PART TWO
RACE AND RACISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Chapter Five
Understanding Racism
Reflections of a Comparative Historian
Historians of black-white relations in the United States often refer to "racism," but only rarely do they define the term precisely and explore its theoretical implications. Compared with the explanatory power associated with the economic and political variables operating in a specific historical situation, the cultural predisposition to stigmatize and abuse the racial "Other" is likely to be treated as a secondary phenomenon—the by-product of something else—or, alternatively, as one ingredient in an eclectic stew, the effect of which is impossible to isolate. Sometimes the term is used narrowly to refer to a set of doctrines that rose and fell in the United States between the late eighteenth century and the mid-to-late twentieth. Often, however, it is a catchall that refers to whatever was thought and done to the disadvantage of African Americans from the sixteenth century to the present. For some purposes, perhaps, nothing much is lost by inattention or lack of analytical rigor. But comparative historians need sharper tools and stronger conceptualizations; otherwise they are likely to find implicit, attitudinal racism in most times and places—a given of any situation that appears to involve "races"—or an explicit ideological racism in only a few places and for limited periods. It is high time that historians devoted the same effort to understanding "race" as a transnational social and historical phenomenon that they have sometimes applied to class, gender, and nationalism.
Postmodernists have contributed some useful new vocabulary to this effort—especially the description of race as "a social construction"
rather than an objective fact. Substantively speaking, this formulation is not so radically new as some of its proponents suggest. The concept of race as a "social fiction" rather than a biological fact has been a staple of the sociological literature on "race relations" for half a century. But the new formulation puts an emphasis on process—how and why the fiction was created—that the older language permits but does not require. Furthermore, postmodernist thought has put gender, nation, and even class in the same category of ideologically constructed fictions that race already occupied in the thought of antiracist scholars. It invites us, therefore, to probe the connections between race and other social constructions of human identity rather than making race a secondary or derived category—the mere reflection of some deeper and more fundamental reality.
Perhaps, it has been suggested, we should no longer use the term "race" at all, because to do so gives credence to the idea that there is a physical reality to which it refers. Human beings do of course differ in physical appearance, but variations in skin color have no more intrinsic or scientific significance than differences in hair color. It is the associations that people make between such visible phenomena and their entire range of interests, beliefs, and attitudes that determine whether or not "race" comes into play. My own view is that we can continue to use the term if we recognize that it refers to an ideology rather than an objective reality. The recently coined verb "to racialize" (in the noun form "racialization") is useful in referring to the process of constructing race rather than to its results.
Like some other notable ways of construing human diversity, racism has enormous historical consequences—on the same order of importance as nationalism, sexism, class consciousness, and sectarian religious zeal. Unless one is prepared to take one of these great signifiers of human diversity and make it the root of all the others—class is the most popular candidate, although gender has its advocates—the historian faces the task of showing how a number of social and cultural constructions interact rather than proving that one is more "real" or fundamental than the others.
Merely recognizing that something is socially, culturally, or ideologically constructed does not fully explain it—indeed it scarcely explains it at all. We need to know how and why it was constructed in the way that it was. Furthermore, only the most radical postmodernists would claim that something can be constructed out of nothing. What raw materials were used, where did they come from, and how well do they
serve the aims of the builders? One can use wood to make a house or a warship. The materials do not determine the function of the thing that has been constructed, but they may help to determine how well it fulfills the purposes for which it was designed. Wooden houses burn more easily than those made of brick, and wooden ships were more vulnerable to enemy cannon fire than the steel-hulled vessels that took their place in the world's navies. Science-based concepts of race may lose credibility as the result of new discoveries and shifting paradigms, but concepts of race based on the cultural differences associated with descent groups may have greater durability. The notion that race or anything else is a social and cultural construction is the beginning of an inquiry rather than the end of it.
When sociologists and historians first wrote about racism in the period between World War II and the 1960s, they generally meant an explicit ideology based on the putative scientific truth that population groups distinguishable from each other in physical appearance or ancestry were different and unequal in genetically determined mental and behavioral capabilities. As recently as 1967, for example, the British sociologist Michael Banton defined racism as "the doctrine that a man's behavior is determined by stable inherited characteristics deriving from separate racial stocks having distinctive attributes and usually considered to stand to one another in relations of superiority and inferiority." In that same year, an American sociologist, Pierre van den Berghe, described it as an ideology based on the belief that "organic, genetically transmitted differences (real or imagined), are intrinsically associated with the presence or absence of certain socially relevant abilities or characteristics."[1]
Michael Banton, Race Relations (New York, 1967), 8; Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York 1967), 11. Recognizing the narrowness and limited applicability of his definition, Banton used the term "racialism" to cover the attitudinal and institutional aspects of racial domination, and van den Berghe's perceptive treatment of the sociohistorical role of race in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa took account of the implicit or assumed character of racism in situations where its full ideological expression was absent or muted. But neither transcended the notion that a belief in genetic or biological determinism had to be present.
Such a doctrine or ideology was used to justify or rationalize a range of policies, depending on the circumstances and aims of the racializing group. The principal possibilities were the subordination and unequal segregation of the Other, exclusion or expulsion from a community or nation, or in the most extreme case physical annihilation. Hitler's view of the Jews and what should be done with them and the southern white supremacist's conception of the African American's place in nature and society were obvious and unambiguous examples of racism in this strict sense.
Since the late 1960s, however, scholars and activists in the United States have tended to apply the term to attitudes and practices viewed as objectively harmful to the interests and aspirations of people previously designated as racially inferior, even though an explicit doctrine of
innate racial differences is no longer invoked as a rationale. The discovery of "institutional"—as opposed to "attitudinal"—racism has broadened the concept to include the discrimination that persists because institutions operate on the basis of seemingly color-blind rules and procedures that in fact deny equal opportunity to members of minority groups. But to maintain that such discrimination is truly unintentional and does not involve individual attitudes would undermine the conception of racism as an ideological construction and make it synonymous with the statistical inequality and apparent social inefficiency of any group with a sense of racial or ethnic identity, whatever the actual causes of its situation might be.
The concept of racism remains relevant in such cases only if it can be established that members of one identifiable group falsely assume that the members of another such group perform less well than themselves because of their inherent or deep-seated inadequacies rather than their disadvantages in an unjust social system. This standard would still cover most of what has been described as institutional or structural racism. Whites who oppose programs that seek to secure equal opportunities for blacks may deny with varying degrees of sincerity that they consider blacks to be genetically inferior to themselves, but can anyone really doubt that if the inhabitants of our inner cities were white rather than black or Latino, more would be done to alleviate the conditions that breed gang warfare, crime and a variety of other social problems? It also seems likely that support for the death penalty would not be as strong as it is in the United States today if a disproportionate number of those on death rows did not happen to be black.
Evidence in fact abounds that actual prejudice continues to operate on all levels of American society. The persistence of white supremacist attitudes is manifested in a toleration of police brutality against minorities, black-white disparities in judicial punishments for the same crimes, housing and mortgage discrimination, and glass ceilings in corporate personnel policies. It is therefore premature and misleading to maintain that attitudes and ideologies are no longer the problem. If American institutions operated in the way they are supposed to operate, we would still have class and status inequality, but racism would no longer be the appropriate diagnosis for such conditions.
Racism is not the only form of injustice and inequality in the world, and if we wish to think about it in useful and productive ways, we have to be able to distinguish it from other varieties of human nastiness. Rather than enlarge the concept of racism to include structural
inequalities that are independent of racialization, it would be more fruitful to expand the concept to include modes of thought and behavior that we do not usually think of as racist because they do not involve the classic racist doctrine of biological logical inferiority signified by color.
Two recent books illustrate the difference between the old and new versions of racist ideology. The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein is an effort to revive old fashioned biological racism. In their view blacks are simply less well-endowed intellectually than whites. Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism eschews the genetic determinism of abilities in favor of a cultural determinism that does much the same work. D'Souza attributes African American "failure" to a "dysfunctional" group culture and then uses this judgment to support a contention that racism is not the source of black underachievement. Stereotyping and stigmatizing a racialized group on the basis of cultural rather than biological inferiority provides a new rationale for discrimination rather than a basis for combating it. This "new racism" is not really unprecedented. Cultural rather than biological determinism was the official justification for apartheid in South Africa. Furthermore, D'Souza's line of argument recalls the rationale for black enslavement and subordination that preceded the growth of scientific racist doctrines in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[2]
Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, 1994); Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York, 1995). See also my review of D'Souza, New York Review of Books, 19 October 1995, 10-15.
According to sociologists and historians who draw a sharp distinction between racism and ethnocentrism, it is anachronistic to describe as racist the prejudice and discrimination against the Other that emerged before Western ethnological thinkers articulated naturalistic conceptions of human diversity and inequality. In an early effort to grapple with the relationship between the ideologies rationalizing slavery in the early colonial period and those employed in the nineteenth century, I made a distinction between ideological and "societal" racism. In the latter category, I included practices that treated a subaltern group as if it were inherently inferior to the socially dominant group even though an explicit doctrine of innate racial differences had not yet been promulgated and widely accepted. But there was of course an ideological basis for such discrimination. An alternative to identifying racism by its effects rather than by the consciousness that produced it is to seek the common element in the differing ideological formulations that have sustained white or European domination over people of color. If the term racism is to apply, I now believe, its association with the specific form of biological determinism that justified slavery and segregation in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be regarded as fortuitous rather than essential.[3]
George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 189-205. This essay on "The Social Origins of American Racism" was originally published in 1971.
What we need for comparative historical analysis is a theoretical understanding of racism that is broad enough to take account of contemporary ideologies that stigmatize the Other without appealing to racist science as well as attitudes that preceded the elaboration of classic racist doctrine. But in seeking such breadth we must be careful to avoid giving credence to the view that racism is an essential or primordial human response to diversity, something that inevitably takes place when groups that we would define as racially different come into contact. It must be remembered that we are doing the defining and that, as the historical record shows, the categories we use did not always exist and were in fact constructed or invented by our ancestors. There is a strong, and perhaps unavoidable, tendency in any society to disparage those defined as Other or alien. Such negative stereotyping may be an inescapable component of identity and boundary maintenance. But who the outsiders are and how much or in what ways they are despised and mistreated are the products of history, not of basic human instincts.
I therefore agree with historian Barbara Fields that "race" and all the ideas and attitudes associated with it are shaped and sustained by social contexts that change over time and are not therefore the reflection of some "transhistorical" impulse that is rooted in objective human differences. But Fields and other historians who argue that "class" is real and "race" is not are captives of a theory of social relationships that privileges one form of social inequality over others in a manner that does violence to the actual history of human inequality. If class is defined very loosely as "the inequality of human beings from the standpoint of social power," there is no disagreement, although it is hard to make analytical use of such an all-encompassing passing concept. Problems emerge when Fields goes on to invoke "the more rigorous Marxian definition involving social relations of production." Is it really true, as she claims, that class in this sense "can assert itself independently of people's consciousness" while race cannot? People certainly do differ in economic power and position, but such differences have literally no meaning until they enter people's consciousness and are interpreted in some fashion. The specifically Marxist conception of two essential and perpetually antagonistic classes is not a necessary deduction from the existence of economic inequality in a capitalist society. There could be more than two essential classes, and classes do not have to be viewed as inevitably at war. Class in my view is as much a
historical and social construct as race, which also builds on differences that actually exist but are not meaningful until constructed into an ideology of differences that serves the purposes of a social group.[4]
Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982), 150-151.
Besides differing in their relation to the means of production or to the market, people really do differ in physical characteristics that are subject to classification, immediate or remote ancestry, and cultural traits associated with belonging to a historically defined community. It is my contention that race and racism derive from the act of interpreting or construing such noneconomic differences to create a sense of group solidarity or peoplehood that becomes the basis for assertions of dominance or privileged status over those considered outside of the group. (If the process stopped at group identity and solidarity, we would have ethnocentrism but not racism.) This way of grounding group power and inequality is not simply a variation on the larger theme of class domination. It has independent roots and consequences. Class refers to the fact that every developed society has an economy and that some people have more access to its fruits than others. Race arises from the equally pervasive fact that all human beings have some sense of family or kinship, a way of differentiating those with whom one has real or fictive "blood ties" from those who are unrelated. Ethnicity can be viewed as extended kinship, and race can be seen as an inflation and elaboration of the notion that my "family" not only is better than yours but also has special rights and privileges as a consequence.
Although race and class are both historical inventions—creative interpretations or ideological constructions based on two ways of conceiving human diversity—it would be a mistake to infer that, once invented, they do not become durable and enormously influential ways of perceiving the world. The construction of class may lead to class conflict, revolution, and socialist societies. The construction of race may lead to secession in defense of racial slavery, the creation of social orders based on racial caste, or to gas chambers for stigmatized peoples.
A useful way of comprehending the relationship of race and class is Max Weber's writings on social hierarchy as a general phenomenon and stratification based on ethnicity or race as a special case. For Weber, "status," or the unequal assignment of honor and prestige to individuals or groups, may vary independently from "class," which he defines as the economic advantage or disadvantage that comes from objective relationships to a capitalistic market. Status may be based on aristocratic descent or the ability to maintain a prestigious life-style, but
in multiethnic societies it can also be derived simply from membership in an ethnic or racial group that has a history of dominance over other groups and seeks to preserve that relationship.[5]
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, 1978), 385-398, 926-939.
Using Weber's concept of "ethnic status" to get at the nature of racism allows us to sidestep an unprofitable debate on the difference between race and ethnicity. As Donald L. Horowitz has argued persuasively in a broad-ranging comparative study of "ethnic conflict," the designation of people by skin color and the mistreatment of them on that basis has no special features that would distinguish it in any definitive theoretical way from group domination based on religion, culture, or the simple belief that some people have defective ancestry. It is only because modern Western liberalism often assumes that it is relatively easy for people to change their religion or culture and be assimilated into a group other than the one in which they were born that the distinction has become important.[6]
Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, 1985), 41-54.
Even in the West the de facto ascription of ethnic status has often been derived from something other than skin color or reputed nonwhite ancestry. Northern Ireland, for example, has the essential characteristics of what sociologist John Rex calls a "race relations situation." A Catholic could certainly convert to Protestantism; however, it is not only extremely unlikely that one would do so but also doubtful whether one could thereby win full acceptance into the Protestant community. Racial consciousness is also what what makes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict so difficult to resolve, despite the lack of clear physical differences between the antagonistic ethnic communities. A large proportion of the population of Israel are Jews who found themselves increasingly oppressed in various Arab societies, and the Arab minority in Israel, despite having the right to vote, is not eligible for full citizenship in a Jewish ethnic state.[7]
See John Rex, "The Concept of Race in Sociological Theory," in Race and Racialism, ed. Sam Zubaida (London, 1970), 35-55.
The key element in ethnicity is descent, and ethnic status emerges when a group of people with a real or fictive common ancestry assert their dominance over those who are believed to be of a different and inferior ancestry. The Burakhumin of Japan are descended from a caste that once engaged in occupations considered unclean or impure. Although they differ scarcely at all in phenotype or general culture from other Japanese, the discrimination against them, on grounds of descent alone, closely resembles the color discrimination of Western societies. One might conclude, therefore, that racism, or something virtually indistinguishable from it, has no essential relation to skin color or other obvious physical characteristics and need not even be based on significant
cultural differences. The essential element is the belief, however justified or rationalized, in the critical importance of differing lines of descent and the use of that belief to establish or validate social inequality.[8]
On the Barakhumin as a minority caste analogous to African Americans in their social position and the problems they face, see John Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste (New York, 1978).
Ethnic status—the sense of being top dog because of one's ancestry—may come from the conquest or earlier enslavement of other ethnic groups or simply from being the original inhabitants of an immigrant-receiving society. To a degree that Weber did not anticipate, such a sense of social superiority could also develop in societies that considered themselves ethnically homogeneous, placed great value on this lack of diversity, and were therefore unwilling to receive ethnic strangers into their national community—one thinks of the history of Australia and Japan, for example. Lest we fall into essentialism, however, we have to bear in mind that the operative group definitions and boundaries are not fixed but are in fact constructed or reconstructed in response to changing historical circumstances. At the same time, we must avoid going to the opposite extreme and overestimating how easily they change or how directly responsive they are to short-term historical developments. Constructed racial categorizations may endure for very long periods, as the career of the patently illogical "one-drop rule" for defining African American ethnicity clearly exemplifies.[9]
See F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition (University Park, Pa., 1991).
Racism, then, can be defined as an ethnic group's assertion or maintenance of a privileged and protected status vis à vis members of another group or groups who are thought, because of defective ancestry, to possess a set of socially relevant characteristics that disqualify them from full membership in a community or citizenship in a nation-state. A racist society functions like a private club in which the membership conceives of itself in a certain way and excludes those who do not fit in. (This analogy is especially apt, because under the "black ball" system not all members have to be strongly prejudiced against an applicant for membership; they merely have to defer to the prejudices of others.) Such a sense of ascribed identity and entitlement naturally inclines its beneficiaries to defend their group position if they believe it to be threatened. Many years ago the Weberian sociologist Herbert Blumer caught the essence of racism when he described race prejudice as an anxious sense of "group position."[10]
Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race, 210-211; Herbert Blumer, "Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position," Pacific Sociological Review 1 (1958), 3-7.
In contrast to traditional ways of defining racism, this definition puts less emphasis on how the alleged deficiencies of the Other are described and explained and more on how a group defines itself and its prerogatives. The essence of racism is caught by such old American expressions
as "give him a white man's chance" or "she's white, free, and twenty one." Historian David Roediger has recently suggested that the key to racism in the United States is an understanding of the meaning of "whiteness" rather than blackness. If we examine the concept of whiteness, we find that it has no specific cultural content, but exists solely as an indicator of higher status than those designated as black or colored.[11]
See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race in the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); and Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London, 1994).
I would simply add that an ascribed status of whiteness signifies that the bearer comes from preferred stock, whereas one of blackness or brownness implies a debased and unworthy ancestry. Whites may find it natural that blacks are underrepresented in positions of prominence because such roles have always been occupied by people like themselves and are therefore legitimately inherited from their ancestors—even if they have no firm basis for believing that blacks would not perform as well as their own "kin." This sense of inherited entitlement may be the hard core of racism. When combined, as it usually is, with motives of a more mundane and material kind, it becomes a powerful source of social and cultural identity.
Racism as a general phenomenon is not therefore defined by any specific set of beliefs about what makes a given minority undeserving of equal treatment. We know from the history of anti-Semitism and anti-Japanese discrimination in the United States that racism of a virulent sort can be directed at groups believed to be superior, at least in their competitive efficiency, to an in-group seeking to protect its position. Using this definition, we would have no problem in considering the South African regime of the late 1980s to be racist even though it was edging toward a willingness to "share" power with Africans and refrained from invoking innate racial superiority to justify its presumption that whites must retain de facto social and economic dominance in a reformed, "multiracial" South Africa. Similarly, those opponents of antidiscrimination or affirmative action programs in the United States who, implicitly or explicitly, base their resistance on fears of losing something to which they feel entitled by ethnicity or ancestry can be described as racists despite the fact that they talk about acquired culture or competence rather than genetics. Even Brazil, that allegedly most nonracist of color-differentiated societies, displays an element of status consciousness based on ancestry, as is clearly evident when a person of dark complexion finds that he or she must have more money or education than a white to attain a comparable social position.
If Weber's concept of ethnic status helps us to understand racism in a general and theoretical way, it is not sufficient in itself to make sense
of the history of racism in different societies. The contribution of ethnic consciousness to the grounding of social hierarchies is a variable and not a constant. Weber acknowledged that in modern capitalist societies class can overwhelm or subsume status, and some of his followers took this to mean that "modernization" meant the decline of "ascription" based on race or ethnicity in favor of a social hierarchy determined purely by "achievement." But it is obvious to anyone reading the newspapers or watching television that domineering and even genocidal ethnicities persist and flourish in the modern world. The analysis of particular cases often reveals that the material and political interests of an elite are responsible for arousing the latent ethnic consciousness of the masses. Hence it is not a matter of differentiating sharply between "class" and "race" situations. All that Weber's theory really requires is that one make an analytical distinction and not reduce one tendency to the other. Demagogues may encourage racism for their own ulterior ends, but they could hardly succeed in doing so unless the attitudes of the people they sought to influence provided fertile ground for sowing the seeds of ethnic hatred.
The histories of the United States, Brazil, and South Africa suggest that the color-coded variety of racism varies significantly in intensity and in function within specific social structures, economies, and cultures. What accounts for differences in the nature, strength, and consequences of racism in these societies? How do we explain the growth or decline of racist attitudes and policies within a nation's history? Anyone who has lived in the United States for the past four or five decades should realize that racism—or status consciousness based on race—changes over time in its strength and capacity to shape a social order. Blacks are far from equal in American society, but their status has improved in significant ways, and white racism, while still very much alive, has declined in power and intensity. Recent signs of retrogression have led some frustrated proponents of full racial equality to charge that "nothing has changed," but few African Americans who grew up in the South before the 1960s would find it of little significance that they are no longer disfranchised, segregated in public places, and exposed to lynch law. How do we account for such changes?
Variability and change in the salience of ethnic status and consciousness depend to a considerable extent, it would appear, on variations or changes in the power relationship among ethnic groups. To the degree that an oppressed and stigmatized group can somehow gain in physical resources, political power, and cultural recognition or prestige,
it can induce or force a dominant group to share some of its rights and privileges. This in turn can gradually erode the material and even the psychological foundations for the sense of a Herrenvolk, or dominant race, that it has clearly defined borders and a collective sense of entitlement. Unfortunately, the process is reversible; loss of power, for whatever reason, normally entails a loss of status or prestige. Emancipation from slavery or other forms of directly coerced labor does not by itself empower a group to challenge its subordinate status and the stigma that continues to be associated with servile ancestry, but it does unsettle the power equation by opening new possibilities for action to challenge the racial order as well as new dangers of marginalization, expulsion, or even extermination.
Many historical examples can be offered from the history of the United States, Brazil, and South Africa to show how political or economic power affects ethnic status. One of the most important reasons why free people of color in Brazil had greater opportunities for upward mobility than their American counterparts in the era of slavery, and were thus in a position to win a greater degree of social acceptance, was the vital role that they played in the plantation economy as growers of foodstuffs, herders of livestock, and catchers of escaped slaves. The "free Negroes" of the Old South could not play such a role because there was a large population of nonslaveholding whites to service the plantation economy. But the acquisition of political power by southern African Americans during the Reconstruction era gave them, during the relatively brief period when they could exercise their right to suffrage, an influence over public policy greater than that enjoyed by freedpeople in Brazil after their emancipation, which was completed in 1889. (Since the right to vote in the Brazilian republic depended on literacy until quite recently, most ex-slaves and their descendants have been prevented from exercising it.) In the Reconstruction period in the South, laborers' lien laws, giving the worker priority over the merchant in the division of the planter's crop after the harvest, were a tangible result of this temporary gain in political leverage.[12]
See Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971); Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York, 1964); and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988).
But nothing is more dangerous for a racialized caste fighting for equality than a partial and precarious accession of power. Caste consciousness dies hard, as the example of India's tortuous efforts to elevate the status of Untouchables demonstrates. Consequently, the new order must be firmly and consistently enforced over a long period if a successful backlash is to be prevented. Such persistence might require a national government acting resolutely in the name of an egalitarian ideology
that has the capacity to override the racist attitudes of the majority. Otherwise, popular resistance to minority rights can readily erase most of the gains made under an earlier dispensation of national power. The decline and fall of Radical Reconstruction in the southern states is the prime example of such a retreat in the face of resurgent racism. The assertion of federal power on behalf of equal rights was inadequate and short lived, partly because the ideology available to sanction the effort was not rooted firmly in the kind of radical democratic values needed to sustain it.
The subsequent disfranchisement of southern blacks after white supremacists regained control was congruent with efforts to place them at the mercy of employers or landlords and restrict their opportunities to acquire wealth and property or to follow occupations other than sharecropper, laborer, or servant. The partial success of this effort made it possible for whites to stereotype turn-of-the century blacks as radically and irremediably inferior. Only when blacks migrated in great numbers to the relatively freer atmosphere of the North after 1914 did they begin to acquire the resources and political influence to challenge the Jim Crow system and begin to elevate their ethnic status in ways that eventually impelled whites to abandon their claims to a racial hierarchy sustained by law.
Recent developments in South Africa also reflect changes in the racial power equation that have culminated in the presidency of Nelson Mandela and the achievement of one-person one-vote, a process that began with the government's decision in 1989–1990 to negotiate with the African National Congress. These advances are due in large part to the leverage that black protesters gained in the 1980s over the South African economy—internationally through the antiapartheid movement's promotion of sanctions and disinvestment, and domestically through their growing influence as organized workers or consumers and their resistance to white rule, which made the country virtually ungovernable and thus undermined the security and prosperity of the white minority.
Such examples show that racism, however tenacious, is not a constant and unalterable influence on public action in ethnically divided societies. For Weber, status was only one of three analytically distinguishable but overlapping and interacting sources of social power and inequality. Others were "class" as determined by objective relationships to the market and "party," meaning ability to influence public decisions through political organization and access to suffrage and officeholding.
As Weberian social scientists have demonstrated, inequalities of class, status, and party do not exactly coincide. A main historical dynamic is the interaction among these forms of social power—that is, the manner in which social stratification of one kind conflicts with the others or reinforces them, as the case may be.[13]
For an example of the effective use of the Weberian triad to analyze race politics, see Ira Katznelson, Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900-1930, and Britain, 1948-1968 (London, 1973).
Under a system of racial slavery, there is of course little or no contradiction; the three Weberian categories coincide almost perfectly. Blacks in the Old South had almost no access to social prestige, government, or the marketplace. After emancipation, however, the three types of inequality could vary independently. At the turn of the century, the Jim Crow era reached its height—almost, but not quite, approximating the early pattern of total subordination. Because there was now an emerging black middle class, albeit restricted to a segregated economy, there was no longer such a close fit between class and racial caste as during the slave era. Furthermore, as we have seen, the exclusion of southern blacks from American politics was mitigated to some extent by accelerating migration to the North where the right to vote and hold office persisted.
But the ethnic status of blacks in the nation as a whole may have been at a low point in the period between 1910 and the Great Depression, as reflected in the generally unfavorable or derogatory stereotypes projected by the dominant culture and in the pervasiveness of social segregation and discrimination. In 1913, the federal civil service was segregated. Also in that period the blatantly racist film Birth of a Nation achieved great popularity; the United States officially admonished French authorities during World War I to discourage fraternization between French civilians—especially women—and black soldiers out of deference to the belief of most white Americans in black inferiority and social unacceptability; and bloody race riots and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan characterized the immediate postwar years. But this was also the period when the NAACP won its first court victories and came close to getting antilynching legislation through Congress. In addition to limited political leverage, black migration to the North brought greater access to industrial jobs and better educational facilities.
The persistence of a sharply defined ethnic status hierarchy in the United States between World War I and the 1940s—a time when blacks were making some economic and political advances—does not prove that ethnic status is unaffected by changes in political and economic empowerment. In the long term, as developments in the 1950s and
1960s demonstrated, substantial and durable gains in one respect can be translated into gains in the others. Racism gains much of its strength and legitimacy from ingrained cultural attitudes, which of course change more slowly than the social and economic structures with which they were once directly and transparently associated. Furthermore, the extent to which racism is rooted in associational preferences derived from an expanded notion of family and kinship probably means that racist thought and behavior is to some degree inevitable in any ethnically diverse society. Racism can, however, be made generally disreputable, thus eliminating most of its socioeconomic effects and transforming its traditional targets into quasi-kin—or even actual kin to the extent that intermarriage becomes acceptable.
The salience and social power of racism clearly vary over time and may decrease significantly in response to changing historical circumstances. It is difficult to maintain at the core of one's identity a culturally sanctioned sense of status in the face of substantial changes in the class, prestige, and power position of a subordinate group. Racism does have a life of its own, but it cannot persist without changing its character and gradually losing some of its force in the face of dramatic and durable improvements in the economic and political strength of a disadvantaged ethnic group. Some might argue that this is getting the cart before the horse, that the empowerment of an oppressed minority requires a radical change in the status-affirming attitudes of a dominant group. But what I am in fact advancing is a kind of interactionist or feedback model of change. Increases in power affect attitudes, and changing attitudes open access to power.
How, one might ask, does such a process get started? Studies of the history of race relations in several societies suggest that something extraneous to the racial order may occur, some larger economic, political, or ideological development that calls for adjustment by the society as a whole in ways that have accidental or unintended advantages for subordinated status groups. The independent effect of nationalism, especially when loyalty to a nation in peril can be construed as requiring an inclusive rather than an exclusive sense of the national community, may be of prime importance.[14]
On the complicated and sometimes antagonistic relationship between nationalism and racism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).
Major wars or intense international competition among nations can have such a catalytic effect on race relations. The Paraguayan war of 1865–1870 speeded Brazil on the path to slave emancipation because it became necessary to use thousands of slaves as soldiers and to reward them for their participation by freeing them. Black Americans were of
course freed from bondage as the result of a Civil War that was fought primarily for the preservation of the federal union and not for their liberation. As a result of the necessities and opportunities of war, emancipation and the use of black troops became a means to the end of national integrity. The victories of the civil rights movement a century later were aided, perhaps decisively, by the belief of influential and powerful whites that Jim Crow was a serious liability in America's competition with the Soviet Union for the "hearts and minds" of Africa and Asia. White South Africa became serious about dismantling apartheid and negotiating with African nationalists because black resistance and the threat of international sanctions raised fears that, unless something was done to accommodate blacks within a capitalistic framework, a future South Africa would have no place at all for an affluent and acquisitive white minority.
These examples suggest that in times of national peril or catastrophe, inclusive forms of nationalism, sometimes encouraged by a belief that survival on any terms available requires a redefinition of citizenship, may prove stronger than ethnic status consciousness and open the way to lowering or even eliminating barriers to the participation and empowerment of oppressed racial groups. Such a stretching of the boundaries of national solidarity is not an unambiguous victory over prejudice against the Other, however. It can be a concomitant of intensified international conflict, in which case the burden of Otherness is shifted to some extent from the shoulders of the usual domestic scapegoats to those of foreign nationals.
A more fundamental and less contingent force that undermines traditional racial hierarchies and the status claims they engender are long-term trends in the structure and value systems of modern societies away from "ascription" and toward "achievement" as a basis for status and power. We need not adopt the naive view that these trends are irresistible or that industrial capitalism is a direct and automatic solvent of ethnic stratification; the long career of apartheid in South Africa and of group conflict in Northern Ireland show that this is not the case. Yet we can, nonetheless, recognize that ethnic hierarchies become more problematic and vulnerable when they are the only form of ascribed status that persists in an open and publicly sanctioned way. A key function of explicit racist ideology, in its heyday between the mid—nineteenth century and the Second World War, was to rationalize the conspicuous exceptions to the prevailing Western norm of a liberal, open-class society
that could be found in places like South Africa, the American South, and various European colonies.
But the period since World War II has seen an international revulsion against racism, inspired in large part by the increasing role in international affairs and organizations played by the emerging nations of Asia and Africa. Another important impetus for changing attitudes is the internationalization of capitalist enterprise, a development that has made overt racial prejudices a liability for those who would seek to compete with the Japanese and other Asians for world markets. Vast international inequalities that correlate roughly with color persist, but the current tendency to talk of the resulting conflict as pitting rich nations or parts of the world against poor ones may reflect the nature of this struggle better than the language of race that would have been more appropriate in the age of conquest and colonization.
The trend toward a worldwide struggle based on "class" in the Weberian sense, or between those who have a favored access to markets and scarce resources and those who do not, is to some extent paralleled within industrialized nations with strong traditions of racial or ethnic inequality. It is clear to many observers of contemporary Brazil that the central issue is the vast differential between a rich minority and an impoverished majority. The fact that people of darker skin are disproportionately represented among the poor is evidence of a long history of slavery and racial prejudice but may not be the most productive way to think about the current situation. Emancipating the poor as such would seem to be the main challenge, despite the exposure of subtle but persistent forms of discrimination that has recently compelled Brazilians to recognize that they do not in fact have a "racial democracy."[15]
See I. K. Sundiatta, "Late Twentieth Century Patterns of Race Relations in Brazil and the United States," Phylon 48 (1987), 62-76.
Even in South Africa an assessment of the prospects for class conflict or accommodation may give a better sense of the forces currently at work than an exclusively racial or ethnic view of the struggle. Racism gave this version of capitalist industrialization its peculiarly segmented quality. But two theoretically color-blind ideologies, free market capitalism and Marxian socialism, came to dominate the two sides in the conflict by the 1980s, gaining in strength at the expense of a statist and corporatist doctrine of white supremacy on the one hand and a racially defined black nationalism on the other. Workers and employers alike seemed increasingly ready to view the struggle in class terms. Contrary to what one might expect from Marxist-Leninist theory, such a redefinition
or reconstruction of the situation increased the prospects for a peaceful transition of power; for history shows that class adjustments and compromises are easier to bring off than the reconciliation of groups that view their differences as primarily ethnic or racial. But South Africa has a long way to go before the dream of "nonracial democracy" is fully achieved. Whites continue to dominate economic life, and many undoubtedly believe that their European ancestry still brings certain entitlements. They may cling to the hope that they can keep the substance of white power and privilege by giving up the trappings and allowing a middle-class black minority to share their advantages.[16]
On the ideological shifts and their significance, see Stanley Greenberg, Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa (Berkeley, 1987), and Julie Frederikse, The Unbreakable Thread: Non-racialism in South Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1990).
What of current black-white relations in the United States? Historically speaking, racism—in Weberian terms, Euro-American status consciousness—has tended to predominate over any consciousness of class that transcends racial categories. The inability of the southern Populist movement of the late nineteenth century to build an interracial political coalition in the face of its opponents' appeals to racial solidarity is a well-known example of this tendency. Another is the notorious difficulty of uniting white and black workers in a collective struggle for class interests, as reflected in the long history of antiblack discrimination by organized labor and the failure of socialist movements to attract substantial black support. During the height of the great depression, when it appeared to many that there were unprecedented opportunities for class action across racial lines, W.E.B. Du Bois was driven, despite his sympathy for Marxism, to espouse the economic self-segregation of blacks, because he despaired of the capacity of white workers to overcome their cultural racism. Three decades later, after the civil rights movement had freed southern blacks from de jure segregation and de facto disfranchisement, advocates of black power and black nationalism came to a similarly pessimistic assessment of American society's ability to overcome racial segmentation. The Kerner Report's 1968 description of the nation as "moving toward two societies, one black and one white—separate and unequal" reflected a general sense in the late 1960s that the United States was still a society stratified by race or ethnic status and not merely by economic or class differences.[17]
W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York, 1940), chap. 7; Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York, 1968), 1.
Ten years later, however, a leading black sociologist, William Julius Wilson, argued that race was declining in significance and that the situation of blacks in American society could now best be approached in terms of class. Wilson, who refined and elaborated his argument in a
later work on the black "underclass," based his case primarily on the growth of a substantial black middle class that he believed was being successfully integrated into the larger American middle class. This was in sharp contrast to the earlier situation of black elites who had been condemned by racism to seek higher status exclusively within the segregated African American community. But the price of this desegregation of elites was that blacks who could not qualify for middle-class opportunities because they lacked skills, education, and employment possibilities were stranded in the ghettos without middle-class leadership or behavioral examples. Consequently, their condition had worsened, and the nation faced the major social problem summed up in the phrase "black underclass." Underclass disabilities, Wilson concluded, were primarily a matter of class rather than race and needed to be addressed as such, mainly through social democratic or New Deal-type policies.[18]
William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago, 1978); and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy Chicago, 1987).
Wilson's theories are controversial and have been sharply criticized by sociologists and historians who believe that racism is not only alive and well but perhaps even stronger than ever. My own opinion is that the class-based, social democratic policies Wilson recommends would do much to alleviate inner-city poverty and demoralization. Also his distinction between race and class as variable determinants of black inequality is a valuable clarification of the theoretical issues involved in the study of American inequality. But Wilson overstated his case for the decline of racism, at least in his original formulations, and has not always made it sufficiently clear that he has identified an uneven and reversible trend rather than an accomplished reality.
It is certainly true that the black middle class suffers less than in the past from specifically racial discrimination, but the affirmative action policies that made such advancement possible are now in grave danger. Black achievers and aspirants for middle-class status on our campuses sometimes face harassment from white students who resent what they view as special privileges or unfair advantages for African Americans, and subtle but effective forms of discrimination persist in access to skilled jobs and white-collar employment, the competition for status and influence within corporate bureaucracies, housing opportunities, and the treatment of black customers in stores, restaurants, and other places of public access. A majority of white Americans still regard interracial marriage as undesirable and a substantial minority would like to outlaw it. Middle-class assimilation, in other words, is not as complete or as certain as Wilson sometimes implies.
Furthermore, it would be hard to deny that the black underclass is feared and despised by many whites not merely for its poverty and statistical propensity to commit crimes or use drugs but also for reasons of race. The Willie Horton stereotype, as employed by the Bush campaign in 1988, was racially charged and not merely the product of class anxieties. What has changed is the ability of education and wealth to compensate to some extent for the stigma of African appearance and ancestry. (Although it might be hard to convince a middle-class African American trying to hail a taxicab in a big city of this fact.) But to be both poor and black is to be doubly disadvantaged. Until this changes, it cannot truly be said that race is no longer significant and that the United States can confront its inequalities exclusively in terms of class.
Wilson's problematic interpretation of current race relations may, however, have some value as prophecy. The deepening economic deprivation and insecurity that relatively large numbers of blacks share with somewhat smaller proportions of other racial and ethnic groups make it conceivable that a sense of class division could eventually eclipse race consciousness as the main source of public conflict in American society. Status based on race and the politics of status protection stubbornly persist and may even increase in hard times—as recent events suggest—but they lack ideological legitimacy and no longer, as in the past, clearly sustain a functional segmentation of labor based on race. Opportunities for the construction of class and the deconstruction of race may now exist to an unprecedented degree, because blacks are no longer consistently and categorically relegated to lower-caste occupations, a development that may change basic social alignments and make class-based responses to the growth of social and economic inequality more likely.
But a sense of racial status or caste is very difficult to eradicate, and the opposite extreme of a homegrown fascism based on a heightened Euro-American status consciousness could also result from the struggle over a shrinking economic pie. Working- and lower-middle-class whites who are struggling to make ends meet or to find and keep a decent job have a tendency, especially when nudged in this direction by right-wing politicians, to blame their hardships on blacks and other racialized groups—which are allegedly benefiting unfairly from affirmative action or being supported in idleness and immorality by the welfare system—rather than on the behavior of large corporations and the operations of the market economy. But it may not be too much to hope that such appeals to ethnic status consciousness will eventually wear thin in the face
of growing evidence that blacks have nothing to do with declining wages and emigrating jobs.
A comparative historical perspective permits the hope, if not the confident expectation, that a plausible combination of circumstances and initiatives could lead to the end of racism as a significant determinant of inequality in the United States. Antiracists should be prepared to capitalize on the opportunities for class-based progressive action that will undoubtedly present themselves. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., Will it matter so much what kind of ship our ancestors came over in, when we realize that we are all in the same boat now?
Chapter Six
Race and Empire in Liberal Thought
The Legacy of Tocqueville
A recent French intellectual "turn" that has aroused less interest in the United States than some other Paris fashions of the past thirty years is the reevaluation and heightened appreciation of Alexis de Tocqueville as a political and social theorist. The repudiation of Marx that followed the belated French discovery of the Soviet gulag has triggered a growing respect for the kind of liberalism espoused by the author of Democracy in America and L'Ancien Régime .[1]
See Harvey Mansfield's foreword to Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (London, 1996).
In the United States, of course, Marxism never dominated social, political, and historical thought to anything like the extent it did in France between the 1930s and the 1970s. Tocqueville's prestige was at its high point among American historians and social scientists during the 1940s and 1950s, when his writings on the United States helped to buttress the concept of American exceptionalism—the belief that the United States differed from other Western nations in its lack of deep and persistent social and ideological divisions. During the 1970s, when Tocqueville's claim that there were significant continuities between the French Revolution and the ancien régime was being rediscovered and validated in France, his putative thesis that American history was shaped by a nonrevolutionary liberal consensus was coming under sustained attack from historians of the United States, who were discovering more conflict and change than this paradigm could account for.[2]
The revival of the Tocquevillian view of the French Revolution was manifested in François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978). On Tocqueville's "unwitting" contribution to the exceptionalist view of the American past that prevailed in the 1940s and 1950s see George M. Fredrickson, "From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History," Journal of American History 82 (September 1995), 591-594. A prime example of the use of Tocqueville to support the liberal consensus view of American history is Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955).
Jean-Claude Lamberti has recently tried to bring together the classic interpreter of the French Revolution with the author of the most influential
book on America ever published. In Tocqueville and the Two Democracies , he has explored the connections between Tocqueville's observations on America and his reflections on the prospects for democracy in France. According to Lamberti, Tocqueville's point of departure was a specifically French concern: "how to defend the values of 1789 against the revolutionary spirit," or, in other words, how to affirm the Rights of Man without unleashing the Terror. Tocqueville was a liberal in the basic sense that his highest priorities were the encouragement and protection of individual freedom and self-development: "Because of his great faith in liberty, Tocqueville argued that the purpose of any political association must be to perfect the individual." This commitment to the individual meant that he could endorse neither the organicism of the traditionalist right nor the class-based collectivism of the socialist left, both of which subordinated the needs of the individual to those of the group.[3]
Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 134, 176, and passim.
Democracy, the subject of the great works inspired by Tocqueville's visit to America, might serve the cause of liberty, or it might not, depending on the historical circumstances and culture of the people seeking to rule themselves. Tocqueville's main project in Democracy in America was not so much the study of the United States for its own sake as the comparative analysis of democracy and liberty in the United States and France. In America, he informed his French readers, the democratic spirit had been made relatively safe for liberty by such factors as the absence of a persistent thirst for revolution, the strength of voluntary associations, the broad participation of the citizenry in local government, the check on majoritarianism provided by legalism and lawyers, and the moral discipline supplied by religion. But America was not a perfect model. The weight of public opinion—the "tyranny of the majority"—was a constant threat to individual independence and to the creative use of personal freedom; for this was a society without the sublimated aristocratic traditions that Tocqueville believed were necessary to breed a respect for intellectual and cultural distinction.[4]
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, 1969); Lamberti, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, 2-4 and passim.
In France, very different historical and cultural conditions prevailed. Threats to liberal democracy came from two sides: a bourgeoisie with a narrow conception of personal freedom as the pursuit of individual wealth and comfort and a lower class with a penchant for revolutionary action. The bourgeoisie, unlike its American counterpart, tended to retreat from public life and leave governance to a central bureaucratic state. In times of popular insurgency, the bourgeoisie was all too willing to put its trust in a strongman or dictator who promised to control
the masses. What needed to be learned from America was the value of administrative decentralization, voluntary associations, and the rule of law, as well as an understanding of the positive role that religion could play as a basis for public morality when church and state are separated. In modern parlance, Tocqueville was saying that liberal democracy required a strong civil society, and France, because of its traditions of statism and revolution, did not as yet possess one.[5]
Tocqueville's generalizations about the dangers of privatism and statism in a democratic society in volume two of Democracy in America are, as Lamberti points out, based mainly on his perception of French tendencies.
Tocqueville's comparative insights were based on a political philosophy that departs in certain respects from the usual representations of nineteenth-century liberalism. As Roger Boesche has pointed out, it was a "strange liberalism" that comes close to being sui generis. Tocqueville did share with a number of other liberals the desire to moderate or discipline the leveling tendencies of the age in order to retain some of the virtues associated with the aristocratic past. Alan S. Kahan has recently identified an important strain of European social and political thought, well exemplified by Tocqueville, that he calls "aristocratic liberalism."[6]
Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987); Adam S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burkhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (New York, 1992).
Nevertheless, Tocqueville was especially, if not uniquely, insistent on the need to maintain aristocratic conceptions of honor, public service, and respect for personal distinction in the face of the apparently irresistible trends of world history that favored democracy, equality, and the ascendancy of the middle class. Although he saw no practical or preferable alternative to a market economy, he viewed the untrammeled pursuit of economic self-interest that it encouraged as dangerous to liberty rather than expressive of it. He did not believe for a moment that public and private interests were automatically reconciled by the operation of a laissez-faire economy. For him, liberty in the fullest sense required that citizens participate regularly and creatively in public affairs out of a patriotic devotion to the common good or the national interest.
The distinction that historians of American political thought sometimes make between classical republicanism and liberalism is difficult to apply to Tocqueville because of the way he synthesized elements of both traditions. Classical republicans feared declension from the standards of virtuous citizenship exemplified by the small republics of ancient Greece or early Renaissance Italy, while liberals normally celebrated modernity as moral and material progress. Tocqueville believed that modernity in the form of large nation-states, commercial-industrial development, and mass politics was irresistible, but it might or might not mean progress. Progress for him, as for Condorcet and other thinkers of the Englightenment, meant the growth of truth and virtue through the exercise of freedom. But he departed from the optimism of
the Enlightenment and many of its nineteenth-century liberal successors by making true progress a possibility or hope—something to be striven for—rather than an inevitability. Retrogression to barbarism and tyranny was also possible. The tension in his thinking between progressive hopes and declensionist fears—his belief that human beings were naturally capable of becoming more virtuous and rational but were also corruptible and subject to destructive passions—invites us to characterize him as a republican liberal or a liberal republican. And it raises the possibility that there is no necessary or essential contradiction between these two political philosophies.
For the most part, Tocqueville disdained deterministic theories of historical development. He maintained that the choices made by human beings and the actions that resulted from them would determine the future—not race, geography, or impersonal economic forces. He also believed, however, that national or ethnic cultures—a given people's "mores"—changed very slowly and that their persistence restricted the range of available choices. The tension between the voluntarism of his liberal hopes and the quasi-determinism of his cultural anthropology was a key element in the thought about race and empire to be found in Democracy in America and in his writings on French colonialism.
Tocqueville lived at a time when Europeans or people of European descent were acutely aware of the "Otherness" of Africans, Asians, and American Indians. Most of those who defined themselves as white believed strongly in their own superiority to those they designated as black, brown, yellow, and red. But they disagreed as to the causes and nature of white or European superiority and its implications for the kinds of relationships that were justified and desirable between Europeans and non-Europeans. Ideological racists, like Tocqueville's friend and correspondent Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau and some of the defenders of slavery in the southern United States, were beginning to advance the theory that racial differences in competence and capacities were innate or biologically determined and that existing hierarchies in power and privilege were in accordance with the laws of nature. From their perspective the efforts of humanitarians to liberate and uplift non-European peoples was sentimental folly. But the vast missionary enterprise of the Christian churches, which was burgeoning in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, was based on the presumption that the "heathens" of Africa, Asia, and the Americas could be converted and "civilized." Existing European superiority was not in dispute, but there were serious disagreements on whether the inferiority of non-Europeans
was the irremediable verdict of science or a temporary condition subject to amelioration through programs of reform and education that might in the future raise them to the level of civilization currently manifested by the West.
The specific question that brought these issues to the fore between the 1830s and the 1850s—the period when Tocqueville was writing—was the future of black slavery in the Americas. Those abolitionists who professed religious and humanitarian motives subscribed to the missionary logic. Their opponents, as well as some of those who opposed slavery on purely pragmatic or economic grounds, were increasingly influenced by the arguments of naturalistic racists. Because it combined the Christian humanitarian impulse and a growing commitment to capitalistic free labor, the antislavery movement proved to be irresistible during the middle decades of the nineteenth century—first in British colonies, then in those of France, and finally (although only after great bloodletting) in the United States.
But the hegemony of Europeans over other races or ethnic groups was not limited to the enslavement of blacks. This was also an era of Western imperial expansion in Africa, Asia, and North America. The United States participated in this process without fully acknowledging it by enlarging its domain through the conquest and dispossession of American Indian societies and the acquisition of new territories with Mestizo and Indian populations as a result of the war with Mexico. For the French, the 1830s and 1840s saw the beginnings of the colonization of Algeria. The question of race and the Otherness of non-European peoples played a role in white or European discourse about empire, but with somewhat different ideological alignments than in the debates over slavery. Missionaries and Christian philanthropists were likely to favor imperial expansion because it brought more people within the reach of the gospel. (In the United States, however, the entanglement of the slavery question with the expansionist program made many northern missionaries less than enthusiastic about Manifest Destiny.) Naturalistic racists, on the other hand, could have qualms about assuming any direct responsibility for people who had such limited capacities for improvement unless, as in the case of American Indians, they were viewed as on the path to extinction. An example of racist opposition to territorial expansion was the ideological resistance to a proposed annexation of all of "mongrel" Mexico by the United States when it seemingly had the power to do so after its victory in the war of 1846–1847.[7]
See chapters 6 and 7 of Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York, 1963). Similar qualms about the futility of uplifting "inferior races" reemerged as a theme of American anti-imperialist discourse at the end of the century.
European and Euro-American estimates of the problems or opportunities associated with the imperial domination or colonization of particular societies or regions inhabited by non-Europeans depended to a great extent on how they evaluated the current social and cultural state of the people to be dominated. Scientific racists differed on how many "Great Races" there were—the number ranged from three to five depending on whether Malay-Polynesians and American Indians were subsumed under Mongolians or regarded as distinctive. But every European or American effort to rank the races of the world put Caucasians on top and Negroes at the bottom.
Another way of ranking peoples encountered in the expansion of Europe was derived from eighteenth-century conceptions of social and cultural evolution. The idea that humanity in general had progressed from savagery to barbarism to civilization provided a guide to non-European societies and to the use that European colonizers could make of them. "Savages"—essentially nomadic hunter-gatherers—were difficult to domesticate and civilize (they did not even make good slaves), but if they were relatively thin on the ground, as they usually were, they could be expected to die off to make way for white colonists, as appeared to be happening in Australia and North America. Barbarous peoples—herders of livestock and subsistence farmers such as many of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa—might be utilized for agricultural labor or for work in mines. The most problematic category were those sometimes designated as "semicivilized" because they had cities and developed commercial economies, written languages, and religions that competed with Christianity in their intellectual and institutional sophistication. India, China, and the Arab-dominated societies of North Africa and the Middle East were the "semicivilized" areas of most interest to European imperialists in the period between the 1830s and the 1850s. Missionaries found such peoples difficult to convert because of the depth and strength of their commitment to Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, or Buddhism. The path of least resistance for Europeans who wished to dominate and exploit societies of this type was some form of indirect rule through the cooptation of traditional rulers that necessarily entailed a willingness to tolerate non-Christian religious beliefs and practices. When they possessed large and thickly settled indigenous populations, such areas were regarded as unpromising receptacles for white emigrants or colonists.
This necessarily crude and oversimplified sketch of white or European attitudes toward race and empire between the 1830s and the
1850s provides a context for describing and analyzing Tocqueville's reflections on "Otherness" and how to deal with it. As a man of his own time and place, the author of Democracy in America (as well as an important series of reports on French prospects in Algeria) could hardly have failed to be influenced by the ethnocentrism and imperialism that pervaded current thought about the relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans. The ultimate question for those who wish to assess the legacy of Tocqueville's republican liberalism is whether his Eurocentric biases—and his willingness to tolerate, and sometimes to defend, brutal and unscrupulous uses of power to subjugate non-Europeans—were essential or incidental features of his political thought. Can one be a Tocquevillian without being a white or European chauvinist?
If racism is defined as a belief in the innate inferiority of the Other, then Tocqueville was not a racist, and his thought shows how strict biological determinism conflicts with the kind of liberalism he espoused. His most famous and categorical rejection of biological racism came in two letters that he wrote to Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau in the 1850s objecting to the latter's racial theories. Gobineau's conception of a natural racial hierarchy and his warnings against the degeneracy that supposedly resulted from miscegenation between higher and lower races (even among European or white populations of differing ethnic origins) were to have enormous influence on the growth of the ultimately genocidal doctrine that Aryans were superior to Semites as well as to Africans and Asians and must maintain their racial purity at all costs.[8]
See Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Paris, 1853-1855). An English translation was published in the United States in 1856.
Tocqueville wrote to Gobineau in 1853 objecting to such theories as "probably wrong and very certainly pernicious." He regarded them as a materialist equivalent of the religious doctrine of predestination and charged that they resulted in "a very great contradiction, if not a complete abolition, of human liberty." "What interest can there be," he asked, "in persuading the base people who live in barbarism, in indolence, or in servitude, that since they exist in such a state by virtue of the nature of their race, there is nothing they can do to ameliorate their condition, change their mores, or modify their government?" From the perspective of Tocqueville's liberal ideology, "the destiny of man, either as an individual or as a nation, is what he wants to make of it." As he made clear in a letter of 1857, Tocqueville's Christian faith also testified against biological racism and affirmed that all human beings could be educated and civilized. Anyone who believed in the biblical doctrine of the unity of mankind and accepted the underlying assumptions of the
campaign to spread the gospel throughout the world had to reject Gobineau's racial determinism.[9]
Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche (Berkeley, 1985), 297-301, 342-344.
It is clear from this correspondence that Tocqueville and Gobineau agreed on the existing abject inferiority of non-European and non-Christian peoples or nations. They differed only on the causes of this "base" condition and its possibility for change. For Gobineau the condition of non-Europeans was a reflection of their physical or biological makeup and was therefore unchangeable; whereas Tocqueville, who attributed it to culture and circumstances, believed that it could be ameliorated through missionary work, education, and the imposition of a civilizing discipline. It also may be noteworthy that Tocqueville was more convinced that Gobineau's theories were "pernicious" than he was that they were actually false. In a manner reminiscent of Pascal's wager, he suggested that a belief in the improvability of barbarous peoples might make it happen, whereas the lack of such a belief ruled out the possibility.
Tocqueville's earlier discussion in the first volume of Democracy in America (published in 1835) of the whites, blacks, and Indians of the United States revealed similar assumptions. According to James Schleifer, the notebooks in which Tocqueville recorded his impressions of America in 1831 and 1832 contain a consideration and ultimately the rejection of "a biological explanation" of American national character. What convinced him that circumstances were more important than "bloodlines" in explaining the attitudes and behavior of the dominant race were the great differences he found in the habits and outlook of northern and southern whites, who seemed to him almost like two peoples. But some ambiguities remained. "In the years after," Schleifer writes,
Tocqueville never totally discarded the idea that race played some role in the shaping of human societies. Race, for example, became an element of l'origine . But what precisely did he mean by race? By the end of his American journey, he thought usually in terms of tenacious but slowly evolving mœurs . Yet what was the exact nature of the connection between bloodlines and national character or mœurs ? Unfortunately he failed to pinpoint the meaning of these words.
Noting that American frontiersmen did not revert to barbarism when they took to the woods, he speculated that the feelings and habits of civilized life had become too deeply ingrained to be altered by a radical change in environment. Nevertheless, Tocqueville's discussion of "The Three Races That Inhabit the United States" in Volume I of Democracy
in America , "repeatedly emphasized the radically dissimilar social, legal, and historical circumstances of the three races. Nowhere would he defend biological determinism."[10]
James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1980), 45-46, 66-67.
A close reading of Tocqueville's long chapter on "the three races" bears out Schleifer's analysis. The differences that he found between the mental and behavioral characteristics of whites, Indians, and blacks were enormous and might have led another observer to jump to the conclusion that they belonged to separate species. The gaps were so great that no trend toward assimilation could be detected—"they have mixed without combining and each follows a separate destiny." But for Tocqueville the principal cause of this separatism and mutual hostility was the fact that the whites had established a monopoly on "enlightenment, power, and happiness" and treated the other races with arrogance and brutality. The enslaved blacks were denied "virtually all the privileges of humanity" and consequently were reduced to a state of misery and abject servility that had penetrated their very souls. Slavery, he argued, had degraded and dehumanized blacks to the point where they were unfit for freedom and would not know what to do with it if it were offered to them. Indians, on the other hand, were proud and free, but for this very reason were doomed to extinction because they would not submit to the rule or embrace the culture of the whites. "The Negro would like to mingle with the European but cannot. The Indian might to some extent succeed in that, but he scorns to attempt it. The servility of the former delivers him over into slavery, the pride of the latter leads him to death."[11]
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 317-320.
To account for the impending doom of the American Indians, Tocqueville invoked the theory of cultural evolution previously described. As "savages," Indians were far behind the whites in the scale of human progress. They had the natural capacity to catch up, as "the success of the Cherokee" demonstrated, but the pace of white settlement and the policy of Indian removal would not allow them the time to civilize themselves. "Civilization is the result of prolonged social endeavor taking place at the same spot, an endeavor which each generation bequeaths to the next." Echoing the Jeffersonian theory of how Indians might be civilized, Tocqueville prescribed a settled agricultural existence. But their devotion to hunting and wandering, as well as the encroachment of whites on their lands whenever they tried to become rooted on the soil, made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to take up farming and thereby advance to the next stage of cultural evolution.[12]
Ibid, 321-339 (quote on 327).
For blacks, the prospects were also dismal. Slavery for Tocqueville was an indefensible violation of natural rights and should be abolished as soon as possible, but the restriction of servitude "to one of the races of man" had created a problem for which emancipation would be no solution. In the ancient world, the freed slaves could be assimilated because they did not differ in appearance from their former masters. But in the United States, "the Negro transmits to his descendants at birth the external mark of his ignominy." For blacks to achieve equality or even a measure of acceptance, prejudice based on color would have to be eradicated. But such a transformation of white racial attitudes seemed unlikely or impossible to Tocqueville: "For my part, remembering the extreme difficulty with which aristocratic bodies, of whatever nature they may be, mingle with the mass of the people, and the excessive care they take to preserve down the centuries the artificial barriers that keep them apart, I despair of seeing an aristocracy founded on visible and indelible signs vanish." The practice of democracy among whites made the problem even more intractable than it would have been otherwise. "Some despot subjecting the Americans and their former slaves beneath the same yoke might perhaps force the races to mingle; while American democracy remains at the head of affairs no one would dare attempt any such thing, and it is possible to foresee that the freer the whites in America are, the more they will seek to isolate themselves." In these passages, Tocqueville anticipated the view of some modern historians and sociologists that the United States developed historically as a kind of "Herrenvolk democracy"—a society in which political and social equality was prized by white males on the understanding that equal citizenship was the prerogative of the master race. Tocqueville was less certain about the ultimate fate of African Americans than he was about the doom of the Indians, but he predicted that emancipation in the South would be followed by a race war in which blacks might conceivably hold their own, thereby gaining a southerly slice of North America for their own exclusive occupancy.[13]
Ibid, 340-363 (quotes on 341, 342, 356). On the concept of Herrenvolk democracy, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Middletown, Conn., 1987, orig. pub. 1971), 61-64 and passim.
What is most striking about these observations is their unrelieved pessimism about the prospects for racial equality or harmony in the United States. If genetically inherited racial traits and instincts were not what was preventing the eventual assimilation of blacks and Indians or even their peaceful coexistence with the white majority, something else was doing the job just as effectively. There is a fine line between the biological determinism that Tocqueville rejected and his fatalism about the prospects of changing the mores and social habits that distinguished
the three races, separated them, and brought them into deadly conflict. Where, one wonders, was the human liberty that he generally cited in opposition to deterministic theories? More specifically, the view that white Americans could not rise above their cultural racism and overcome their color prejudices seems like a flagrant denial of Tocqueville's liberal faith in the capacity of human beings to transcend the past and improve themselves and their world.
Tocqueville's sense of the inherent obstacles that would impede and probably defeat efforts to achieve justice and equality for racially defined minorities in a liberal-democratic society may have shown the limits of his liberal faith, but they cannot be rejected on those grounds alone. Who can say with certainty that history has proved him wrong? John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville's friend and fellow giant among nineteenth-century liberal thinkers, believed that representative government worked well only among ethnically homogeneous populations. Although he never made the same point explicitly, Tocqueville's conclusion that American democracy was, and would remain, an exclusively white affair was another way of saying that governments based on the will of the people depended for their success and stability on the ethnic solidarity of the people that was expressing its will.
The success of American democracy, it might be argued from Tocquevillian premises, resulted in part from the very fact that blacks and Indians were excluded from the body politic. The only apparent alternative to exclusion and subordination was uncontrollable race conflict. Describing the presence of black slaves in one section of the United States as the greatest threat to the democratic republic, he warned presciently that the slavery issue could provoke a great cataclysm that would dissolve the Union. Some of the same American political virtues that he hoped the French could emulate, especially decentralization and local self-government, were also major obstacles to the peaceful abolition of slavery and the extension of citizenship rights to blacks. Localized white majorities would never give up their racial privileges. It would thus take some form of centralized dictatorship to accomplish such a revolutionary change. In other words, one might readily conclude that the virtues of American democracy were inseparable from its vices and that one could not have one without the other. Left to itself as an expression of the liberty and equality of the white majority, American democracy would never treat blacks and Indians fairly and decently. Only by undermining the liberty and self-government of the
whites would it become possible to emancipate the blacks and protect the Indians. It was a dilemma for which Tocqueville saw no resolution.
What made the problem insoluble was Tocqueville's conception of the persistence and continuity of the "mores" of any people or ethnic group. Mores did change, but very slowly over the course of many generations. The mores of white Americans included race consciousness as a central and defining element. "The pride of origin, which is natural to the English, is most remarkably increased in the American by the personal pride derived from democratic liberty. The white man in the United States is proud of his race and proud of himself." Any effort to equalize the status of blacks would be an affront to white pride, an assault on the whites' positive sense of identity. Although not a biological determinist, Tocqueville came close to being a cultural determinist. When the mores that gave character to a nation conflicted with universalist ideals of justice and equality, he expected the ideals to give way. His denial to white Americans of a capacity to overcome their ingrained racial prejudices illustrated a general principle: "It can happen that a man will rise above the prejudices of religion, country, and race, and if that man is a king, he can bring about astonishing transformations in society, but it is not possible for a whole people to rise, as it were, above itself." From his day to ours, black nationalists and those white liberals who have despaired of overcoming the cultural racism of their fellow citizens have echoed Tocqueville's gloomy prognosis.[14]
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 257, 356. One striking example of liberal pessimism about black-white equality is the racial thought of Abraham Lincoln. See George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 54-72. For a recent manifestation see Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal (New York, 1992).
Since France had what Tocqueville regarded as an ethnically homogeneous population, it could learn from the positive features of American democracy without being concerned about the injustice that majorities might inflict on racial minorities. This happy circumstance explains why the chapter on race was relegated to the end of the first volume of Democracy in America after Tocqueville had completed his "main task" of describing "the laws and mores of American democracy." He regarded the racial situation as so tragic and threatening that it could fatally undermine the American experiment, but he relegated it to a virtual appendix because he wanted the French to understand the "normal" operation of American government and society in a way that might inspire the emulation of some of its features.[15]
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 316.
If France was racially homogeneous, its overseas empire was not. Tocqueville confronted the problem of the relationship between his own people and non-Europeans most directly in his writings and reports on French colonial subjects between 1837 and 1847. During the public service that he performed between his first candidacy for the
Chamber of Deputies in 1837 and his brief tenure as foreign minister after the Revolution of 1848, he was devoted to two main objects: the abolition of slavery in the French empire and the colonization of Algeria.
For Tocqueville, applied Christian ethics, which he believed lay at the root of the egalitarianism and fraternalism of the French Revolution, made the abolition of slavery a moral imperative. As he wrote in his 1843 article on "L'émancipation ," "It is we who have given a definite and practical meaning to the Christian idea that all men are born equal, and we have applied it to the realities of this world." It was disgraceful therefore that the French had not abolished slavery in their own colonies: "It is we who, by destroying the principle of castes and classes throughout the world, by rediscovering … the rights of the human race that had been lost … [and] by spreading throughout the universe the idea of equality of all men before the law, as Christianity had created the idea of the equality of all men before God, … are the true authors of the abolition of slavery."[16]
Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 192.
As a man of affairs who aspired to be a statesman, however, Tocqueville could not afford to be a pure idealist when the subject at hand involved French national interests. Eschewing the unconditional moralism of a William Lloyd Garrison, he took account of the practical problems created by emancipation in the specific proposals he advanced for ending slavery in the French overseas empire. In the report that he wrote for the national assembly in 1839 and in a series of articles published in 1843, he drew on what he had observed in America and on the recent experience of British emancipation in the West Indies to advance a proposal that had two main features—compensation for slaveholders and direct government responsibility for educating and controlling the former slaves. In lieu of the operations of a free-labor market, he advocated what Matthew Mancini has described as "a form of state socialism." As Tocqueville put it in the 1839 report: "The bond that now exists between [masters and slaves] should be totally dissolved. The state should become the sole guardian of the enfranchised population." He thus registered his skepticism as to whether a colonial environment could be conducive to liberty and civilization without the sustained intervention of the metropolitan authorities. Benevolent despotism, which would be destructive of liberal-democratic tendencies in France itself, would be essential for the well-being and progress of its former slave colonies, just as it would have been the only way to achieve fairness for blacks and Indians in the United States. Once again, he assumed that the habits of mind bequeathed by a history of slavery
and racial hierarchy meant that the only kind of democracy sustainable in such an environment was the Herrenvolk or racially circumscribed variety.[17]
For a good account of Tocqueville's views on slavery in the French colonies, see Matthew Mancini, Alexis De Tocqueville (New York, 1994). 103-119 (quote on 115).
Besides being an architect of the French abolition policy that came to fruition in 1848, Tocqueville was a strong and influential advocate of the colonization of Algeria. In 1830 the city of Algiers had been taken by the French in reprisal for the insult to French honor that had occurred when the Dey of Algiers struck the French consul with a fly whisk during talks over a longstanding debt. During the 1830s France occupied only a limited area around Algiers and remained uncommitted to the establishment of a permanent colony. But in 1841 the government decided to embark on an expansion of the French enclave leading to the full-scale conquest and colonization of the region, a process that was completed in 1847 after fierce indigenous resistance had been overcome by means of a brutally repressive policy that featured massacres of noncombatants and the destruction of crops and villages. Tocqueville took up the subject in 1837 when he was running unsuccessfully for the Chamber of Deputies. (He would succeed two years later.) In 1841 and 1846 he traveled to Algeria to observe local conditions. After the second trip, which he made as an official representative of the Chamber of Deputies committee on Algeria, he was the principal author of an influential report calling for reforms of the administration of the colony to give more freedom to the French settlers.[18]
My discussion of Tocqueville's views on Algeria is based on Melvin Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," Review of Politics 35 (1963), 362-398; André Jardin, Tocqueville, trans. Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway (New York, 1988), 318-342; Alexis de Tocqueville, De la colonie en Algérie, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris 1988); and Todorov, On Human Diversity, 191-207.
A fervent advocate of French colonization, Tocqueville based his case for imperialism on political rather than economic grounds. France's place among nations required its participation in what he described to an English correspondent in 1840 as the great event of the age: "the subjugation of four-fifths of the world by the remaining one-fifth." In his 1837 letter on Algeria he expressed a hope that France's "share in the partition of the Orient" would not be limited to its involvement in Algeria. Tocqueville greatly admired the British for their domination of India, believing that the assumption of this responsibility had improved the British national character, and he wanted the French to have the same kind of redemptive experience. The alternative, if the French failed to rise to the challenge, would not be the preservation of Algerian independence, but rather colonization by another European power, which would thereby increase its power and prestige at the expense of France.[19]
Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," 385; Todorov, On Human Diversity, 194-202; Tocqueville, Algérie, 60-61.
This strategic argument for national expansionism, which would be echoed by many later imperialists (leading some historians to wonder if
economic motives were really at the core of the imperialist impulse), was combined with a powerful concern for French domestic politics and culture. Tocqueville despised the July Monarchy that had come to power as a result of the Revolution of 1830 for its corruption and encouragement of materialism. The best antidote that he could find for the decadence and self-seeking individualism that was threatening the French national character was the kind of patriotism that could be aroused by war and overseas adventures. The conquest of Algeria was necessary therapy for the bourgeois society of France as well as a contribution to the progress of the human race. To inspire dedication to the common good at home, it was necessary to subjugate foreign populations.[20]
Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," 381-388; Todorov, On Human Diversity, 195-196.
Did Tocqueville's belligerent French nationalism contradict his liberalism or constitute its logical extension to the international sphere? The two leading authorities on his thought about Algeria disagree sharply on this question. Melvin Richter concludes that his position on Algeria conflicted with the principles that he applied in Democracy in America: "When this issue forced him to choose, he placed nationalism above liberalism; the interests of 'progressive' Christian countries above the rights of those who were not." Tzvetan Todorov, on the other hand, argues that an amoral and ruthlessly nationalistic foreign policy was the logical corollary of domestic liberalism. Personal rights, according to liberal theory, exist only within a context in which the rule of law serves to protect the individual against the "volonté générale " (general will). In the absence of a world government or enforceable regime of international law, there is neither a general will nor an effective limitation on the liberty of individuals (which in the international sphere are nations rather than persons). Consequently, liberty is expressed internationally by the exercise of state power on behalf of national interests. If a government were to abjure the power competition among nations, it would merely open itself to foreign conquest and domination. Hence the preservation of a nation's liberty justifies disregarding the rights of persons and communities beyond its borders.[21]
Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," 364; Todorov, On Human Diversity, 199-202.
Whether the democratic rights of other peoples must be respected by those who prize them at home has in fact been a matter of dispute among liberals from Tocqueville's time to ours. Todorov's formulation has the merit of making Tocqueville comprehensible; it shows how he could imagine himself to be consistent whether he was or not. Western liberalism has, for the most part, been closely linked to nationalism and has proved to be a relatively ineffective basis for resistance to imperialism.
Liberals have sometimes been anti-imperialist in principle, but more often they have called for a repudiation of colonial responsibilities on the basis of pragmatic calculations of "national interest." Yet the ethical content of liberalism would appear to conflict with the kind of nationalism that sanctions the conquest and enslavement of other peoples in the pursuit of glory and as a remedy for domestic "decadence." Tocqueville keenly felt the immorality of slavery and lamented its brutalizing effects on its victims. No considerations of national interest could assuage such feelings of guilt and remorse about how whites had treated Africans since the sixteenth century. It remains to be explained why his liberal conscience virtually ceased to function when he was confronted with an imperialist war of conquest that was conducted with ferocity and inhumanity.
Tocqueville the proponent of the civilizing mission of the Christian West came to the aid of Tocqueville the French nationalist whenever he sought a thoroughly compelling justification for the conquest of Algeria. His dual allegiance to Christianity and to the spirit of 1789 meant that he could not really be at peace with imperialism if it simply meant that the Other existed only to serve the interests of Europeans in any way they saw fit. He had in fact condemned slaveholding for the immoral and arrogant attitude that it revealed—its assumption that dark-skinned human beings, like domestic animals, could be made the instruments of those who happened to be born with lighter pigmentation. In his mind, slavery and colonial domination differed in the sense that the latter did not inevitably mean the degradation of its subjects. Conducted in the right spirit and with the right methods, it could lead to improvement in their conditions, character, and morale. The civilization of Africa and Asia by Europeans was a logical outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; it was the next great step in the progress of the human race.
But the issue in Algeria was complicated by the fact that the French had decided not merely to establish European hegemony over an indigenous society as the British had done in India, but also to introduce substantial numbers of colonists from the metropole power. Unlike India, Algeria was thought to be underpopulated and endowed with more arable land than its original inhabitants could effectively cultivate. But neither was this America; for the indigenous people were not savages who would soon die out in the face of competition from civilized white settlers. As semicivilized people and adherents of a world religion that had long held its own in the struggle with Christianity, they
presented a difficult problem for the colonizers. How, Tocqueville wondered, could a just and workable relationship be created between the indigenous majority, the white colonists, and the French governing authorities? In his 1837 "Letter on Algeria," written before he had visited the country and examined the question fully, Tocqueville proposed an assimilationist policy. The only justification for placing French colonists in the midst of Arabs, he wrote, was "to establish with them a durable link and to form ultimately a single people from the two races." Practical interests, he thought, would weaken the religious zeal of the Arabs and make it possible to reconcile the two communities.[22]
Tocqueville, Algérie, 53-54.
After he had visited Algeria in 1841, Tocqueville changed his mind about the prospects for assimilation. He was struck by the fervor of the Muslims and concluded that the Christian and Islamic sectors of Algerian society could not be combined or amalgamated in the foreseeable future. The two communities, he found, had remained almost totally separate, and any notion that they might fuse was chimerical. As a result, it was necessary for the indefinite future to maintain segregated societies with a dual system of laws. It would be useful, he concluded, to think of the European colonists "as if they were alone, since the rules to be made for them are to be applied only to them." This meant that they should be accorded some, if not all, of the basic rights they would have enjoyed if they had remained in France, but no such rights should be extended to the indigenous inhabitants. Here and elsewhere, Tocqueville opined that Islam was a religion incompatible with human progress and enlightenment. Its fatalism and confusion of the civil and religious power meant that its adherents were incapable of citizenship in a liberal-democratic polity. Because of what he took to be the enduring cultural incompatibility of the French and the Algerians, he advocated what amounted to a system of apartheid with a European monopoly on political rights. Tocqueville did not view Algerian Arabs as racial inferiors, only as religious and cultural inferiors. Like American Indians, they had the capacity to become fully civilized but lacked the will to do so.[23]
Tocqueville, Algérie, 141-142; Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," 375.
The depth of Tocqueville's animus against Islam came out several years later in a letter to Gobineau in which he expressed a cultural intolerance that some might regard as the functional equivalent of the latter's racialist claim for Aryan superiority. His study of the Koran, he reported, had convinced him that "there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Mohammed." It was more to be feared than polytheism and was in fact "a form of decadence rather
than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself." Tocqueville's willingness to support the scorched earth policies of the French army in Algeria—the destruction of crops and villages that led to mass starvation—may not have resulted simply from nationalist Realpolitik . In all likelihood, religious and cultural intolerance played a role in making him callous about the fate of the Algerians who were resisting French domination.[24]
Quoted in Jardin, Tocqueville, 322.
In his 1847 report on Algeria, which was written after the conquest had been completed and the emotions of war had died down, Tocqueville recovered some of the high ground from which he had judged white treatment of blacks and Indians in the United States: "If we demonstrate by our behavior that we consider the native population merely as an obstacle to be circumvented or smashed, if by our rule we bring them not well-being and enlightenment but destruction then the only issue between the two races will be that of life and death. Sooner or later Algeria will become the bloody arena for a mortal combat between these two peoples with mercy neither offered nor accepted." He hoped it might be otherwise, but given what he had written in Democracy in America about the normal brutality of Europeans toward other races—including the kinds of policies that he himself had endorsed while the conquest of Algeria was under way—what grounds could he have had for optimism?[25]
Tocqueville, Algérie, 178-179; Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," 367. (I use Richter's translation of this remarkable passage.)
To return to our basic question: Was Tocqueville's liberal humanism an invitation to the disparagement and domination of cultural Others or a potential deterrent to it? Postmodernist writers have concluded, for the most part, that liberalism is inherently Eurocentric and in some sense racist, and they can find support for this assessment in Tocqueville's writings. But such a verdict, in my opinion, requires a view of liberalism defined in terms of historical contingencies rather than recognizing that it is a dynamic faith subject to revision in the light of changing circumstances and further reflection on its essential meaning. What is timeless and basic in liberalism is a commitment to individual liberty and human rights. But the meaning of liberty and its recognition of the rights regarded as sacred and inalienable have expanded over time. Tocqueville apprehended some of the enduring spirit of liberalism. Most significantly, in my opinion, he demonstrated conclusively that liberal thought is not the same thing as capitalist apologetics, but in fact has a potential life of its own that can provide a basis for resisting the materialism and economic determinism of free-market ideology. But it is also obvious that his time, place,
and personal circumstances put limits on how and where he could apply his liberal-humanist faith. Furthermore, his quasi-deterministic theory of the persistence of mores and national characters seriously compromised his sense of human freedom and possibility.
Liberals need to be realistic about the possibility of change, but an underlying commitment to freedom and indeterminacy should prevent them from becoming fatalists. Liberal values may indeed conflict with those of religions and cultures that deny or severely limit human freedom, but coercion or intolerance are not the answer. Tocqueville believed that the best solution for the problems of democracy was more democracy. Similarly, he might have argued, if he had followed this logic further, that peoples and nations cannot be forced to be free; they must rather be given the opportunity to become free if they so desire. Colonialism, like slavery, was a clear denial of this imperative.
If Tocqueville's thought reveals a permanent and unresolvable conflict in liberalism, it is not the one that postmodernists commonly find, the intellectual contradiction between a professed universalism and a covert racism and ethnocentrism. From a logical and philosophical perspective, a universalism that is truly universal is conceivable and would be capable of resolving this conflict. The most serious and durable split within liberalism that Tocqueville's thought exposes is the inherent conflict between the liberal philosopher and the liberal politician or statesman. The theorist may be a cosmopolitan advocate of principles that apply to humanity in general, but the locus of liberal politics is the nation-state. Conflicts will inevitably arise between the liberty and welfare of American or French citizens and those of people elsewhere in the world. When liberals debate immigration policy, for example, they generally consider only the rights and interests of the nation's current inhabitants, not those of potential immigrants from other societies. More broadly speaking, what is best for one's own society is not necessarily best for humanity in general. As long as nation-states govern the world, universalist liberalism will be unable to realize its ideals. This was Tocqueville's real dilemma—and ours.
Chapter Seven
Black-White Relations since Emancipation
The Search for a Comparative Perspective
Preeminent among historical topics that have been explored extensively from a cross-cultural perspective is the institution of slavery, especially the comparison of the Old South's "peculiar institution" with systems of unfree labor elsewhere in the world. For more than forty years, scholars have been probing the similarities and differences between African servitude in the southern United States and in other slave societies of the New World; more recently Africa itself has been brought into the comparison; and now we even have a major study of North American slavery and Russian serfdom.[1]
Among the major studies comparing slavery in the United States and Latin American are Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946); Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York, 1964); Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Cuba and Virginia (Chicago, 1967); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), 223-288; Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971); and Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, ed. Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (New York, 1977). For comparisons with slavery in South Africa, see George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981), 54-135. Comparative perspectives on slavery elsewhere in Africa can be found in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison, Wis., 1977); Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1977); and The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (Madison, Wis., 1988). The latest extension of the scope of comparative slavery studies is Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
Some of these studies go beyond the discussion of slavery itself and argue that black-white relations in the postemancipation era were predetermined or at least strongly influenced by the character of the antecedent slave society.[2]
Although they disagree sharply on whether or not how slaves were treated had a determining effect on postemancipation race relations, or indeed on the question of what, if any differences there were in the harshness or leniency of servitude in the areas being compared, the books cited in note 1 by Tannenbaum, Harris, Klein, and Degler all attribute the creation of enduring racial patterns to the kinds of distinctions and modes of stratification that developed in the context of a slave society.
Although it would be hard to deny that the slave regime left an enduring legacy of attitudes and habits predisposing former masters and slaves to think and behave in certain ways, it is doubtful whether one can deal effectively with the subsequent history of race relations exclusively, or even principally, from this perspective. Circumstances and events of the postemancipation era, of a kind not clearly prefigured by slavery and the attitudes associated with it, may be of more importance in understanding postemancipation race relations than the peculiarities of the slave past. This is especially true if we take the long view and consider not merely what happened to the freedmen immediately after the abolition of chattel servitude but attempt to trace the trajectory of black experience from the time of emancipation tothe present. Such a longitudinal view reveals major changes as well as significant continuities, and it would seem unlikely that we could explain change and development in terms of the characteristics or effects of an institution that was abolished before these transformations took place.
The subject of race relations over the entire time span from the end of slavery to the present remains relatively undeveloped in comparative historical analysis. This paper is no more than prologue to such an undertaking, because it starts from the premise that fruitful comparison can begin only after we know what other case or cases of modern race or class relations would provide the most useful comparative perspectives on what has happened to African Americans since the Civil War. There is no substitute for in-depth bilateral or trilateral comparisons if we wish to get a purchase on particular historical experiences, but here I seek merely to point the way to appropriate comparisons without actually making them in more than a hypothetical or heuristic way.
My point of departure is a synthetic view of the course or trajectory of black-white relations in the South, and ultimately in the United States as a whole, since emancipation. From such a general understanding, it should be possible to look at some other cases or types of cases to determine what kinds of insights or perspectives a more systematic comparison might be expected to yield.
Black Americans were emancipated as the byproduct of a Civil War that was fought for the preservation of the federal union. As a result of the necessities and opportunities of war, as viewed from the Union side, emancipation was adopted as an expedient policy that also appealed to the ideals of democracy and free labor that many northerners espoused as the basis of their superiority to the "aristocratic" South with its reliance on an archaic form of unfree labor. It is often incorrectly asserted that the slaves made no significant contribution to their own liberation. In fact they voted against slavery with their feet and offered themselves en masse to the Union army as a source of manpower. Had they remained quietly at work on the plantations, the temptation to free them as "a war measure" would have been weaker and perhaps even resistible.[3]
See The Destruction of Slavery, series 1, vol. 1 of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ed. Ira Berlin et al. (Cambridge, U.K., 1985).
By itself, emancipation did not determine the status of blacks in American society. Racial prejudice and white-supremacist ideology remained strong in the North as well as the South in the immediate postwar years, and a possible model for the role of freedmen in the new order was the status of the half-million free Negroes of the antebellum
period, who had been, as much in the North as in the South, a segregated pariah class without citizenship or "rights white men were bound to respect," except the right to own their own bodies, possess such property as they might somehow be able to acquire, and choose their own employers when not apprenticed under some form of labor contract. If one could have taken a poll of white Americans immediately after the Civil War, there seems little doubt that a majority would have favored such an arrangement. It was only because the postwar agenda of the ruling Republican party required black citizenship that the constitution was amended to provide for equality under the law and nonracial suffrage. Republican motives have been much debated, and various efforts have been made to distinguish elements of principle and expediency in the formation of Radical race policy. What is important for our purposes is that some combination of practical circumstances and ideological pressures made the fundamental Law of the Land into a barrier to legalized or publicly sanctioned racial discrimination, although the question of how far it went or what precisely it covered would long remain debatable.
Constitutional reform of this kind was not sufficient to turn exslaves into citizens. Efficient enforcement and generous interpretation of the law was necessary, and these were not forthcoming except fitfully and for a relatively short period. By the late 1870s, the southern states were once again under the dominance of white supremacist majorities, and the rights accorded blacks during the Reconstruction era were largely nullified. In the period 1890–1910, the southern states, with the consent of the United States Supreme Court, segregated blacks by law in virtually all public facilities and amended their constitutions to bring about the de facto disfranchisement of most of the freedmen and their descendants. In the North, blacks retained many of their civil rights, including the right to vote and hold office, but they had no adequate defense against the private or extralegal discrimination that denied them equal access to jobs, housing, education, police protection, and public amenities. The organized and articulate black response to these developments took two forms. In the South, where opposition to black political rights was massive and unyielding, the dominant ideology was accommodationist, condoning social segregation, stressing economic self-help, and deferring aspirations for full citizenship. The accommodationist and gradualist approach of Booker T. Washington was also influential in the North, especially among a rising class of black entrepreneurs working within an increasingly segregated economy. But in
the early 1900s, northern black professionals, seeking to turn back the tide of Jim Crow laws and practices, launched a protest movement, modeled on pre—Civil War abolitionism, that rejected Washington's accommodationism and called for the end of enforced segregation, disfranchisement, and all publicly sanctioned discrimination. In 1909 they joined a group of white liberals and socialists to form the organization that soon became known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In the meantime, economic and demographic changes were occurring that would alter the contours of black-white relations. For the first half-century of freedom, most blacks remained in the rural South as sharecroppers and farm laborers, or, in the case of a fortunate minority, as renters or owners of small farms. Except to the extent that they worked in such extractive industries as mining and lumbering, blacks were scarcely affected by industrialization; in the South most factory jobs were reserved for poor whites. Hamstrung by a credit system that kept many of them in perpetual debt, these rural blacks constituted part of a class that was not supposed to exist in America—an oppressed and impoverished peasantry, an agrarian lower stratum that had some limited access to the means of production but was denied upward mobility and full rights of citizenship.
This situation began to change in the era of the First World War when the combination of an economic boom and the restriction of European immigration provided new employment opportunities for blacks in the North, including the chance to gain a toehold in secondary industry. Except for a temporary hiatus during the Great Depression, the great migration accelerated until the 1970s.
This massive shift of black population from the South to the North and from the country to the city had profound effects on American race relations. Discrimination in the housing market, combined with the preference of American ethnic groups to cluster in their own neighborhoods, produced the great urban ghettos. As has often been noted, the North was no promised land; blacks were often frustrated in their desire to find and keep decent jobs, sometimes encountered violence in their struggle for living space, and in addition to the special disabilities imposed by racial discrimination, confronted the problems of social and cultural adjustment faced by any population of ex-peasants that finds itself thrust into an urban environment.
But great advantages also followed from the migration. Despite the racial inequities, economic and educational opportunities were normally
greater than they had been in the South. Furthermore, the less repressive northern environment accorded blacks the political space to air their grievances and mount protest movements. Blacks also regained the right to vote when they went north, and politicians began to appeal to black interests and feelings for the first time since Reconstruction. As early as the 1930s, it was clear that the black vote could be crucial in municipal, state, and even national elections. With the NAACP now functioning as a legislative lobby, blacks in the 1930s were able to block the confirmation of a racist judge to the Supreme Court and came close to getting a federal antilynching law through Congress. In the same decade, blacks developed their first significant ties to organized labor when nondiscriminatory unions recruited them in such industries as auto manufacturing and steel. The transformation of blacks from peasants to proletarians picked up further momentum during World War II. Wartime labor shortages, pressures from black organizations and movements, and federal policy encouraging nondiscriminatory hiring brought about a substantial increase in the proportion of blacks in steady, relatively skilled jobs, and the enormous gap between the average incomes of whites and blacks began to close for the first time.[4]
William Julius Wilson's work drew my attention to how an increase of black resources during World War II made effective protest more likely in the postwar period. See Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Socio-Historical Perspective (New York, 1973), 122-127.
Partly on the basis of progress already made and political clout already acquired, black activists and organizations launched a successful assault on southern segregation and disfranchisement in the post—World War II period. But this victory was not simply a result of northern blacks' ability to influence federal policy toward the South. The breakdown of the sharecropping economy and the accelerating urbanization of blacks within the South in the period before, during, and after World War II gave the growing proportion of southern African Americans living in cities greater freedom and capacity to organize for protest than those still living under flagrantly repressive rural or small-town conditions. Urban black churches, unique in the extent to which they provided southern blacks with an experience of autonomy and self-government, became potential centers for community mobilization.[5]
See Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, 1984).
Encouraged by favorable Supreme Court rulings and a concept of national interest that made racism a liability in the international competition for "the hearts and minds of men" in Asia and Africa, the nonviolent direct action movement of the 1950s and 1960s was able to compel federal action to eliminate "Jim Crow" segregation and a variety of obstructions to black suffrage in the southern states. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 fulfilled the promise of the Reconstruction amendments to theConstitution and at long last put equality under the law and at the ballot box on a firm foundation.
Although it did not bring full equality or total liberation, the civil rights movement resulted in substantial and seemingly irreversible progress toward eliminating status inequality based on race in the United States. Its legislative and judicial successes appear to give the lie to the common assumption that patterns of race relations, once they become firmly established, are virtually immutable. It can now be argued on the basis of historical precedent that, however long certain people have been assigned an inferior status and to whatever extent a dominant group may have cherished a belief in their inferiority, pariah groups or oppressed minorities can gain substantive legal and political equality with their former overlords.
One should not conclude, however, that the U.S. black-white problem has been solved; it would be more accurate to say that is has changed character. The growing black middle class has been the main beneficiary of the civil rights movement and the affirmative action programs that came to be viewed as an essential means for achieving its goals. But the emergence of black judges, congressional representatives, presidential candidates, elite professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs should not obscure the fact that the impoverished black lower class—about a third of the black population—is in worse shape than ever before. Trapped in inner-city ghettoes from which the black middle class has now largely fled, these blacks remain poor, unemployed or underemployed, beset by problems of teenage pregnancy, crime, and drug abuse, and essentially cut off from the aspirations and opportunities available to most white Americans.[6]
My view of current black-white relations has been influenced by two books by William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago, 1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City Underclass and Public Policy (Chicago, 1987). I agree with Wilson that economic class has become relatively more important in recent years as a determinant of black disadvantage but would not go quite so far as he does in deemphasizing the current role of racial attitudes. Racial prejudice continues to exist and may never entirely disappear, but it can be made less harmful and even neutralized to a considerable extent by successful efforts to empower blacks economically and politically.
But this is not so much a civil rights problem in the traditional sense or even attitudinal racism as a challenge to the political economy of late twentieth-century American capitalism. Only reforms directed at changing the American economic system in a fundamental way are likely to emancipate the black poor from misery and desperation. Race-specific policies are still necessary, but solving the problem of accumulated economic and educational disadvantage—and rehabilitating the "underclass" it produces—depends on the growth of a broader and more inclusive movement for economic justice and equality.What general conclusions can be drawn from this thumbnail sketch of the African American experience since emancipation that might inform and guide our search for a comparative perspective? It should be clear enough, first of all, that the essential character of black-white relations
has not been static, but has in fact changed substantially over time—first in the direction of greater separation and segmentation between the 1870s and the First World War and thereafter in the direction of greater openness and enhanced opportunities for at least some blacks to enter the mainstream of American life. Accounting for these changes requires not only an understanding of the effect of such large-scale and long-term processes as industrialization and urbanization but also a recognition of the creative historical impact of black leaders and movements.
It is also evident, however, that one essential aspect of American race relations has not changed fundamentally—the sense of race itself as socially and politically salient. The sharp color line that was drawn during the segregation era has ceased to be the basis of invidious laws, but it lives on in the form of black-white polarization on issues such as affirmative action and the responsibility of government for the relief of poverty and its consequences. Many social questions that in other countries would be debated on their merits for the entire society—or in terms of class—tend to be viewed in the United States through a prism of calculations on how they will affect this or that racial group. Even those whites who profess a lack of prejudice or ideological racism still tend to think that there are white "interests" that clash with black "interests."
Blacks also have a strong sense of racial cohesion and group interest. It was essential to the success of the civil rights struggle that blacks develop ethnic solidarity under their own leadership. Only through the group pride that came from independent action could the masses be aroused to confront white racism in the direct and courageous way necessary to accelerate reform. Liberal whites have of course supported civil rights movements, but since the earliest years of the NAACP they have not led them or constituted a major proportion of their membership. The great paradox of the struggle for desegregation was that blacks seemingly had to separate themselves from whites in order to gain the right to come together with them. But coming together has not meant assimilation to the point of surrendering black identity. As a result of their origin and peculiar historical experience, African Americans have developed a strong sense of ethnic distinctiveness. (Even in the days when "full integration" was proclaimed as the single goal of the civil rights movement, no black leader seriously proposed eliminating separate black churches.) As long as one portion of the black population is excluded from the opportunities that American society offers to whites,
and another, more successful, segment feels insecure about whether it can hold on to the gains it has recently made, race will continue to determine the political and social outlook of most African Americans. Black ethnic assertiveness risks bringing white prejudices to the surface and provoking white tribalism and violence against blacks. The color line in the mind persists long after the color line in the law has been eliminated.
The obvious way to begin a search for comparative perspectives on the experience just described is by asking to what extent the trajectory of black-white relations in the United States is the product of special American circumstances and to what extent it reflects some larger international process. As in virtually all comparative studies involving the United States, the question comes down to the issue of American "exceptionalism." But it is not very helpful to frame this question as a simple either/or proposition. It is better to begin with the assumption that the American experience will share some of the elements of situations and transformations occurring elsewhere but will also show distinctive features that may mean that different consequences will result from comparable processes. This may sound like a truism, but if so, it is often forgotten in the heat of debate over American exceptionalism.
The comparisons that most readily come to mind are with the other former colonial societies of the New World that abolished slavery during the nineteenth century and faced a similar problem of incorporating freedpeople of African descent into a new social order. For a sustained bilateral comparison, Brazil presents many analogues to events in the United States. As a large, independent continental nation with a racial composition roughly similar to the North American, it might be expected to yield valuable comparative insights. When slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1889, the freedpeople instantly became, on paper at least, citizens with equality under the law. After attempting unsuccessfully to survive as agricultural workers or subsistence farmers, substantial numbers of former plantation slaves fled the countryside and migrated to the cities where they found little demand for their labor and were often condemned to a poverty-stricken existence on the margins of a slowly developing economy. Furthermore, like North American blacks, they often faced unequal competition from white immigrants also seeking employment as wage workers in emerging industries. In some ways, the predominately black favelas on the periphery of Brazilian cities were analogous to the inner-city black ghettos in the United States.
Faced with pervasive, if unofficial and extralegal discrimination, black Brazilians began to organize along racial lines in the late 1920s and early 1930s, forming the Frente Negra Brasilera in 1931. But the Negro front was outlawed when Getulio Vargas took power in 1937 and banned all political movements. It was not until the 1970s that the political atmosphere, as well as international examples of black insurgency, permitted a renewed expression of organized black protest. That decade saw the emergence of the Movimento Negro Unificado .[7]
Florestan Fernandes, The Negro in Brazilian Society (New York, 1971), 210-220; and I.K. Sundiatta, "Late Twentieth Century Patterns of Race Relations in Brazil and the United States," Phylon 48 (1987), 71.
One might conclude, therefore, that Brazilian blacks have been moving in the same direction as blacks in the United States but in a slower and less continuous fashion. Industrialization and the full proletarianization of the black peasantry have been inhibited by the general slowness of economic development, and black mobilization has been impeded by a lack of democratic political conditions in the country as a whole. Yet other differences between the two racial situations make it difficult to conclude that they represent merely the same process at different speeds. Brazil has never had as clearly defined and rigid a color line as the one characteristic of the United States. The well-known fluidity of racial definition in Brazil and what Carl Degler called "the mulatto escape hatch" has meant that it was never entirely clear who was black and who was white and that upward mobility through a change in racial categorization was possible, as it has rarely been in the United States with its rigid "descent rule" for ascribing racial status.[8]
See Degler, Neither Black nor White.
Furthermore, in Brazil the segregation of even those who were both dark-skinned and poor was never mandated by law or even consistently and comprehensively enforced by custom or private action. The presence of wealthy mulattos among the "white" elite and poor whites living cheek by jowl with blacks in the favelas indicates an underlying pattern of race relations quite different from that of the United States.The Brazilian comparison also suggests the extent to which an experience of segregation and overt racial discrimination may be a precondition for the development of successful black movements. Several of the black informants whom Florestan Fernandes interviewed for his classic study, The Negro in Brazilian Society , saw segregation as "the real cause of the Negro's progress in the United States" because it created a clear-cut set of grievances and led "Negroes to unite and fight for better things." One informant concluded that the Negro in Brazil was debilitated by a covert and "hypocritical" form of prejudice while the American Negro had "benefited" from "open" prejudice because it had "led him to look at himself and solve his own problems."[9]
Fernandes, Negro in Brazilian Society, 300-301, 416-417, 430.
One neednot wax lyrical over how fortunate North American blacks were to face such intense and flagrant racism to acknowledge that black mobilization and militancy came more naturally in a situation of sharp racial definition and enforced segregation than in a more fluid and ambiguous context.
Hence Brazil makes for a good comparison if one is seeking to appreciate the role of race consciousness and black-white polarization in the United States. In Brazil, it seems, nonracial determinants of class and status have been better able to bend or blur lines of demarkation based on color and ancestry. The Brazilian adage "money whitens" would be hard to apply to North American race relations, at least until very recently and in a somewhat different sense. If, however, one is seeking to learn how and why the political and social implications of a deep and polarizing sense of racial difference may change over time, Brazil is not such a useful analogue. For that purpose, it might be better to turn to another society in which official segregation and militant white supremacy emerged early in the modern industrial era and incited forms of black mobilization and protest comparable to those in the United States.
Comparing race relations in the United States and South Africa is a difficult enterprise full of traps for the unwary, particularly if one focuses on the period from the late nineteenth century to the present. In an earlier work on the development of white supremacist attitudes and policies in the two countries, I concluded that the different circumstances surrounding the practice of "segregation," as well as the actual functions performed by the legalized separation of racial groups, called into question the value of a detailed comparison of twentieth-century developments.[10]
Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 239-254.
Clearly the demographic variable, the fact that blacks have been a minority in the United States (even in the South) and a substantial majority in South Africa, means that blacks have weighed differently in the social and economic calculus of whites and that the consequences of racial equality for the politics and power relations of these nations would vary enormously. Furthermore, it is difficult to make an equivalence between an ex-slave population with its fragmented or problematic culture and indigenous peoples who, in many cases, retained vital links with traditional ethnic communities.[11]This point is made by Shula Marks in The Ambiguities of Dependence: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth-Century Natal (Baltimore, Md., 1986), 5.
In fact, I found in my earlier study of white supremacy that the South African population group most analogous to African Americans, both demographically and historically was the mixed race or Cape Colored minority rather than the African majority.[12]Fredrickson, White Supremecy, 255-281.
Nevertheless, one does get a strong whiff of similitude from one kind of source—the documentary record of public discourse on the race question from both sides of the color line. Both South African segregationists and Africans who were protesting segregation drew heavily on American racial ideologies or from common sources of international thinking about black-white relations. This was especially the case between the 1880s and the 1940s. Despite the demographic and structural differences between white hegemony and black resistance in the two societies, many participants in these ethnic struggles defined the issues similarly and engaged in debates on racial policy that echoed each other, sometimes consciously. The similarities in these discourses become evident if we compare either with the rather different colloquy on race and class in Brazil.
Ideological similarity must reflect some common features in the two racial situations that would go at least part of the way toward compensating for the demographic and cultural differences that would otherwise seem to obviate comparison. In my book White Supremacy , I probed the origins of attitudes that promoted racial hierarchy, exclusiveness, and ultimately systematic segregation. It is a complex argument, but it involves a comparable legacy of ethnocentrism, racial slavery, reactions of the beneficiaries of racial domination to nineteenth-century humanitarianism, and the adaptation of preexisting white-supremacist habits and attitudes to an emergent industrial capitalism. In short, I found a comparable interaction between inherited premodern attitudes toward race and the exigencies of industrial modernization.[13]
Ibid., passim.
Brazil, on the other hand, brought to the modern era a different conception of race relations, for reasons buried deep in its history as a slave society, and has not until very recently experienced the kind of massive and rapid shift to industrial capitalism that occurred in the United States after the Civil War and in South Africa after the Anglo-Boer War. Hence there were commonalities in both the ideological traditions of whites and the economic and social transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that would set off the general tenor of American and South African racial doctrines and policies from those predominating in Brazil during the same period.The United States and South Africa shared a conjuncture of inherited cultural racism and industrial capitalist development that might account for the fact that racial issues were to be framed in a similar way and even seemed at times amenable to analogous solutions. Massive movement of black peasants into the city and into industrial work was
a common new development of the early-to-mid twentieth century, although, admittedly, official responses to it differed significantly. Unlike the United States, where extralegal or unofficial discrimination ghettoized the new arrivals, the South African state assumed a major role in trying to control the flow and its consequences through policies that were later centralized and extended under the name of apartheid. I refer here to the pass system, influx control, prohibition of black land ownership outside of designated reserves, and reliance on contract migratory labor.
The proposition that fruitful comparisons can be made between black-white relations in the United States since emancipation and African-white relations in South Africa in the twentieth century appears even more compelling if we view matters from the other side of the color line and examine the development of black movements and ideologies. There is first of all a rich record of black South African awareness of African American ideas and achievements and a willingness to be influenced by them. Allow me simply to enumerate some examples of the African American connection: (1) the encouragement of religious separatism, or "Ethiopianism," by missionaries and bishops from the African Methodist Church of the United States between the 1890s and the First World War; (2) the reverence for Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute among the first generation of African nationalist leaders; (3) the substantial impact in South Africa during the 1920s of Marcus Garvey and his robust version of black nationalism; (4) the great prestige of W.E.B. Du Bois and his journal The Crisis among educated Africans seeking to combine a Pan-African vision with a militant struggle for equal rights in a multiracial society; (5) the influence of African American music, dance, and literature on urbanized Africans seeking to fashion a syncretic culture that would transcend ethnic differences and yet remain distinctively black; (6) the way that the South African Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s appropriated the rhetoric of the American Black Power Movement of the late 1960s. One might find an even more recent example in the civil disobedience campaign of 1989, in which black demonstrators adopted many of the techniques and even the songs of the American civil rights movement. A number of scholars are studying the role of African American influences and examples in shaping the consciousness of black South Africans, and the results to date suggest an important interchange of ideas and perspectives that only makes sense if the situation of blacks in the two societies were comparable in some significant respects.[14]
Recent works on the connection of black America and black South Africa include the following: J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Baton Rouge, 1987); James Campbell, "Our Fathers, Our Children: A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1989; William Manning Marable, "African Nationalist: the Life of John Langalibele Dube," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, the University of Maryland, 1976; Robert A. Hill and Gregory A. Pirio, "Africa for the the Africans: the Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1930-1940," in The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (New York, 1987); Tim Couzens, "Johannesburg, 1918-1936," in Industrialization and Social Change in South African: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1970-1930, ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (London, 1982); and David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre (New York, 1985).
Perhaps the origins of this ideological affinity can be traced to the status situations that confronted black elites in the era of intensified white supremacy and segregationism between the turn of the century and the First World War. During the late-nineteenth century, a new class of educated blacks, the product of mission education or its equivalent, emerged in both countries and sought the opportunities for social mobility and incorporation in the larger society that seemed to be promised by the theoretically color-blind liberalism of the mid-Victorian era. Bitterly disappointed by the resurgence of ideological racism and discriminatory policies around the turn of the century—culminating by 1913 in such symbolically similar actions as the segregation of federal employees in the United States and the denial to Africans of the right to purchase or rent land in the "white" areas of South Africa—the black intelligentsia moved from optimistic accommodation to moderate protest. The founding of the NAACP in 1909 and the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress) in 1912 were parallel expressions of black elite dissatisfaction with new color bars and diminishing opportunities for educated, Christianized, or "civilized" blacks. Although black elites organized increasingly along racial lines, they resisted an exclusionary nationalism and based their plea for equal treatment on a liberal and interracial vision of a just society. The Americans, who had been promised more, demanded more—the universal black suffrage and full public equality that had been affirmed during the Reconstruction era. The early South African nationalists claimed only the equal rights for a "civilized" minority that was the essence of the "Cape liberal tradition"; under its aegis blacks who could meet a general property and literacy qualification had been voting in the Cape Colony since 1852. The struggles of both movements for inclusion in a white-dominated political and economic system were based on an assumption that peaceful agitation, the petitioning of those in authority, legislative lobbying, and legal action based on constitutional guarantees or English common-law traditions would eventually induce the whites to live up to their own professed principles of equal opportunity and democratic citizenship.[15]
These generalizations and those that follow are based on work in progress.
Because the NAACP had only a modest initial success and the ANC virtually none at all, and because both organizations failed to address the most pressing problems of black peasants and workers, they were challenged during the 1920s by popular movements drawing on a heightened racial or ethnic consciousness. These movements sanctioned overtly antiwhite sentiments and put forth utopian visions of a separate
black nation. It is in this context that the appeal in both countries of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association can best be understood.
As the extravagant expectations of the ultranationalist and millennialist movements of the 1920s shattered against the obdurate reality of white power, a different and seemingly more efficacious conception of revolutionary change gained a following among middle-class black intellectuals, as well as among the politically conscious members of an emerging industrial working class. Marxian socialism did not gain a mass following among blacks in either the United States or South Africa through the Great Depression and through the Second World War, but it had significant impact on leaders and political activists. Serious efforts emanating from the Comintern to combine an orthodox Marxian class analysis with recognition of the primacy in some societies of a race or national question engendered similar debates among black and white leftists in both countries.
Enough has perhaps been said to give at least a crude sense of how it is possible to see a similar trajectory for black ideologies and movements in the United States and South Africa through the Second World War, and one could go on to suggest parallels between the coming of nonviolent mass protest to South Africa in the early 1950s and to the southern United States in the late fifties and early sixties. But in the postwar period the outcomes of comparable protest initiatives diverged widely and the American example became increasingly less relevant to the calculations of the South African resistance. The massive nonviolent American campaigns of the 1960s did not come until after the African National Congress had already tried such tactics and been forced to abandon them by a repressive regime.
The turning point for both societies was possibly the election of 1948. In that year the Nationalist party came to power in South Africa and began to implement an even more rigid and systematic policy of racial separation and discrimination. The same year saw the surprising victory of Harry S. Truman and the Democratic party in the United States, despite the fact that the Democrats had a civil rights plank in their platform and faced a third-party challenge from southern white supremacists. In effect the black vote in the North more than counterbalanced the white defections in the South. Up to 1948 it might have been possible to argue that South Africa's prospects for racial reform were comparable to those in the United States. Hopes for a peaceful evolution toward equal rights became patently unrealistic in one context
at the same time that they were becoming quite credible in the other.
The shift from parallelism to divergence might be explained in many ways. Some were suggested by our earlier discussion of the factors involved in the victories of the American civil rights movement, none of which were present, or present to the same degree, in the South African case. Demography, legal-constitutional traditions, and geopolitical circumstances were clearly more conducive to reform in one case than the other. An international development with significant implications for the status of blacks in white-dominated societies—decolonization and the emergence of independent nations in black Africa—had quite contrary effects on short-term black prospects. In the United States, it gave added weight to the cause of reform, while in South Africa it provoked a beleaguered white minority to greater repression. But the elections of 1948 brought one crucial factor into sharp relief. In one election the black vote was a decisive factor, in the other it did not figure at all, for the electorate was all white except for a small number of "Coloreds" who would soon be disfranchised by the Nationalist government.
If any general truth emerges from this admittedly very tentative exploration of comparative possibilities, it is that politics and power are crucial to understanding evolving patterns of race relations. In Brazil blacks have not been able to challenge a system that makes them de facto, if not de jure, inferiors because a confused and ambiguous ideological situation, a lack of group resources, and an unstable, often undemocratic, political system have made it impossible for them to exert political power as a distinctive element of the population. In South Africa blacks gained a clear understanding of their situation and what would be required to change it, but, until 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the ANC was unbanned, ruthless repression denied them the capability to influence the government by peaceful means or through nonrevolutionary, reformist politics. In the United States blacks have been able to acquire some power and leverage within a functioning democratic political system—not enough to address the problems of an impoverished lower class but enough to keep hopes of progressive reform alive. In short, the history of race relations should be viewed, not as illustrating some iron law of social and cultural determinism, but rather as the record of a dynamic process that can be made to change course as a result of political action and initiative. Black people, like people in general, make their own history even if they cannot make it exactly as they choose.