ethnic identity is fluid, flexible, and multiple?

•Why would an ethnic group want to reject ethnic affiliates?•Could there be advantages for a minority group in adopting members of a dominant ethnic group?

Discussion Point 2: Racializing Strangers

•What are the problems with racializing/ethnicizing groups through government policies to enhance national security?•Are there other common examples of racial profiling that are damaging to certain communities?•What are the positive sides for individuals and groups of being able to claim an ethnic identity that is officially recognized?