Why Americans are F***-ed in the head over race

The history of the US has generated persistent racial derangement. It has been far more of a case of structures generating racism than of racism generating structures.

Source.

People have a pretty good understanding of their own continental ancestry. People are also relatively accurate at picking out other people’s continental ancestry.

This is not surprising. There was not much mixing of lineages across continents until relatively recently, at least outside continental border regions. This was due to the limitations of technology: specifically very limited transport capacitie. Moreover, thousands of years of separate genetic lineages, with genetic bottlenecks creating relatively small founder populations for various continents, meant that there are fuzzy-boundary, but relatively clear, patterns of physical markers of continental ancestry.

So, a folk concept of race based on continental ancestry has some, relatively straightforward, patterns of physical-markers to work off. Hence the history of skin-tone descriptors of race. With race becoming to be understood as being continental, or some significant sub-continental region, ancestry. (Medieval Europeans had a rather different concept of race, one much more language based — so it made sense for a C14th commentator to talk of Scotland being one nation with two races: highlanders and lowlanders as thy spoke different languages.)

The US in particular has a long history of obsessing over race because continental origin coincided with fundamentally different roles in colonial society (the settlers, the dispossessed and the enslaved). Different roles that persisted into the country created by the American Revolution.

Slavery, settlement and racism

As continents produce neither single cultures per continent nor single breeding populations per continent, analytically, remarkably little follows from physical markers of continental ancestry being relatively clear. But as physical markers of continental ancestry are collectively visually relatively clear, they can, very easily, have social meanings attached to them. Which, of course, has happened repeatedly. Especially when one region has systematically enslaved people from region(s) with different general patterns of physical markers. Or when folk from one continent have populated another. We can call these the slavery effect and the settlement effect.

Both have proved to be powerful generators of racism: attaching normative ranking to continental (or region thereof) origin. That is, positive social meaning to one’s own group and (especially) pejorative social meaning to those with a different continental origin (and so a different social role).

A third generator of racism has been imperialism: domination of a state created by one continental origin group over folk with differing continental origins. This has been a rather stronger generator of elite or theoretical racism than more general racism, as imperialism is mostly an elite activity. (A 2018 study found that the UK and Portugal, the two surveyed countries with the longest histories of colonialism, had generally the lowest levels of racism among the surveyed European countries.) Though all racism, and race talk, starts off as an elite discourse.

The fourth generator of racism has been ethnicised religion. The classic version of this being racialised Jew-hatred.

None of these factors are sufficient in themselves to generate racism. The Romans were mass-enslaving imperialists who settled new areas and tended to dislike Jews. Racism was not a feature of their culture.

For the Romans were not a xenophobic culture regarding descent. Folk of any origin could become Roman citizens, including ex-slaves. Their slaves could be of any origin. Their society and their thought did not structurally differentiate by continental origin.

Moreover, Romans traditionally were not moral universalists. So, they did not have to generate some generalised story about why some folk were slaves. Slaves were simply losers and if they were freed, and became Roman citizens, then they became winners. Folk would put that they were freedmen (i.e., ex-slaves) on their tombstones, as that showed how much of a winner they had become.

Islam and racism

The first significant discourse grading people as cognitively deficient, based on physical markers of continental origin, came out of Islam. Islam being an imperial, evangelising monotheist (so morally universalist) religious civilisation that systematically enslaved people to their north (including Europeans, notably Slavs) and people to their south (Sub-Saharan Africans).

Folk of such origins were repeatedly characterised by Islamic writers as being cognitively deficient. Often either due to too little sun (Northern Europeans) or too much sun (Sub-Saharan Africans). So, in Chapter Three of his Tabaqāt al-ʼUmam (Categories of Nations), geographer Sa’id al-Andalusi (1029–1070) wrote:

The rest of this category, which showed no interest in science, resembles animals more than human beings. Those among them who live in the extreme North, between the last of the seven regions and the end of the populated world to the north, suffered from being too far from the sun; their air is cold and their skies are cloudy. As a result, their temperament is cool and their behaviour is rude. Consequently, their bodies become enormous, their colour turned white, and their hair drooped down. They have lost keenness of understanding and sharpness of perception. They were overcome by ignorance, and laziness, and infested by fatigue and stupidity. Such are the Slavonians, Bulgarians and neighbouring peoples.

(The English word slave likely derives from Slav.)

The patterns of castrating male slaves, and of incorporating the children of Muslim fathers into the umma, the Muslim community, meant that centuries of mass slavery failed to generate an ex-slave underclass within Islamic lands. But there are still linguistic traces of these centuries of mass slaving: abd in Arabic can both refer to slave (as in Abdullah, slave of Allah) and to Sub-Saharan African.

Christianity and racism

The Americas were subject to imperialism and mass settlement from Christian Europe. Added to this imperialism and settlement, millions of slaves were imported from Africa. This made continental origins socially salient in the Americas and did so from within a morally universalising religious perspective Christianity). This was a situation made for racism to develop. Which it duly did.

Hence the confused interaction between Christianity and racism. On one hand, the Gospel of Love applies to everyone. Indeed, from the earliest days of Christian European settlement of the Americas, there were devout Christians who spoke and agitated on behalf of the moral status of the inhabitants of the Americas as children of God.

An early, and important, manifestation of this was the 1537 Papal Encyclical Sublimus Dei declaring that the inhabitants of the discovered lands, even if they did not know Christ, were children of God with natural rights and could not be enslaved. In the words of Pope Paul III:

… the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

This did not bar owning slaves someone else had enslaved. As African rulers were more than happy to take care of that stage of the process, Sublimus Dei had little effect on the Atlantic slave trade. 

The moral claims and reasoning of the Papal Encyclical were, however, in rather direct contrast with Sharia, which is entirely fine with enslaving non-Muslims who have not submitted to rule by Sharia (i.e. by Muslims), including sexually exploiting captured women. The last being endorsed no less than 15 times in the Quran and by the example (sira) and the acts and sayings (hadith) of the Prophet. A principle of Sharia is that the marriage of any woman captured by a Muslim man is automatically annulled by the act of capture.

The Anglosphere abolitionist movement in the C18th and C19th had strong Christian roots. As did the US civil rights movement of the mid C20th.

On the other hand, Christianity is a morally universalist religion. Like Islam, it required some justifying story about why you were systematically enslaving the children of God from Africa. It required some justifying story about why you were dispossessing the children of God in the Americas. 

Christian moral universalism later also required some justifying story why you were systematically denying the descendants of slaves political and other civil rights. These were never going to be good stories about the dispossessed, the enslaved, and the excluded. There were plenty of people who were racist, not despite being Christian, but because they were Christian.

Enlightenment thought, which was also morally universalising, had much the same confused interaction with race and racism as Christianity. On one hand, the scientific impulse to categorise could be, and was, mobilised to propagate racist ideas. On the other hand, seeing the world as a shared globe inhabited by a single human species, along with a sense of expanding human capacities, made slavery morally problematic on a scale never seen before. Hence the rise of the abolitionist movements.

As for the settlement effect, so long as the Amerindians were being dispossessed (and feared) by the settlers from Europe, the structural reasons to be racist against them remained strong. After they were subjugated and shoved into reserves, the underlying structural motives to be racist against them lost strength. The effortless virtue, and pleasures of contempt, that bigotry provides may linger, but the general social retreat from, and anathematising, of racism has further weakened what was already a form of racism in structural retreat. As the eminent political career of Herbert Hoover’s Amerindian Vice President, Charles Curtis, demonstrated.

The intensities of slavery

Slavery and its aftermath proved to be a different matter to self-justifying antipathy to Amerindians, who always had a certain warrior vigour going for them. As sociologist Orlando Paterson has brilliantly analysed, slavery does much more then reduce people to property, it imposes on the slave a form of social death. They have no social standing, no family standing nor heritage to be acknowledged. Slavery is profoundly stigmatising and dishonouring, as it deprives the slave of the capacity to have honour or any status that casts doubt on being a slave.

The slave States of the US operated one of the most closed slave systems in history. It became legally hard to manumit a slave and the stigmatising dishonour of slavery was not excised by freedom. A process of stigmatisation greatly helped by the slaves being of a different continental origin than the settlers. The generalised theories that justified slavery could not allow space for some moral transformation from not being a slave anymore.

Roman slavery, not having that justificatory burden, and not being divided by continental ancestry, was far more open. Hence ex-slaves could become citizens and would even boast of how far they had come from their former slave status.

In much of the Americas, an intermediary mulatto or mixed race (i.e. mixed continental origins) identity grew up. Such folk served useful intermediary roles between a small settler elite and large slave or indigenous population. This did not happen in the slave South of the US, as the political importance of voting, and the scale of European settlement, worked against a mixed-race identity emerging.

There was no particularly useful social role that a mixed-race group could fulfil that was not already being filled by folk of European ancestry. Moreover, if ex-slaves and their descendants began voting in any numbers, they could begin to wield political power. Which was both politically threatening and an affront to the justifications for slavery. The result was the “one-drop” rule, whereby any African ancestry identified your slave origins, with all the associated stigmas and exclusions.

These structures served the divide-and-dominate politics of the plantation elite. Before the Civil War, the plantation elite used a range of mechanisms to repress poor “whites”, the masterless men, who had no stake in the slave system but who traded and socialised with the slaves. After the Civil War, and the failure of Reconstruction, the plantation elite used the same range of mechanisms to repress the ex-slaves and their descendants. They simply racialised the operation of exactly the same repressive mechanisms that had operated against the masterless men before the Civil War into what became known as Jim Crow. The former masterless men were now on the “right” side of the exclusions, and were thereby incorporated into the Southern system.

As African-Americans migrated to the industrialising cities, a version of such divide-and-dominate strategies turned out to be congenial to, and adaptable by, urban elites. Public policy was wielded to generate increasing residential segregation, as such segregation makes divide-and-dominate tactics far more effective.

A note in Richard Rothstein’s revelatory The Color of Law, sets out the path of residential segregation. Residential segregation that was driven by public policy. Including intensifying under FDR’s New Deal. In the ten largest US cities:

…in 1880, the neighborhood (block) on which the typical African-American lived was only 15 percent black; by 1910 it was 30 percent, and by 1930, even after the Great Migration, it was still only about 60 percent black. By 1940 the local neighborhood where the typical African-American lived was 75 percent black.

At all stages, such divide-and-dominate politics only worked because people bought into the political framings and discourses that legitimated them. Far more of our thinking and decision-making is unconscious than we realise. Social selection processes work on information and feedback: but not necessarily fully conscious, or sufficiently critically examined, information and feedback.

Weakening racism

The experience of the Second World War, both the mass mobilisation for a common purpose and the horrors of Nazi imperialism and racism, as well as the pressures of the Cold War, increased, both domestically and internationally, the embarrassment that American racism generated. At the same time, the continuing fail in transport and communication costs made it easier for marginal groups to organise, as did increased urbanisation and suburbanisation.

So, the structural supports for divide-and-dominate racism weakened. The civil rights movement, and particularly Martin Luther King, brilliantly played up the moral embarrassment of racial exclusion. Both the Christian moral embarrassment and the American-ideals moral embarrassment. With mass communications making it easier to reach people for persuasive effect.

Hence the successes of the civil rights movement and the retreat of racism from being pervasive within American society to being a moral shame. Though, as Glenn Loury makes clear in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, complex patterns of stigma have been rather more stubbornly persistent.

From this history, we can see that structural racism (or analogues such as systemic racism) is generally not a useful term. For it has been far more the case that structures generate and mobilise racism than that racism generates structures. Nor are such structures a necessary part of the social system. They are more about bending the social system in a particular direction.

After the civil rights movement

Which brings us to the graph at the top of this post and its odd pattern whereby “white” (i.e. Euro-American) Democrats were very much more likely to say that they knew someone who was racist in 2015 than in 2006, but “black” (African-American) and Hispanic Democrats were apparently somewhat less likely to say they knew someone who was racist in 2015 than in 2006.

If someone knows more people they regard as racist than someone else, that can be because (1) they are more likely to meet racists; (2) they are better at identifying racism; (3) they are more expansive in their characterising of racism; or (4) some combination thereof.

So, taking the 2006 results in the graph above, it could be that Euro-American Democrats were more likely to meet racists than Hispanic Democrats or Euro-American Republicans. Or that they are better at identifying them than Hispanic Democrats and Euro-American Republicans. Or that they have a more expansive definition of racism than do Hispanic Democrats and Euro-American Republicans. Or some combination of the above.

If we move to the 2015 results, Euro-American Democrats were far more likely to believe they knew a racist than were African-American Democrats, Hispanic Democrats or Euro-American Republicans. They were also the only group who increased their likelihood of knowing a racist since 2006, and did so dramatically. By contrast, both African-American Democrats and Hispanic Democrats became, if anything, less likely to believe they knew a racist. (The shifts were not statistically significant but do accord with long term patterns of declining racism.)

The most plausible read of this data is that racism has declined somewhat in the US (in accordance with long-term trends) but Euro-American Democrats have acquired dramatically more expansive definition(s) of racism. (Unless they are registering dramatically increased anti-white racism — we can reasonably give that low probability.)

So, by 2015, Euro-American Democrats apparently lived in a US of significantly more racists among the people they interacted with, while African-American Democrats and Hispanic Democrats did not.

If fluctuations in racism are largely driven by changes in structural factors, as history strongly suggests, that suggests a change in structural factors that is particularly affecting Euro-American Democrats, but not other folk. Something that is making race much more salient to them.

An obvious factor is the massive increase, since around 2010, in the use of racial terms by US elite media. As Democrats have far more confidence in elite media than do Republicans (a long-term tendency that increased dramatically from 2015), the dramatic upsurge in the media’s use of racial terms could be accounting for much of the “more people know a racist” effect.

Especially as there clearly has been an expansion of what counts, within elite race talk, as racism. Partly because our concept of a phenomena tends to expand as the prevalence of that phenomena shrinks. There has been, for example, a creeping expansion of what is labelled as harm in Psychology. But there has also been an expansion of the concept of racism due to the expanding influence of intersectionality and critical race theory. Especially in the education of increasing numbers of younger journalists.

Is there a structural reason for this increased focus on race? One is fairly obvious: the value of anti-racism as a status play. The more intense one’s opposition to racism, the greater the moral prestige in being ostentatiously anti-racist and, conversely, the greater the moral shame from failing to appropriately oppose racism. So, a status-play purity spiral gets set up. One that can be used to lever folk out of jobs. The bottom-up (but still elite) prestige play then becomes a dominance play. In a situation of elite over-production, such status-plays are a very useful weapon in struggles over opportunities and resources.

Ostentatious anti-racism can make one reluctant to admit that racism has declined or to give credence to other factors in explaining social dynamics. One becomes invested in continuing to ascribe social meanings to race. The surge in hate crime hoaxes fits in with this.

Function does not require intent

Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible… 

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerolology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, p.163.

The other reason for increased focus on race is less obvious, but has a longer historical pedigree. Overt racism might have become embarrassing, but the advantages to urban elites of divide-and-dominate politics has never gone away, so social selection pressures will continue to favour such politics. The more divided residents, workers and citizens are on racial grounds, the less elites have to deal with competing (against them) claims on resources. Symbolic race-identity politics are way cheaper for elites than politics that delivers good government. That is as true today in urban US as it was in the Antebellum or Jim Crow South. Hence racially-divided US cities are (by developed democracy standards) comparatively ill-governed, just as the Antebellum and Jim Crow South were in their time.

If anti-racism can be turned into a racialised divide-and-dominate strategy, as clearly it can, then all the better for opportunity-hoarding elites. Especially for elites facing intensified internal competition for resources and opportunities.

Intersectionality and critical race theory are very much elite products, coming out of places such as Harvard Law School. Nor do they have to be originally developed as divide-and-dominate mechanisms for social selection pressures to adapt them into divide-and-dominate mechanisms.

Moral concern easily becomes status plays. Status plays are naturally divisive. Moral dominion easily becomes social dominion. Such feedback loops provide much for social selection processes to work on.

Such outlooks and patterns of action do not have appear to their active proponents to be divide-and-dominate politics in order to function as such. Remembering that such framings and discourses work much better if folk can be convinced to go along with them, while social selection processes do not have to be entirely conscious. Especially as the prime mechanisms for self-deception are by manipulating salience. Particularly moral salience.

One cannot force oneself to believe what one doesn’t believe. We can, however, use focus on, for example, image-self-protection, to block paying attention to awkward facts or considerations. This is especially easy to do with highly moralised concerns and self-images. Both because of their emotional power and because it is inherent in moral claims that they be normative trumps. That one has an ostentatious image of oneself as being not-oppressive does not guarantee that one is not buying into politics that are, in fact, oppressive or self-serving.

Coverage by elite media of deaths in police custody, or at the hands of police, is particularly revealing. There is a general problem of police training and accountability in the US. One that varies far more by jurisdiction than it does by race (whether of police or civilian protagonist). If media had reported these things accurately, then a broad coalition could have been built up to improve police training and accountability.

Instead, by intensely and selectively racialising their coverage, the “racist cops” narrative was firmly established by elite media. Turning this into a specifically African-American-and-police problem rather than a general accountability-to-the-citizenry problem and allowing those propagating, and those accepting, the narrative to thereby parade their ostentatious anti-racism. A way easier, and more immediate, social and cognitive reward than doing the hard work of increasing police training and accountability. Hence “defund the police”: a simplistic but convenient symbolic politics that was way easier to pander to than improved police training and accountability.

Revitalising divide-and-dominate

Even better, one of the key mechanisms for divide-and-dominate has been to fail to provide effective policing in African-American urban communities (as measured by homicide clearance rates), thereby generating much higher homicide rates in those communities. (In rural US, Euro-Americans and African-Americans have identical homicide rates.) These differential levels of violence do more to racially divide US cities than any other factor.

The “racist cops” media narrative, and activism, so congenial to moralised self-image, and their associated status plays, has increased the level of violence in those localities and so increased the most racially divisive element in US cities. If one was seeking to revitalise divide-and-dominate politics, it would be hard to do better.

A recent study found that the more educated you were, the more politically progressive you were, and the more you trusted the media, the less well informed you were on police shootings. (But the more conveniently you believed, as far as divide-and-dominate politics went.)

Social intent does not entail social function. Social function does not entail social intent.

Elite race talk is always a divide-and-dominate mechanism. Elite race talk has, historically, been racist. Indeed, racist discourses have always started off as elite theories. But anti-racist race talk works just as well as a divide-and-dominate mechanism, provided one continues to ascribe social meanings to race and do so in pejorative ways. Which, of course, is what all the talk about whiteness, white supremacy, white racism, etc. does.

It is still a case of structures generating the assigning of divisive social meanings to race, far more than the reverse, seeking to bend the social system to their benefit. Even doing so within ostentatiously anti-racist rhetoric and moral framings.

What is that French saying? plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing …

(An earlier version was posted on Medium.)

Ancestry, ethnicity and the hopeless confusions of race

Yes, ancestry matters but not in the way that makes race talk sensible.

A 1904 depiction of Asian ethnicities.

The early medieval scholar Regino of Prum wrote the following:

Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.

For those (such as myself) not up on the their Latin, that translates as:

The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.

This quote has been much cited since. Its fourfold formula was frequently used by medieval writers. For instance, Bishop Bernard of St David’s wrote to Pope Innocent II referring to:

populos nostre provincie natione, lingua, legibus et moribus, iudiciis et consuetudinibus discrepare

In English,

the peoples of our province are distinct in nation, language, laws and customs, judgements and manners

But manners are part of customs and laws entail judgements, so it is a more poetic version of the same fourfold formula.

About law
This was a region and an era where your law could be as much about which group you belonged to as where you lived. A single sovereignty could readily entail a variety of systems of law. A single system of law (e.g. Brehon law) could operate across several sovereignties. A non-resident in a city involved in a legal dispute might be asked what laws he lived under.

For much of the medieval period in Europe, particularly early in the medieval period, law was: the custom of the area. Which tended to mean: whatever we remember doing, last time this came up.

Henry II, the first Plantagenet king of England, used his Chancery and royal judges to develop what became the common law precisely because different people in different parts of England had different law (Norman, Saxon, Danish), with local variations. Royal judges would offer judgements that were both common across England and sought to synthesise the common elements between existing local laws, creating the common law of England.

Common law can be understood as evolving customary law. One of its many fine features is that it provides a structure of law without any Parliament, or other legislating authority, having to issue any specific law. A system of law with, moreover, an inherent tendency to move towards consistency. Something that is not a notable feature of statutory law.

In the modern era, law is very much a matter of state jurisdictions. So, setting law aside, that leaves us with origin (so descent or ancestry), customs and language as identifying an ethnic group. (Nation is ambiguous between state and people, but it is ethnicity that we are concerned with here.)

Ethnicity is something that develops in a mixture of separation (you overwhelmingly interact with members of the same group) and differentiation (there is one or more other groups that are identified as not being of the same group). Geographical separation means that folk can much more easily have specific customs and a specific language. (And, of course, specific laws.)

Ancestry matters because it is how customs and language are transferred across the generations. Yet the key thing is connections between people and common features that arise from the patterns of connection. A child adopted as a baby will be raised in the ethnicity of their adoptive parents and local community, regardless of their genetic ancestry. People are overwhelmingly raised by one or more biological parents, or adopted within the same group, so ancestry tracks ethnicity very strongly. But it does not drive ethnicity.

The overwhelmingly dominant connection between ancestry and the ethnicity in which folk are raised, drives some muddy thinking about ethnicity (and race). The notion that DNA tests can determine ethnicity, particularly for policing boundaries between ethnicities in intermingled communities, is deeply confused thinking. The bits of ethnicity that matter are your customs, your language, your expectations, your received framings, your patterns of connection. None of that is genetic or genetically defined.

Ethnicities can arise and fade away while genetic lineages continue. In his The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, James C. Scott notes that people and families in Southeast Asia would periodically choose new cultural identities, creating “crazy quilt” ethnic enclaves that ethnographers found perplexing. Ethnicities are nowhere near as primordial as is often pretended and ethnic identities can often be situational and strategic.

Race has come to refer to continental ancestry and the concept, and its associated social meanings, has had the most social power when folk of different continental ancestry interact. Most notoriously in the Americas where settlers from one continent (Europe) invaded another continent (North or South America, as the case may be), imported slaves from a third continent (Africa) and then received migrants from a fourth continent (Asia). That skin tone and other physical features were strong indicators of continental ancestry interacted with these very different social roles to make race talk an easy, and sadly convenient, option.

Yet continental ancestry on its own does not tell us what customs or languages you, or anyone else, has. No continental group, including Australian Aborigines, is a single ethnic or cultural group or users of a single language. Nor are they a single breeding population. Hence the speciousness of race — continental ancestry — as an analytical category, however socially convenient it has been for various folk to invest social meanings in physical markers of ancestry. Particularly as a divide-and-dominate dynamic.

Race as continental ancestry is also a long way from the C14th chronicler John of Fordun describing Scotland as a land of one nation but two races:

Mores autem Scotorum secundum diversitatem linguarum variantur ; duabus enim utuntur linguis, Scotica videlicet et Theutonica, cuius linguae gens maritimas possidet et planas regiones, Scoticae vero montanas inhabitat et insulas ulteriores. Maritima quoque domestica gens est et culta, fida, patiens et urbana, vestitu siquidem honesta, civilis atque pacifica, circa cultum divinum devota, sed et obviandis hostium iniuriis semper prona. Insulana vero sive montana, ferina gens est et indomita, rudis et immorigerata, raptu capax, otium diligens, ingenio docilis et callida, forma spectabilis, sed amictu deformis, populo quidem Anglorum et linguae, sed et propriae nationi, propter linguarum diversitatem, infesta iugiter et crudelis. Regi tamen et regno fidelis et obediens, necnon faciliter legibus subdita, si regatur.

Or, in English:

The manners of the Scots vary according to their language, for they employ two languages, Scottish [Gaelic] and Teutonic [Scots/English]. The race of Teutonic language has the sea coasts and lowlands, that of Scottish language inhabits the mountainous areas and the outer isles. The race of the sea coasts is domesticated, civilized, faithful, patient, cultivated, decently dressed, refined and peaceable, devout in church worship, yet always ready to withstand any harm done by its enemies. The island or mountain race, however, is wild, untamed, primitive, intractable, inclined to plunder, leisure-loving, quick to learn, skilful, handsome in appearance but vilely dressed, and continually fiercely opposed to the English people and language, but also to their own nation, on account of the difference of language. Nevertheless they are loyal and obedient to the king and the kingdom, and also easily subdued to the laws, if they are ruled properly.

Intermingling
DNA as a convenient sorting mechanism is only likely to be reached for if people of different ethnicities (so different ancestries) are intermingling. If everyone lives in villages of the same ethnicity, but are aware of there being villages of a different ethnicity over there, the issue does not arise. It is only if folk within the same larger community have varied ancestries (and so varied ethnicities) that it is going to seem sensible to look for some “sure” marker, such as biological ancestry or (once the technology exists) DNA testing.

The problems of maintaining separate identities in a situation of intermingling is what led to the development of the “one drop” rule in the US. If you had any element of African ancestry you were “black” (i.e. not “white”). It is a sign of how intense the stigmatising social meanings attached to being “black” were, the extension of the inherited dishonour of slavery onto their descendants, that no mulatto or mixed-race identity emerged in the US, in contrast to much of the rest of the Americas.

Ironically, this pattern was largely because electoral politics — who could vote and for whom — mattered so much more in the US. In societies with proportionately smaller settler elites, where voting was not much of an issue, it tended to be convenient to have an intermediary group as social buffer and suppliers of services. In such situations, one gets gradations of ancestry rather than sharp continental-ancestry (“race”) divisions, where elite ancestry provides the most benefits and slave or indigenous ancestry the most handicaps.

With the current attempts within the US and the wider Anglosphere to stigmatise the social meaning of “whiteness”, we are nowadays getting the same one-drop rule exclusion working in contemporary society, but going the other way so that any degree of non-European ancestry confers a presumptive moral advantage, making one “a person of colour”. But this just flips the pejorative effect while also wrestling with the problem of differentiation in intermingled societies. Situations of intermingling are much more likely to see situational or strategic use of ethnic (or racial) identities. 

It looks "racial" as the elite came from Europe and the slaves from Africa. But all elite structures have a strong element of ancestry in them (including in Leninist states). It is just that differing continental origins associated and associate different physical markers with different social/class status.

To impose simple, dividing, categories on intermingled populations requires systematically ignoring (inconvenient) ancestry. The original “one-drop” rule in the US meant ignoring any European ancestry among those with African ancestry. The new version similarly generally involves ignoring any European ancestry among “persons of colour”.

There is a long history of ignoring inconvenient ancestry. Patrilineal kin-groups generally ignored maternal ancestry, as matrilineal kin-groups generally ignored paternal ancestry. But the point in such cases was also very much to enforce differentiating boundaries.

The great advantage of DNA is that it reveals the complexities of ancestry. It does not track the complexities of culture. It does, however, point to how genetic lineages pass through, and into, cultures.

Segregation
The use of public policy to impose residential segregation in the US, to the extent of attempting to break up integrated neighbourhoods, was another way of wrestling with problems of differentiation among intermingled folk.

The enforced spread of residential segregation in the US, including attempts to segregate previously integrated neighbourhoods, is set out in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. A note in the book quantifies the path of residential segregation, including its intensification under FDR’s New Deal. In the ten largest US cities:

in 1880, the neighbourhood (block) on which the typical African American lived was only 15 percent black; by 1910 it was 30 percent, and by 1930, even after the Great Migration, it was still only about 60 percent black. By 1940 the local neighborhood where the typical African American lived was 75 percent black.

Reducing intermixing by residential (and other) segregation is an obvious way to sharpen identity differentiation in a mixed society. This is typically done by giving one group a greater say than another. Whether it was such things as hostile zoning and resident activism in the US producing the aforementioned residential segregation, shuffling people off into reservations or giving one group claims over land that others cannot have.

Such segregation can indeed sharpen identity, but at the cost of giving up the benefits of interaction with the wider society. Denying folk such benefits has often been the purpose of such segregation. It is likely to be the effect of it, regardless of intention.

Marriage
As is well known, intermarriage, a very intimate form of intermingling, blurs ethnic identity. Hence groups that wish to retain their separate identity either block intermarriage or require outside spouses to convert to their group. Such marriage boundaries then provide a way to continue intense patterns of connection that differentiate the group from outsiders.

Religions have often been very much involved in setting up and policing such boundaries. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes, the right sort of boundary laws can turn a minority into a majority:

the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues — the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.

The two asymmetric rules were are as follows. First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam — and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. 

The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.

Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small but continuing rate of interfaith marriages and little or no defection from the group folk are marrying into.

Such boundaries and group identities have often been reinforced by participation in common rituals.

Vanishing heritage
John Wood Jnr has observed that, on the Euro-American (“white”) side of his family, folk can talk about a heritage reaching back to Europe. As can Asians with Asia or recent African immigrants with Africa. On the (slave-descended) African-American side of his family, there is a striking absence of such. The descendants of American slaves have no such identifiable specific ancestral heritage(s), as slavery mixed ethnicities together while slaves had no family rights.

As sociologist Orlando Patterson has pointed out, the social death that slavery entailed, and the consequent natal alienation, separating slaves from any acknowledged line of ancestry or family rights, defined the slave far more then being property did. (Medieval serfs, for example did not suffer any such social death, any such alienation from family and heritage.) The process of Transatlantic exile of slaves, and their descendants, was a process of exile much more profound than that experienced by others arriving in the US and the rest of the Americas.

The descendants of slaves imported into the Americas have the most “American” identities, as they have had to create their identities within the Americas and within the context of European settlement. (Indigenous Americans have identities that reach back before European settlement, so are not anchored in the creation of new societies that American implies.) It is not accidental that various quintessential American cultural forms, such as Jazz and Blues, are grounded in the experience of American slaves and their descendants.

Within the US, the descendants of American slaves were an ethnic identity defined by “race”, i.e. African ancestry. They are now an identity submerged by “race”, as Afro-Caribbeans and recent African immigrants are both also “black”. (Though there is some evidence that American-born generations of such migrants may be at last somewhat socialised into attitudes of the descendants of American slaves; another instance of the effects of intermingling.)

That no descendant of American slaves has graced the Presidential nomination ticket of either major US Party is very much obscured by focusing on race rather than ethnicity. (President Obama and Vice-President Harris are both examples of migrant heritage, not US slave heritage.)

Custom
Culture is a notoriously ambiguous term, with literally hundreds of definitions being offered by social scientists. Custom also suffers from a certain ambiguity. Fortunately, philosopher Cristina Bicchieri has done the work, setting out a rigorous theory of norms that helps clarify thinking on these matters. This is done formally in The Grammar of Society and with a more practical focus in Norms in the Wild.

Using Prof. Bicchieri’s definitions:

Customs are things you regularly do because they work for you. They may generate expectations among other folk but they are not driven by such expectations.
Conventions are things you do because other people do them. They both generate, and are driven by, expectations. Language and fashion are classic convention-driven activities. Conventions allow people to coordinate with each other.
Social norms drive things you do because other people expect you to do them and are likely to sanction you if you do not.
Moral norms drive things you do because you believe it is the right thing to do regardless of the expectations of others.

The use of custom by Regino of Prum as quoted above clearly covers customs, conventions and social norms. In mixed societies, folk adopt and lose customs. They adopt and lose conventions. Both customs and conventions lose their distinctiveness, blurring identity. Similarly with social norms. So, once again, we can see the power of connection and the problems of intermingling.

Thinking in terms of custom, convention and social norms brings out the power of religion as a creator and preserver of identity. For participating in common rituals can be a great binding and a differentiating mechanism. Indeed, they are much of the social effect of ritual.

Corrosive contradictions
But thinking in terms of custom, convention and social norms also brings out how much politicising and legalising identity becomes a morass of corrosive contradictions. Such attempts to differentiate seek to draw lines in ways that social intermingling must undermine.

One ends up being at war with such intermingling — and so at war with any overarching common identity — while creating endless possibilities for strategic game-playing that is likely to be highly socially corrosive in its effects. Such identity-games can create simple categories that are appealing in their simplicity and disastrous in their lack of nuanced realism.

Ethnicities evolve. They change, emerge, weaken, strengthen, mingle and divide according to circumstances. Attempting to create a legal, moral and political order based on primordial, unmixed and fixed identities is to build a series of noxious fictions into the social order that are at war with the complexities of the human in ways that invite bad, even disastrous, outcomes.

There is no good form of identity politics. What look to be such (e.g. the various agitations for civil rights, whether for women, African-Americans, indigenous people, same-sex attracted …) have been attempts to gain the benefits of a common status, not a divided and differentiated one. To be judged by the content of one’s character, not some general, differentiated, category. That is true of every emancipation struggle, from the campaigns against slavery onwards.

Intermingling strengthens the case for a common humanity and a common citizenship. Contemporary identity politics do not represent the completion of the processes of celebrating a common humanity, and building a common citizenship, but the overturning of them. Hence contemporary identity politics replicating and adapting past methods for forcing differentiation on intermingled communities. But, then, divide-and-dominate retains its appeal to elites and forcing differentiation has always been very useful for that. As it still is.

[Cross-posted, somewhat improved, from Medium.]

Why we all need to stop having conversations about race

I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.
Booker T. Washington (1911)

The term ‘race’ … is a fiction but it is not entirely a fiction. It is a social fiction built around something that we might call population or lineage and those things are real biological phenomena whereas ‘race’ is polluted by politics. … A one-drop rule is obviously a political phenomenon not a biological phenomenon.
Bret Weinstein

Racism is the belief that races exist. … Racism is the belief that there is some sub-specific, naturally occurring population within Homo sapiens that exists between the level of the species and the local breeding population and those are called ‘races’. I have often said to people that every time you hear the word ‘race’ think ‘unicorn’, because it’s the same thing.
Adolph Reed

We humans, as a global species, have had at least five great “out of” migrations. We are in the midst of the fifth, the out-of-the-countryside migration. In 1500, around 5 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities. Now, around 60 per cent do and moving to cities has generally been accelerating over time.

The four preceding major “out of” migrations were:

Out of Africa. In a couple of waves, around 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged from Africa and spread across (eventually) every continent except Antartica. If their spread across the Americas is any guide, they expanded their territory at a rate of around 10km a year. They absorbed and replaced every other genus Homo species on the way through, becoming the only biped primate left standing. (“Absorbed and replaced” is, of course, something of a euphemism — there was rather more replacing than absorbing.)

Out of the River Valleys. In a series of expansions, starting around 10,000 years ago, wherever farming was invented, waves of farmers spread across the arable lands (typically expanding at a rate of around 1km a year), absorbing and replacing the foraging populations. The genetic record suggests rather more replacing than absorbing, farmers and foragers having very different patterns of life and skill requirements.

The foragers generally lived distinctly healthier existence than the farmers, but farming increased the ability to extract calories from the landscape by up to 100-fold, so the sheer numbers of farmers overwhelmed the foragers. The last continent this process reached was Australia, with the beginning of British settlement in 1788. The process is still underway in some parts of the world.

Out of the Steppes. Starting around 5,000 years ago, the original Indo-Europeans began to expand out from the Pontic steppes. They were pastoralists who had domesticated the horse, had the wheel and axle, used wagons and expanded across the steppes at about 10km a year and across Europe at about 5km a year. They eventually reached all of Europe (except the Basque Country and Sardinia), Anatolia, the Iranian plateau, northern India and northwest of China. About 4,000 years ago, they invented the chariot, which increased the extent and rate of expansion.

They were patrilineal kin groups of related warriors who replaced a lot of the men in the conquered areas and absorbed the women into their societies. (To speak very euphemistically.) They were also mutants. They were lactase persistent: they could consume milk as adults. Being able to raise animals for dairy permitted them to extract perhaps five times as many calories from a given amount of grassland than just raising animals for slaughter, a huge biological advantage that could not be copied.

Out of Europe. Starting around 1500, Europeans expanded into the Americas, across Siberia and later into Australasia, absorbing, replacing and dominating the local populations, creating a Eurosphere extending across four continents and a significant part of a fifth. The exporting of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas greatly aided this expansion.

This, the fourth great Out-of migration, was an interactive mixture of state expansion and settlement. It was by far the fastest expansion of the four and the only one by cultures that only recognised single-spouse marriages. (Until very recently, it has been far more common for cultures to permit polygamy than to ban it.) These Euro-Christian cultures lacked strong kin groups but had, in replacement, developed a very flexible range of cooperative social mechanisms. With the most successful cultural group, the Anglosphere, displaying even more persistently the relatively high levels of political bargaining that developed in Northwestern Europe in particular. Political bargaining that tended to expand over time and spread to other cultures.

Why that state-and-settlement pattern of expansion? The institutional variety between competing states within Europe led to the evolution of unusually effective states, as that variety gave the selection processes of history far more to work with. Especially as there was enough cultural similarity to make successful mechanisms by one state easier to observe and adopt. The combination of institutional variety and competition also encouraged accelerated technological development.

The geography of Europe was probably a factor. It meant that European states were insulated from steppe invasions and their empire-encouraging, institution-flattening effects. The geography — lots of mountain ranges and peninsulas, no dominating central plain — was, once the social technology of state-building had spread beyond the Mediterranean littoral, antipathetic to a unifying empire, keeping the institutional and technological innovation going. A colder climate may have encouraged more interest in technology.

Non-kin cooperation is a key element of Homo sapien success as a species. It turns out, that if your societies put non-kin cooperation on steroids, you can end up dominating the planet. Until, of course, other people start copying your tricks.

There are those who hold that the low melanin count of those spreading out from Europe makes the fourth of the great Out-of expansion a particularly evil Out-of sequence. This is nonsense, the Europeans were just acting like Homo sapiens. Or, indeed, any species population with exploitable advantages seeking access to greater resources.

If someone waxes eloquent about all the dreadful things that happened in a particular history, congratulate them on noticing that it is, indeed, a history of Homo sapiens. Also be a bit wary. History provides a rich source of information and understanding. Separating us from that enormous information source by presenting us with some narrow caricature of history (of either the oh-so-heroic or of the oh-so-tragic variety) is a great mechanism to deprive people of the basis for critical judgment and thus to disorient, and so dominate, them.

Of course, there can be a sort of grandeur in being the scion of a heroic history or a righteous critic of an oppressive one. Conversely, accepting the being-Homo-sapiens nature of a history can be distressingly mundane.

We can trace this enormous scope of history, including the dynamics of European history, without mentioning race. This is because race is an analytically useless concept in understanding this history. Until we get to ideas that evolved during this history.

A concept in people’s heads

Race is a concept in people’s heads, and what is in people’s heads affects their behaviour. But why is race a concept in people’s heads?

Once upon a time, race was about ethnicity. People in Europe might talk of the Czech race, or the German race, as they would of nation or tongue (meaning language group). Early medieval chronicler Regino of Prüm (d.915) defined ethnicity in his Chronicon as:

Diversae nationes populorum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.

For those (such as myself) that are not up on their Latin, that translates as:

The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.

Ethnicity does obviously matter in understanding how people might see themselves and others, how they might behave, and so on. To the extent that the term race ever makes much analytical sense, ethnicity can usually be substituted for it just fine, as ethnicities are local breeding populations with large elements of common culture. (Complicated by the fact that people can choose to adopt cultures and cultural identities.) Especially if we adjust Regino of Prum’s definition slightly to substitute norms for laws, as all ethnicities have norms but not necessarily specific laws.

The descendants of American (i.e. US) slaves are an ethnic group. A result of ethnogenesis happening in a new continent within the direct gaze of history. Afro-Caribbeans are a different set of ethnic groups. Recent African immigrants to the US are from a different set of ethnic groups again.

Ignoring its more prolix late C19th and C20th “race science” versions, race in the modern sense refers not to ethnicity but to, in effect, continental ancestry. To express this in the classic colour-coded way, whites come from Europe, blacks from sub-Saharan Africa, reds from the Americas, yellows from East Asia and browns from the Middle East and South Asia.

Notice how the only generally acceptable colour markers for race left are whites and blacks. A matter for deeply sceptical contemplation in itself. Notice also that these are not breeding populations with a common culture; they are geographical aggregations containing within them a wide range of local breeding populations and cultures. They do have some (extremely fuzzy) physical markers due to facing broadly similar evolutionary pressures (especially pertaining to sun exposure and so melanin count) and (outside of Africa) specific ancestries from bottleneck events. (The Americas, for instance, was originally settled by a population of maybe a few hundred people.) But these continental aggregations do not match actual genetic lineage patterns.

People are quite accurate in picking their own continental ancestry, but that is not surprising. One is likely to have some idea which continent (or continents) one’s ancestors came from. Nor does the ability to pick our continental ancestry quite accurately mean that continental ancestries are other than geographical groupings of various local breeding populations. (Folk are not as accurate in picking out their ethnic ancestry.)

So, in what circumstances do we want to analyse people by such broad continental groupings of ancestry? In no instance that makes serious analytical sense. Cultures and history matter, after all, but they vary widely across and within continents. But we might engage in continental-wide generalisations if they are useful for some other reason. Perhaps we want to explain, and/or justify, how people from one continent end up dominating people from other continents. Or because we want to have an excuse to engage in mass slavery against people of a particular continental ancestry.

Slavery creating race talk

The latter turns out to be exactly where the first serious ranking of people by skin colour came from. Except it does not come from within a “white” group but a “brown” one.

The original practitioners of mass slavery, the Romans and the Greeks, did not need to engage in moralised categorisation by continental ancestry for two reasons. First, their slaves came from a wide range of sources. Including people who looked exactly like them.

Second, they were not adherents of a universalist morality; they did not conceive of everyone as having a shared moral identity and common moral status. This matters, because they could simply categorise slaves as “losers” and that was the moral end of the matter.

If, on the other hand, you have a universalising morality, then clearly slavery, reducing people to property, is an offence against the notion that we are all moral beings sharing a common moral identity. So, some moralising story has to be told to explain why this group could be enslaved, could be so dramatically exempted from the moral status and protections granted to everyone else.

Any such story is not going to be a positive one for those targeted for enslaving.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle did write about “natural born slaves”. Aristotle’s ethics had a universalising tendency, so he was forced to give some moral story about why some people were slaves and others weren’t. But there was no ancestry basis for this, as patently people from all and any ethnicity or ancestry could and did end up as slaves.

The Romans generally regarded such natural-born slave theorising as Greek silliness. Of course there was no natural justification for slavery. Hence freed slaves could become Roman citizens. (I.e. be promoted to winners.) In fact, Rome operated one of the most open slave systems in history. (A nice discussion of the complexity of Roman slavery is provided here.) Rivalled in its openness only by Islamic mamluk “slave to lord” systems, whereby slave boys were trained as warriors, yet could come to hold an iqta tax-collecting land grant, and so be one of the lords of the realm.

It is within Islam that we first get discourses that tie colour to continental ancestry, and then to alleged moral qualities, as it is within Islam that we first get the deadly combination of universalising morality and mass slavery.

Islam holds that we are all children of Allah who should be led into the community of submission to Allah, the sovereign lawmaker of the universe. (Sharia being the human understanding of the laws of of the sovereign of the universe discerned through fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence.) Sharia explicitly permits slavery. Indeed, capturing slaves was one of the benefits of engaging in jihad; in the righteous struggle to spread submission to Allah across the globe.

Slaves were, moreover, very useful. So useful, it was good to have groups permanently outside the territory of submission to Allah, so that they could be regularly enslaved. For those who have submitted to the rules of Allah could not be rightfully enslaved. But there had to be some justification for not bringing the sources of slaves within the fold of submission to Allah. The answer was, of course, that their systematic defects of character made them particularly fit for slavery.

Thus we have Sa’id al-Andalusi (1029–1070) writing in the Islamic fifth century in his (1068) Tabaqāt al-ʼUmam (Categories of Nations):

The rest of this tabaqat, which showed no interest in science, resembles animals more than human beings. Those among them who live in the extreme North, between the last of the seven regions and the end of the populated world to the north, suffered from being too far from the sun; their air is cold and their skies are cloudy. As a result, their temperament is cool and their behaviour is rude. Consequently, their bodies become enormous, their colour turned white, and their hair drooped down. They have lost keenness of understanding and sharpness of perception. They were overcome by ignorance, and laziness, and infested by fatigue and stupidity. Such are the Slavonians, Bulgarians and neighbouring peoples. (Chapter 3: Nations Having No Interest in Science).

It is amazing how stupid and lazy slave groups are so often reported to be. It is almost as if slavery is antipathetic to commitment to hard and diligent work.

This is classic denigration of a slave group because your universalist morality (they are children of Allah who should be converted to Islam, or brought within its rule) contradicts the convenience of continuing to enslave them en masse. When mass slavery later became part of their societies, societies that professed universalist moralities, Christian and Enlightenment writers responded to the same imperative in the same ways. Except, of course, they were specifically enslaving people of African origin, not Europeans as well.

Sa’id also denigrates sub-Saharan Africans for the same justifying-mass-slavery reason. He then has a problem, however, for South Asians clearly have very advanced mathematics and science but very dark skins. He wants to make it clear that they are a very different group:

The Indians, as known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal [essence] of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are people of sublime pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions. In spite of the fact that their color is in the first stage of blackness, which puts them in the same category as blacks, Allah in His glory, did not give them the low characteristics, the poor manners, the inferior principles associated with his group and ranked them above a large number of white and brown peoples. (Chapter 5: Science in India).

Wasn’t that good of Allah?

Race as a category flattens, indeed trivialises, human identity. This makes it ideal for any project of dehumanisation. Slavery reduces people to property, clearly a dehumanising move, but slaves also have to be managed, which creates a persistent tension in slavery between dehumanising effects and practical management and human interaction. The tension is more intense the more moral justification is required to make slavery acceptable.

Racism did not cause slavery. Slavery, in the context of universalising morality, generated justificatory classification by race (i.e. continental or sub-continental ancestry) and so racism.

About slavery

Slavery was obviously a very prominent feature of European settlement of the Americas.

This was because the spread of the Eurasian disease pool into the Americas had depopulated the Americas and meant that labour had a higher scarcity value than land. The normal historical response to labour having a higher scarcity value than land has been some sort of labour bondage.

Labour bondage is the separation of ownership of the labour services from the person doing the work. Either by banning exit from an estate without the owner’s permission (serfdom) or some form of indenture or by turning the person into property (slavery). These are all ways of creating a compulsory employer. They meant that the person doing the work could be reduced to a subsistence income while transferring the scarcity value of the labour to their compulsory employer (usually, though not always, a landowner).

Slavery and other forms of labour bondage have been ubiquitous across human civilisations, extending into modern times. The first Marxist-Leninist state, the Soviet Union, re-introduced slavery. State-owned, slaves, of course. It did so in its labour camp system, in which coerced workers were stripped of all rights, treated as the property of the state and provided with bare subsistence. It also re-introduced serfdom. From June 1940 to April 1956, no employee could change workplace without the permission of their current workplace; the defining element of serfdom. Nazi Germany also used slave labour. North Korea still uses state slavery: indeed, effectively exports the services of slave labour.

In some parts of post-European contact Americas, the indigenous population survived the shock of the arrival of the Eurasian disease pool in sufficient numbers that a form of serfdom was imposed, the encomienda system. After 1542, it was replaced by repartimiento labour service. Generally, however, the collapse in the indigenous population of the Americas that created the resource opportunities for the incoming Europeans was so great that some form of serfdom or other labour service from local labour was not an option. Hence any bonded labour had to be imported. Thus, there was extensive use in the British American colonies of indentured labour, and convict labour. But that had various limitations, as the bondage was for limited periods of time and indentures required people to be willing to sign up for them.

The classic form of imported human bondage is, of course, slavery. Slaves are people turned into property precisely so they can be moved around at will, including being imported. Ideally, from a considerable distance, as that isolation from their place of origin made them easier to control. Having physical markers distinct from the non-slave population also made enforcing ownership somewhat easier.

Across the Atlantic from the Americas was Africa, a continent where disease, predators and megafauna (a herd of elephants can strip a farmer’s field in a few hours) meant that labour was always more scarce than land. Sub-Saharan Africa had a well-established pattern of local slavery which, with the expansion of Islam, become an extensive pattern of export of slaves. (The Sahara passage to Islamic countries was every bit as horrible as the Atlantic passage, and lasted centuries longer.)

Expanding an already existing pattern of export slavery to satisfy the demand for labour in the Americas was remarkably easy. Of course, approximately doubling the export of slaves also hugely intensified the effect of slavery on African societies.

Slavery is currently returning to Africa. (In some parts of West Africa, it never entirely vanished.) Slavery is returning as a trade into Islamic countries or in Islamic countries such as Libya. Production by slaves feeds into global supply chains, including for very prominent companies.

In the Transatlantic African slave trade, the Europeans bought slaves. They almost never did the enslaving. They didn’t need to, the infrastructure of the trade already existed. For Catholics, actively enslaving discovered peoples was banned by a 1537 Papal encyclical. (Owning or trading in slaves was fine, however.)

So began the Atlantic slave trade. The overwhelming majority of the slaves went to Brazil and the Caribbean, where the death rate of slaves was so high, they needed constant replenishing. Temperate zone North America had a much lower death rate among slaves, so (even with smuggling) it probably only received about 10 per cent of the flow of slaves across the Atlantic.

There is a simple, grim, indicator of how high the relative slave death rates were. If slaves lived and then reproduced in significant numbers, they adopted the religion of their masters. If there was much higher turnover in slaves, because of much higher death rates, then African-derived religious ideas were much stronger, as the slave population was constantly being replenished with newcomers while Christianity had less ability to take root. Hence temperate zone Americas had much higher take-up of Christianity among slaves and tropical zone Americas much more African-derived religious beliefs. A division we can still see among their descendants.

If racism and race talk in the Americas was just the legacy of slavery, it could be expected to fade as slavery recedes into the past. To a significant extent, it has in the Caribbean and Latin America. What appears to give race some continuing life, notably in Brazil, is being very class-hierarchical societies where class has a lingering continental ancestry pattern due to low levels of social mobility. Or, rather, continental ancestry patterns make it easy to see how low social mobility actually is.

This is mildly complicated by melanin count becoming a marker of status, as it is obvious that the elite are overwhelmingly of low melanin count. But this is clearly a product of the class hierarchy being made more physically visible by the patterns of continental ancestry. Plus some lingering association of sun effects on the skin with the negative status-marker of outside manual labour. Trying to analyse this class-status pattern through the prism of race is to confuse effects for cause.

What gives race talk so much more life in the US than the rest of the Americas is that slavery did not generate the only use of race talk within the US.

The ancestry problem in American colonies

At the time the British colonies in the US were being settled, European states were avidly continuing their long practice of fighting each other. The European states were not peace states that occasionally went to war, but war states which experienced intervals of peace. Hence the British conquest of Dutch and French colonies in North America.

So, as the North American colonies tried to construct new societies, there was an obvious need to create an identity that bound newcomers into the new societies without importing the rivalries of Europe. Even the British Isles had ethnic and religious fracture lines. The advent of railways and steamships from the 1820s onwards, which is when mass prosperity really began to be built, increased the scale of migration to the US and broadened its ethnic origins.

They were people from one continent (Europe) settling in, and invading, a new continent (North America) and some of whom started importing slaves from a third continent (Africa).

Continental origins were clearly in play, so continental identifiers were the obvious and easy place to go. Whites were the civilising creators of the new societies, reds were barbarians to be defeated and dispossessed and blacks were the slaves serving the white civilisers. Thus Europeans, of whatever origin, could be whites together. Provided they took appropriate steps to fit in.

Inevitably, there were complications. Such as indigenous Americans owning slaves. Race was a gloss on much deeper social patterns and racism a justification for the otherwise morally awkward bits of those patterns.

The white (and black, and red, and later yellow) terminology separated people from their history. (No-one has a continent-wide culture or history.) That made the terminology advantageous in the situation of colonial North America and the independent US. Separating people from potentially divisive European identities within a common American identity was much of the point. The American colonies, and then the United States, were creating a supergroup (to use scholar Amy Chua’s term) around the identity of white. Groups “became” white as they were absorbed into the supergroup. Whatever your European ancestry (and there was no common European identity: there was not even a common religious identity, given the post-Reformation fracturing of Christianity) folk could be “white” together.

There was also a drive by the slave-owning plantation elite to create a common “white” identity. This had begun before the Civil War, once steamships and railways had increased the rate of European migration, but took on much more urgency after the abolition of slavery. In the Antebellum South, the identity construction of race was, with some ambiguities, so as to divide poor folk of European ancestry from the slave folk of African ancestry. In the post-Reconstruction South, it was so as to divide working folk of European ancestry from working folk of African ancestry.

One can tell much about the dominant moralising of a period by what sermonising myths parading as history are popular. This is a genre with a strong tendency to the grandiose, both in moral and in explanatory pretension, flattering both author and audience. Hence its enduring appeal. The current trend is for sermonising myth with a strongly penitential air. This is epitomised by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a disingenuous exercise subject to a great deal of criticism for its distorted and highly selective take on history. (It is difficult for slavery in the US to have started in 1619 if slavery was first legally recognised in the British North American colonies in 1641.) But then, applying Adolph Reed’s principle stated above, a race-centred history of the US is going to be a unicorn history of the United States, so historiographical failures are to be expected.

If one prefers history to be an experience of genuine discovery, I can recommend Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States (2010). Part two of the book, How White People Lost Their Rhythm, explores how various groups — the Irish, the Jews and Italian-Americans — climbed the racialised hierarchy of their new land. Innovative attraction to the vitality and vibrancy of African-American music and dance by each wave of newcomers recurrently turned into rejections of such associations in the pursuit of a sober “whiteness”. A cultural supergroup identity parading as a biological one.

Fitting in meant embracing the cultural model of citizenship built on an English and Puritan cultural core: sober, hard-working, self-controlled, diligent, responsible, restrained. A self-image often not embraced by African-Americans, either during or after slavery, much to the frustration of many African-American intellectuals, including Martin Luther King. But, then, why would they embrace that constrained ideal? They were literally excluded from citizenship when slaves and functionally excluded afterwards by Jim Crow and segregation. The autonomies of pleasure provided refuges from, and rewards independent of, their social exclusions. Hence the cultural vibrancy that waves of newcomers found attractive but whose rejection facilitated inclusion in the American supergroup.

In telling the story of how various groups “achieved” “whiteness”, Russell nicely exposes a key feature of race talk: how much it is a moveable feast. What purports to be biological is very much a matter of social categorisation whose coverage shifts over time. One “rose” to whiteness in large part by one’s embrace of the sound-citizen identity. The effect was to build a supergroup; “white” Americans, who were expected to downplay their past identities in favour of their new one. To not be hyphenated Americans but members of a new-nation supergroup based in part on a double separating rejection — of the hedonistic and unruly black and the barbaric red. After the rise of Chinese immigration, it was based on a triple separating rejection — of the black, the red and the alien yellow. A created aggregation rejecting created antinomies.

There was also a heroic national myth, a sacred history, to provide a binding historical narrative. With the US Constitution being a binding civic icon and sacred object.

Creating a new national identity (and manipulating it for sectional advantage) gave race talk a power within the US that way outlived the end of slavery in 1865.

A utility that was broken, in its overtly racist forms, by the civil rights movement. (Race talk has since made a comeback in ostentatiously anti-racist form.) Martin Luther King invoked, with soaring rhetoric, the principles of the American Revolution to claim, correctly, that systematic separation of Americans of African ancestry from the political life of the United States was a profound offence against those Revolutionary principles, against the deeper story and promise of the American founding. Which, of course, it was.

This was a bid to create a new supergroup: Americans regardless of ancestry. A supergroup of all those who embraced the citizenship, principles and history of the United States. Martin Luther King did not merely want African-Americans to be full political and legal citizens, he also wanted them to be embrace the culture of citizenship. A debate that continues to rumble along.

The convenient divisive cheapness of identity politics

The Civil Rights Act 1964 and Voting Rights Act 1965 coincided with the Immigration and Nationality Act 1965. The shift in migration policy proceeded to hugely complicate the ethnic make-up of the United States.

Having an inclusive politics of citizenship in a situation of increasing waves of new migrants from a wide range of countries, most obviously from Latin America, proved inherently difficult. For the migrants were not part of, but rather tended to break up, the local connections that effective citizenship and resident politics is based on. Given that the new arrivals tended to concentrate in coastal and border cities, that began to create a two-track politics in the US.

There was rural/small town/small city United States of the interior, with few ethnic minorities, who came to broadly accept the notion of a common American citizenship. A process that was easier if there was no prior history of slavery in their region. (As, in the most of the United States, there either wasn’t or else slavery had been relatively minor and locally abolished.)

Then there was the politics of metropolitan United States: ethnically diverse, dominated by an increasingly cosmopolitan elite. The trouble with citizenship politics in such a situation was (1) the increased weakness of local connections due to resident flux and (2) citizenship politics implies resident politics and working-class politics. And if you are part of the networked elite you would prefer politics not go down that path. You would much prefer politics that breaks people up into separate, and separating, identities. Just as had the plantation elite in the Antebellum and Jim Crow South.

Race talk, especially elite race talk, is a discourse of domination precisely because it divides citizens, residents and workers into separate identities. Race talk is very obviously a discourse of domination when justifying slavery. But it is also a discourse of domination when being used to, for example, create split labour markets divided by, say, melanin count.

Here’s the thing. Race talk does not have to be overtly racist to separate people. On the contrary, ostentatiously anti-racist race talk can perform exactly the same function. One simply identifies racism as a major threat, tag it as coming from a particular group, tag another group or groups as suffering under its burdens, and you are away.

It is even better if one invokes a concept of systemic or structural racism. For systemic racism, and the whole identity politics schtick, is a great way to avoid accountability. If there is this pervasive force that affects everything, then no actual decision-maker is responsible for anything. Nor is racism, with its presumptive malice, a useful term with which to tackle the legacies of past race politics. (Unless, of course, the point is to divide people.)

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michael’s point that identity politics is class politics has a great deal of truth behind it. Throughout US history, race-talk politics, of both the explicitly racist and the ostentatiously anti-racist versions, has recurrently been elite-useful politics.

Various disparities between groups can be trotted out to “prove” that systemic racism is pervasive. Yet there are plenty of disparities between groups who have the same continental ancestries. While some previously highly discriminated against groups, such as Chinese-Americans in California or Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, now do, on average, very well.

It is perfectly true that, for example, Americans of European ancestry have an average income of $37,000 while Americans of African ancestry have an average income of $23,000, almost 40 percent lower. But Indian-Americans have an average income of $53,000, more than triple that of Burmese-Americans, who have an average income of $17,000. Nigerian-Americans have an average income of $27,000, Haitian-Americans of $18,000 and Somali-Americans of $3,000. Macedonian-Americans have an average income of $51,000, more than double that of Pennsylvanian-Dutch/German-Americans with an average income of $24,000. The disparities between groups within the same continental ancestries are hugely greater than those between aggregated continental ancestries. How long a group has been migrating to the US, the skill levels of migrants, what selection processes have been operating on who migrates; all these factors affect average incomes.

Median household income also shifts the patterns somewhat, because of differences in family size. (There are difficulties with ancestry data, but since I am only comparing it with itself, that’s fine.)

Moreover, the most common age of Euro-Americans is 58, that of African-Americans is 27. That has huge average income implications.

Pointing out the lower average income (and lower assets) of African-Americans on one hand, who make up around 13 per cent of the US population, a proportion that varies wildly depending which part of the US you are in, and then claiming that every member of the (much larger) Euro-American population (73 per cent) “benefits” from racism is nonsense on stilts. Especially as the most obvious race-based disadvantage Asian-Americans suffer from is the operation of affirmative action to benefit African-Americans.

The disparities-so-racism game may not stand up to deeper analytical scrutiny, but it is simple and rhetorically very powerful.

Moreover, systemic racism more or less immediately de-legitimises any conservative viewpoints — they are boxed away as apologists for “systemic racism”. As the politics of rural/small town/small city of the interior US can be expected to be more conservative than the politics of the increasingly cosmopolitan metropolises, systemic racism talk, as part of identity politics, becomes a rallying cry for metropolitan politics while identity politics separates the citizens, residents and workers of those metropolises into competing groups.

Hence we arrive at the phenomena of “woke capital”. The networked corporate and professional elites like identity politics just fine. None of this awkward citizen or resident or working-class politics. No, instead we have easy purchases of moral legitimacy plus a divided metropolitan citizenry, residents and working class, all at once.

Hence also the odd pattern of the Party that has for decades dominated the cities and states where minorities mostly live getting to blame the Party that runs the places where minorities mostly don’t live for any difficulties that members of the minorities may be experiencing.

A neat trick if you can pull it off. Which, with a sufficiently friendly metro media, you can.

While we could multiply examples of this “not us, honest” dynamic (who has run those police forces folk are complaining about?), affirmative action, in its operation among African-Americans, provides a nicely revealing example of the bankruptcy of race-based policies and politics.

The race-based affirmative action con job

I am deeply sceptical about the alleged value of affirmative action in higher education. Social effort would be much better directed much earlier in people’s lives.

Moreover, taking top-in-their-local-school students and positively continental-ancestry weighting their test scores so that they systematically become bottom students in their university classes is more or less bound to create aggrieved students with lots of emotionally-bruising experiences. Especially if their education actively encourages them to see every negative experience in their life as “racism”.

Allocating affirmative action by continental ancestry turns it into a transparent con-job. It does so by lumping recent African immigrants and their children, who include notably successful groups in the US (said children having already included a US President) and are not the descendants of slaves, as well as Afro-Caribbeans, who have a history of self-government after the earlier abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, with the descendants of American slaves and victims of Jim Crow, who have a very different history and burdens therefrom. (Then again, at some level, all race-based anythings are going to be a con job: remember the unicorn principle.)

One of these days, one of the major Parties may even include a descendant of American slaves on their Presidential ticket. (It hasn’t happened yet.)

The flattening away of the varying legacies people are heir to in favour of melanin count is a profound intellectual, social and moral fraud. Except, of course, pressure is put on to make sure that people do not publicly notice the racialised affirmative action con job.

Re-jigging affirmative action so that it was explicitly for the descendants of American slaves would, however, expose the emptiness of race talk, and the interlocking status, political and income-generating strategies built on it.

One of the many, many reasons Americans, and others, should stop having conversations about race.

Especially when it is used as money spinners in a burgeoning, and toxic, legitimacy-purchasing “diversity” industry. Legitimacy purchased at what might be considerable cost in team dynamics: this is not a good commercial move for a company, however advantageous it might be for morally grandstanding executives or congenial for HR and marketing folk living in social bubbles of the like-minded. Of course, if the aim is to discourage unionisation, then encouraging workers to think of themselves as divided by identity groups may well be helpful.

But while spending vast sums on toxic anti-training may be the most grotesque manifestation of having conversations about unicorns, aka race, it is not remotely the worst or most potentially disastrous.

For if there is no common citizenship, no common heritage, no common principles, then there is nothing to sustain a common nationhood. And if differentiation by constant allegations of pervasive racism, of pervasive oppressive malice, for malice is what the term racism invokes, are used to build careers and protect (and so also deny) access to status and resources, then becoming the violently Dis-United States becomes that much easier.

The United States has already had one Civil War over protecting status and access to resources via exploitative differentiation of people by continental ancestry. Sliding into another one because an academic, professional and corporate elite finds identity politics a convenient path to gain, and retain, access to status and resources would be a world-class tragedy.

Race flattens and trivialises human identity, hence its facility for dehumanisation. The two groups most obsessed about race — woke progressives (or PC authoritarians) and white identitarians — share more than an obsession with a concept ideal for dehumanisation. A recent study has found that (pdf) both groups share similarly elevated rates of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy (the Dark Triad) plus entitlement. If what you see most about other people is their race, then you see their humanity that much less. Of course that is a viewpoint that attracts manipulative, self-serving and entitled personalities.

The words of the former slave and playwright Publius Terentius Afer, known as Terence, echo down to us:

Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.
(I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.)

In a tweet of 31 August 2020, an anonymous person presenting as a parent of children of mixed continental ancestry expresses a hope that we should all embrace:

I want them to be the generation that at last transcends the limiting and soul-destroying American “skin game”.

We all urgently need to stop having conversations about race and start taking our common humanity, and the realities of specific legacies, much more seriously.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Cro