Thursday, March 19, 2015


THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE TERMS OF
RACE AND RACISM
Zarina Urmanbetova
 (Student of 
Department of Anthropology, Hacettepe University)


The terms of race and racism began and spreaded with the geographic discoveries. “White” people have estimated a new “others” as “wild”, “primitive” and such kind of cliches. Even they began to teach “wild” ones to become “modern and civilized”. At the same time white man began to enslave them.
Believing in the race was supported by scientific prove. The scientists tried to prove of the existence of race by the morphological differences like skin color, hair type and facial appearances as apparent differences. People believed that race determines the character, capacity and the culture of human (Fenton, 2001).
Classic definition of racism is the order of belief in racial hierarchy of various human groups. “The belief that the own race is superior to other races and the behavior forms accompanying this belief”. The determination of biological racial differences has been accepted as proven to be accurate of the thought (Somersan, 2004).
During the evolution process the human communities spread to the different regions. When they adapted to the new natural environment, there appeared slightly different groups from each other. These different groups are called as "population groups" but not a "race". In spite of the distance and an absence of the relationship between different population groups they don’t divided to the races. They are the same species (Somersan, 2004).
Thinkers of the 19th century divided people to the Caucasian, Negroid and Mongoloid races. Later unsatisfied scientists divided the people into white, black, red and yellow. Along with the geographic discoveries the colonial areas have widened. And it was thought that the few races are not explaining the human diversity. In addition to the physical properties such as skin color, hair type etc. they have begun to add an intellectual capacity to the dividing into the races. And the race amount has increased, first time it rose from 3 to the 16, then to 32. In the USA in the beginning of the 20th century there were realized different tests to scientifically prove that black people have a low intellectual capacity than white people (Somersan, 2004).
The first who rejected of the existence of race was an anthropologist Franz Boas, who said that people couldn't be divided into the races because of the physical features and cultural diversities. Boas had claimed that the differences inside of the human groups are more than between different groups (Boas, 1932; Fenton, 2001; Somersan, 2004).
The discourse of race and racism was developed by the policy which has legalized the superiority of the one group of people above others and economic colonialism. Between 1526-1870 in Brazil millions of people were enslaved and sold, thus enslaved people became a part of the trade system (Fenton, 2001:100).
In the development and legitimization of the concepts of race and racism there were a contribution of the main thinkers of Europe. According to the Bernasconi, German philosopher Immanuel Kant is a originator of the concept of “race”. For Kant the main element of dividing the people was a skin color. İn the his book “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime” Kant asserted that “the blackness of someone from head to toe is the evidence of stupidity of that people”  (Bernasconi, 1999:38).
A famous American philosopher and one of the constituents of the American Declaration of Independence John Locke also has a racist discourses in his works. He approved of slavery, and the authority and power over slaves slaveholder. İn the same way German philosopher Hegel in his book “Lectures on the Philosophy of History” asserted that African people are deprived from culture and stated that Africa is not historical. Based on this idea he thought that the European colonization of the Africa is for the benefits of the Africans (Bernasconi, 1999:65).
Racism is a changing cultural element. The evidence of the race/racism were searched in the biological researches and the holy writings. Nowadays even after the stopping the searching for the physical differences, racism is still exist in our cultural life (Fanon, 1967; Somersan, 2004).


Here is another article about race and racism: The myth of race: Why are we divided by race when there is no such thing?


Racism is a part of our everyday lives. Where you live, where you go to school, your job, your profession, who you interact with, how people interact with you, your treatment in the healthcare and justice systems are all affected by your race. There is no inherent relationship between intelligence, law- abidingness, or economic practices and race, just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood group, or skin color and any set of complex human behavior
However, over the past 500 years, we have been taught by an informal, mutually reinforcing consortium of intellectuals, politicians, statesmen, business and economic leaders and their books that human racial biology is real and that certain races are biologically better than others. For the past 500 years, people have been taught how to interpret and understand racism. We have been told that there are very specific things that relate to race, such as intelligence, sexual behavior, birth rates, infant care, work ethics and abilities, personal restraint, lifespan, law-abidingness, aggression, altruism, economic and business practices, family cohesion, and even brain size.
Many of our basic policies of race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their followers in control of the way we live our modern lives. These leaders often see themselves a s the best and the brightest. Much of this history helped establish and maintain the Spanish Inquisition, colonial policies, slavery, Nazism, racial separatism and discrimination, and anti-immigration policies.
Over the past 500 or so years, many intellectuals and their books have created our story of racism. They developed our initial ideas of race in Western society and solidified the attitudes and beliefs that gradually followed under the influence of their economic and political policies.
Then, approximately 100 years ago, anthropologist Franz Boas came up with an alternate explanation for why peoples from different areas or living under certain conditions behaved differently from one another. People have divergent life histories, different shared experiences with distinctive ways of relating to these differences. We all have a worldview, and we all share our worldview with others with similar experiences. We have culture (Sussman, 2014).

References
Boas.F. (1940). Race, Language and culture. Columbia University, The MacMillan Company, New York
Fenton.S. (2001). Etnisite. Irkçılık, sınıf ve kültür. Phoenix Yayınevi, Ankara
Somersan.S. (2004). Sosyal Bilimlerde Etnisite ve Irk. İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, İstanbul.
Sussman. R.W. (2014). The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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