Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses: Picking holes in ‘culture’ and ‘human rights’

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4): 427–443 Copyright © 2004 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses Picking Holes in ‘Culture’ and ‘Human Rights’ Alana Lentin U N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D , U K

Abstract This article seeks to re-examine two major assumptions in mainstream antiracist thought of the post-war era. These are culturalism, on the one hand, and human rights on the other, both of which have been offered as potential solutions to the ongoing problem of racism. I argue that both fail to cope with racism as it has been institutionalized in the political and social structures of European societies because they inaccurately theorize ‘race’. Racism is treated as an individual attitude born of prejudice and ignorance and not as a political project that emerged under specific conditions within the context of the European nation-state. A re-examination of this legacy of modernity and a questioning of the structuring principles of anti-racism is necessary in the current context of racism against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

Key words ■ anti-racism ■ culturalism ■ human rights ■ ‘race’ ■ state

Introduction The racially configured nature of the nation-state is a notion that has been successfully theorized by a significant body of authors from the German philosopher Eric Voegelin in 1933 to the present day (Voegelin, 1933; Arendt, 1966; Mosse, 1978; Balibar, 1991b; Traverso, 1996; Foucault, 1997; Goldberg, 2002).

Nevertheless, the relationship of ‘reciprocal determination’ between ‘race’ and nation (Balibar, 1991b) entered into by western states at precise periods in the history of modernity (most emphatically from the mid-nineteenth century onwards) has been almost completely removed from mainstream academic accounts and, consequently, from so-called common sense. Moreover, since the aftermath of the Holocaust, in Europe and the West, the discussion of racism as a social evil has been widespread. Yet despite the general agreement in the

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DOI: 10.1177/1368431004046699

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) democratic public spheres of western Europe that racism represents a problem to be expunged from society at all costs, it is seldom related in such discourse to the historical or contemporary actions of European states themselves. On the contrary, racism is typically described as an individual problem, often in psychological terms, that connects between ‘attitudes’ and ‘prejudices’ based, it is said, on ‘ignorance’. Racism is, therefore, generally described as the problem of those with little exposure to the positive qualities associated with ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’ difference; and too much exposure to the, mainly economic, disadvantages that such ‘difference’ is said to bring with it. The solution to the persistence of racism in post-war European societies was often conceived in terms of the striking of a balance between knowledge of the Other and the restriction of their arrival in too great numbers. Under rare circumstances, in this dominant package of diagnosis and cure, is racism ever considered to be a problem of elites; and even more seldom, despite the work of the authors I cite above, is it considered to be embedded in the very structures of the nation-state.

This article intends to unpack the reasons why racism continues to be dealt with in such a way. I shall do so by offering an analysis of what can be thought of as ‘dominant anti-racism’ from the 1950s on – that practised by institutions and many mainstream associations – and its impact upon the construction of explanations of racism still in use today, both in everyday language and in the social sciences. While, as Bonnett (2000) reminds us, racism has been widely studied from a variety of often conflicting disciplinary and political standpoints, anti-racism has rarely been the object of study. This is despite the fact that the majority of the conceptualizations of racism available to social scientists since the 1930s have been developed in an anti-racist perspective. It is my intention to submit anti-racism, or at least one dominant trend in anti-racist discourse, to a sociological analysis that refuses to see it, merely and unproblematically, as the opposite of racism. The complicity of dominant and institutional anti-racist discourses in upholding the vision of the state as neutral, despite the persistence of racism at the level of the state, is long overdue the serious attention of social scientists committed to anti-racism.

In order to reconstruct the argument that leads us to seeing the full extent of anti-racism’s own problematic relationship with the link between ‘race’ and state, a few steps shall be taken. I shall argue that a dominant current within anti-racist thinking, that continues to occupy an important place in European anti-racism today, neglected to historicize the growth of racism as a political idea used by states, for example, under the conditions of colonialism, in the treatment of the working classes, the development of modern political antisemitism and the regulation of European-bound immigration. However, in order to show more precisely what it is that such anti-racism fails to treat and explain in its discourse, the first section deals with some of the main historical and theoretical consequences of the political relationship between the idea of ‘race’ and the political needs of modern states. In particular, I shall focus on the apparently paradoxical development of modern racism in parallel with the rise of a heretofore unknown equality in European societies. Modern racism, it will be suggested, following

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Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses Balibar (1991a, 1991b), cannot be fully understood without a concomitant engagement with the history of the development of the notion of universalism and the project of conceiving a general ‘idea of man’. Furthermore, the historicist or progressivist racism that succeeds and at times coexists with its more crude ‘naturalist’ variant (Goldberg, 2002) establishes the conditions under which racism becomes inextricable from a civilizing mission whose racist origins are more easily concealed when applied to the post-colonial metropolis.

The continued widespread understanding of racism as part of a ‘natural’ human propensity towards discrimination in a ‘survival of the fittest’ perspective popularized since the advent of social Darwinism is in part due to the efforts of early institutional responses to racism. Historicizing the development of antiracist arguments by institutions such as UNESCO and their infiltration into state and non-governmental discourse as well as everyday parlance, from the 1950s onwards, points to the reasons for this. In the second section, I shall trace two of the founding principles of the UNESCO tradition in anti-racism which, I suggest, are still central to much of the anti-racist rhetoric proposed by European governments, supranational organizations and mainstream anti-racist organizations. These are first, the necessity of refuting racism on its own terms, namely as a science; and second, the proposal of an alternative explanation of human difference to that of ‘race’. Both these elements are central to anti-racism’s principal role: to explain racism. Yet neither deals seriously with racism’s historical encounter with the nation-state and therefore with ‘race’ as a political idea: ‘one of the elements producing political communities’ (Vögelin, 1933: 1). The consequences of this dominant tradition in anti-racism, that promotes the ‘reconciling of fidelity to oneself with openness to others’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1983), rather than a state-centred critique of racism as structuring the conditions of domination and exploitation in contemporary societies, will be illustrated in the final section. The contemporary preoccupation with the language of rights and the rule of law, rooted in the legacy of ‘European universals’ (Hesse, 1999: 211), and its application to the fight against racism further compounds the dominant consensus to naturalize and depoliticize the origins of modern racism.

‘Race’, Modernity and the State In the second section I shall argue that the mainstream anti-racism of the postwar period that grounds much of present-day responses to racism fails to effectively counter racism because it neglects to engage with the history of the relationship between ‘race’ and state. In order to be able to construct such an argument, it is necessary, first, to make sense of that relationship. While this article does not leave me the scope to elucidate this historical relationship in its full detail, in this section I shall deal with the interstices of ‘race’ and state from one, very significant, point of view. Building on the understanding of ‘race’ as a political idea and racism as a political project as wholly modern phenomena, it is necessary to ask why racism emerges at a time of unparalleled equality in the

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) history of Europe, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In order for the relationship between racism and equality – or democracy – to be explored, it is also important to ask what the relationship between racism and universalism is.

In other words, how does the idea of a general conceptualization of humanity intersect with the concomitant need to categorize human beings upon which racism is based?

The Modernity of ‘Race’ One of the hardest tasks facing the theorist of ‘race’ and racism is to convince the audience that these are modern phenomena. So ingrained has the idea that racism is a matter of individual prejudice become – a notion largely attributable to mainstream discourses of anti-racism as will be later shown – that it is difficult to insist that its widespread acceptance can be traced back only as far as the midnineteenth century. Although theories proposing the division of the human species into ‘races’ can be traced back to the late seventeenth century,1 the full development of racism in its modern form cannot be said to have come about before the mid- to late nineteenth century. The period known as the Golden Age of racism (1870–1914) is that which marks the emergence of the ‘race state’, the birth of modern antisemitism, rampant imperialism and the belief within politics, exemplified by Benjamin Disraeli, that ‘race is everything; there is no other truth’ (Hannaford, 1996: 352).

‘Race’ as the political idea which underpins the emergence of the political ideology of racism can be said to be wholly modern for two reasons. First, this is because it relies on a methodological shift, created by Enlightenment interests in rationality and progress that enables the envisaging of humanity as polygenetic.

This represents a radical shift from the previously overriding belief in Creation and therefore monogenesis. However, the refutation of the notion that all people are directly created by one God does not immediately follow Enlightenment and requires also the increase in travel that enabled the observation of non-European, non-white Others over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The second reason for racism’s modernity is based on its entry into a relationship of ‘reciprocal determination’ (Balibar, 1991b) with nationalism, itself a modern phenomenon coming to dominance in the nineteenth century, without which it could not rise beyond the status of pseudo-scientific theory. Balibar defies the distinction between nation and nationalism by showing how the latter invents the former and, moreover, creates racism as a political tool to uphold its principles and goals. ‘Race’ and nation work in tandem, rather than in a relationship of causality, to bring about the objectives of nationalism that, over time, become increasingly fused with those of racism. As Nicholson (1999: 7) reminds us, understanding the modernity of racism cannot be divorced from the particular ambitions of modern, competitive and above all expanding nation-states: [R]ace is not simply a peculiarity of certain nations; it is a phenomenon of expansive nations and the emotional borderlines set by the laws that define and constitute nations. People were turned into races when nations extended and defined their

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Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses political hegemony through conquest and expropriation. Race and nation were born and raised together; they are the Siamese twins of modernity.

To succeed politically, racism requires both scientific legitimation and the framework of nationalism. Ultimately, it is elevated through a combination of rationality and political romanticist ideals which favoured the theorization of nations (like individuals) as naturally conceived and innately superior or inferior to each other.

It is important to recall that precise political reasons made it expedient to develop racism as a political ideology. As Balibar (1991c), Foucault (1997) and MacMaster (2001) all remind us, the discourse of ‘race’ is first applied to the working classes whose new internationalist political consciousness in the Europe of the nineteenth century is perceived as a threat by a weakened aristocratic or ruling class.2 In such a conceptualization the poverty of the working class – presented as a natural condition – was seen as disabling its participation in the strengthening of the ‘race’. Moreover, working-class adhesion to an internationalist anti-capitalism threatened the foundations of the nation-state as the sole vessel in which the ‘race’ could flourish. The nascent eugenics movement initially held the ‘degenerate’ working classes in its sight, proposing the halting of public and private charity which would lead to their gradual demise (MacMaster, 2001).

Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twentieth century racism’s target shifts, mirroring the consolidation of the idea of the seamlessness of ‘race’ and nation, to focus on the external. Now proponents of racist ideals are concerned with strengthening all classes by extending welfare nationalism in the aim of the ‘technocratic and biological engineering of the unified race-nation’ (MacMaster, 2001: 56). This shift must be understood within the wholly modern constraints of the time, namely the pressure of inter-national competition whose stakes were placed ever higher during this period of rampant imperialism. The necessity for national strength – increasingly translated in terms of racial purity – was never more necessary than during the First World War and the onset of mass conscription. Racism then and now is a ‘a plastic and chameleon-like phenomenon’ (MacMaster, 2001: 2) which perfectly adapted itself to the growing pressures created by increasingly competitive modern nation-states.

Racism and the Paradoxes of Equality David Goldberg (2002) sees racism as divided into two conceptions: one naturalist and one historicist or progressivist. The development of the latter, more ambivalent and entirely political, form of racism is at the core of racism’s relationship with equality. Briefly, naturalism and historicism can be distinguished thus: the former lasted from the seventeenth to approximately the mid-nineteenth century and was defined by the idea that racial inferiority was inherent and scientifically provable. Historicist racism, altogether more complicated, came to dominate from the mid-nineteenth century on. It continues to inform-neoconservative ideas such as ‘colour blindness’ and what Goldberg calls, ‘raceless states’.3 Emerging mainly under conditions of the administration of

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) colonial rule, and later of immigration, it relies on the assumption, based on the posited need for ‘racial realism’ (Goldberg, 2002: 82), that ‘inferior’ others may become ‘civilized’ through a process of assimilation. Despite the progress that this apparently signifies, when compared to the rampant excesses of naturalism, Goldberg reminds us that historicist views have not brought with them the demise of racism. On the contrary, it is the elaboration of historicism that perhaps enabled racism to be perpetuated within today’s state rationalities.

The naturalist–historicist distinction helps us to see how racism becomes articulated politically at a time of increasing equality among populations of western European nation-states from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

Outside of the colonial administrations that came increasingly to rely on a historicist vision in order to ensure the self-regulation of European rule over colonized ‘subjects’, no case better illustrates the ‘paradox’ of equality on European territory than that of Jewish emancipation. Modern antisemitism – as opposed to premodern Jew hatred (Arendt, 1966; Bauman, 1989) – emerged as a political force towards the end of the nineteenth century accompanying the spread of Jewish emancipation across Europe.4 The permission granted to Jews to exit the ghettos and live among their Christian co-nationals transformed Judeophobia. From the naturalness with which the Jews’ distinctiveness was viewed while they lived separately and enclosed, their assimilation into mainstream society now led to their difference being rendered artificial (Bauman, 1989). Jews were now seen as the dangerous ‘race’ among all ‘races’ (Foucault, 1997) which, in order to maintain the rationally preserved order of modern societies, had to be weeded out. Under the conditions of equality, when it was increasingly hard to tell Jew from Gentile, racial theory, ancient religious myth and conspiratorial rumour all had to be manipulated for the political aim of proving the Jews’ inherent foreignness.

It is the condition of assimilation that leads to the fascination with the Jews’ place in society as either ‘pariahs’ or ‘parvenus’ at the core of social antisemitism (Arendt, 1966). Assimilation functioned as a type of trap. On the one hand, the refusal to relinquish a particular communal lifestyle meant ‘a life-sentence of strangerhood’ (Bauman, 1991: 112). On the other, by choosing to adopt the cultural hierarchy imposed by the state that saw Judaism as inferior to national (Christian) culture, Jews and other outcasts helped to prove both its superiority and its universal validity. The assimilation brought about by Jewish emancipation in practice meant that Jews were forced to give up their particularism in order to gain full membership of the nation. But both the inability of many to amalgamate seamlessly and the overwhelming desire of others to do so, by publicly turning their backs on Judaism, were seen as signs of the Jews’ undeniable otherness. Emancipation assisted in creating social and political antisemitism by imposing itself upon Jews, just as the call for immigrants to assimilate today creates discriminatory exasperation at their seeming unwillingness to do so.

Traverso (1996), noting that the Jewish emancipation that followed the French Revolution was accompanied by a Jacobin insistence on the outlawing of public demonstrations of religiosity, claims that many Jews experienced emancipation

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Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses as a ‘revolution from above’ (1996: 24). The demand to assimilate accompanied by the political manipulation of a social mistrust of Jewish intentions is symbolic of the problem that defines modern racism: an antidote to the spread of greater equality.

Racism and Universalism The failure to regard modern racism as functioning within the logic of an expansionist, modernizing and increasingly competitive European nation-state is grounded in a generalized belief in the overriding value of the project of modernity. In other words, its secular, universalistic and emancipatory elements, upheld as the foundations of present-day democracy, have been taken at face value, often in the absence of a problematization of the course they have taken in history. In reality, as the ultimate impossibility of assimilation shows us, the power of racism is in its ability to define ‘the frontiers of an ideal humanity’ (Balibar, 1991b: 61) into which individuals either fit or do not. Balibar argues that racism takes on the status of a ‘supra-nationalism’ that acquires meaning at the universal level beyond the realm of individuals or even of the singular ‘race nation’. Racism sustained the passage into the post-colonial era because of the universal appeal of ‘racial signifiers’ which constructed the European, rather than the individual nation, as the dominant and therefore ideal, human type. This was achieved by means of the emphasis placed on the degrees of difference that separated ‘man’ from the ‘savage’, so that ‘all nationalisms were defined against the same foil, the same “stateless other”, and this has been a component of the very idea of Europe as the land of “modern” nation-states or, in other words, civilisation’ (Balibar, 1991b: 62).

Although racism and universalism cannot be reduced to each other, Balibar sees them as ‘determinate contraries’ that are ‘bound to affect the other from the inside’ (Balibar, 1994: 198). Because universalist philosophy is based upon the premise that moral equality is a natural entitlement of the ‘brotherhood of man’, racism (like sexism) becomes the prism through which we may understand the very possibility of talking about a universalist ideal. In other words, both racism and sexism serve to justify the fact that there are always exemptions to inclusion in universal humanity. Racism is therefore inseparable from the task of creating a ‘general idea of man’ because of its implicit invocations of superiority and inferiority. The construction of universally rational man necessitates a definition in relation to an Other that also calls for a hierarchization of human beings, ranked in relation to the universal ideal. Racism functions at the level of universals, however, because it struggles against universalism’s impetus to homogenize us. By claiming ‘race’ as the universal system for the organization of humankind, the space for uniqueness that racism and nationalism crave is ensured. The consolidation of the idea of ‘race’ within politics brought with it a universalized system of ‘races’ to one of which each individual must belong. As the notion of ‘race’ was invented by Europeans and applied to themselves as superior and to others as inferior to various degrees, the violence that accompanies racism was grounded in the concomitant need to

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) preserve the hierarchical order of things. This order was beneficial solely for those who invented the racial classification of humanity: the Europeans.

The universalism of racism sits uneasily with the extension of humanism that accompanies historicism well into the post-colonial era. The idea that including more peoples in a general idea of humanity will render racism impossible – the idea at the core of human rights – is negated by the extent to which a universalized vision of humanity has relied on racism’s provision of a dehumanized Other against which humanity itself can be defined. Such an idea is dismissed by Césaire as a ‘pseudo humanism’, based on a partial interpretation of the ‘rights of man’ that is ‘narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist’ (Césaire, 1972, cited in Gilroy, 2000: 62). The attempt to understand racism within the contemporary hegemony of the human rights discourse necessitates tracing the history that links historicist racism to the ideological requirements of an expanding modern nation-state, to the quest for an ideal of humanity and to the refutation of ‘race’ that enables the continued dominance of Eurocentrism. Behind this veneer, racialization and racist discriminations continue but are facilitated by the appearance of equality that was first instituted at the time of racism’s Golden Age. The following section elucidates the part that early post-war discourses of mainstream, institutionally sanctioned anti-racism had to play in enabling the persistent coexistence of historicist racism with a regime of rights.

The Role of Anti-Racism Examining the role played by anti-racism as a political discourse and a form of collective action can reveal the reasons why there has been a failure to effectively historicize the relationship between ‘race’ and state. However, treating anti-racism seriously from either an historical or a sociological point of view has been hindered by the predominance of polemics and prescriptions, arising from the tendency to mobilize a common sense depiction of anti-racism as simply the inverse of racism. As noted by Bonnett (2000: 2), ‘Racism and ethnic discriminations are under continuous historical and sociological examination. But antiracism is consigned to the status of a “cause”, fit only for platitudes of support or denouncement.’

In fact, anti-racism is essentially a heterogeneous phenomenon whose variants reveal differing political allegiances, political aims and representative functions.

Based upon my research into the political sociology of European anti-racist discourse and praxis (Lentin, 2004), I shall argue that by examining one particular and central variant of anti-racism it is possible to demonstrate the collusion between this discourse and the circumvention of the historical relationship between ‘race’ and state. This anti-racist discourse emerges from the post-war project of institutions such as UNESCO and is subscribed to by western governments, to explain and suggest remedies for racism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This mainstream form of anti-racism stands in opposition to the

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Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses state-centred critique that developed out of the anti-colonialist movement to inform a self-determined anti-racism.5 Instead it focuses on racism as a consequence of individual prejudices, replacing political explanations with psychological ones and advocates cultural rather than politicized responses to it.

Moreover, the hegemony of this form of anti-racism has played a vital role in bringing about the dominance of a discourse of universal human rights which constructs racism unilaterally as discrimination.

By focusing on the development of the UNESCO ‘tradition’ of anti-racism (Barker, 1983), it is possible to see how the mainstream anti-racist practices that it endorsed have avoided the theorization of the racial nature of the European state. Two main components of the tradition have led to this neglect of the politicized origins and implications of ‘race’. First, UNESCO, in its ‘Declaration Against Race and Racial Prejudice’, first published in 1950, attempts to defeat racism on what was seen as being its own terms, namely as a science to be unproven. Second, it proposed that ‘race’, an inadequate term because it was an unscientific way of categorizing human beings, be replaced by culture. However, because the thinking that informed UNESCO’s work denied the political nature of ‘race’, choosing to see it as purely pseudo-scientific in origin, the alternative of culture failed to eradicate the hierarchical organization of humankind that embodies the real perniciousness of racism. The misconception, in both popular and academic discourse, that because ‘race’ does not objectively exist that racism cannot do so either belies the fact that racism has always mobilized both ‘racial’ (e.g. phenotypical) and cultural (e.g. ethnic/religious) differences for its expression.6 By separating between ‘race’ and what it called ‘racial prejudice’ in this way, UNESCO ignored the power of racialization to determine relationships between dominant and subordinate groups.

How did the UNESCO project go about disproving racism and suggesting the means to overcome it? The work carried out by the ‘world panel of experts’ brought together by the organization for the first time in 1950 was heavily influenced by anthropology and genetics, and to a lesser extent psychology and sociology. Geneticists mainly influenced the reasons for approaching racism as a science, rather than a political ideology, in the efforts to explain it while anthropologists, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, can largely be accredited for ensuring the culturalist perspective from which the solutions to racism were formulated.

The treatment of racism as a science was based on the perceived need to defeat racism on what was seen as being its own terms, namely as a scientific discipline, grounded in genetics and physical anthropology, known as racial science. The failure of ‘race’ to stand up to scientific scrutiny was summed up in the assertion that: The division of the human species into ‘races’ is partly conventional and partly arbitrary and does not imply any hierarchy whatsoever. Many anthropologists stress the importance of human variation, but believe that ‘racial’ divisions have limited scientific interest and may even carry the risk of inviting abusive generalisation.

(UNESCO, 1968: 270)

This component of the declaration is emblematic of the apolitical nature of its

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) drafting. It demonstrates how the recourse made to ‘convention’ and ‘arbitrariness’ naturalizes racism and disconnects it from the political processes with which historical analysis reveals that it is bound. This circumvention of ‘race’ as a political invention, as ideology rather than science or mere common sense, was largely due to the role played by geneticists and physical anthropologists in the declaration’s drafting. Indeed, the declaration in its original form was deemed too sociological in approach and was supplemented by an additional ‘Statement on the Nature of Race and Racial Difference’ (1951) that further informed the UNESCO position. The statement’s authors called for the social phenomenon of racism to be distinguished from ‘race’ as a biological ‘fact’, considered to be a scientifically useful concept (Comas, 1961). Their position is summed up thus: In its anthropological sense, the word ‘race’ should be reserved for groups of mankind possessing well-developed and primarily heritable physical differences from other groups . . . National, religious, geographical, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups. (UNESCO, 1951; cited in Comas, 1961: 304)

What of the solutions to the admittedly persistent problem of racism despite the refutation of ‘race’ as good science? These too led to a framing of the problem of racism as separate from the political usage made of ‘race’ by states both historically and in the aftermath of colonialism and the Holocaust. The stronger influence of anthropologists, rather than geneticists, upon UNESCO’s work led to the search for an alternative to ‘race’ as a means of explaining human differences.

The need for such explanation became greater with the onset of European-bound immigration in higher numbers in the post-war period, and therefore the actual meeting of different populations. Culture and terms such as ethnicity came to replace ‘race’ as markers of human difference. This was based on the belief that they were stripped of any implication of superiority or inferiority at the core of the idea of ‘race’. Different cultures were now seen as relative to each other and any variations in the levels of progress across groups worldwide were put down to the extent to which cultural groups had interacted during the course of history (Lévi-Strauss, 1975). According to Lévi-Strauss in ‘Race and History’, a key text published initially by UNESCO, only seldom can cultures develop in isolation.

The overcoming of racism, or what it is suggested should be known as ‘ethnocentrism’, is understood by UNESCO as being possible through greater intercultural knowledge. This is summed up in the notion of ‘reconciling fidelity to oneself with openness to others’. This approach is rooted in a vision of racism as a problem of individual attitudes of ‘prejudice’ that may be overcome through an increased tolerance to those different to ourselves. A direct link is made between the proposal of culture as an alternative to ‘race’ and the idea that persisting racism is a problem of individuals who lack intercultural knowledge. Emphasizing the importance of re-educating prejudiced individuals results in a neglect of the racism that persists at the level of the state by releasing it from its historical responsibility in constructing racism as common sense through the dominance of the politics of ‘race is all’.

This individualizing and psychologizing of the problem of racism are entirely

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Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses consistent with the historicist racism that Goldberg (2002) shows exists in parallel with, and eventually becoming more powerful than, its naturalist predecessor. According to the UNESCO view adhered to in the policies of postwar states, different cultural groups, previously barred from participating in the progress enjoyed by western societies, are gradually admitted to this process through both the international community and western-bound immigration. In domestic policies, this view is translated to terms of assimilation; the need for immigrants to give up their cultural specificities in order to become a seamless part of the national whole. It is only through such a process that the members of different so-called cultural groups may develop and progress: so far, so consistent with colonialist historicism. However, it is important to note that Lévi-Strauss himself, despite being used as a primary theorist of the UNESCO position, did not agree with the aims of assimilation. His altogether more ambivalent approach, which he revised in 1971 in reaction to what he saw as the failures of the UNESCO tradition,7 resisted the dilution of cultural specificities which he felt would be brought about by greater proximity between peoples.

To some extent Lévi-Strauss’s ideas are consistent with the multiculturalism that came to replace assimilatory policies in many western states. This shift represents a further culturalization of difference that coexists with the ongoing institutionalization of racism. Specifically, the politics of multiculturalism, to which the UNESCO project may be seen as a vital precursor, have largely been responsible for the reification of groups of non-European origins which are culturally determined and viewed as internally homogeneous. The identification of communities with apparent leaderships who could be called upon to liaise with governments about their members’ needs has led to a misrepresentation of those needs, often based more on the interests of such leaders than arising from those of their purported membership. Such a system, often referred to as a cultural ‘mosaic’, has permitted states to positively present the richness of their society’s diverse make-up without addressing the imbalances of political and administrative power which permit the continuity of racist and class-based exclusion. The approach taken by the official, state-endorsed response to racism – to condemn it as the bad science of darker times – fails to challenge the effects of so-called racism without ‘race’ because it misdiagnoses racism’s origins and mistreats its symptoms. Racism becomes a problem of cultural misunderstanding, adjustable through the adequate representation of ‘difference’.

Conclusion: The Problem of Human Rights A re-analysis of the role played by what I am calling a mainstream strand of antiracist thought in the way we understand racism today is vital for those who are interested in the theorization of racism and anti-racism. Anti-racism as a political discourse has all too often not been adequately historicized. Most importantly, it is not generally understood explicitly that the way mainstream anti-racist thought has evolved is largely responsible for the ways in which it is possible to

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) make sense of ‘race’ and racism today. In other words, the explanations of racism offered by some anti-racist thinkers and activists are those that have entered into common-sense understandings today. I refer to some thinkers and activists because despite the success of self-organized anti-racists in bringing about public and institutional recognition of the phenomenon of institutional racism, for example, this is often confused with the much more widespread understanding of racism as a matter of individual prejudicial attitudes and lack of education.

The reason for which this view is the more common one is because it was largely that promoted by institutions such as UNESCO, adopted by governments and furthered by an anti-racism that did not promote an active state-centred critique of racism.

It is important to show that states have been involved in ensuring this failure to historicize the relationship between their evolution into nations, with increasingly imperialist ideals and needs for bio-political control, and the political idea of ‘race’. As Goldberg (2002) shows us, in the post-war period the persistence of racism is not the result of some agreed-upon policy but rather of the continuation of a logic of racial historicism that remains undisturbed despite the atrocities of the Holocaust. Whereas these events led to the call to arms to eradicate naturalist racism ‘wherever it raises its ugly head’, they did not by association result in the targeting of what may appear to be its more subtle or ambivalent variant. On the contrary, because of the readiness to dismiss naturalism as irrational and unscientific ‘racism persists behind the façade of a historicism parading itself as uncommitted to racist expression in its traditional sense’ (Goldberg, 2002: 210). This state of affairs leads Goldberg to describe the condition of post-war western states as being one of ‘racelessness’: because ‘race’ does not exist, neither, by association, does racism as a problem that deserves political attention. In fact, it is precisely this that is at the core of the historicist vision according to Goldberg: [Racelessness] is achievable only by the presumptive elevation of whiteness silently as (setting) the desirable standards, the teleological norms of civilised social life, even as it seeks to erase the traces of exclusions necessary to its achievement along the way.

(2002: 206)

The racelessness of whiteness8 and its standardization as the norm have led to the installation of so-called colour blindness as a system for making possible the denial of racism as a real experience while ensuring the de facto persistence of discrimination against those who in fact cannot be whitened. As defined by Goldberg: Racially understood, colourblindness is committed to seeing and not seeing all as white, though not all as ever quite, while claiming to see those traditionally conceived as ‘of colour’ and yet colourless. (2002: 223)

It is impossible to ignore the role that the discourse and practice of mainstream anti-racism have played in bringing this to bear. As I demonstrated in the previous section, the widely influential UNESCO tradition of anti-racism

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Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses individualizes racism as a problem of pseudo-science and proposes alternative definitions of difference such as culture and ethnicity. It thus succeeds in circumventing the problem of racism by denying the role played by the state in its origins and perpetuation or, in Goldberg’s terms, by refusing to recognize the growing hegemony of historicist views of unquestioned universalism, racelessness and colour blindness. This failure is not confined to the authors of the UNESCO Declaration but has become the dominant view supporting state action against racism and the activity of one, and in some contexts dominant, type of antiracism: one which denies the importance of grounding its actions in the lived experience of the racialized and promotes a universalized vision of equality that individualizes humanity without seeing how racism refuses the individuality, and thus the humanity, of non-white, non-Europeans.

It is to this problem in anti-racist discourse as the basis for action that I wish to turn in concluding this article. This is a thorny subject because it could, by being misread, be confused with the ideological stances against anti-racism taken by authors such as Pierre-André Taguieff (1989, 1991, 1995). It must therefore be stressed that, as a rule, the failure of certain forms of anti-racism to ignore the relationship between ‘race’ and state and to deny the importance of racialization by stressing the primacy of individual rights emanates from a will to do ‘good’ and bring about change. The problem with many solidaristic movements in general, however, is precisely this; because by wanting to bring about justice they also assume that they are privy to knowledge about the roots of discrimination that does not necessitate consulting with those primarily affected by it. Furthermore, the hegemony of rights-based solutions to discrimination including racism is such that it is increasingly being adopted by black and ‘minority’-led groups as the only means of having their voices heard. In particular, the paradigm which I argue must today be submitted to serious scrutiny is that of ‘human rights’ as promoted through the activism of a wide variety of organizations including those with an anti-racist agenda.

Human rights discourse cannot be divorced from the regime of racial historicism governing the practices of western states towards non-whites and nonEuropeans. It is ultimately, although in many cases certainly unknowingly, compliant with this system because it accepts the notion of racelessness and promotes a universalistic vision of humanity that fails to question its relationship with racism (Balibar, 1991a, 1991b). These two problems cannot be separated from each other. The discourse of human rights seems to accept racelessness by emphasizing the primacy of the individual, separated from the context. In other words, it equates the admittance of ‘race’ as a factor with discrimination on racial grounds itself, rather than revealing how racism continues to operate under the guise of historicist progress, which in turn relies on promoting the belief that ‘race’ has no meaning. It thus succumbs to the view that historicism promotes under the auspices of racelessness, that ‘racial histories’ and the injustices they engender (Goldberg, 2002) can be passed over on the way to an era defined only by individual access to opportunity.

This problem is compounded by the second interrelated one, namely that

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) human rights’ promotion of a universalized individualism fails to deal with the relationship between universalism and racism demonstrated by Balibar (1991a, 1991b). As Goldberg reveals, the ideal of racelessness is not extended to include whiteness, which is de-raced. Therefore, the aims of colour-blind policy, for example, hold only those of colour in their sight, ‘conjur[ing] people of colour as a problem in virtue of their being of colour, in so far as they are not white’ (Goldberg, 2002: 223). Like racelessness, universalistic human rights also fail to question the standards set by the very people they see as irrelevant, namely ‘whites’ or westerners. They are the setters of standards because their hegemony is assured; it is assured because the standards have been set in their own image.

It is this that Balibar speaks of when he describes racism and universalism as each containing the other inside itself: a universal vision of humanity cannot be constructed without reference being made to that which it excludes, and so the universalism of Europeans was constructed in their own image yet set as norm.

Human rights is in many respects a naïve discourse but one which has several questionable repercussions. It both avoids and compounds the problem posed by failing to problematize whiteness and seeing it as inextricably bound up with the ideal vision of humanity which we are all encouraged to attain in the interests of greater equality and liberty. By avoiding a discussion of how this norm was institutionalized, namely through the historical practice of racism which ensured the dominance of the ‘Anglo-European moral tradition’ (Goldberg, 2002: 224), human rights participates in compounding the logic of racial historicism. It does so also by refusing to admit the impossibility of equality as premised on the assumption that each and every individual has the opportunity to attain the humanity encapsulated by the universalist vision. Simply, if the universalistic ideal of humanity is founded upon the European, white model, it will simply not be possible for the Others that human rights seek to protect to gain entrance to that community of individuals. This is not to say that individual freedom and the equality of rights do not constitute a noble cause and that rather we should fall back on a cultural relativism that also ignores the heterogeneity and internal conflicts within so-called cultures. On the contrary, I am arguing that the choice between human rights and cultural relativism is a wholly artificial one because both rely on a view of humanity as organized according to differential levels of progress. While cultural relativists non-problematically accept that this situation of diversity may remain a permanent one, human rights advocates seek to bring about a uniformity of humanity predicated on the ideal of equal rights. What neither position sees is that they both tacitly assume the existence of a (superior) model of humanness against which those conceived of either as culturally different or fundamentally subordinate can be perceived and towards which they may, it is assumed, progress over time.

As the West is plunged into yet another phase of obsession with the ‘spectre’ of immigration, fuelled by the addition of the dimension of terrorism to the asylum nexus, the issues raised here take on greater importance. The solutions proposed to racism in the post-war period have engendered a number of policies, from assimilation to multiculturalism and from integration to

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Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses diversity-management, none of which has grappled with the problem that defines the persistence of racism, namely the relationship between ‘race’ and state perpetuated by historicism. Even the recognition of institutional racism brought to light by the MacPherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK (1999) has failed, for obvious reasons, to go beyond admitting failures at the level of practices and organizational cultures. The facility with which these problems have been separated from the racial histories of the British state are hardly surprising given the way in which racelessness, as Goldberg so expertly demonstrates, allows for the condemnation of racism to coexist with the assumptions about human capabilities or desirabilities implied by ‘race’. In order to actually work towards the equal rights of all in a time of acute racism at the level of state and society across the West, it will be necessary to reveal the fact that such rights come neither with an absence of historical baggage nor are they politically neutral. By revealing the role that mainstream anti-racism has played in culturalizing and ethnicizing the language of difference thereby obscuring the irrefutable reciprocity between racism and the modern nation-state, it may be seen how the campaign against racism itself cannot be left out of this vital and far from complete reflection.

Notes 1 Hannaford (1996) claims that the idea of ‘race’ emerges initially with François Bernier’s (1684) publication of Nouvelle division de la terre par des espèces ou races qui l’habitent.

2 Note that among the most vociferous of the proponents of racism at this time were those such as Gobineau who, although using the title of ‘Comte’, was an aristocratic aspirant rather than a true noble. Gobineau and those like him were rather more royalist in their political agenda than royal by birth.

3 Goldberg shows that a historicist view informed abolitionist movements (and, I would add, mainstream anti-racist ideas). These movements posited ‘racelessness’ as the obvious response to racism, a view that became common sense in post-war state rationality. However, the failure of historicism to eradicate racism, but rather its replacement of naturalism with ‘the infuriating subtleties of a legally fashioned racial order’ (Goldberg, 2002: 203) meant that many of the old racisms remained while being glossed over with apparently progressive attitudes that favoured nurture over nature.

4 Whereas in France, the Jews were emancipated in 1790 and 1791 and Napoleon’s army emancipated Jews in many of the countries it conquered (Traverso, 1996), in Germany they were not granted full emancipation until 1869 with Bismarck’s rise to power (Meyer and Brenner, 1996).

5 By self-determined anti-racism I mean the opposition to racism developed by the actual or potential victims of racism themselves in collaboration with others such as that rooted in the legacy of the American Civil Rights movement and taking different forms in its application in various national contexts (e.g. the French Mouvement beur, the British monitoring groups, etc.).

6 This argument counters that of authors (cf. Taguieff, 1991; Stolcke, 1995) for a new culturalist or differentialist racism. These authors claim that contemporary, post-war racism no longer relies on phenotypical or biological explanations of difference and has

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) fully accepted the scientific refutation of the validity of ‘race’. Taguieff cites the examples of the French Front national which speaks in terms of the right of the French to maintain their culture in the face of the proliferation of immigrants, seen to belong to incompatible cultural groups who too would be more greatly fulfilled in their ‘home’ environments. However, as Balibar (1991a) has shown, ‘differentialist’ racism, or racism without ‘race’, existed long before the advent of so-called neo-racism in the guise of modern antisemitism. Antisemitism is a form of differentialist racism par excellence which could describe all forms of contemporary neo-racism, in particular Islamophobia which is based upon the perception of Islam as a ‘world-view’ that is incompatible with Europeanness.

7 Lévi-Strauss’s adjustment of his position with regards to the UNESCO project came about in the context of a controversial speech he made, at the invitation of UNESCO, on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the Declaration. It is reproduced as ‘Race et culture’ in Le Regard éloigné (1983).

8 It is important to note that while whiteness in opposition to blackness may be used by Goldberg and others in the context of the United States, in Europe it has a more symbolic meaning. This is especially important to point out in the contemporary period where the growth in racism against white migrants and asylum seekers, for example, from Eastern Europe, has led to the questioning of the black–white dichotomy often employed in writing on racism.

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Balibar, Etienne (1991a) ‘Is There a “Neo-Racism”?’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, pp. 17–28.

—— (1991b) ‘Racism and Nationalism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, pp. 37–67.

—— (1991c) ‘Class Racism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, pp. 204–16.

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New York: Routledge.

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Hannaford, Ivan (1996) Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hesse, Barnor (1999) ‘ “It’s Your World”: Discrepant M/multiculturalisms’, in Phil Cohen (ed.) New Ethnicities, Old Racism. London: Zed Books.

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Lentin Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses Lentin, Alana (2004) Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe. London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1975) ‘Race and History’, in L.C. Dunn et al. (eds) Race, Science and Society. New York: Whiteside and Morrow, for UNESCO. —— (1983) ‘Race et culture’, in Le Regard éloigné. Paris: PLON. MacMaster, Neil (2001) Racism in Europe 1870–2000. Houndmills: Palgrave.

Meyer, Michael A. and Brenner, Michael (1996) German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Vol. II. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mosse, George (1978) Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Nicholson, Philip Yale (1999) Who Do We Think We Are? Race and Nation in the Modern World. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

‘The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry’ (1999) ‘Report of an Inquiry by Sir William MacPherson of Cluny, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Command of Her Majesty’. London: The Stationery Office.

Stolcke, Verena (1995) ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–24.

Taguieff, Pierre-André (1989) La Force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles. Paris: La Découverte.

—— (1995) Les Fins de l’antiracisme. Paris: Michalon.

Taguieff, Pierre-André, ed. (1991) Face au racisme 1: Les moyens d’agir. Paris: La Découverte.

Traverso, Enzo (1996) Pour une critique de la barbarie moderne: Ecrits sur l’histoire des Juifs et de l’antisémitisme. Lausanne: Editions Page Deux.

UNESCO (1968) ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’, Current Anthropology 9(4): 270–2.

Voegelin, Eric ([1933] 2000) Race and State, trans. Ruth Heim. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

■ Alana Lentin is currently EC Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Her first book Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe is published

by Pluto Press in 2004. Address: Queen Elizabeth House, 21 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LA, UK. [email: alana.lentin@qeh.ox.ac.uk]

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