What Race Is
By Crispin Sartwell
Race was invented.
Race was invented by the sort of people who came to regard themselves, after that invention, as white.
The content of this invention was an application of the mind-body or soul-body dualism of various sorts that has been fundamental to Western intellectual and spiritual traditions for millennia, expressed in one form or another, for example, by Pythagoras, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes.
Hence, the content of race is prefigured in and crystallized by the history of Western philosophy, or at any rate by Western philosophy of a certain type: the sort that associates mind, order, and virtue with itself and the culture from which it arises, as in Hobbes or Hegel, and anarchy and animality with peoples who were to be colonized or enslaved.
Race, in short, is mind/body dualism externalized or expanded from the scale of the individual to the scale of humanity as a whole. We are minds; they are bodies. We are pure white souls; they are polluted, stained, or tainted. We are human; they are animal. We are rational; they are emotional. We are free wills, natural masters, because of our status as rational minds; they are slaves of their own passions and hence need our oversight. We are culture; they are barbarism.
All these - rational/emotional, man/animal, civilized/savage, body/mind - are the same distinction in various applications or at different scales, and are reflected in exclusions and hierarchies: of the first and third world, male and female, black and white.
For this reason, white construction of blackness relentlessly emphasizes embodiment and animality, violence and sexuality: things that the people who regarded themselves as white wanted to repress or conceal in themselves. You can see this in every stereotype of black people, in the toxic mix of sexualization and violence in the murder of Emmett Till, in representations of black criminality and promiscuity, substance abuse and violence.
These constructions are, at their heart, purely imaginary, or merely false; they are intended fundamentally (a) to enhance the self-image of the people who account themselves as white, and (b) to help create and hold in place a racial hierarchy that benefits white people economically.
But this invention is embodied in the most concrete physical realities: ships and chains, plantations and prisons, the segregation of bodies. Race depends on techniques by which stereotypes are enforced and hence simulated: laws against literacy or barriers to a decent education, impoverishment, and profiling in law enforcement, for example.
But perhaps race is more than false, as many black commentators such as Frederick Douglass have emphasized. The truth is closer to the reverse of the content of the invention. We portray ourselves as bringing you God or civilization, and show ourselves to be unspeakably savage. We project onto you our own barbarity: we lynch you for looking at a white woman wrong, and we have inflicted generations of systematic rape on your people. We accuse you of violence, then whip you or incarcerate you en masse. We accuse you of laziness and live off your labor.
We are, in other words, what we accuse you of being, and necessarily we do not know that about ourselves. But you know it about us. The oppression we inflict arises from systematic, semi-intentional ignorance about who we are and what we are in fact doing. Or, white identity is a fabric of self-delusions, and blackness is a standpoint that yields knowledge of the racial situation.
The imaginary and concrete exclusions create cultures of resistance whose content far exceeds the original raw dualism.
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