Diving deep into the complicated issue of race and how to talk about it

Wednesday, 21 September 2022

A search for new ways to talk about race in Aotearoa New Zealand brought together a group of scholars, writers and activists in the new book ‘Towards a Grammar of Race’. Four extracts from the work, published last week, follow. The opening extract is from a chapter co-authored by editors Arcia Tecun, Lana Lopesi and Anisha Sankar, before brief extracts from three of the 15 contributors.

Race is a complicated issue. Over time and place, people from various academic disciplines have defined, redefined and contested the ways in which we understand race. This contestation affects how people talk about race on social media, in mainstream journalism, in academic study and in general public discourse. It doesn’t always feel like we’re speaking the same language. We see this in the New Zealand context, too. Even as a group of friends and editors, we have slightly different understandings of race. But it will quickly become clear that, although we sometimes use the term in different ways, we certainly do not use race to refer to or reinforce any idea of an inherent biological difference between people. As we know, the eugenicist pseudo-scientific construction of race, which puts people into different racial groups according to a supposed hierarchy of intellectual and physical development, is false, even though many of those assumptions and beliefs continue to persist today.

**READ MORE:

* We must speak out against racism

* The unreal prospect of unteaching racism

* 'Doing well for a Māori': My experience of racism in New Zealand

* How NZ can lead the way in dismantling systems of white supremacy

* Silent racism does more to perpetuate inequality than blatant bigotry

**

The concept of race has changed over time. Initially, when it first entered the European languages, it was in reference to ‘family’ or ‘breed’ – what we might generally call kinship structures. This relatively ambiguous notion of race was accompanied by religious convictions, particularly the Anglican and Puritan belief that the individual and their property rights were sacred. Eventually this was replaced by a more formal and pseudo-scientific understanding of the ‘five races of mankind’, in which different groups come to correspond to different visible and physical characteristics between people, including skin colour, hair texture and eye shapes. This notion of race, supported by Enlightenment philosophers, scientists and anthropologists, made an association between phenotype, place of origin, and different capacities of intelligence or consciousness. The rise in popularity of this formal notion of race emerged from a combination of things: the age of exploration, the rise of capitalism and the rise of science. We can identify the development of race as we know it today as unique to Europe, and some of the first subjects of dispossession internally in Europe were racialised themselves. But race didn’t stay contained there for long. With transatlantic slavery and colonisation in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe took its method of social categorisation to the world. It is this same logic of race that appears to us today, albeit in different and more sophisticated forms.

The mid to late twentieth century saw a shift in understandings of race, challenging the argument that there is any scientific evidence of behavioural or intellectual differences inherent to different racial groups and skin colours. Yet modern societies continue to produce race as a category of difference, and we see this in forms of racial oppression today. The myth that biological racial difference exists is very much alive and well, and continues to be reinforced in everyday language, media and some versions of history. Myths about race continue to assume that specific traits can be consistently assigned to distinct racial groups, especially those pertaining to behavioural differences, physical ability, aggression, criminality, health and sexuality. These associations rely on the assumptions that racialised groups, clusters and populations are internally homogenous, or have remained ‘pure’ somehow.

Today many people choose to ignore race. Rejecting the pseudo-scientific notion of race, along with its essentialist notions of what defines certain groups of people, they ignore race and talk instead about ethnic or cultural differences in things like inequality or policy outcomes. Reflecting this, some scholars choose to put the term in scare quotes, so it reads as ‘race’. This pattern is rife in disciplines like sociology and anthropology, as well as in popular literature on race. The problem with this, as we see it, is that it denies the way that race continues to operate as a mode of power, organising people into a social formation that still resembles the pseudo-scientific constructions of racial hierarchy. In other words, even though ‘race’ is not exactly ‘real’ in a biological sense, it continues to operate in the world today as if it were.

In fact, perspectives that minimise the importance of race end up exacerbating racism instead. Racial injustice does not go away when we stop talking about race, and collapsing race into a question of cultural or ethnic difference doesn’t adequately allow for an understanding of the ways in which race performs the work of power – it just conceals it. An example concerns the issue of racial profiling. In response to culture-centric approaches, when confronted with this issue, our friend and co-author Adele Norris has previously posed the question in conversation: ‘Did the cops pull you over because of your culture?’. She points to the contradiction of ignoring the assumptions tied to visual judgments that are already racialised, and that therefore cannot be adequately understood by focusing only on one’s individualised and personal cultural identity. Any contemporary definition or understanding of race faces the twofold task of addressing both the myth of biological and genetic racial difference and also the political reality of race. This is why we have taken race out of the usual scare quotes – in order to treat it as a very real social phenomenon that has material causes and consequences in the world.

Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant write that race has shaped the terrain of the state in a dynamic way, appearing in different forms from the colonial era to the present. Racial categories change in such a way that race has no clear boundaries, adapting easily to the needs of power. This also means that race is bound up with other kinds of oppressions, based on gender, sexuality, class, citizenship and ability. These intersections produce different experiences of oppression for different people. As the Black lesbian and socialist group the Combahee River Collective argued in the 1970s, the nature of these intersections demands an integrated analysis. This led the collective to coin the term ‘identity politics’ in ‘A Black Feminist Statement’, where the radical root of identity politics is found. It is grounded in an analysis that takes seriously the material factors that create the inter- sections we have just discussed – those linked to categories such as gender, sexuality, class, and so on. Taking our cue from these demands, we argue that race cannot be separated from those other categories. At the same time, we connect them all back to the same global structure from which each stems.

All of this must be considered alongside the material violence that race as a mechanism of power continues to inflict. Racial violence today looks like a variety of things, including (and informing) the ongoing displacement of Māori from ancestral lands and seas in Aotearoa New Zealand, and of Indigenous peoples elsewhere. It looks like economic impoverishment and wealth corresponding to racial lines – which groups of people own capital and wealth, and whose labour is exploited to make that possible. It looks like certain people being over-represented in the prison system and under-represented in the halls of political power and institutions of tertiary learning. It looks like the people who are affected by war and imperialism globally – and whose suffering we might sympathise with, respond to, or ignore – and it looks like the countries that we know are in debt and why, corresponding to the Global North–South divide. And it also looks like ecological crisis – which is bound up with how race, colonialism and capitalism work together to produce an unsustainable world, which impacts people, initially and most intensely, along racial lines. Understanding each of these forms of racial violence in relation to each other helps us to come to terms with how we might account for the complexity of race, colonialism and capitalism, and their entanglements today. It also helps us make sense of the personal, historical, global and structural factors that engender race, situating our own experiences within a much bigger picture.

Pounamu Jade Aikman

The notion of racial inferiority was pivotal to colonisation, reiterating the sub-humanness of Indigenous peoples, and justifying the exploitation of their lands and resources. This built off the religious divisions that had been cemented earlier in European thought, and it came to be articulated through what came to be known as the ‘doctrine of discovery’. This was the name given to a collection of fifteenth-century papal bulls, or decrees issued by Popes, that together justified the exploitation and colonisation of the non-Christian world. As European powers expanded across the globe, this religious rationalisation paved the way for the colonisation of Africa, the Americas and Oceania. In so doing, the doctrine of discovery enunciated a ‘societal reasoning of European superiority over all who are non-white and non-Christian, accompanied by a sense of supreme European entitlement to all non-white, non-Christian lands and resources’. When British and European explorers arrived in Aotearoa, therefore, they brought with them these racial ideologies, and a paternalistic presumption of the need to pacify, civilise and rule over the native population. In the throes of colonisation, as historian Angela Ballara has described, ‘Anglo-Saxons in New Zealand did not question their assumption that theirs was a race born to rule, and that the Maori belonged to a race which was bound to require that rule’ As matua Moana similarly underscores, colonisation is a ‘race-based process’, premised upon the ‘racist belief that so-called White, civilised people in Europe were innately superior and therefore had the right to dispossess non-White “uncivilised” peoples who were inferior’.

Tze Ming Mok

With regard to our history in Aotearoa, Chinese people in particular, including me, have written at length about how racial tropes of the ‘yellow peril’ were constructed and deployed as a key oppositional premise of establishing a ‘White New Zealand’ colonial state, at the expense of Māori sovereignty and status as the founders of the first independent state of ‘New Zealand’. Infamously, precarious Chinese migrant workers in the extractive settler economy were painted as rapacious, pestilential, colonising threats by the white press, as if ‘white people are looking in a mirror, but do not like what they see’. These tropes still pervade popular consciousness in the West, summoning regular outbreaks of street violence against people who look like us, including in Aotearoa. In response, some East Asians have supported and built decolonial anti-racist solidarity movements with tangata whenua and other people of colour, based on our rights and responsibilities as tangata Tiriti, in order to shuck off the limitations of life as a disposable layer of the racial hierarchy.

Mahdis Azarmandi

Race constitutes a relationship with others, and it is through the process of racialisation that white people can establish and distinguish themselves from those who are deemed non-white – whether they are Indigenous, Black or other – and as superior. Therefore, to unpack this relational aspect of how race is operationalised and continues to structure society, we must look at the different ways in which the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion are drawn in order to maintain white hegemony. We cannot reduce anti-racism to cultural difference, to cultural competency, or to individual decolonisation journeys and moral awakenings. For Pākehā it also means reconsidering whether they are re-centring themselves when working with other racial minorities groups or mediating relationships and solidarity efforts between tauiwi of colour and Māori. If racism means violence and dispossession, for Indigenous and people of colour, existing under white supremacy always already poses a risk to their lives. To be anti-racist therefore requires more than taking a stand ‘against a concept, a name, a category, a categorising [which] does not itself involve standing (up) against (a set of) conditions of being or living’ with racism. Anti-racism means standing up and challenging those conditions of racism and taking a risk to dismantle white supremacy. It needs to move beyond education and awareness and translate into actions that dismantle the colonial status quo.

Towards a Grammar of Race: In Aotearoa New Zealand is published by Bridget Williams Books. The other contributors are: Faisal Al-Asaad, Simon Barber, Garrick Cooper, Morgan Godfery, Kassie Hartendorp, Guled Mire, Adele Norris, Nathan Rew, Vera Seyra, Beth Teklezgi, Selome Teklezgi and Patrick Thomsen.