J. Moore – Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (3 Volume set)

Автор: J. Moore
Название книги: Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (3 Volume set)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Культура и Искусство
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

*Starred Review* The introduction to the Encyclopdia of Race & Racism states that race and racism are two different terms with different histories. The set explores the historical origin of these concepts and their social and scientific impact throughout history. There are approximately 400 entries from 350 contributors, arranged around 28 themes such as “Colonialism,” “Genetic and Biological Concepts,” “Genocide,” and “Popular Culture.” Although the U.S. receives the most attention, the encyclopedia provides a worldwide perspective on race and racism, with articles on cultural groups, such as Burakumin, Dalits, and Roma; individuals, such as Stephen Biko and Nelson Mandela; and concepts, such as Black feminism in Brazil, English skinheads, and Indigenismo in Mexico. A series of articles covers the colonization of Africa by various European nations and is accompanied by maps displaying the regions they claimed. The third volume contains an annotated filmography listing both feature films and documentaries; a selection of several primary sources, including “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the “Lusaka Manifesto” on southern Africa, and the “Report on Crimes against Humanity in Guatemala”; and an easily accessible index to the volumes. See also references link some related entries, and bibliographies following each entry can provide further reading. A number of maps, drawings, and photographs add to the text. The caption for a photo in the article on Color-blind racism implies that the Los Angeles Urban League supported California Proposition 209 to ban race or gender preferences in public hiring, but in fact the Los Angeles Urban League was against the proposition. In addition, a map of Italian colonies in Africa in 1914 fails to show Italian Somalia. The set is very comprehensive in its coverage of both race and racism and deserves credit for clear and concise explanations of a variety of often confusing issues, for example, multiculturalism, tokenism, immigration, and IQ testing. The Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States (Greenwood, 2005) is a similar work, though focused solely on the U.S., and some libraries may opt not to update their collections with this new set. It is, however, highly recommended for most libraries based on its broad look at race and racism and well-researched articles showing how and why people came to believe racist theories and refuting those beliefs.

Race and racism are two distinct concepts which have separate histories. The term race was
borrowed by human biologists from general biology, and simply means a local kind or
variety within a species, especially applied to those common plants and animals which were of
interest to early naturalists and philosophers such as Herodotus (484–425 BCE), Aristotle
(384–322 BCE), Lucretius (99–55 CE) and Albertus Magnus (1193–1280). With the
discovery of genes in the early twentieth century, a species was defined more precisely as a
group which shares an inventory of genes, freely exchanging genetic material among
themselves, but not with other species. A race, then, might represent a minor adaptation
to local conditions within the species. A species of butterflies, for example, might include
‘‘races’’ which present different patterns of camouflage on their wings in different parts of
their range where the vegetation and assortment of predators and other butterflies are
different. Arctic races of mammals tend to be whiter than southern varieties, while races
of forest mammals tend to be more emphatically striped or spotted than races of the same
species living on the plains. A single species, then, might consist of several component local
races, all of which are mutually fertile with one another.
Members of the human species are highly variable in appearance, which should be
expected in a species with a wide—in this case world-wide—distribution. For reasons
explained in this encyclopedia, regional populations of humans have adapted themselves to
local conditions of climate, nutrition, and diseases, so that some human groups are darker in
color than others, some taller, some shorter, some with curly hair, and some with straight hair.
These variations in appearance among human populations, seemingly trivial in the eyes
of early observers, were suddenly seized upon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by
biologists, anthropologists, historians and even philosophers, who alleged that these superficial
traits were far from trivial, but signified deep and profound differences among human
populations in their psychology, temperament, and even moral structure. And thus the
ideology of racism was invented, the belief that human races were not just different from one
another, but that some were superior to others. Not surprisingly, the persons who invented
racism were themselves members of the race that they alleged was superior—the white race—
Nordic and European. Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840),
and Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) are usually ‘‘credited’’ with inventing racism, if we
can use that word, and they alleged further that their taxonomy of racism was not based on
mere opinion but was ‘‘scientific,’’ based on careful methods of observation and analysis
And thus the phrase ‘‘scientific racism’’ has survived to describe a field of study which is not
truly scientific, but pretends to be. As the reader will see in example after example in this
encyclopedia, the use of numbers and statistics does not automatically mean that an assertion
is logical or correct by scientific standards.
It is not mere coincidence that racism was invented during the time that tens of
thousands of Africans were being captured, enslaved, and transported in chains to the
Americas to work as field hands and manual workers for European owners. And it is
interesting and important to note that the institution of chattel slavery, in which human
beings were considered as mere property, was put into place before scientific racism was
invented. Chattel slavery in North America was put into law in Virginia in 1640, but
Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae was not published until 1735, Blumenbach’s Natural Varieties of
Mankind in 1775, and Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races not until 1853. Thus
racism was practiced for about one hundred years in North America before scientific racism
was put into print to justify what was already a highly developed institution.
Although racism is a recent invention, with its assertions about inherent human
inequality, slavery was a very old institution in the Mediterranean region of the Old
World. Sumeria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome all maintained vast numbers of slaves, which
they had acquired by various means. The Spartans, for example, subdued neighboring
Laconians and forced them into slavery. The Romans captured slaves from Britain to
Carthage, and likewise created a slave-based economy. But these slaves were not marked by
their outward physical appearance—in fact, their physiognomy was very much like that of
their owners. Greek and Roman slaves had to wear collars or distinctive dress to differentiate
themselves from other members of society.
Blackness in ancient times was not equated with the status of slave. In Rome there were
prominent black men, like Emperor Septimius Severus, Consul Lusius Quietus, and a
Roman general who became Saint Maurice, the patron saint of medieval chivalry. But
according to Plato, there were invisible, inherent differences among men which led some
to be kings and others to be slaves. Plato tried to capture the essence of the supposed
inequalities among men (leaving aside his allegations about female inferiority) in a supposed
dialogue between his teacher Socrates and Socrates’s student Glaucon, included in Plato’s
Republic. Author Stephen Chorover has called this fragment of philosophy ‘‘the most
frightening document in European history.’’
The dialogue consists in part of an analogy between human character and metallurgy.
According to Plato, although all Greeks might look alike on the surface, they were different
inside. Some were essentially ‘‘golden’’ in their intelligence and character, while others were
silver, brass, iron, wood, or lead. Those with golden spirits, the children of golden parents,
were destined to be monarchs or ‘‘philosopher-kings.’’ Those who were brass or iron would
become soldiers, craftsmen and tradesmen, while those who were wood or lead, would be
slaves. The frightening part of this idea is the notion of an invisible inner self, an early
forerunner of the notion of intelligence, and hence of ‘‘intelligence quotient’’ (IQ), which
emerged as the foremost rationale for racism in the twentieth century. Plato is clearly a
forerunner of the idea that human character and intelligence are innate, are inherited from
parents to children, and can be measured by specialists such as philosophers, or in modern
times, by psychologists.
The study of race, and of racism, presently requires at least two general and somewhat
different approaches, one from science and the other from the humanities. It is up to
scientists to test the biological assertions of racist theory—that human groups, regional
populations, ‘‘races,’’ are significantly different from one another in their mental, artistic, and
physical abilities. The struggle between racist and antiracist biologists has been continuous
since the invention of racism. But it seems that as soon as one racist allegation is refuted,
others spring forward. Much of this encyclopedia is devoted to examinations of particular
propositions and how they have been criticized in the last three hundred years.
Even if all racist assertions about human inequality are refuted, it remains to explain
how and why these assertions were generated in the first place, and what functions these
beliefs served in human society. As the reader will see in this encyclopedia, the perspective
loosely called ‘‘post-modernism’’ has provided a critical vocabulary for explaining how
opinions and ideologies are ‘‘socially constructed’’ or ‘‘culturally constructed’’ in a particular
time or place. It is not enough simply to refute the supposedly scientific biological assertions
of racist individuals; it is also necessary to explain how and why people came to believe these
propositions, and who was promoting them.
Racism is not merely a psychological disorder, then, curable by hearing the biological
facts. Racism not only poisons minds, it also lines the pockets of certain well-placed elites.
American farmers, contractors, store owners, and manufacturers, for example, reap enormous
profits from the difference between what they pay workers of color and what they
would have to pay white workers to do the same jobs. In the past, some of the greatest
advances in human rights have been on those occasions when racism, by various means, was
made to be unprofitable. When industrial capital expanded into the South afterWorldWar II,
for example, industrialists did not want to build factories with dual facilities for whites and
blacks, and so they joined the struggle for integration.
The nearly four hundred articles in this encyclopedia are roughly of two kinds—
biological and historical. But many articles are both historical and biological, and overlap
with one another in the coverage of a particular geographical region, historical figure, or
topic. For example, ‘‘civil rights,’’ ‘‘migration,’’ and ‘‘people of color’’ are mentioned in
several places, in different contexts. To help the reader navigate among overlapping articles,
we have listed ‘‘Related Topics’’ at the end of each article. Each article also contains a list of
suggested readings where the reader can find more information and more references to the
topic under discussion. All articles are signed by authors who are prominent in their fields.
All of them are well published, and their other books and articles can be found in local
libraries.
This project began in 2004 with a discussion among Macmillan editors concerning the
need for a new reference source which would ‘‘fit a wide range of the social sciences, from
history to multicultural studies to sociology and psychology,’’ but would also be ‘‘appropriate
for the high school curriculum.’’ That is, the publisher wanted a kind of ‘‘one-stop’’ reference
for students in high school and college to lead them to other inter-related sources in the
subjects of race and racism.
There followed a telephone call from editorial director He´le`ne Potter to me, asking me
to serve as editor in chief of the proposed volumes on the basis of my research in both the
scientific and humanist sides of race and racism and based on the distribution of topics I had
included in the on-line course syllabus which had guided my teaching of a college class called
‘‘Race and Racism’’ for more than twenty years.
The next step was the selection of a board of editors, who would solicit articles for
particular fields of scholarship, their own specialties, and edit the manuscripts they solicited.
Our first meeting was at Macmillan offices in New York City on September 2–4, 2004. The
editors are as follows, along with their institutional affiliations, and primary responsibilities
as editors.