The origins of race-thinking and racism

Nothing has disturbed mankind more than the false idea that there was ever one race of people that was superior to another and more glorious than others. There is no temptation that has been stronger than the urge to believe that by one’s blood and totem one should be bigger and better than others. In one of the most telling philosophical essays of her century, Hannah Arendt, in Race-Thinking before Racism, ponders the origins of race-thinking in Europe, thinking that eventually spread throughout the world as it became an ideology of imperialism and colonialism.  Race-thinking, Arendt teaches us, had its roots in the 18th Century and achieved its explosion in the 19th Century. This was the same time in which virtually all European national identities began to aggressively romanticise their origins, their history and the purity of their blood against other nations in Europe.

 

The people of other places outside Europe, in Asia and especially dark Africa, were lowly classified as primitives and barbarians that could not belong equally to the same mankind, human race, and humanity with white Europeans. So, race-thinking, thinking about the superiority of one’s race against others was the beginning of racism, a cancer that has continued to eat into the human family, causing hatred, conflicts, and even wars. The idea that one people could conquer and dominate another to become a “master-race” is the idea that eventually drove European imperialism and the conquest and domination of the world. It is remarkable  that as large an event in world history as the conquest of the Global South by the Global North began with an ideology, a false but strong idea, that some races were more pure, powerful and closer to God than others.  Arendt does not mince her words in that all ideologies are fallen ideas, ideas that fell from the truth, and that unfortunately drive the history of the world. 

Before “the fateful scramble for Africa, race-thinking had been one of the many free opinions” that were floating in the sea of opinions and had not achieved the force and power that it gained with the conquest and domination of black skinned people of the world. That these darker peoples were classified in the hierarchy of races as inferior and godless was used to justify their conquest and domination as not such a crime but some kind of duty to God.

There was a time that it was wisdom, racist wisdom, to understand the colonisation and enslavement of black people as the kindness of saving them from their darkness. Race-thinking grew from an opinion to an ideology that justified such crimes against humanity as slavery, colonialism and imperialism. Race-thinking and its child racism became bigoted ideologies that have turned the whole world into a crime scene and a hell for dark peoples. What Achille Mbembe has popularised from other philosophers as “the power of the false” is exactly what happened with race-thinking and racism, false ideas that became strong and so convincing such that even the victims of these ideologies began to believe the truth of the ideologies. There are many black people today who believe that there is something naturally inferior and bad about being black. 

The racial contract 

It is European philosophers of the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries who generated ideas of the social contract. These ideas described a kind of government where people give up some of their freedom in exchange for the protection and provisions of the state. The ideas of the social contract eventually became world ideas of what governance should look like, thanks to such philosophical figures as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  As recently as 1997, however, a philosopher of the Global South, Charles Wade Mills in the book: The Racial Contract, disputed that the world was run through the social contract. Mobilising the mother of all evidence and fortifying his observations, arguments and conclusions with some of the finest philosophical argumentation Mills stated that the world is run through a “racial contract” that has come to bind all human beings, even those that do not know of the racial contract. 

Class-thinking and race-thinking 

The two most notorious ideologies, according to Hannah Arendt, are race-thinking and class-thinking. In a way race-thinking and class-thinking produce and sustain each other in a complex relationship of co-production and co-constitution. In that way, the way of the racial contract, to be white in the world gives one a superior social class. And superior social class gives one superiority in the ranks of the races that colonialism and slavery naturalised. In that logic, some black people that have earned social class, by money or political power, have become what my friend Andile Mgxitama has described as “honorary whites,” that have bought racial superiority even when their skins remain black. In the same logic, some white skinned people that lose their social class, through poverty and other forms of vulnerability and powerlessness, lose their racial superiority and live in the no-man’s land of races or affiliate themselves to being black and oppressed. 

The post-racial utopia in the racial dystopia

The South African democratic experiment after 1994 included some lofty ideas about the “rainbow nation of God” and non-racialism. But three decades after democratisation, social inequalities have kept race-thinking and class-thinking intact in the country. The road that divides Sandton from Alexandra in Johannesburg is not just a tarred concrete road but also a racial and class divider. The Utopia of non-racialism that drove the struggle for liberation cannot survive the dystopia of social inequalities and deep poverty. The people of different social and political classes that are structured by history and coloniality are divided by the racial contract and now and again some cross the road to power and others fall from power to poverty and blackness. Even the world’s greatest, so-called, form of governance, democracy cannot solve the problems created by race-thinking and class-thinking.  

Towards post-racialism

Marxism was and still is a philosophy that dreams of and works for a post-class world where class-thinking would have been totally destroyed. Decolonial philosophy, critical race theory and critical diversity literacy among other currents of thought and activism have dreamt of and worked for a post-racial world where one’s race does not determine one’s access to life opportunities and station in life. Working against race-thinking and class-thinking, therefore, are decolonial projects. If one can speak ecclesiastically, what is described as paradise in various religions should be the eschatological (final destiny) post-racial and post-class world. That world still exists in the utopia of philosophical dreams. 

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].