Perry Anderson skewers "Sinomania" and "Sinophobia"

In a wonderful article in LRB, Perry Anderson skewers the facile "Sinomaniac" (or, sometimes also at the same time "Sinophobic") narratives floating around in Western (particularly US) discourse. The piece is politically sharp, as always, and the soberness of the assessment is refreshing. If you're suffering a headache from making the mistake of perusing through one of Thomas L. Friedman's hackjobs... this is precisely the prescription you need.

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"Cultural Relativism" and Orientalism

I recently heard a comment in a university setting that we should teach about "cultural relativism" and Orientalism when discussing how "we" encounter other cultures.

The view the person was trying to express, I think, was something like the following. We should teach students to think critically about the cultural and social field in which they live, so that they don't unthinkingly reinstate the imperialist gaze, common in the "West", that afflicts so much thinking about "non Western" cultures. This is a point I happen to agree with. But it's unclear that you can agree with this if you are a "cultural relativist".

Here's why. If "cultural relativism" is true, then we shouldn't quarrel with what some in the West say about other societies. For how, according to the "cultural relativist" story, could ethnocentrists and imperialists do otherwise? In succumbing to the Orientalist gaze, you might think, all ethnocentrists in the West are doing is proving that "cultural relativism" is true. They are merely asserting one facet of what they understand to be their own culture, in a plural field in which different cultures operate according to different, incommensurable paradigms. If, for instance, a defender of British imperialism claims that all Asians are barbarians, we could locate this view within a segment of historically-situated British culture and conclude that this person's belief is just a matter of their particular culture. To judge it otherwise would be a mistake.

Here's a quick and dirty account of what I understand by "cultural relativism". It is the view that "worldviews" are internal to a particular "culture", of which there are many in the world. Value has no specific meaning outside of a particular culture, and there are many cultures. To apply values from one culture to that of another, therefore, is to do something that doesn't make sense (notice that we can't say that this is to do something wrong, since then we would have to appeal to an extra-cultural value like toleration, or the like).

Let's leave aside what "culture" might mean here, and how we might go about clearly demarcating its boundaries. Let's also leave aside how this view simply assumes that we cannot critically engage our "own" culture (whatever we might mean by "culture"). Let's also leave aside who it is that actually believes this view (I'm not sure hardly anyone does, despite what they may think or say about the matter).

Let's just consider how this view jibes with Orientalism. It seems to me that if you think that former is true, then you clearly disagree with Said's thesis about Orientalism.

Orientalism amounts very roughly to the tendency not to see other societies or cultures as they are, but as the typical, historical Western onlooker wants to see them. This tendency often takes the form of imposing mystical, mythic, fantasies onto cultures outside of Western Europe, a tendency which has deep roots in European literature, politics and culture. This imposition need not always be the assignment of predicates that are ostensibly 'bad', they could be traits like possessing obscure wisdom, sexual powers, magic, etc. That these imposed traits are not obviously 'bad' (as, for example, characterizations of non-Europeans as barbarous, animal-like, uncivilized, etc.), does not make them any less imposed or false.

But this view is an indictment of a certain trend in literature, culture, politics and the history of ideas in the West. It claims that myths and fantasies (or anxieties, contradictions, desires, etc.) are simply imposed upon a foreign culture and taken for granted when subsequently talking about them and assessing them. This tendency has, as Said points out, deep roots in Western societies. It has taken on a life of its own in some respects, and may even appear to some in those societies as the way things actually are. Some may not have even considered that these myths and fantasies about "the Orient" could be otherwise.

But to be able to point all of this out, you'd need to firmly reject the crude view often called "cultural relativism". You'd need to think that the ethnocentrism of the traditional Western gaze is wrong, that it uncritically accepts falsehoods about other people and their societies, and that it imposes fantastical traits onto foreign cultures that are alien to them. Moreover, you'd need to critically engage the cultural landscape of Western societies, thus presupposing that culture is the sort of thing that can be criticized and pulled apart.

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Sacha Baron Cohen: Liar

From the Guardian:

"The non-profit worker from Bethlehem who was branded a terrorist by Bruno

• Christian activist plans to sue Sacha Baron Cohen
• Interview was filmed in hotel, not refugee camp

For a supposed terrorist, Ayman Abu Aita is remarkably easy to find. It takes one phone call to set up a meeting with the man described in the hit movie Brüno as a "terrorist group leader".

He sits alone at a long, white table in the gardens of the Everest hotel and restaurant in Beit Jala, a mountain village near Bethlehem. This, he says, is the "secret location" where he met Brüno, played by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen."

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What is racism?

If I inferred a definition of racism from many conversations and discussions about race that I've encountered in a casual setting among many of my white peers when I was an undergrad, it would run something like this:

Racism is 'seeing' or noticing that someone has different color skin from you and making generalizations on the basis of their skin (thus, part of not being racist is 'not seeing' or 'being blind' to the social phenomenon of race). In other words, making any decision on the basis of race just is what it is to be racist; the non-racist alternative would be to 'treat everyone the same' as though racial designations and hierarchies were non-existent. Moreover, racism is tantamount to an individual pathology: it's when some individual intentionally harbours cruel or hateful feelings about other individuals because of their racial designation. Thus someone who is a racist is a terrible person, in the sense that they are cruel and mean to other people in a concerted and intentional way. Finally, someone who is ostensibly a member of a marginalized group, or''has minority friends", cannot properly be called a racist.

Now the above is an armchair sociological observation, that is, more or less just what I've noticed. It's hardly a coherent set of beliefs (of course ideologies and dominant beliefs, like the balance of power from which they emerge, seldom are). But despite its problems, not everything about this way of characterizing racism is false (although, as I will argue, most of it is). Racism is often hateful and it is a kind of pathology (albeit a social pathology rather than an abnormality of individual psychology). But it's hardly a matter of 'seeing' some attribute of a person that ought to be ignored.

Before launching into my criticism of this cluster of observations about race noted above, I'd like to dwell for a bit on a seemingly trivial question: what is race, exactly?

The 'traditional' answer to this question offered by white European colonizers was that race was a series of genetic or biologically-defined characteristics that determined the character, culture and behavior of the members of that race.

After Auschwitz, the correspondence between particular 'racial/biological traits' and certain behavioral attributes has been shattered as a legitimate view. After the horrors of Fascism, many of the intelligentsia in dominant imperialist countries began to strongly reject the eugenics and 'racial science' that had enjoyed widespread intellectual currency in the early 20th century, particularly during the interwar period. Unfortunately, ever since its nadir after WWII, eugenics has been slowly making a comeback. You can even read it in its new form, 'sociobiology', in outlets like the New York Times from time to time.

Yet while the correspondence between biologically-defined racial groups and predicates like "primitive" (or, alternatively, "pure") has rightly been dealt serious blows, the cogency of the idea that race can be successfully cashed out in terms of water-tight genetic/biological properties continues to enjoy purchase within public consciousness as well as the academy.

But critical reflection quickly makes this biological-essentialist view difficult to maintain.

If you start seriously asking what biological characteristics actually constitute a 'race', you are left only with a series of unanswerable questions. Every possible answer begins to look question-begging, or imprecise, or simply incoherent. Say you pick 'skin color' as the litmus test for what constitutes a race. How, then, should we taxonomize skin colors? Human phenotypes regarding traits like eye color, skin color, hair color, etc. exist on a wide and fluid scale that does not admit of quick-and-easy dividing lines. It starts to look like skin color alone won't get you a coherent, self-contained set that distinguishes people with certain characteristics as a group distinct from others. Also it's unclear what the import of successfully labeling different phenotypic traits could be: how does that get us to a purportedly 'thick' and substantive concept like 'race'?

Other attempts to provide grounds for water-tight genetically distinct races are equally unpromising routes of analysis. Unsurprisingly, its the case that certain trends in phenotype among different populations for historical and geographic reasons. But a 'race' this does not make. Instead of speaking of some amorphous notion of biological 'race' it becomes unclear why, for example, we can't just talk about wide variance in morphology, in particular, outward appearance.

In general, the alleged correlation between genetic makeup and any behavioral traits whatsoever is very poorly understood. (One would hardly know this, given the recent proliferation of pop-psychological books purporting to be able to explain nearly everything in terms of some half-baked account of human genetic makeup). Even among different breeds of dogs, contrary to popular belief, we have very little scientific understanding or evidence of correlations between breeds and traits like 'aggressive', 'obedient', etc.

Any serious look at human biology quickly leads us to the conclusion that there is no scientific warrant for coming upon necessary and sufficient biological conditions for membership in a race. In fact, contemporary genetics completely exposes the lack of intellectual and scientific rigour of purportedly 'scientific' versions of racism. Contrary to the frightening prerogatives of neo-eugenicists, we have every reason to think that genes don't determine race. Contending otherwise is precisely what at least one version of racism consists in: conflating social/cultural variations with pseudo-scientific accounts of human biology.

So much for any biological basis for racial-essentialism. (Incidentally, similar problems arise when we try to cleanly justify gender binarism (or sexual binarism) on biological grounds: we find a continuum of 'sexual' characteristics (e.g. 'intersex') and we are led on the basis of the biological evidence at our disposal to conclude, contra traditional gender norms, that biological sex is a more complicated affair than 'man' and 'woman'.)

So if 'race' actually has any meaning, it must be contingent, socially-maintained, and historically-emergent meaning. In other words, 'race' is an idea that certain groups of human beings have created as a basis for organizing and taxonomizing certain social relations and hierarchies. As the recently-arrested Henry Louis Gates puts it:

"It's important to remember that "race" is only a sociopolitical category, nothing more. At the same time ... that doesn't help me when I'm trying to get a taxi on the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue."

I don't know the history, I would guess that race is a far less old concept than we typically assume. But despite not knowing its origins, we can be sure that its meaning and political currency has fluctuated throughout history.

Drawing on Ali Rattansi's Racism: A Very Short Introduction (which, incidentally, I'm reading at present) let's look at the example of anti-semitism. As Rattansi points out, the term 'anti-Semitism' only came into being in the late 1870s. Now this is not to say that hatred of Jews didn't exist before then: the 'new' idea embodied in 'anti-Semitism' was that anti-Jewish sentiment was a racial matter. Moreover, the pretenses of 'anti-Semitism' were scientific, whereas the justifications for anti-Jewish oppression had taken on different (not purportedly scientific) forms in the past.

So we must note that this new 'racialized' and 'scientific' way of expressing hatred of Jews was a development of the late 19th century. But although it purported to a new development, was it really qualitatively different from other forms of Christian anti-Judaism, xenophobia, nationalism or ethnocentrism? It was different in form, but there was no more scientific warrant for this new permutation of oppression than there was for older examples. As Rattansi points out, throughout the history of anti-Judaism we find that oppression always occurs in the absence of any clearly-defined biological evidence, whereas certain cultural practices are paramount in singling Jews out for attack.

What all of this suggests to me is that to accept the biological/essentialist explanation of what race is, even if you still nonetheless think that all 'races' (biologically construed) should be equal, is already to buy into the eugenicist framework. And as we've seen, it's not only scientific farce, but it's also loaded with tons of oppressive, xenophobic baggage.

One more thing to say about race is that "whiteness" problematic property. While most American's take it for granted that Jews, the Irish and Italians are all "white", this conceals the fact that "this status has been gradually achieved in the 20th century as part of a social and political process of inclusion. As 'Semites' Jews were often regarded as not belonging to 'white races', while it was not uncommon in the 19th century for the English and Americans to regard the Irish as 'black' and for Italians to have an ambiguous status between white and black in the USA". (again, I quote here from Rattansi).

The same problems occur when trying to find a coherent basis for defining 'black' as a distinct 'race', as evidenced by the social/political struggles in Caribbean colonies over the political status of Mulattoes, as well as the infamous "one drop" rule implemented in the American South for defining 'black' (as Rattansi points out, 'one drop' of 'white blood' didn't therefore make someone white, whereas the converse was true). This isn't to take up the 'post-racist' colorblind ideology; on the contrary, this is merely to point out how unstable, contingent, and political the concept of race (as such) really is. For me, recognizing this from the start is the only way to conduct an emancipatory struggle to smash racism.

So race is a complicated matter. Whatever the legitimacy of the concept of 'race' or its grounding in fact, we must not deny that the concept has widespread effects as a social phenomenon impacting relations of power in contemporary societies. Whether or not 'race' is a coherent concept, people are still oppressed on the basis of their non-membership in a dominant group, as they have been for long periods of history. As Rattansi notes, "many millions have died as a result of explicitly racist acts and the injuries and injustices committed in its name continue". Thus, as I've suggested above, to speak today as though 'race doesn't exist' is not a virtue: it is to silence discussion of real, objective hierarchies in society. This phenomenon, sometimes called 'colorblind racism', has the effect of preventing discussion of a pernicious mode of social oppression that persists, thus shielding contemporary racism from critical engagement. To my mind, concealing oppression (or denying it exists) is even worse than admiting its there but seeking to justify it.

Re: the initial sketch of what racism means to many of my peers, I agree with Rattansi that many public debates falter from over-simplified attempts to divide racism from non-racism. All too often, discussions of racism among whites turns on constructing facile ways of identifying who really is racist and who is not. Moreover, on the question of concerted intent and racism, I think its ridiculous to assume that because someone intends not to be racist, that they are therefore not implicated perpetuating racism. Racism, if we agree that it is a social phenomenon, is not an abberration or a sin committed by an invididual who simply makes bad choices. Someone is not 'rotten to the core' simply because they are complicit or directly involved in sustaining racism in any way. When someone says "hey, what you just said strikes me as rather racist", it should not be tantamount to "you are a bad, bad person and you intentionally mean to harm others!". This is not the way to talk about racism, and doing so in this way only makes the "but I didn't mean it" or "but he's actually a good guy, I swear" character defences seem plausible (when, in fact, they are totally irrelevant).

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