>"Seperate but equal," the Supreme Court called it in
>Plessy v. Ferguson (1897). What's neo about that?
That was a bullshit cover for a hierarchal concept of race. This is a diffferent animal.
Doug
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Etienne Balibar, "Is there a 'neo-racism'?" in Balibar & Wallerstein, Race, Class, Nation (Verso):
<quote> The functioning of the category of immigration as a substitute for the notion of race and a solvent of 'class consciousness' provides us with a first clue. Quite clearly, we are not simply dealing with a camouflaging operation, made necessary by the disrepute into which the term 'race' and its derivatives has fallen, nor solely with a consequence of the transformations of French society. Collectivities of immigrant workers have for many years suffered discrimination and xenophobic violence in which racist stereotyping has played an essential role. The interwar period, another crisis era, saw the unleashing of campaigns in France against 'foreigners', Jewish or otherwise, campaigns which extended beyond the activities of the fascist movements and which found their logical culmination in the Vichy regime's contribution to the Hitlerian enterprise. Why did we not at that period see the 'sociological' signifier definitively replace the 'biological' one as the key representation of hatred and fear of the other? Apart from the force of strictly French traditions of anthropological myth, this was probably due, on the one hand, to the institutional and ideological break which then existed between the perception of immigration (essentially European) and colonial experience (on the one side, France 'was being invaded', on the other it 'was dominant') and, on the other hand, because of the absence of a new model of articulation between states, peoples and cultures on a world scale.' The two reasons are indeed linked. The new racism is a racism of the era of 'decolonization', of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity within a single political space. Ideologically, current racism, which in France centres upon the immigration complex, fits into a framework of 'racism without races' which is already widely developed in other countries, particularly the Anglo-Saxon ones. It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but 'only' the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short, it is what P. A. Taguieff has rightly called a differentialist racism.
To emphasize the importance of the question, we must first of all bring out the political consequences of this change. The first is a destabilization of the defences of traditional anti-racism in so far as its argumentation finds itself attacked from the rear, if not indeed turned against itself (what Taguieff excellently terms the 'turn-about effect' of differentialist racism). It is granted from the outset that races do not constitute isolable biological units and that in reality there are no 'human races'. It may also be admitted that the behaviour of individuals and their 'aptitudes' cannot be explained in terms of their blood or even their genes, but are the result of their belonging to historical 'cultures'. Now anthropological culturalism, which is entirely orientated towards the recognition of the diversity and equality of cultures with only the polyphonic ensemble constituting human civilization - and also their transhistorical permanence, had provided the humanist and cosmopolitan anti-racism of the post-war period with most of its arguments. Its value had been confirmed by the contribution it made to the struggle against the hegemony of certain standardizing imperialisms and against the elimination of minority or dominated civilizations - 'ethnocide'. Differentialist racism takes this argumentation at its word. One of the great figures in anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, who not so long ago distinguished himself by demonstrating that all civilizations are equally complex and necessary for the progression of human thought, now in 'Race and Culture' finds himself enrolled, whether he likes it or not, in the service of the idea that the 'mixing of cultures' and the suppression of 'cultural distances' would correspond to the intellectual death of humanity and would perhaps even endanger the control mechanisms that ensure its biological survival. And this 'demonstration' is immediately related to the 'spontaneous' tendency of human groups (in practice national groups, though the anthropological significance of the political category of nation is obviously rather dubious) to preserve their traditions, and thus their identity. What we see here is that biological or genetic naturalism is not the only means of naturalizing human behaviour and social affinities. At the cost of abandoning the hierarchical model (though the abandonment is more apparent than real, as we shall see), culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin.
But this first turn-about effect gives rise to a second, which turns matters about even more and is, for that, all the more effective: if insurmountable cultural difference is our true 'natural milieu', the atmosphere indispensable to us if we are to breathe the air of history, then the abolition of that difference will necessarily give rise to defensive reactions, 'interethnic' conflicts and a general rise in aggressiveness. Such reactions, we are told, are 'natural', but they are also dangerous. By an astonishing volte-face, we here see the difterentialist doctrines themselves proposing to explain racism (and to ward it off).
In fact, what we see is a general displacement of the problematic. We now move from the theory of races or the struggle between the races in human history, whether based on biological or psychological principles, to a theory of 'race relations' within society, which naturalizes not racial belonging but racist conduct. From the logical point of view, differentialist racism is a meta-racism, or what we might call a 'second-position' racism, which presents itself as having drawn the lessons from the conflict between racism and anti-racism, as a politically operational theory of the causes of social aggression. If you want to avoid racism, you have to avoid that 'abstract' anti-racism which fails to grasp the psychological and sociological laws of human population movements; you have to respect the 'tolerance thresholds', maintain 'cultural distances' or, in other words, in accordance with the postulate that individuals are the exclusive heirs and bearers of a single culture, segregate collectivities (the best barrier in this regard still being national frontiers). And here we leave the realm of speculation to enter directly upon political terrain and the interpretation of everyday experience. Naturally, 'abstract' is not an epistemological category, but a value judgement which is the more eagerly applied when the practices to which it corresponds are the more concrete or effective: programmes of urban renewal, anti-discrimination struggles, including even positive discrimination in schooling and jobs (what the American New Right calls 'reverse discrimination'; in France too we are more and more often hearing 'reasonable' figures who have no connection with any extremist movements explaining that 'it is anti-racism which creates racism' by its agitation and its manner of 'provoking' the mass of the citizenry's national sentiments).
It is not by chance that the theories of differentialist racism (which from now on will tend to present itself as the true anti-racism and therefore the true humanism) here connect easily with 'crowd psychology', which is enjoying something of a revival, as a general explanation of irrational movements, aggression and collective violence, and, particularly, of xenophobia, We can see here the double game mentioned above operating fully: the masses are presented with an explanation of their own 'spontaneity' and at the same time they are implicitly disparaged as a 'primitive' crowd. The neo-racist ideologues are not mystical heredity theorists, but 'realist' technicians of social psychology ...