Cultural racism

Jim heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Fri May 29 12:54:03 PDT 1998


In message <3.0.1.32.19980529151505.00bac0c8 at jhuvms.hcf.jhu.edu>, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> writes
>I also think,
>however, that both Yoshie and Charles attach too much value to the contents
>of this neo-racist pseudo-science. As I tried to show in my earlier
>posting under the same thread, this stuff is evdently crap and can be
>easily refuted on methodological grounds. Thus, its value to the ruling
>class must lie in something else than the content that can so easily be
>refuted.

I'd put it a bit differently. I can remembe writing a very angry article when the Bell Curve came out warning of the oncoming march of Eugenics, but actually it never happened. The overwhelming critical response was hostile to the Bell Curve. It is noticeable that subsequent books of this ilk sunk without trace. Waterstones, the biggest bookchain here now regularly refuse to stock works of explicit genetic racism. My assessment would be that the 'scientific' racism is just too explicit to get a hearing amongst the powers that be.

What you have instead is the 'cultural' version of the racist argument. So while elites fear that it might be unnacceptable to say out loud that black people are genetically inferior, what they do feel confident to say is this: that there is a culture of underachievement, or that there is an underclass that is passing on its behavioural traits through negative acculturation, or, as the government's 'Social Exclusion Unit' here says, that social exclusion is passed on through generations.

Dressed up in this socio-psychological rhetoric, racism is rehabilitated. No racial elite needs to say 'black people are genetically inferior' any more. They have social scientists on hand to say that black communities are congenitally under-achieving.

The pioneer in this field was Ruth Beneict, whose Sword and Chrysanthemum, written for the US authorities duringthe Second World War is a model of anti-Japanese racism, that never once says that there is a _natural_ difference between Americans and Japanese, only that Japanese culture (because of its malevolent potty-training) is inherently warlike and duplicitous. -- Jim heartfield



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