Racism and Sexism Questions

Week 1

Benjamin Isaac, “Slavery and Proto-Racism in Greco- Roman Antiquity”

Why is Isaac invested in the project of ”proto-racism”?

• Attitudes of the mind before there was a modern language of racism which he argues that there is an abundance of

• These attitudes would shape a form of rationalizing and systematically justifying various forms of prejudice

• How these attitudes and values would shape justifications, (il)logic, and the enterprise of slavery in connection with concepts of empire (imperial expansion) and migration

Isaac, in a way, is asking a very contemporary question at the heart of this article: what precedes the language of racism? Why is persecution and punishment tied to the role of difference in the Other? What enables and perpetuates structural racism (as opposed to relations of race)?

Isaac’s definition of racism: “an attitude towards individuals and groups of peoples which posits a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities. It therefore attributes to those individuals and groups of peoples collective traits, physical, mental and moral, which are constant and unalterable by human will, because they are caused by hereditary factors or external influences, such as climate or geography.”

“The essence of racism is that it regards individuals as superior or inferior because they are believed to share imagined physical, mental, and moral attributes with the group to which they are deemed to belong, and it is assumed that they cannot changes these traits individually. This is held to be impossible, because these traits are determined by their physical make-up. This is a relatively broad, yet precise definition, broader than the ones usually employed.” This type of definition allows us to recognize forms of racism that are not steered exclusively by biological determinism.

• Fluidity of racism as an ideology which applied in different periods and different societies to various groups while still maintaining definable characteristics

• Proto-racism, or a value system part and parcel with ideology of racism, can be found in Greek and Roman texts where there is an already determined distinction between ruling class and barbarians

Isaac: “It is generally accepted that Greek civilization was the first to raise the level of abstract, systematic abstract thought to a level that we now recognize as approaching our own. I assert that the Greeks not only contributed the first attempt to think systematically about, e.g., political systems, but also the first effort to find a rational and systematic basis for their own superiority and their claim that others were inferior” (33).

“Hostility towards foreigners occurs in every society, but in widely differing degrees, social settings and moral environments. An essential component of such hostility is always the tendency to generalize and simplify, so that whole nations are viewed as if they were a single individual with a single personality” (33).

5 Concepts of Proto-Racism/ Determination of a collective nature of groups, or the character of people

1. Environmental determinism 2. Inheritance of acquired characteristics 3. Combination of these two ideas 4. Constitution and form of government 5. Autochthony and Pure Lineage

6. Connections between these ideas to the ideology of ancient imperialism

Environmental Determinism

• Implication is that essential features of body and mind come from the outside and are not the result of genetic evolution, social environment or conscious choice;

• Individuality and individual change are thereby ignored and even excluded; • For example, Isaac points out that ”entire nations are believed to have common

characteristics determined wholly by factors outside themselves… • “These presumed characteristics are then subject to value judgements, in which

foreigners are usually rejected as being inferior to the observer or approved of as being untainted and superior in some respects.”

• “Not based on objective observations of reality” • Expressions of ethnic stereotypes and proto-racism

Claims made by environmental determinism become a useful ideological tool for ambitious imperialists, because it justified the conclusion that the Greeks were ideally capable of ruling others.

Environmental determinism (cont.)

Isaac’s notion of environmental determinism illustrates that imperial expansion is not only based on the ideal of attainable expansion, but the notion tat there are people imagined to inhabit particular regions that “show no capacity of governing others” * In other words, that expansion requires the notion that other people are conquerable

* Environmental determinism therefore becomes a ruse to justify a value system of racial inferiority and conquest

Isaac points out that Ethiopians, for example, did not co-exist among Greeks or Romans; but were considered valuable because they were “[representative] of peoples living near the edge of the world.” -- Geographical and physical features were interpreted as assets deeming them “as a rare and expensive type of slave, the possession of which enhanced the status of the owner.”

Isaac explains that: “the environmental theories of antiquity were widely accepted by the European authors of the Enlightenment and thus contributed to the later development of racism.”

Inheritance of acquired characteristics

• The belief of acquired characteristics leading to the belief that “results of such inheritance were cumulative from generation to generation, thus producing, in time, new species”

Who is the human? Who is disposable and governable?

By now, we should already infer an ethical problematic: that is these forms of proto- racism assume there are fundamental characteristics of the human that constitute a race of superiority.

Myth of races produce who is susceptible to deformations, disease, disability. At the same time, these are traits that would signal a “racial inferiority” and governability– both perpetuating racial hierarchy and when it comes to the Enlightenment period, a racial science.

Combination of these factors:

1. Taken to a generalizable extent; these beliefs lead paradoxically to an assumption that their characteristics become uniform and constant.

2. “Climate and geography have definite effects on all people being born in a given region. These effects then become permanent traits because they become hereditary in one or two generations. These result of this combination is a powerful incentive to discriminatory attitudes. It is this combination which definitely justifies describing ancient ethnic prejudice as a form of proto-racism, for it turns what could just be an external influence which can be variable (environment influence) into something that is fixed and permanent (such as skin color).”

“Racism is by definition a fallacy and we should not be surprised if it consists of elements that do not fit together as they should. It is then not the analysis which is to be blamed, but the intellectual inconsistency of the ideas analyzed.”

Constitution and form of government: • The idea that “a good form of government is an essential ingredient in shaping a

people.” • “The environment determines basic qualities: a good constitution is essential, but can

exist only when basic human qualities exist.” • Contemporary example: “A proper education will determine the level at which an

individual functions, but the pre-condition for the success of a good education is an appropriate level of intelligence.”

• i.e. the pre-condition for success is allocated by those who already benefit from system of value which places them in a more superior position

Autochthony and pure lineage - Myth that there are people of unmixed lineage (sprung from the soil

itself) - A. entitled to hold legitimate possession of the soil - B. regarded themselves as a people uncontaminated by an

admixture of foreign elements; therefore, superior - C. Mixed blood considered to be conducive to degeneration

- White supremacy in the present reflects a deeper myth and fantasy of purity, homogeneity, and static identity.

- Fear of mixed race will function as contradictory, violent, and unethical relation in society—namely in the reproduction of slavery and rhetoric of possession and property

Ancient Imperialism

• Rhetoric of decline and degeneration, environmental determinism, and capacity for governance and conquest demonstrate blueprint of imperialism, colonialism, and conquest more generally

• But also, we see from Isaac’s examples how even before the institutionalization of slavery, there is the attitude synonymous with anti- blackness

• That is, the language of white supremacy as a dominant race is also the intensification of a myth in which a particular race is deemed as disposable, degenerate, criminal, and even non-human.

• Such attitude will set the ground-wire to justify the expansion of slavery

Individual and collective slavery

• In Greek and Roman society, slavery was hardly represented as a moral dilemma as it has done in modern history

• If there was anything close to a moral debate, it pivoted on ”the difference in nature between free men and slaves, an issue important for the justification of slavery.”

• “If an essential difference, mentally and physically, between free men and slaves could be demonstrated it was easier to claim that their difference in status was justified and reasonable.”

• Again, the question of what constitutes (and constructs) the human is critical.

Individual and collective slavery (cont.)

• “Slavery… and similar terms are frequently used to denote political subjection generally.

• “The justification of individual slavery becomes then applicable also to collective subjugation and thus becomes part of imperialist ideology.”

• “War then is a form of acquisition, just like hunting, and the object of this process is the procurement of slaves among those people who are slaves by nature, but resist Greek demands that they submit to their proper fate in the world.”à “a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.”-- Thucydides

• Classical ideas of slavery point to the assumption that those who have been enslaved “deserve to be in that position, there is another common belief which holds that people, once enslaved, degenerate irrevocably into servile characters.”

• In other words, there is an assumption that there are a race of people who are enslave-able and punishable by nature and destiny.

• There will be a system of government and punishment to respond to such a race

Conclusion

• Construction of racial difference becomes fundamental basis in order for institutions and practices of domination and power continue to persist– including the institutionalization of slavery.

• Myth of racial difference and naturalizing proto-racism shaped social and political structures and as we shall see, theories of punishment, capture, and captivity.

• Structures of inequality necessarily maintain the status quo.