Arts & Book Review
January 18, 2014
A HISTORY OF HATE
A survey of racism across the centuries reveals a phenomenon that
repeats itself RACISMS: FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BY
FRANCISCO BETHENCOURT (Princeton University Press £27.95) » Order at
the discounted price of£10.99 inc. p&p from independent.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0843 0600 030 BOOK OF THE WEEK
by EKOW ESHUN
BULGARIAN BENEFIT tourists, Romanian criminal gangs, the alleged
abduction of a blonde, blue-eyed child by Roma: anti-immigrant
hostility is more pronounced in Britain than any time in a generation.
With it have come a raft of questions about race and national identity
that were once confined to the fringes of public debate. Is Britain
full? Is our way of life at breaking point? Is it racist to raise such
points? And come to that, what exactly does racism mean in a modern,
multicultural nation like Britain anyway?
Answers, especially to the last question, often prove elusive. That’s
because racism is often treated as a subject too charged, too
sensitive to address head-on. It’s easier to see it instead as an ugly
but inescapable fact of life, a failing common to all nations when
different groups decide they can’t get along. But history also offers
examples of societies where intolerance, unchecked, has triggered
horrifying consequences.
In 1915, the Ottoman Empire began a brutal campaign of discrimination
against its Armenian minority that escalated from arrests and property
seizures into mass deportations, the burning of families and death
marches into the Syrian desert. Over the following year about a
million Armenians died in the first historical example of genocide by
a state against a specific national minority. There are numerous other
instances of national policy based on prejudice, from further cases of
genocide in Nazi Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia to the iniquities of
the Jim Crow South and apartheid South Africa.
How does discrimination on this scale occur? What does it take for
prejudice to become the rationale for segregation or enslavement or
racial extermination?
This is the subject of Francisco Bethencourt’s ambitious and
wide-ranging Racisms, which tracks the evolution of a pernicious
belief system from the Crusades to the present day. Focused primarily
on Western history, Bethencourt’s thesis is that racism can’t simply
be thought of as a naturally occurring, universal aspect of human
behaviour. Instead racism is “relational”, the result of specific
economic or political circumstances that create the context for
extreme intolerance. For instance the climate of murderous bigotry
that led to the Armenian genocide was triggered by the losses in
battle of Ottoman forces during World War I and a desire to find a
scapegoat for national failure. As Europeans ventured overseas during
the 16th and 17th centuries, they justified their territorial
ambitions in Africa and the Americas with lurid tales of cannibalism,
idolatry and debauched sexual practices among the indigenous peoples
they encountered there. In 1990s Rwanda, conflict over power and
natural resources was expressed in racialised terms, with the Tutsi
minority vilified by Hutus as cockroaches, the deserving subject of
genocide.
Each of these cases is unique in their circumstances and their
rationale for discrimination. And for Bethencourt there is no one
single type of racism practiced by nations through history, no group
that is universally discriminated against -hence the pluralised title
of his book. However, where those racist regimes are linked is through
a shared belief in the sanctity of blood. Bethencourt describes racism
as “prejudice concerning ethnic descent coupled with discriminatory
action”. This admirably succinct description goes to the core tenet of
racist ideology, which is that physical or cultural characteristics
are passed by blood from generation to generation. Fear of
contamination of bloodline, and of the body politic itself, becomes
the justification for the racist policies of a host of countries
otherwise separated by time and geography, from the one drop rule of
the American South to the violent expulsion from Spain of Christian
descendants of Muslims in 1609 and the anti-Jewish pogroms in civil
war Russia in 1917, led by the White army under the slogan, “Beat the
Yids and save Russia”.
The fact that beliefs around descent have prevailed across the
centuries is largely down to the ambiguous nature of the term race
itself. The word was coined in the Middle Ages in connection to the
raising of plants and animals. It gained an ethnic dimension around
the 16th century to describe an impurity in the blood of Jews and
Muslims. Over time, race gained multiple meanings, as a synonym for
nationality, gender and varieties of human beings in general.
In the 19th century it also acquired a hierarchical character, as
natural historians such as Georges Cuvier and Robert Knox equated race
with cultural development, drawing a lineage of human progress from
the civilised Caucasian to the savage Ethiopian. Today, science has
made a nonsense of the entire biological basis of race, having found
greater genetic variation between people of the same skin colour than
between say blacks and whites. Yet even with no grounding in fact the
myth of racial difference, of types of behaviour inherent to different
ethnicities or peoples, persists.
Bethencourt traces its origins to the publication in 1570 of the first
significant printed atlas of the world by the Flemish cartographer
Abraham Ortelius. The frontispiece of the atlas carried an
illustration of Europe, Africa, Asia and America, personified as
women, each with a clearly identifiable set of virtues or vices.
Seated on an elevated throne was Europe, the embodiment of wisdom,
justice and ethics. Asia, courteous, honourable, but also capable of
great cruelty and depravity, stood below. Beside her was Africa,
wearing only a loose cloth around her hips to indicate her lascivious,
barbaric character. America lay naked at their feet clutching a
severed head; a reference to the popular image of the continent’s
people as conscienceless cannibals. Ortelius’ atlas was enormously
influential, going through 41 editions and setting the template for
ideas about race and national identity that continue to resonate
today.
As the immigration debate in Britain becomes more heated, its rhetoric
more inflammatory, it’s all the more important to trace the historical
context for our understanding of otherness. Racisms is a dense,
closely argued work resistant to browsing. But its cataloguing of
successive centuries of poisonous bigotry, of tangled, self-serving
myth and murderous victimisation, creates a powerful cumulative
effect. To chart some of my own emotions while reading it: anger;
pain, disgust and sorrow. This is an unlovely history. But a necessary
one that appears, sadly for the wrong reasons, at the right time.