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.
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