VIOLENCE AND VIOLATION ARE AT THE HEART OF RACISM

The 2017 debate of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, Manchester

Edited by Soumhya Venkatesan (University of Manchester)

Debaters:

Proposition: Pnina Werbner (University of Keele) and Christopher (Kit) Davis (SOAS)

Opposition: Peter Wade (University of Manchester) and John Hartigan Jr. (University of Texas,

Austin).

THE PRESENTATIONS

SUPPORTING THE MOTION

Pnina Werbner

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Figure 11

We live in scary times. Racism and brutal racial violence seem to be everywhere around us.

We are witnessing the rise of an assertive, publicly visible white supremacist movement in the

US, drawing millions of followers, with members of the Ku Klux Klan marching brazenly in

front of TV cameras shouting openly racist slogans, its members apparently endorsed by the

US President and his close advisors. There has been a precipitous increase in publicly

reported hate crimes not only in America but in Britain too, and alongside this the rise of

explicitly racist, anti-immigrant populist parties and their leaders throughout Europe. On our

TV screens we watch nightly the slaughter of Rohinga Muslims in Burma, in what amounts to

state-sponsored genocide. Israeli settlers attack and murder helpless Palestinians while

grabbing their lands, apparently with impunity, backed by a right-wing Israeli government,

while the international community looks the other away. Not only that: as authors of a recent

AAA Newsletter lament in an article on White Nationalism, ‘we are faced with the dismal

reality that the [election] of a first African American presidency ended not with a movement

towards racial progress but towards an overt racist backlash.

You have all seen the images, just as you’ve seen the violent images of black men and some

black women being shot dead by police, often with no provocation whatsoever. You have all

no doubt seen images of a murdered young English MP, of peaceful church attenders

slaughtered in Charleston, South Carolina, and of a young black teenager killed walking

innocently through his Miami neigbourhood, all murdered by racists and white supremacists.

Most of the time, the perpetrators get away with it. I don’t think there is any need for me to

elaborate further.

But these manifestations of racial violence are not what moves my argument. I am not simply

stating the obvious – that racist expressions are often brutally violent or that racist slurs

1 Acknowledgements: My argument in this debate draws on Werbner (1997) and Werbner (2013). I am grateful to Hava Gillon who drew the cartoon of ‘folk devils’.

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violate personal dignity, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued – that non-recognition

or misrecognition can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and

reduced mode of being.

No. My argument here is different and, I believe, more profound. First, I want to propose that

race and racism is not simply a discourse or even ideology as is often argued but that – seen

from the perspective of the racists – racism is a visceral, atavistic social imaginary, embodying

deep-seated psychological fears of difference and sameness, animated by imagined folk devils.

When I said we live in scary times I meant it quite literally - racism is generated by and builds

upon fear, rage and deep resentment.

Second, I propose that, seen from the point of view of the victims of racism, beneath the

surface of apparently differential racisms lurks a single, violent message: the Other must be

effaced and subordinated – physically, culturally, economically and politically. Hence what

distinguishes racism, xenophobia, ethnic violence and state terror from ordinary political

ethnicity is its violence and violations. Racists target the human body – perceived as a source

of dangerous and contagious pollution and threatening physicality; they target collective

cultural symbols – mosques, flags, graves – for destruction; they expropriate and destroy

property and sources of livelihood; they spread deadly, false conspiracy theories, and they

efface the political voice of the racialised Other. In other words, if racisms are many and the

political-cum-historical contexts in which they arise unique, the violations of racism are

familiar and repetitive – public humiliation, denial, enslavement, pogroms, ethnic cleansing,

rape, murder, torture, destruction, expropriation, starvation, industrial death, genocide.

If I were Mary Douglas I would say that racism in Europe and America – though not perhaps in

Latin America - is constituted from the beginning by category violation: race violates the

purity of blood of white people and their privileged superiority, whether by proximity or

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miscegenation.2 In his book Race, Nature, Culture and elsewhere (Wade 1993, 2004), Peter

Wade defines ‘race’ or ‘racial discourse’ as an historically inflected idea about human

difference in which selected visible (or indeed invisible) biological and cultural differences,

regarded as hereditary, are naturalised and inferiorised as embodied, essential human nature.

Missing from this definition, however, is the visceral disgust, fear and aggression that so-

called ‘race’ invokes. This is where racism and my own analysis begins.

There seems to be agreement among scholars of race that since World War II there has been

an erasure and delegitmation of discourses of race in Europe and America (Wade 2010, 2015;

Goldberg 2009; Stoler 2002).3 Political correctness and euphemistic references to ‘culture’

replaced explicit references to race. But if there was indeed such a moment when race talk

went underground or was privatised, as these scholars contend, the present moment is one in

which race and racism, as we have seen, have been shockingly and brutally visibilised and

legitimised.

Before going on to elaborate further on my main argument, I need to make two things

clear. First, I am not arguing that all violence is racist. There are many forms of violence

including sexual and domestic violence, sectarian violence and nationalist violence, which

may share some features with racism but are not racist. Second, I am not arguing that

ethnocentrism is the same as racism. Ethnocentrism, the valorisation of one’s own culture or

society above others, is – let’s face it - normal and common. Most people think their own

culture is good, possibly better than other cultures, and sometimes that some cultures – say,

Japanese culture or American Indian culture – are more attractive than others (Levi-Strauss). I

2 See Douglas (1966). Racism in Latin America has, however, been extremely violent, as Michael Taussig has argued (Taussig 1984). See also Werbner (2016) on Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques and racism in South America.3 Reflecting on the historiography of scholarly accounts of racism, Ann Stoler (2002, p. 370) notes a widespread insistence that there is ‘no single object called racism, but a plurality of racisms which are not rehearsals of one another but distinct systems of practice and belief.’ They arise contextually, in response to different historical circumstances. Despite this, she notes, such accounts share ‘surprising’ commonalities, linked perhaps to a shared scholarly vision of an evolution in racist practice and discourse from overt to implicit, ‘insidious’ and ‘subtle’, from ‘biologised’ and ‘somatic’ to a ‘more nuanced culturally coded and complex racism of the present’, defined as the ‘new’ racism (Stoler 2002, p. 371).

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am not arguing that all those who voted for Brexit are racists. But what is undoubtedly the

case is that ethnocentrism can easily descend into racism in response to competing interests

or perceived threats (Bar Tal 1990). The sign for this shift is always, I put to you, violation and

violence, often cycles of revenge. That is why multiculturalism is such an important

framework for relations of peaceful tolerance. Multiculturalism teaches the need to respect

other cultures and their rights to equal visibility and recognition in the public sphere.

But, you may ask, what about institutional racism – where is the violence there? After

all, most of the time racism only surfaces in statistics showing discrimination. My answer to

this is to invoke the example of Barak Obama who dared to break the glass ceiling, the taken-

for-granteds of everyday racism. As Susan Anderson writes in her book White Rage, ‘the

vitriol heaped on Obama was simply unprecedented.’ The hatred started, it seems, when he

was only a candidate. In his first year in office there was a 400 percent increase in death

threats. Facebook eventually shut down a page where hundreds answered yes to the question

‘Should Obama be killed?’ He was accused of being a Muslim, a Kenyan, an un-American

monstrosity. He was repeatedly called a nigger, depicted as a chimpanzee. His crime was to

buck the ramparts of institutional racism. The violence against him was only visibilised

because he did accept his place in the racial hierarchy. But that violence was there all along.

Hence, the challenge facing anti-racist scholars, I propose, is to grasp the visceral,

atavistic nature of the social imaginaries and the deep-seated psychological fears of difference

and sameness that constitute contemporary racisms and their mutations in the face of

changing historical circumstances. A common approach has it that the folk devil of racist

imaginaries is a displaced figure of collective anxieties and fears and, as such, an arbitrary

scapegoat embodying racist paranoid convictions that only cultural, ethnic and racial purity

can stem the breakdown of social order and the collapse of society. This view sees the racist

gallery of folk devils, and the differential or cultural racist fantasies of which they are

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constituted, as mere facades disguising more unitary, fundamental processes in which a

constellation of Others - blacks, Jews, liberals, Asians, Muslims - is constructed as a threat to

the purity and order of the nation, the ethnos, seen as a moral community. In this

interpretation, beneath the surface of apparently different racist imaginaries lurks a single,

violent message: the Other must be effaced and subordinated - physically, culturally,

economically and politically.

Against this singularity, Wieviorka (1995) has argued that the logic of racism is a dual logic -

of inferiorisation and differentiation; of subordination and exclusion. The duality seems to

explain the three central historical exemplars of racism that form, as Etienne Balibar (1991)

recognises, our fundamental imaginaries of racism: American slavery, colonialism (including

apartheid) and the Holocaust. But the racisms of late modernity, as Stoler notes, are

altogether more subtle and insidious. In our era of heightened self-consciousness and cultural

reflexivity, a further principle or logic of racism becomes apparent. This is suggested by

Zygmunt Bauman (1993) who argues, citing Levi-Strauss, that the uncertainties of modernity

crystallize around the disturbing figure of the alien or stranger. We deal with the stranger in

our midst, Bauman contends, through two strategic alternatives: anthropophagy - literally,

cannibalism, and by extension, ingestion, assimilation; or anthropoemy - literally, vomiting,

and by extension, expulsion, exile, incarceration. The first ‘assimilates’ the strangers to

neighbours, the second merges them with the aliens. Together, he says, ‘they posit a genuine

‘‘either/or’’: conform or be damned, be like us or do not overstay your visit, play the game by

the rules or be prepared to be kicked out from the game altogether’ (Bauman 1993, p. 163).

The impulse of the modern nation state is to pulverize its ethnic peripheries and stubborn

minorities in the cultural blender of nationalism.

The array of imaginary folk devils which I have labelled the Slave, the Witch and the Fanatic

have their roots in three parallel racist ontologies. All three ontologies share the paradoxical

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feature that violent racists perceive themselves to be defending the nation against the threat

of an evil aggressor and potential usurper.

Where exploitation and subordination are the key defining principles of racism, the fear is of

the physically powerful, wild, out-of-control slave. This is the dangerous street mugger who

threatens the law and order of society, as Hall and colleagues (1978) show in Policing the

Crisis, a figure reflecting fear of insurrection.

Against that, the witch crystallizes fears of the hidden, disguised, malevolent stranger, of a

general breakdown of trust, of a nation divided against itself. Your neighbour may be a witch

who wants to destroy you. He or she is culturally indistinguishable in almost every respect

because the witch masquerades as a non-alien. The nefarious Jewish merchant, icon of

suppressed greed, may be said to undermine the integrity of the ego. Hence, long-settled

middleman minorities - Jews, Indians, Chinese - although often wealthy, publicly compliant

and assimilated, become intermittently the object of extreme destructive violence or national

purification. Anti-Semitism invokes the folk devil of the Jew as the nefarious feeder on the

blood of children, the avaricious capitalist and perpetrator of violent global conspiracies.

Finally, the Muslim, the religious fanatic, the violent terrorist, negates - indeed despises - all

these impulses motivated by the id and ego. Islamophobia is the fear of the super-ego gone

wild. At stake is not the battle between Christendom and Islam, as many Muslims believe.

What is scary about Islam is the way that it evokes the spectre of a past puritanical

Christianity, a moral crusade, European sectarian wars, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the

attack on the permissive society. The Islamic fanatic is not a disguised, assimilated threat as

the Jewish ‘witch’ was; ‘he’ is not subservient and bestial like the black ‘slave’. He is upfront,

morally superior, openly aggressive, denying the morality of the promiscuous society and the

validity of other cultures - in short, a different kind of folk devil altogether. He is a figure

constructed by fearful elites that may nevertheless legitimise far cruder forms of biological

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racism. Anti-fundamentalist images provide these racists with a legitimising discourse against

Muslims, to which may be added the usual epithets directed against all racialised groups: that

they are dirty, promiscuous, licentious, violent and so forth. Muslim terrorists prove that the

Koran itself and the Prophet of Islam are intrinsically ‘evil’ and promote violence. In some

ways Muslims have now replaced Jews as the conspiratorial hidden witches, whereas for

Muslims, Jews and Americans are seen as the new Crusaders, openly violent, inhuman and

destructive.

To sum up my argument then: racist folk devils are no mere illusions and fantasies. They

represent deep-seated, atavistic, real fear, displaced onto strangers and what strangers come

to represent symbolically. Racism, the racist imagination, is fundamentally violent and

violating.

Kit (Christopher) Davis

Race is not a professional study for me. It’s just that race is something that follows me around

and fights with me like something out of a bad screwball comedy. So, this is a bit of an auto-

ethnography. I am going to start with three ethnographic instances and we’re going to draw

out of them some broader principles that will allow us to find a way forward. It’s appropriate

to be having this discussion right now because sixty years ago this year nine black students

attempted to enter a previously all white high-school in Little Rock Arkansas and the

governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus called the National Guard to block their entry and then

president Eisenhower in turn called the army in to enforce integration. That’s vignette

number one now. It was also the point when I first discovered white racism. I remember

asking my mother ‘what is happening, why are they doing this?’ My mother very wisely said “I

don’t know” because, really, why should she speak for them.

Number two: a little more than 50 years ago the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference, brought the struggle from the South to Chicago as a way of broadening the

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struggle to include economic as well as racial disparities. They were also attempting to

desegregate housing. Chicago is an extremely segregated city – it’s one of the most segregated

cities in the country. There were covenants by which people promised not to sell properties to

Blacks and Jews. The idea was to walk in peaceful protest through all-white areas that were

directly adjacent to all-black areas in which black people were paying more in rent than white

people across the street were paying for mortgages. Martin Luther King came. These walks,

they were exercises in militant non-violence, took place on Sunday afternoons and I went

along. You had to have a briefing before you began where you taught not to fight back and to

remain passive in the face of violence, to take off your earrings and jewellery so that people

couldn’t hurt you, and also, at a certain point, to kneel and pray. You can catch glimpses of it in

Raoul Peck’s recent film “I am not your Negro” which is a celebration of James Baldwin’s work,

but in the background you see a tremendous amount of the violence. There were a series of

critical events, obviously, during that time, but it was critical particularly in terms of my own

life and changed my life in a direct way. First of all, King said that the white violence was

worse than anything he had ever seen in the south and that he had knelt to pray with one eye

open. People threw things, they screamed, they could hardly physically express the magnitude

of their hatred, and that included women and children as well as men. There were swastikas,

there were flags saying ‘white is might and might is right,’ they adapted little jingles that they

sang about wishing to kill all the ‘niggers’, or that they wished they were Alabama troopers so

they could kill us all. It was quite extraordinary. You would always tell new people coming

along to keep walking, because they would be so astonished by this. But for me, first of all

instead of feeling frightened I felt jubilant, because you look at this and say ‘this is what I can

do by simply walking down the street. I can make you act like this’. And when I started

reading Foucault on the distribution of power over the population, while everyone else said

there’s no centre of power here, I remembered that. Everyone plays a part in power and if you

get out of place you can disrupt the power system. It was the first time I had seen police there

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to protect me, I had never seen that before. Also each week the number of protesters grew

and they included people who seemed other than the usual white folks I knew. I had an

integrated background, but all the white people I knew were like anthropologists, they were

on the Left, they wore ethnic clothing and jewellery, they were part of the CND. You would

expect to see them at a march. But there were also other people with bubble hairdos and

plastic hand bags – just normal looking white people that you would never expect to see or

think were on your side. I learned that I myself had a prejudice that I didn’t realize I had. That

was a learning experience for me and for them. They would say things like ‘my family don’t

know I’m here, but I couldn’t possibly just let another week of this go on without coming.’

That’s ethnographic example number two, and I want to emphasise there the element of

choice as well.

The third thing was teaching structuralism in the University of Michigan. I remember once

somebody making the observation that Levi Strauss was writing Elementary Structures of

Kinship while World War Two was going on, and there was no trace of the politics of the

Holocaust and of that mass destruction in his text. So in some way, in order to have a futuristic

approach, I’m taking a page from Levi-Strauss’s book because he taught us to pay attention to

the underlying logics of things that create the different manifestations of things in varying

times and places, and that account for both repetition and difference, the system of

transformations. I think it’s important if we’re thinking in terms of being open to the future

that we think in terms of looking at the underlying logic. On this basis, I would argue that we

understand racism for what it is, which is to say it’s one visible form of a type of

political/personal passion, itself combining two inherently precarious, and therefore tending

to violence, passionate ideologies. These are supremacism and purism. They are emotional

ideologies that are a way of negotiating our creaturely condition as empathic predators, to

which I would now add an idea, a missing piece provided by Andrew Irving in conversation

last night, we are also paranoid! So, we’re empathic, paranoid predators. It means that every

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time we try to dispossess others of something that is rightfully theirs we have to protect

ourselves from our own empathy by making that other deserving of the violence we are

perpetrating on them.

Equally, supremacism and purism are two unnatural states, they’re precarious states. We are

always conscious of the fact that they need consistent reassertion and consistent defence

because otherwise they’ll decline into nothingness. So we’re constantly then in a state of

anxiety. In addition, as passions they are emotions in search of an object. They are

formulations of resentments that are fundamental to human beings. I would draw attention to

the work of Melanie Klein or Lacan or early psychoanalysts who look at the fact that the

alternatives to feelings of affection and belonging are to feel excluded, resentful and cast out.

Shakespeare was very good on this. Characters like Iago or Don John are just pissed off and for

no other reason than that they’re excluded and they’re bastards and they don’t like it and they

are going to make everybody pay. So we have to just recognize that these are passions. But, in

addition, coded into our philosophy of being, in whatever it is we mean by us, through people

like Hegel and Nietzsche, there’s always also an unhappy consciousness. There’s always also a

master-slave dialectic. The notion of freedom is very heavily coded with its opposition to

slavery and that’s another problem that we have to deal with. So if we’re going to begin to

have a properly anthropological approach to the problem which is to understand it both it its

particularities of time and space but also in its commonalities across time and space, we need

to understand that these are the driving forces and that they will produce three kinds of

violence which we have all experienced in our life time.

The first is vigilantism, which can be communal or collective violence. It can be things like

lynching, it can be things like Faubus calling the National Guard, it can be individual acts of

attempted terrorism. The point is that they are all appealing to a higher law that is above the

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law of the state, and they are justified by this broader purpose, and in fact one of the

satisfactions is breaking the law to show how supremely important this thing is.

The second kind of violence is structural violence in the sense of obviously abiding

deprivation and imposition of disabling constraints on others which are then normalised and

racialised and made and perceived as a reflection of the others’ degraded ontological

condition, rather than as something that is imposed on them in order to create the purism and

the supremacism that one is feeling oneself.

The third element is the psychic violation in the sense of the mentalities of both actors. Both

the person that is the victim of persecution and the supremacist are psychically distorted by

these emotions. In fact they take bodily forms as well.

If we think about it this way, in terms of the psychic life of power and in terms of the fact that

underneath it all, psychologically, even in terms of infant development, these are things that

people think of as fundamental to human coming into being. Thinking in this way allows us to

tolerate, because we have to, the abiding nature of these passions. In other words, not to hope

for a time when they will ever go away because they are part of our self-construction. An

infant is incredibly uncaring about whether or not its mother has any sleep, whether or not

she is in a good mood or a bad mood. It just wants to eat. It is only later that it comes to say

‘oh’. Because these operate at the level of individual psyche, they operate to frame experience.

It is a position one can occupy and I’m thinking also of what people would say in the Congo

using the mentality of a sorcerer. There is a word in Swahili (chuki) to describe the kind of

rage you feel when you see something really inappropriate and impossible such as a child

talking back to a parent, or a parent being rude to a child, or when somebody comes along and

you have to share your food. And it is just really deeply annoying. The average person gets

over that, a sorcerer does not. And if they take against you, every time they see you, you just

piss them off and they are not going to be happy until they have made medicine against you

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that will kill you. And when you are dead they will be the first person at your funeral, because

they want to be sure to see you in the ground. And the problem then is the fixity of that

emotion, I think, because we all experience that irritation that becomes a proof that sorcery

exists. We all could feel the same feeling and that is how we know that other people feel worse

than we do. So I am saying that the persistence of these passions is what matters when we

begin to think about the future and that is why I wanted to kind of cut through the flesh, so to

speak, of racism. I like that moment in Terminator, specially the first Terminator, when he

cuts into his arm and you realise that it is a machine underneath. But your first feeling is ‘oh,

my God.’ It’s a bit like that cut through the flesh of the machine. The sentiments appear

unchanging but of course they change because they adapt. And that is why I want to go back to

the fact that when we now look at things like Charlottesville and when we look at the current

arguments and compare them to what things were fifty years ago, you see it is the same but it

has also significantly changed because the social circumstances around those feelings have

changed, and because they are debatable in different ways, and because among other things

you can fight back which, until the Black Panther party came along, the idea of fighting back

was kind of not a thing.

So what I want to then argue, again thinking futuristically, is to look in our contemporary

society at the role that algorithms play in this model, in this kind of constant repetition, both

the newness and repetition. So the encoding of racism or of ideologies in algorithm is crucial

and I just want to take the example of Dylann Roof who was the young man who went to a

prayer meeting at an historically black church in South Carolina and who shot and killed nine

people. He refused to have a psychiatric assessment as part of his defense., he left a manifesto

that was what he wanted to be his only statement. He did not come from a racist household,

he had black friends as a young man, but he was affected by the shooting of Trayvon Martin in

Florida (the young man to whom Pnina referred), who was walking through a neighbourhood,

his own neighbourhood in fact, and some self-appointed security person decided that he

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should not be there and he ended up being shot dead. So Dylann Roof went online, the

Southern Poverty Law Center has recorded this, to look at black on white crime. He googled it

and what popped up was a whole series of bits of evidence left by rightwing groups that

itemised and gave individual names of instances of black on white crime. What did not pop up

was the rarity of such crimes. So what we see happening is a weaponised artificial

intelligence, that’s one way of putting it. Artificial intelligence learns from every single click

that you make on every single thing. Every single click you make on Facebook and all your

friends. Data gathering organisations harvest information and they attach it now to

psychological profiling. So they have a sense of who you are, what you are as an individual

mind. Therefore if I were to google black on white crime, I would get a different set of things

from Dylann Roof. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been trying to get Google to

acknowledge and to change their algorithmic methods, so that it cannot be gamed in this way.

Going back to the open occupancy demonstrations, what I want to emphasise is that people

choose. It is not where you begin, it is what you choose at a critical moment that makes you

who you are. And what I like, not only about my own learning, was seeing that also ordinary

white people, to whom the proposition had never been put, had made a choice in that

moment. And what I am saying now in terms of our point of view as anthropologists is that

this emphasises the significance of the social, and of the politics of the social, and it

emphasises the future. What we see with algorithms is that they reinforce passions, they are

meant to be addictive. They diminish choice and freedom because they do not allow us to

think outside of the box. This is our challenge, to be able to find ways to continue to regroup,

continue to reform.

OPPOSING THE MOTION

Peter Wade

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The idea that violence/violation “are at the heart” of racism is a bit vague - which is what

makes it a typical and productive GDAT motion. I think it means that all you need to

understand racism is the concept of violence/violation. That is, to understand racism, violence

is not only necessary but sufficient.

I do not deny that racism very frequently involves violence and violation. It is hard to deny

this when “violence” has been conceptually expanded so that it now includes: symbolic

violence (such as invisibilisation in the media, the operation of stereotypes, etc.); micro-

aggressions (unthinking remarks that betray underlying assumptions, which make people feel

uncomfortable or violated); and structural violence (the impact on people of segregation,

inequalities, etc.).

But what does a focus on violence/violation hide from us? It is not so much that it is wrong, as

that it narrows our view, it foregrounds some things while backgrounding others, and it

predisposes us to see things in a certain light. It closes down asking the “other question”. The

“other question” is a conceptual tool developed by legal scholar Mari Matsuda in thinking

about the intersection of different forms of oppression. If something looks racist, you ask:

“where’s the sexism?” If something looks sexist, you ask: “where’s the racism?” So, in our case,

if we see violence/violation, we should ask: “What else is going on that we are not seeing?”

This of course raises the question of what is the “other thing” that is being hidden from view?

A first response here might be to claim that we are not seeing structural processes of

exclusion. A focus on violence tends to foreground the experience of stigmatisation, and to

push into the background structural processes of exclusion. Stigmatisation can be defined as

an “assault on worth”, an attack on, or violation of, one’s moral value as a person by means of

insults, jokes, negative stereotypes, being ignored, etc. Exclusion, on the other hand, involves

denying someone access to a resource or opportunity, such as jobs, promotions, housing,

education, etc. (see Lamont et al., 2016).

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Obviously stigmatisation and exclusion are connected. Being denied access to something can

often make a person feel stigmatised; if a person is stigmatised, this can often mean they will

be denied an opportunity. But the distinction can be helpful because it suggests a perspectival

difference between a) focusing on a sense of woundedness, which is the result of a perceived

violation; and b) focusing on structural processes of exclusion, which may not be experienced

as violence or violation because they appear as everyday normality. An added benefit of

attending to structural processes is that we can see more clearly structural processes of

inclusion; it focuses our attention on the maintenance of privilege through everyday

behaviours, rather than on the maintenance of privilege by the active use of

violence/violation.

Now this first objection can of course be worked around to some extent by using the idea of

“structural violence”. This concept encompasses structural processes that do not necessarily

operate through direct violence and violation, but that nevertheless reproduce racial

hierarchies; and the effects of these hierarchies may include a violation of the right to a decent

life (for example, when racial minorities end up living in dangerous and polluted

environments, which reduce their life span). So the idea of “structural violence” can get us

past this first problem of what we might be missing. However, the idea of structural violence,

by its very recourse to the concept of violence, tends to channel the analytic gaze towards a

binary of wounded and wounders, of victims and victimisers.

This binary leads us to a much deeper problem with the focus on violence/violation - which is

that some of the key experiences and structural processes involved in reproducing racism are

actually about conviviality and equality. I will illustrate this by looking at Latin America, which

is a particularly useful location to think about structural processes that reproduce racial

hierarchy, but are themselves non-violent.

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Latin America is characterised by long-established processes of racial mixture, which have

produced nations with majorities of mestizos (i.e. people recognised as a mixture of white

European, brown native American and black African). A key characteristic of the region is the

co-existence of racial conviviality with racial inequality and racism.

Mixture has a dual aspect. On the one hand, it is a site for conviviality: people make families

across racial differences; they live in families that encompass racial difference; they have

social networks of friends and colleagues that cross racial difference; and in some important

domains of social life, they interact in convivial ways that pay little attention to racial

difference.

On the other hand, the same mixture is also and simultaneously a site for the reproduction of

racial hierarchy and privilege. Mixture is not a neutral process, but instead is stratified by

racial meanings. In general, being darker is less valued, and being whiter or lighter is more

valued; people often seek to achieve a lighter look for themselves (as it is seen as more

attractive) and they may seek a lighter partner so they can have lighter kids. These processes

can often be experienced by people as involving violation: for example, the darkest sibling in

the family may feel slighted or treated less favourably; or darker women may feel they are

ugly, or that they have “bad” hair, etc. How are we to understand this duality of conviviality

and racism?

One way is to interpret conviviality as a mere superficial pretence under which lies the violent

reality of racism. This interpretation is given weight by the fact that Latin American states and

elites have often highlighted conviviality above all else, and used this to make claims to “racial

democracy”, denying or minimising racism and creating an ideological front. This

interpretation is also often adopted by Latin American academics and by ethno-racial social

movements, whose aim is to uncover the racism hidden behind this ideological front. And this

is certainly a valuable process, which I support.

17

But here we should ask the “other question”. What are we missing with such a perspective?

We are missing the fact that the conviviality is also a structural reality; that it is part of

everyday experience for many people. It is not just an elite ideology or mask, which hides the

realities of racist violations. We need to highlight that conviviality is constitutive of the way

racism operates in Latin America; and that it is the co-existence of conviviality and racial

hierarchy that underlies the structures of racism in the region.

The focus on violence/violation misses the fact that the very social practices in which racism

works its violence are the same ones in which racial conviviality operates; racial conviviality

and racism happen at the same time and in the same space. While the idea of racial

conviviality certainly does act as an ideological front, it is vital to see that the maintenance of

Latin American racial formations depends on racial conviviality being more than just a front:

it is a lived reality as well, albeit a partial one.

Latin America is a particularly good example of the operation of certain structural processes

of conviviality, because mixture there is long-standing, pervasive, and institutionalised. But

the same principle applies more widely: liberal democracies in general exhibit a constitutive

tension between hierarchy and equality, or between violence and conviviality.

There is a view that conquest and racism are constitutive parts of modernity; this has been

expressed forcefully by coloniality theorists such as Walter Mignolo, but also by others, such

as Paul Gilroy. They say that conquest and racism are the “dark side” of modernity and its

public claims to progress, equality, liberty, etc. These claims only exist (and only for the

privileged) by virtue of conquest and racism, understood as a series of violations imposed on

the subalterns. This is undoubtedly true - but it also begs “the other question”. Which is: “Does

racism only exist by virtue of the idea of equality?” I argue that it is only through the promise

of equality that racism gains its meaning. And more than just a false promise, it is the

possibility, however remote, of realising that promise that puts equality into a relationship of

18

mutual constitution with racism. It is only the existence of real processes of inclusion that

make the existence of real processes of exclusion possible. These are both partial realities.

Thus racism, and the violence and exclusion that it involves, cannot be understood in isolation

from the opposite processes of equality, conviviality and inclusion.

In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal published a book, The American Dilemma, in which he said that in the

US, the principle of equality stood in direct contradiction to the existence of racial inequality.

There were two things wrong with this. First, the dilemma was not just “American” (i.e. US),

but is in fact a key tension in all liberal social orders. Second, insofar as Myrdal was talking

about contradiction, his analysis misunderstood the relationship between the equality and

inequality. They are not separate forces in opposition or contradiction; instead they depend

on each other for their existence. So my argument is that racism is constituted by its

relationship to non-violence - and this is why I think it is not actually wrong, but rather too

narrow to say violence and violation are at the heart of racism. To understand racism,

violence is necessary but not sufficient.

The sense of woundedness and injury implied in a focus on violation is immensely powerful; it

has driven the politics of identity and recognition that we live with; it has driven the idea of

affirmative action and reparations, which seek to repair past violations. However, my

argument is that, beyond the partial truth of the world divided between victim and victimiser,

is the figure of the person who is neither victim nor victimiser, but without whom the

concepts of victim and victimiser could not exist.

John Hartigan Jr.

Rather than violence, race is at the heart of racism. At the risk of being simplistic and

countervailing “what everybody knows,” I suggest racism is the belief in race. Before racial

violence, we have to explain how people come to believe and feel race so palpably. They did so

first through practices of care applied to domesticated species, a history I recount in detail in

19

my recent book, Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity. This

process and experience are quite distinct for racial subject and objects—those objectified by

and through racial violence and those subjects who perceive others as warranting assault and

attack. If our principal concern is intervening in the reproduction of racial thinking, whiteness

requires the closet scrutiny. Attending to violence will likely only offer an oblique point of

entry into thinking of white racial subjects, since they largely eschew or reject such overt,

unwieldy acts. But if we can lay bay the forms of care that inform racial thinking, perhaps we

have a chance to disrupt the conditioning of white racial subjects that leads to violence.

In social terms, violence arises in the maintenance and reproduction of forms domination.

Sociality operates by keeping violence limited and effective; it does so largely by encasing

subjects in multilayered, overlapping forms of politeness and decorum. Prior to violence are

social subjects constituted to feel the realness, weight and import of these conventions. So

what is this sociality of race that serves as the predicate for racial violence? How do racial

subjects come to feel both the realness of race and the sense of threat from which violence

springs?

Social anthropologists answer these question with the “idea of race.”4 It’s a convenient artifact

for us to assail. This stance suggests, first, that ‘it’ emerged at a defined point in the past,

suggesting we may be free of it in the future. Second, in order to reach that future, we have to

get people to stop believing this idea. Simple. I used to adhere fiercely to this tenet but I no

longer do. It does not jibe with what I’ve found from years of studying whiteness and race.5

Violence is not primally there as whites are socialized into a comforting unmarked sense of

normativity, one that bestows a sheen of respectability and rightness to what we do.

Importantly, this comfort is there before the threat of otherness. And it does not start as an

4 For a comprehensive, foundational account of this stance see, Audrey Smedley and Brian D. Smedley, 2011.5 See John Hartigan Jr, 1999.

20

“idea.” It begins with breeding. It is achieved through practices of care, and perhaps the first

act of such racial subjects is deciding who and what is unworthy of care.6

Humans, like other social species, are characterized by a capacity to extend care to each other.

One of our distinguishing features in evolutionary time is care extended to injured or frail

conspecifics; even our dead warranted such attention, with burials, which grew increasingly

elaborate, necessitating monumental structures. Race begins with the recognition that such

attention can be directed to altering, to “improving,” the life forms we care about: first, our

“beasts of burden,” our “domesticates.” The doubled referent in that term of racial servitude

needs to resonate, as with the doubled connotations of “breeding”—both privilege and

directed sexual reproduction. When the violence of the eugenics movement was subject to

critique in early 20th century, only its “negative” forms such as forced sterilization were

targeted; its “positive” forms—selective choices about mating that reproduce class privilege

and racial identity—largely went unassailed and remain active today and are proliferating

rapidly.7

When Darwin wrote about race in Origin of Species (the book’s subtitle, “the

preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,” is often elided) he did not reference

humans. As was common parlance at the time—and as is still the case today in Spanish-

speaking countries, with the word “raza”—he talked about pigeons and dogs and cabbages,

about goats, ducks, and rabbits. He talked about the vaunted capacity of breeders to discern

what was imperceptible to most others and to direct that perception toward an improved

lineage—a species vision drawing from and directing millennia-old practices of care. That

combination of vision and practice creates races, first of nonhumans; later we ably applied it

to humans. Race results from practices of care. This also may seem counterintuitive at first,

especially when considering the violence of the slave trade. But consider: that human horror

6 For a full account of the racial subjects produced by practices of care, see Hartigan Jr. 2017. 7 For this history, see John Hartigan Jr, 2005.

21

was entailed by the care and cultivation of several domesticated plant species: cotton, sugar,

tobacco and then coffee. Importantly, racism later arose as an ideological means of justifying

slavery; for its initiation, the slave trade largely required only religious justifications.8

When Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a founder of racial science, gazed into the visage of the

first “Caucasian” skull, it was beauty and sameness he beheld, not otherness. And the power of

that sense of recognition was capable of extending great care or privilege, on one hand, while

impelling acts of violence on the other. Racial violence arises for varied reasons, but certainly

crucial to its venting and explosion is when and how this combination of vision and practice is

disrupted or disputed, when the privilege extended to subjects of good breeding is threatened.

Or even earlier, in order to secure and perpetuate that form of privilege, that breeding, other

are killed and terrorized or simply left to suffer and starve.

In intersectional terms, white, middle-class men in the United States commit mass murder

when their racial, sexual, and class forms of entitlement are ruptured. This does not happen

instantly, as the spew of furious violence might suggest. First, they must acquire that

privilege; that entitlement is inculcated over time, imbibed through parental care that extends

to securing homes and schools away from people of color; they are aided in doing so by a vast

infrastructure of caring, extended through loans and financing, jobs and networking. 9 Then

the economy that made such extensions of care has to shudder and shift; too, the political and

social discourse that naturalized it all has to be disrupted or disputed. Then, as they are

exposed to the precarity of such care and directly encounter its disruption or termination,

some respond quite violently.

The outbreak of spectacular racial violence in the United States today is predicated on

disruptions of practices of care that have long protected most whites from the vagaries and

perils of “market forces.” Confronting economic and social “failure” in various guises, for

8 For this shift from religious justifications for slavery and the subsequent elaboration of racial identity, see Bruce Baum, 2006.9 For a detailed accounting of these forms of care, see the work of George Lipsitz, 2011.

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which many advantaged white men are not prepared, violence seems warranted. Defending

against “threats,” real and imagined, to those forms of advantage, violence seems necessary

and righteous. In the face of “loss” of a long-assumed, thoroughly socialized sense of

dominance, violence appears the only recourse. And its fury may be all the greater because its

targets were not deemed worthy of the same extensions of care that constituted this angry,

unhinged white racial subject.

For several decades, we have largely addressed race in terms of perceptions of

otherness, and this approach has been revelatory. But the psychoanalytic model that

undergirds this critique too narrows our attention to race and its forms of socialization—to

the often silent equations made seemingly effortlessly between whiteness and comfort,

between white and nice.10 The sense of sameness so crucial to whiteness begins with a feeling

of belonging, in cultural terms. Its cultivation does not require the Other, though it demands

domesticates to serve as its sustenance. Violence draws a firm line around who does and does

not warrant care, but it is peripheral to the prior, fixated perception on cultivating subjects of

care, on breeding toward an improving lineage. Ask any gardener about the violence entailed

by caring for plants—the weeding, for instance—and you will soon see how an attention to

care can reveal the roots of violence in practices that seem so gentle and good.

What’s the answer? How do we engage critically with the racial conditioning that is the

predicate of violence? By getting whites to grasp their breeding, to dislodge the sense of

rightness and comfort via a “making strange,” perhaps through the intuition or odd sensation

of recognizing we are breed for privilege much like our dogs and the other domesticated

species about which Darwin wrote. I’m haunted by an image of white diplomatic workers

being evacuated from a compound in Rwanda as the genocide was breaking out—pets cradled

carefully in their arms, passing rows of black “domestics” who remained behind to face

10 See Setha Low’s (2004) account of how “niceness” works as an exclusionary racial discourse without ever explicitly referencing race.

23

certain slaughter.11 Or recall the dog Excalibur, whose owner, a Spanish nurse, was the first

person in Europe to contract Ebola; the global outcry over the decision to euthanize the

animal echoed eerily in the pall of silence over the fate of Africans dying of the disease.12 More

recently, I’m haunted by a noble effort of sending private jets to rescue pets-at-risk in Florida

in the face of Hurricane Irma, while no such mobilization materialized for imperiled migrant

works unable to evacuate.13 Certainly, extending privilege to our pets, feeding them gourmet

treats as “family members,” while homeless people starve on the streets, offers a glimpse of

how deeply breeding runs.14 It also is a good gauge of the ancillary power of racial privilege to

incite violence.

What we glimpse in white people and our pets is that what’s being privileged here—an

extension of sameness to nonhumans—parallels and perhaps even mirrors the

dehumanization by race. These forces work in tandem, and we won’t get sufficient critical

purchase on racial thinking without drawing both into view. It’s the underlying assumptions

and projections of sameness that allow the operations of othering to seem commonsensical

and undisturbing. Recognizing this will expand what we consider in response to the crucial

question, “Is it racial?”

THE DISCUSSION

Soumhya Venkatesan (Manchester): Kit and Pnina focused on the psyche, on passions, fear

and so on. John and Pete focused more on social processes – we got a sense of how care can be

11 Peter Redfield discusses this example, http://somatosphere.net/2014/02/human.html critically commenting that, “Embassy pets make the cut; Rwandan staff do not.” For the power of this perception, see the comments of one Ohio firefighter, who said he would save the life of a dog over a black man, explaining ““one dog is more important than a million niggers.”” https://www.theroot.com/ohio-firefighter-says-he-d-rather-save-a-dog-than-a-mil-1818474862 12 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/09/excalibur-spanish-ebola-patient-dog-euthanised13 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2017/live-updates/weather/hurricane-irma-a-monster-storms-devastating-path/dozens-of-dogs-will-evacuate-florida-on-a-private-plane-to-new-york/ 14A recent study that tried to ascertain racial identity through consumer spending found the most certain indicator of white identity is owning pets. See “Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States over Time,” by Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, NBER Working Paper No. 24771, issued in June 2018; also, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/07/10/rich-people-prefer-grey-poupon-white-people-own-pets-data-behind-cultural-divide/

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at the heart of racist practices, and also how conviviality can generate racist hierarchies in

particular ways. John and Pete, where would you place the psyche? And Pnina and Kit, what

about the social processes of everyday racism? How do you see those kind of micro, everyday

racisms that Pete, in particular, raised.

John: When you get to the level of the psyche, the social is already there. Can I see all these

things – the passions and the angers? Yes, I certainly can. But I see them as expressed in social

terms and, importantly, as learned, and in that sense, predicated on class, racial and gender

positionings.

Pete: I would say that if you’re going to concentrate on the other, then you should also

concentrate on the self, on the formation of the self. You can’t understand the other without

the self in the same way that you cannot understand violence without non-violence or

equality without hierarchy. Also you have to understand the ambivalence of the other, which

is that it is not only hated and reviled, but also desired.

Pnina: I don’t normally write about the psyche. Fanon, Homi Bhabha and a whole host of

people did focus on this issue in relation to racism, exclusion, colonialism, and I found these

writings very productive in this context. But I want now to say something about the structural

processes of exclusion. I don’t think that everyday racism is so simple or hidden. There was a

program on the BBC about the spike in hate crime after Brexit. This was described as racism

by the program-makers, but was in fact directed at Polish migrants. They took it for granted

that hate crime defined race, and so Poles were understood as a race. In relation to this I want

to bring up Stuart Hall, who said that class is a modality through which race is experienced.

And that kind of links into the structural processes – you can’t separate class from race. You

probably can’t separate gender, age and various other intersectional features from race. When

you talk about everyday racism, which can be very pernicious, you’re thinking about it in

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terms of these modalities. I accept what Charles Taylor says that this kind of violation is

demeaning. It diminishes the person.

Kit: I think it is important for us to realise that the psyche of a social creature is entirely

social; [although] it can be separated out analytically as a way of looking at dispositions of

particular individuals and choices, and I think there is nothing out of keeping in terms of both

care and conviviality. I think those two things are complimentary and the issue is the matter

of extending boundaries of care and of equality to others. But to pull back just a little bit too,

it’s important not to confuse race with colour. Why was it important under Nazism for Jews to

wear stars? It was because they were not visible otherwise. So to think of this as something

that is based on a visible provocation of otherness is to make a fundamental mistake in terms

of looking at how the mechanism operates, and also to say that if we take social construction

seriously, as we must as anthropologists, we can see that it affects bodily practices in very

significant ways, and particularly in terms of oppression: people knowing where not to go,

people knowing how to position themselves, and, particularly in relationships of servitude, of

being able to be present enough to touch the other, but also of being absent enough. Both [the

raced and the racing] bodies are conditioned by hierarchy and supremacy. What I like about

the idea of the psychic is that it maintains the possibility of choice. People can decide to be

other and to take a position that moves them away from racism. If we don’t recognise that we

end up making an ontological mistake, creating a category of ‘racist’ that exists permanently

and enduringly. There is no hope there for social change and I think it's the very challenges

[they encounter] that allow people to have to choose between positions. Race/being raced is

not a natural thing, it's a political position.

On micro-aggressions: in the old days when we were integrating things you had to put up with

a lot more than that. You were bodily and socially informed to be an integrator. If you want to

know the conditions under which I was brought up, there is a wonderful ethnography that

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came out in 1945 called Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. The first

part is a sociology of the black community in Chicago; the second part is an ethnography that

gives a description of social classes and modes of living within the black community. The last

chapter in that book is called ‘Advancing the Race’ and it's a category of thinking about

political struggle. I was brought up in that category. Advancing the race meant that everything

you did and everything you were was about making a way for other people. You had to be

twice as well prepared and twice as armed and if you messed up, nobody black was ever going

to get a chance after you. What I am saying is that race isn’t something that you are passively

and unthinkingly. It's something that comes into being, and it has a heritage and a tradition

including a heritage of political struggle. Now we have advanced it to the point where we can

think about micro-aggressions.

Soumhya: Does racism always have to somehow feature whiteness?

Kit: I don't think it does always have to feature whiteness. That's partly why I’ve tried to look

at a mechanism that can apply in many different circumstances. One of the controversies

about banning discrimination against people of Dalit origin in Britain was that there was no

law under which it could be registered except race law, because it's a condition you come in to

by birth. In terms of all of the bodily renditions of things we’ve been discussing, the important

thing is that it has to be seen as something that you can’t get rid of; that it's in you ‘naturally’

and that's what makes possible the supremacism, the violence.

John: I'll say no. The kind of dynamics that Kit was pointing out – contamination, pollution,

ideology – are indeed core to racist thinking and that doesn't need the articulation of

whiteness. Going back to Rwanda – Hutus and Tutsis – it's a categorical identity that they

were able to see complete physical differences in each other that were ineradicable. It's a

function of colonialism, certainly, but what emerged was an absolutely terrible capacity to

other that didn't require whiteness per se.

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Pete: Antisemitism is a pretty clear example, although even then depends on how you define

whiteness because a Jew wouldn't necessary be white in terms of the raciology of the late

nineteenth century. There are other examples, e.g. the Japanese empire where they had racist

views and practiced racist exclusions on people they identified as other. My own

understanding of racism does tie it quite clearly to European colonisation of other areas of the

world. That's where racism and ideas about race were born. So that does link it quite strongly

to whiteness, but it has since been elaborated in different kinds of ways where you don't

always have to have the figure of the white person actually there. But I think it's always there

as an absent presence in some way.

Pnina: There are all kinds of cognate terms like xenophobia, communalism, casteism, ethnic

violence. In Israel people say to me, ‘Well we are all semitic, how can we be racist against

Arabs? We're from the same race.’ That doesn't hold for me when you find there is domination

and violation where one group is clearly in control. Then it does seem to me that the kind of

violations that are perpetuated on the other become racist. But I accept what Pete says, that

there is a sort of model that comes from relations of colonialism in the first place.

Jeanette Edwards (Manchester): I have a question for the opposition and one for the

proposition. Opposition first. It seems to me, as Pete started off, that many of our GDAT

debates hinge on what looks to be the least important of the words in the motion. What you've

argued, partly, is that violence and violation are not at the heart of racism but what you've not

denied is that racism entails violence and violation. So if those words ‘are at the heart of,’ were

changed to ‘integral to’, ‘imbricated in’, ‘implicated in’, would you have supported the motion?

For the proposition, both Kit and Pnina opened up the possibility of hopeful futures. Kit

through the notion of choice, and Pnina with notions of multiculturalism. Can you see

multiculturalism as similar to the benign convivialities that Pete was talking about. That, in

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fact, multiculturalism, like the benign convivialities, is actually the other side of the coin of

racism.

Pete: You can't deny that racism involves violence. Of course it does. But is that all it involves?

Can we get a complete understanding of the phenomenon by only looking at violence? I think

you can't.

Pnina: I think it is at the heart. Is ethnocentrism racism? There are people who would say it is.

Is nationalism racism? Some people would say it is. While I don't want to make either claim, I

think it's normal to think that your own culture is better, that your own country is better. But

that in a much more self-conscious, pedagogical way, multiculturalism teaches people that

they can't just have a naive ethnocentrism that easily descends into racism. It teaches them

that they have to respect others. Whether this leads to conviviality is a question of

circumstances because not everybody lives in neighbourhoods which have that possibility. It

helps to have conviviality, to know people from another culture, to be able to interact with

them. But in ideological terms, you need to be able to say to people, ‘look you might think that

your culture is better but other cultures are equally good in their own terms’. When I started

to work on issues to do with racism, violence didn't appear in the literature. It did in the

newspapers or on TV, but when people were theorising racism they didn't talk about violence

and violation, and they didn't talk about the experiences of victims. That's what alerted me to

the fact there was a missing element in all these critical race theories.

Kit: I don't think that conviviality and multiculturalism are inconsistent. And that goes back

to the point I made, but did not develop, about purism. When I think, for example, about the

violence in Northern Ireland, one of the points made was that some of the worst violence

started initially in neighbourhoods that had been previously integrated of Protestants and

Catholics together. And so if we are going to make multiculturalism productive in the longer

term, we have to constantly be aware of and vigilant about the things that advance the rise of

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a purism which can undo all of the emergent neighbourly bonds. I think that's the other

reason why things like segregation are very useful for those who are racist or purist. If people

live together and have allotments together and maybe share food together or, as in Israel

before things became so wildly separated, worship at the same shrine and things like that, the

next thing you know they're chatting and exchanging recipes, or inviting people around and it

mitigates these hard lines, and can come to make them seem arbitrary, unjust, nonsensical.

The prospect of more important or consequential social mixing growing out of these small

acts of empathy is threatening to ideologies of purism. In the States in terms of the political

process, the divide between white and black was crucially important for constituting a

melting pot among white ethnic communities that had been regarded as different, many as

lesser. If you were Protestant English you were at the top. But if you were Italian, German,

Jewish, Irish then you were not quite white enough. And the concept of the Caucasian enabled

you to be assimilated both as a worker and as a political participant because you could

exclude a whole category of other people, Native Americans and African Americans, who were

socially excluded from the beginning. So if we look at the machine and what the machine

produces, it is the illusion on the part of poor whites that they are better, that they are okay,

and that they have something to protect rather than seeing themselves in the broader context.

They don't see the machine. They see the fleshy outside and they misidentify it. As Lyndon B

Johnson said, ‘If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored

man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and

he'll empty his pockets for you.’ That's the violence, but it is on both sides; the perpetrators

are violated as well.

Vlad Schuler Costa (Manchester): Can racism can be a generalized phenomenon? There have

been hints that racism may work differently in America to in parts of Latin America. Is there a

racism and every minor racism is an epiphenomenon of it, or are there actually different

phenomena all through the world?

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Pete: That's a typical definitional question, isn't it? When you have varied phenomena, what

are the common factors and what’s the variety? If you talk about common factors, you are

denying the variety and if you emphasise variety then you don't get what makes them

somehow similar. My own approach is that there is a whole bunch of phenomena in the world,

and as analysts we have to carve out particular domains and the way we do that ultimately is

slightly arbitrary. Obviously we don't want this to be completely arbitrary because it is

pointless. But it's slightly arbitrary. So at some point we have to just decide that for analytical

purposes I'm going to define this particular domain in this way for these reasons and see how

far it gets me.

The way that I think about racism and the concept of race is, as I said before, rooted strongly

in the history of European colonialism. It's got anterior roots in the Iberian peninsula and

draws on some of the ideas about breeding, particularly horse breeding and so on, that John

was referring to, and then that was transferred to the exclusions of Jews or people of Jewish

descents and moros or people of Muslim descent and so on. That's where the word raza first

emerges. As applied to human beings it was conceived as a kind of lineage, not as a group of

people, but as something that you inherited. Those kinds of ideas were then transferred into

the Americas by European conquerors and that's where the whole race complex really

emerged. Now there are other kinds of beliefs that are similar in many ways. The way the

ancient Chinese thought about people who were non-Chinese was very naturalising, looked at

their bodies, saw them as inferior, linked their bodies to their geographies etc. Is that racism?

Well, in some ways it is. It’s got the formal characteristics of many things of racism but I prefer

to retain the idea of race linked to that particular history of European colonialism. That, for

me, is what gives it the root, and the categories that emerged in that history, white, black,

indigenous, Asian etc. are the key racial categories. And then where you see those categories

emerging even if there isn't a discourse about biology, then that's still classed as race and

racism in my book. There is a kind of common core but obviously there is a huge amount of

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variety. Anti-Semitism started right from the sixth, seventh, eighth centuries right to the

Medieval period when there was growth in anti-Semitism. For me it is not about race at that

stage, but in the nineteenth century anti-Semitism in France and Germany elaborates and

violently expresses ideas of race and racism that emerged from a colonial history, applying

them to a non-colonised population. That for me counts as racism.

Pnina: There is an interesting discussion in American Ethnologist (2008) on Islamophobia and

anti-Semitism and the argument was that Islamophobia has replaced or displaced anti-

Semitism. In other words, the same sorts of attacks and definitions, images and so on, are now

applied to Muslims. The idea was that in a particular moment in European history, the Jews

were very threatening to the nation state, you’ve got Baumann’s argument about the

holocaust. So the purity of the nation state was threatened by the Jews, now the threat is from

Islam to the whole of Europe. These fears, or what I call folk devils, have some unique features

but they all rest on a sense that these people are alien and they don't disappear entirely and

vanish. These kinds of commonalities exist across these differences and in that way we know

racism when we see it.

Soumhya: Incidentally one of the early debating motions that we eventually rejected was “we

know racism when we see it”!

John: I'm ambivalent here. I'll say first that I'm working at articulating pre-modern notions of

race. I would lean toward seeing racism as active prior to that. So the way the Francs set out to

slaughter the Saxons. That was probably racial thinking - there was racism or some form of it

in a very pre-modern sense. When I go to define racism, I lean towards Pnina's

characterisations: this sense of contamination. I think that there is something prior to a notion

of purity. The idea of inheritance that Pete mentioned, how early can you see that? I'm

basically arguing that when you see the domestication of species long before we have a

conceptualisation of genetics or inheritance, well that's racial thinking. The ability to

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subordinate domestic species, to labour, perhaps the predicate for slavery as we see it in the

Babylonian era and in the early states. Is racism there? Probably.

Kit: This is an interesting question, and it's part of the reason I'm looking at the machinery.

And it's really interesting, John, you should mention antiquity because in my many

wanderings, trying to sort this thing out, I ended up reading sections of Julius Caesar's

descriptions of the Gallic Wars. He's talking about Celts and Germans and Celtic cultures and

the ways he describes people are in every bit degrading and demeaning as anything we might

read and that's of course absolutely essential if you’re establishing an empire and

dispossessing people of all their things. You can't do that unless they are defined as a form of

human animal- as a barbarian or a savage. Once you put a person in that position you have to

make their being deserving of that condition because otherwise you cannot keep

subordinating them because you know that that you yourself you would not like it. So you are

bent on denying that knowledge by making them extremely the other. Pete makes a very

specific point of origin that comes out of a particular history in order to make his set of

transformations work properly and I think that's fine. It's just limited, and what we need is a

broader system that then allows us to see that there is not only Islamophobia, but

fundamentalisms of all sorts; religious fundamentalism, things that derive from the same

mechanism of supremacism and purism driving a kind of sense of threat and the

determination, as Pnina has said, to eliminate the problem by containing or exterminating the

threat

David Gellner (Oxford): When I first saw the motion I thought this was going to be about the

definition of violence and whether we counted structural violences as violence or not. Now it

seems like actually the key term is racism and whether we accept that as a universal or not.

Dumont famously argued that the situation in the United States was not caste because it was

animated by an ideal of equality and the absolute necessity to deny Blacks’ equality. I was at a

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conference in July in Bangalore where the government of Karnataka flew over Martin Luther

King's son to address the massed ranks of the Congress party there and it was pretty

impressive. There were at least a dozen Black academics from the United States and from

Africa, who were absolutely sure that the way Dalits are treated in South Asia is exactly the

same as the way black people are treated in North America. Personally, I must say, in relation

to the issue of Dalits in this country, I find it astonishing that their claims are not accepted as

falling under the Race Relations Act. It is absolutely clear that the kind of discrimination they

face is exactly the same as the kind of discrimination of other people who are accepted to fall

under it and their struggles and resistance to that can only be politically motivated and has to

be understood in terms of diaspora politics and so on. My first question to all the panelists:

may be racism is the problematic term, so what if we replace racism with ethnic closure? Does

the argument still work there, and is it generalizable through out the world? Second question:

what about, and this is sort of backing up Pete's argument, pre-modern cases where you have

communities living together for hundreds of years, say under the Ottoman Empire or in lots of

places in Asia we've got living pre-modern multiculturalism. These are often very hierarchical

and people can be friends and they may have blood kinship with each other and yet they still

hold, what in modern terms, we call racist ideas and yet they live together. So are we going to

say that violence and violation are part of that kind of actually existing pre-nationalist

conviviality?

Pnina: Dumont’s argument, if I am remembering it correctly, was not just that there was a

contrast. Rather, because the value of equality was so dominant in the US, black people who

were not equal, visibly not equal, were therefore the subject of discrimination and violence. In

other words, it worked differently from India where there was pluralism, and that was

accepted, then the whole system worked without violence. So the violence in the US was

precisely, maybe you said this earlier in a different way Pete, because there was an

assumption of egalitarianism. And I think that where there is pluralism and inequality, that's

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not racism. That's just pluralism but with a division of labour and niches and inequality and so

on. The Ottoman empire was probably racist by today's standard because only certain people

could rule. For example, Jews could not rule. But no Jew ever thought that they could rule. It is

a good question and I am not sure how to answer it, but certainly when there is an

assumption of equality and there is inequality and it's violently upheld, then that is racism.

Pete: We're all talking about the same kind of phenomena when we're talking about

differences between groups of people which might be thought of in terms of biology, culture,

where they live, what they do, what kinds of people they are. Let’s take gender, that is another

category where there is naturalisation, categorisation, othering, extreme violence, in many

cases. We would definitely not want to include gender violence and gender discrimination as a

form of racism in some way. Similarly, if you think about class you can find all the kinds of

historical instances where working classes or lower classes and upper classes are talked

about in highly naturalising terms, and in terms of inherited difference and so forth. Do we

want to include that under racism? Well, we could do, maybe, because often race and class are

very closely related but then this not always the case. If we broaden racism to include all these

different things, in my view, then it loses its analytic coherence and utility. At some point, as

social scientists, we're going to have to say: ‘Okay, here there is a bunch of phenomenon which

seem to be somehow related to each other, what are the differences? How do we classify these

different phenomena to different kinds of analytical categories in ways that they are useful ?’

For me, racism has a particular set of characteristics and I link that to its particular history of

conquest, of European conquest.

Kit: I would say the opposite. If we think of the drive of our disciplinary process – the move to

looking at the social constitution of things, there is a thing that for the moment we are calling

racism . But, these things are all fluid. Take certain kinds of vigilantism against women who

want to marry the ‘wrong kind of person’. There is an intersection between race and gender

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here that is absolutely unavoidable. If we tighten our analytical categories too much, we miss

both the way the whole machine operates and where it's going to go. We only study where it

has been in order to understand where it's going to go next because it will go somewhere and

we need to be there first as anthropologists.

Pete: But I'm not talking about intersections. Of course race and gender intersect. But

vigilantism has been practiced against women as a category without anything to do with race.

Just because women are the subjects of vigilantism – controlling their behaviour, their

chastity, their honour and they get punished, beaten up or raped because they step over the

line – does that make them a racial category? I don’t think so.

In my view, racism always involves sexism, but sexism does not always involve racism. You

can think of scenarios where sexist violence occurs which isn’t racialized. But it’s extremely

hard to think of scenarios where racialized violence occurs that isn’t sexualized or sexist at

the same time.

John: I want to respond to the question about the state and living together. One

understanding of the traditional state is that they didn't care what language you spoke or who

you married, as long as you paid taxes. This meant that people could coexist. The modern

state, in contrast cares about all of that. Arguably, and to get back to Foucault, we see racial

thinking at the level of the state with biopolitics and the concept of population, with certain

kinds of medical surveillance and intervention. While that's not necessarily predicated on an

idea of racism, I'm increasingly swayed by Pete's saying that maybe racism is modern but I

think racial thinking is very pre-modern.

Penny Harvey (Manchester): I think you're doing quite well at trying to keep the two sides

apart. Now I'm going to try collapsing them. I was quite taken by Pete's arguments that

violence is necessary but insufficient, that racism exists by virtue of the promise of equality

and the whole relationship between conviviality and violence.

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My first question was to Kit. You had that great point that human beings have to protect

themselves from empathy because they are basically predatory creatures. Isn’t your focus on

the relationship between empathy and predation basically the same argument as Pete’s – just

that yours is at the human scale and Pete’s at the historical?

But, Pete, you end up with the problem that you then have colonial slavery is racist and

classical slavery isn’t. This requires a kind of break that's quite hard to defend.

Finally, I wanted to ask Pnina and John to also think about pre-modern racism. I kept thinking

of the sixteenth century images of when Spaniards first arrived in South America and they

have this fantastic description of the pre-modern races. The images were really amazing

because they showed white figures, but they were distorted: people who walked backwards,

people who had only one humongous foot, people who had eyes in the middle of their chest. It

seems that in those early images there was a kind of fear, but there was also an incredible

sense of curiosity. It would be worth thinking about that.

Pete: There is a vast debate about whether classical slavery was racist or not which I'm not

going to rehearse here. I don't think that’s particularly hard to defend because I think there is

enough evidence that it wasn't the same as Transatlantic modern slavery or even the kind of

Medieval Arab slavery which is often part of the history of racialisation. I think there is

enough evidence about classical slavery to show that it was qualitatively different from either

North African Arab slavery or much more so Transatlantic modern slavery.

Kit: People used to discuss that a lot in the late 50s and 60s in terms of being able to

understand the inherited condition of being descended from slaves and what slavery meant.

And it was in many cases obviously not opposed to intimacy because where did all those

mixed race children come from? And if you read slaves’ accounts and histories, you see that

people were living in the same households and that sometimes people owned their cousins or

their children. So we can't say that there was absolutely nothing that was hospitable or

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convivial in the system as it existed historically, but it was clearly established by a kind of

violent supremacism. Anything that allows one human being to own the body of another and

makes that other person classified as some kind of possession or animal is violent. There is

just no other word for that.

Racism exists in a condition of supremacy and entitlement over the lives of others and the

bodily persons of others. In the United States, the promise of equality was encoded in the

constitution, but it was not intended to include people of African descent or Native Americans.

Equality was among white people. It was not meant to include those others. Racism was made

visible in certain ways by the struggle for equality. But it was always there. I'm saying pick

this as a model, look at this as a machine. The beauty of the United States as a crucible for this

particular discussion is that it's got every single element of endemic racism and racial

supremacism, with each operating in its own way but with all still functioning as an ensemble

and you pick it apart and then you can begin to see how it works on every part of the

population and then see how it also works elsewhere.

Pnina: I'll say something very short about monstrosities. The explorers' vision of various

monstrosities that they encountered is quite different from a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ where

we feel threatened by some other. And that has to do with racisim. But seeing strange beings

as you go on your travels have nothing to do with the kind of racism that we are talking about.

John: Penny, you underscore the point that I'm trying to make. Yes, racial thinking is far

broader than just fear and it involves curiosity and intrigue and fascination.

Dick Werbner (Manchester): The point that Pete is compelling us to think about is: can you

clap with one hand alone? If you focus on only one part of a phenomenon, you'll get it out of

perspective. How do we go about analysing something which has so many connections to

something else? Well, I accept that this is a very powerful argument and I wish I could be

convinced. The difficulty that I have with it is that there comes a point when you have to say

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what really takes priority, what is at the heart of the matter. Unfortunately the more I listen to

Pete, the more I became convinced that he really agrees with the other side: that the heart of

the matter really has to do with something which emerged in colonialism

Nayanika Mukherjee (Durham): I wanted to ask a question to all the panelists about the idea

of the non-human human as foundational to racism. It’s been touched upon briefly. My bigger

question is how do we avoid diluting the violence of racism by trying to understand structural

inequalities which lead to racism. I am reflecting on some of the discussions about whiteness

that have emerged after Brexit or after Trump where whiteness has become a way of

whitewashing issues about racism.

John: When I started engaging in race scholarship the question was entirely focused on de-

humanisation and rendering other humans not-human. But looking at the history of race, raza

in particular, that this idea is articulated by aristocrats through their hunting dogs and their

horses by seeing forms of equivalence between themselves and these non-humans: they are

valourous in the hunt and so we are valorous too. This was part of making a series of claims

for a genealogy of power and, I think, very importantly, that’s racial thinking. It does not

involve de-humanisation, rather saying we are the same as these non-humans.

Kit: If we are talking about liberal democracy and the emergence of egalitarianism, what we

see historically and certainly in Anglophone countries is precisely the idea emerging from the

Medieval period in which aristocrats were regarded as a race apart. The transformation is

from a race of aristocrats to an aristocratic race. If you look historically at the expansion of the

franchise in Britain, for example, you’ll see that one of the things they did in order to study

how it would work was to go to Canada and South Africa and places where white people who

had not been allowed to vote in Britain were allowed to brand themselves as self-governing

republics, and on that basis came back with the reassurance that an aristocratic race was

capable of self-governance. There literally is a line that you can trace around this shift from

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aristocracy as bound in biology rather than in pedigree and genealogy. In some ways there’s a

possibility for a way out through that same door that we came in by, but I don’t know.

John: Just a quick note, in the colonial US whiteness was restricted to property owners. White

as a category gets formulated after Bacon’s rebellion when they’re going to shift from

indentured servitude more towards slavery.

Pnina: I’m just going to say something about this relationship between structural exclusion

and violent enactments of racist sentiment. I think it does vary from country to country. When

I first used to attend conferences in Europe, most Europeans would not want to use the word

racism for structural exclusion. Racism was associated with the Holocaust, with all kinds of

theories of race which were much more violent and much more scary and historically potent,

than something like discriminating against some kinds of people in jobs. I have seen

Europeans actively object to the use of the word racism for things that, in Britain and America,

are acceptable to name as racism. I am wondering if the use of the word racism is much more

common in Europe than it used to be or whether it is still linked to neo-Nazi movements.

Christian [last name not given] (Manchester Metropolitan University): my question would be

to John in the first instance, but I would be very keen to also hear the opinion of other panel

members. I was intrigued by your point about racism being at the heart of care practices. I

would like to ask if you talk about care as primarily a reproductive/racial practice as in good

breeding, or do you think about care as a boundary process of forming communities and

kinship, or do you think about care in a kind of bio-political sense which could be elaborated

through the work of Michel Foucault as. I was just wondering if you could specify your ideas a

bit and maybe what others think about care and racism and that kind of connection.

John: I mostly worked through the bio-political sense of care, but the more time that I spend

on it I get closer towards that second and first definitions that you articulated. Obviously,

they’re so fundamental to constituting community, they are the basis of establishing belonging

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and the principle about it is what distinguishes us as a species. It really becomes prior to so

much that follows from it.

Ed [last name not given]: I don’t have an affiliation to a university. I’m just here for the open

day and for this debate today. Kit spoke about racism as a conscious or semi-conscious choice

that people make in thinking or behaving racially – whether that’s a group of vigilantes or the

lone psychic violator who is acting in a racist way or the agent or cog inside the machinery of

structural oppression. I think this is interesting when you pose it, in particular, alongside the

topic of Dylann Roof, and how digital media is this new and widely adopted form of material

culture where you have large twitter forums producing polarizing race relation through these

really raced accounts. My question is can you then consider, based on this information,

weaponised algorithms or artificial intelligence to be considered violent or violatory at their

heart, when A) they’re not human, and B) they’re not making a conscious or semi-conscious

decision to act violently, or are violatory or racist in themselves because the same parameters

of morality don’t extend to them? Seeing as how big data is really affecting our lives and some

people would say reducing the level of autonomy and experience, and how at some point in

the future, artificial intelligence and robots maybe are races in themselves that

anthropologists study, can AI be racist?

Kit: Technically speaking there are two elements. One is that artificial intelligence and these

robots are entities that are created by human beings to amplify their intentions for whatever

reason. It’s a bit like a machine gun, it just shoots faster but it doesn’t necessarily change the

agency behind it, which is that of human beings. Now, the other part of it is, of course, that

these robots and these entities have also been programmed to learn and to modify their

behaviour on the basis of how we respond. So indeed we become the environment to which

they increasingly adapt and one of my concerns is that we are held in a state of constancy. We

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get more and more of the same kind of thing and less and less of the things that actually

combine conviviality, with the possibility of choosing to be outside your own prejudices.

Pete: I think this is a very interesting question because it also gets to the idea of agency.

Where is the agency in these things? They’ve been designed by humans and they’re designed

to have a certain level of agency themselves. There isn’t a clear distinction between human

and non-human agency here. I’m quite keen on the idea of the unforeseen consequences

because part of the way that structural racism operates is by creating environments in which

people behave in certain ways. They’re not necessarily thinking of excluding someone else, or

being violent or racist, they’re just living their lives. Yet the collective effects of their actions in

the longer term can be to exclude certain categories of people. That’s the same kind of

mechanism as the AI or the algorithm that is created in a certain way and then let out into the

world to run and has racist effects, even if it wasn’t actually designed in that way to start with.

Ruth Sullivan (University of Manchester): My question actually follows quite nicely on that

one and I was just wondering if violence and violation is at the heart of racism now, do you

think that given the changing structures of the social world, it remained that way and if not it

will be harder to identify and confront.

Pete: Well, I do not think that it is at the heart so I can’t respond.

Kit: I think that it will always be there. I think that we will always be able to recognize it

because the people who are on the business end of it will be telling us about it and they will be

making a case and we’ll need to be attentive. I think it’s important that when people are

speaking grandly and in a promising way about the future we have to consider going back to

the idea of liberal democracies as an unending project. Liberal democracies rely on consensus

and voluntarism for many things, and that is exactly where people are challenged if they wish

to restrict or exclude or confine other people. A kind of cheerful pessimism is really helpful:

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it’s always going to be there but can we manage to make it something that we disapprove of

broadly?

John: Yes, similarly, I think racial thinking will continue to be creative and elaborated and we

have to find the kind of stance that Kit is talking about. Racial thinking won’t always be clear

through violence.

Ximena Altamirano (Manchester): Pete, you raised the issue of Latin America where it’s a

multicultural environment where people are proud of the heritage but with Kit raising the

difference between colour and race. I was wondering if inequalities in Latin America would be

better classified as colourism instead of racism and if that would explain the lack of blatant

violence or violation.

Pete: I don’t think for a second that there isn’t blatant and rampant racial violence in Latin

America. It coexists with conviviality, that’s the point. But you just have look at the police

harassment of black people in Brazil, racist violence in Guatemala, in Bolivia etc. or against

indigenous people in Brazil. And it’s not better there than it is anywhere else in terms of

violence. So, I do think that the word racism is appropriate for the Latin American context.

You could qualify it as colourism, people have tried to interpret it in that way – that racism

operates by gradations of colour. The skin tone, the actual colour of your skin, has been shown

to make a significant difference to your life chances. Rather than whether you are black or

white, how black or how brown are you statistically links up to education and all kinds of

other things. This is the case in the States as well.

Guilherme Fians (Manchester): I was thinking about bureaucratic forms here in the UK.

There’s always a question about ethnic background and one of the boxes we can tick is White

British, and when they establish this category of White British they are linking nationality and

ethnicity, or race. And relatedly, when we are thinking about discrimination against refugees

here in the UK for example, usually people have in mind this idea that these people don’t

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belong to this place. So would you say that racism and discrimination in general are

necessarily related to geographical origins?

John: I’m thinking of the category of Caucasian and this theory about whiteness, that

Blumenbach articulated in the late 1700s. By the late 1800s with ethno-nationalism in

Europe, the 26 or so races of Europe had very easily ratified around what were emerging as

national boundaries and nobody wanted to talk about Caucasians or whiteness any more.

That idea was gone and it was replaced by Teutonic, Saxon, Mediterranean, Nordic and so on.

There are some very strong arguments that World War One and World War Two were ethnic

wars basically, where this visceral sense of hatred involved racial components. It’s bizarre

that now we’re back to talking about whiteness again. So, yes, it scales very easily through a

pre-national and then a national version and then post-national, perhaps.

Pnina: I think that in Britain the census, for example, that asks an ethnic question and now a

religious question is a progressive project to discover if there is discrimination amongst some

groups rather than others. It’s not intended to be racialised. It’s intended to be linked to

policies. In places like France they’ve never had a census which has an ethnic question and

therefore they don't know what’s going on in terms of structural racism. I think that one has

to accept the fact that the British actually, more than the Americans even, have had a very

progressive race relations policy in relation to finding out where discrimination lies.

Soumhya: it sounds like you are saying that progressive racialization is not racism.

Pnina: Yes. It is not at all.

Kit: If you look historically there has been a proliferation of categories from no categories at

all. I was working on a paper about this issue in Britain in the 90s. Before the census of 1991,

they did not ask about race or ethnicity. The place of origin – where one was born – was used

as a proxy for race/ethnicity. In the census of 1991, when they asked about race, they

discovered that many of the people that they had been counting as Indians because they were

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born in India, were actually white; similarly many of the people that were counted as South

African. These were people who were coming back to Britain with the end of colonialism.

Douglas Holmes (Binghamton, SUNY): I am interested in the status of the poor white or

what’s called in the US ‘white trash’. I spent most of my adult life living in Euston, Texas and

would say that the most despised group by everyone by far are poor whites and much of the

contempt and anger towards Bill Clinton was about that: his whiteness was causing an almost

racial fury, so I just want to see what you have to say about white trash.

John: I have a lot to say and I wrote a book about it. Yes, I agree and to call it racism exactly

shows how complicated and difficult this concept is. Yes it’s visceral. Yes, it’s absolutely a very

intense kind of othering and my hesitancy around invoking atavism to talk about racism is

exactly because poor whites are consistently seen as atavistic, in some primal prior state of

humanity, and it’s very much about the incapacity to distinguish them from poor Blacks. In the

South for instance, they share a way of speaking and food and activities that are not

discernible by a clear colour line. That was surely the problem when those poor whites moved

North to Detroit.

Pnina: In the most recent UK census, which hasn’t yet been officially published, it’s been

shown that white boys who get school meals are well behind everybody else in reading. In

other words, there is this category in Britain as well that is of deprived white kids and they

are certainly a problem. What this census shows is that this is not entirely about race in a

simple way; it is also about class if nothing else.

Kit: This is such a good category to bring up because, when I’m thinking about the psychic

violation of racism, what it does is create a category of person. When you think

conspiratorially in the States, if you have the capacity to speak in terms of economic things or

to establish shared interests across racial lines you’re far more likely to be done away with,

than if you speak within competing groups for entitlements because that works politically

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very effectively. That’s one of the things that’s a concern about artificial intelligence, when

people within those communities actually do reach out or go online or try to find out more

information, they begin thinking of themselves as a class for itself as well as in itself. What

they find is stuff that reinforces the isolation rather than things that actually show that there’s

a sort of shared suffering, a shared kind of economic deprivation that could be overcome. I

always think that it’s crucial to include, as you were saying Pnina, poor white people. Thinking

about the comparatively privileged positions of having a very heavily articulated egalitarian

movement that is focused around visible blackness, the category of the poor white is

unmarked and it’s taken for granted. It needs to be included not only because excluding it

causes resentment, but also because it’s unjust to exclude their suffering. It should be and also

and not either/or.

John: In the US, there’s a difference in life expectancy between Whites and Blacks of about five

years. Life expectancy overall is improving pretty consistently, but you still see that racial

difference. Over the last decade, the only group that now is seeing a declining life expectancy

is whites without a college education. This makes it very difficult to talk about racism in this

very straight forward way as we have been doing in terms of life expectancy when you see a

group that is counter to the overall increase: African Americans is increasing, for Latinos is as

well, for this group of whites is actually decreasing.

Douglas Holmes: The size of the group is also something that we don’t take seriously. It is

probably the poorest segment of the poor population in the US.

Kit: And they are also the people whom you racialize in social welfare discussions A) they

might join in, B) they’re also hidden because they’re also recipients and they do need support

and it’s made that vulnerability a source of shame, instead of being a source of national shame

and it becomes personal shame.

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Chima Anyadike-Danes (University of California, Irvine): I was thinking particularly about

the way in which Pete has talked about Latin America and the conviviality around

enracement. Obviously you’re talking about a linguistic cultural scale as opposed to a national

scale. I’m wondering if, in the context of the US, talking about a national scale in terms of race

obscures as much as it reveals because of the various regionalised histories of colonialism. To

talk about the binary white/black on the West coast doesn’t make very much sense, it doesn’t

make sense for Hawaii, and the various ways in which these histories of colonialism were

effectuated by the Russians, the Spanish etc. So I wonder if that culture of conviviality

argument might be useful for thinking about, for example, the Spanish colonisation of what

became the west in the US and thinking through racism in that context?

Pete: I don’t study the USA, but yes, of course, the black/white binary which has been so

powerful in the imagination of race in the States, and in the analysis of race in the States by

social science, finds it pretty hard to get to grips with the presence of Latinos and the growing

presence of Asians. So, yes, there’s been an increased awareness among social scientists in the

US that the black/white binary isn’t working anymore and there’s a whole examination of

what they call the “browning” of the USA, and an emphasis on multi-racialism and the kind of

hidden histories of race mixture in the US that have been submerged under the black/white

binary etc. I don’t think we need to think about the relation of conviviality and violence only in

specific regional situations. My argument was broader: that whenever you see violence you

also always have to think about the possibility of conviviality or what violence is constructed

against. I like Dick Werbner’s idea of the one hand clapping. Whether one wants to think

about Latinos and Asians as somehow encapsulating a particular form of racial conviviality,

I’m not so sure, because then you can say well they’re also the subjects of violence, so my idea

is that the relation between violence and non-violence is pervasive. You find it in any situation

not only in some particular regional conjunctures.

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Kit: I think there’s also a kind of conviviality within racism because there’s social solidarity in

a social context that is created. Unless we take seriously our simplicity as human beings, we

take comfort in all kinds of proximities that might not be available to us otherwise, we’re not

thinking with kindness about the undoing of this hostile attitude. We have to look at what it

also provides for people and take other human beings seriously. We can’t just be reductive

because people have ideas that are repugnant to us, we have to look at what the role of those

ideas perform in their lives.

Pnina: I have to say that I think entirely differently from Pete, because I think that racism is

performative. It makes a statement. It’s symbolic and an attempt to hit at and break

conviviality. Conviviality may be there, but the racists want to stop it. They do that by

violence, which leads to counter violence which leads to revenge and so on… The polarization

that’s created through racism is anti-convivial. If I look at places like Israel and the way Arabs

are treated, certainly there’s a movement to defend human rights and citizens’ rights, but the

aim of the racists is to break through that conviviality, to stop it. So, I think we can’t

underestimate the force of the performative violence. To me, that’s a very important aspect of

the violence – it creates a cycle of revenge, and by the end of it people who were friends are

killing each other.

SUMMING UP

Pnina

Unlike ‘race’, racism is performative and exemplary. The violence at the heart of racism is

an extreme act of symbolic communication which generates a transformation in human

relationships. The moral philosopher Emmanuel Levinas contrasts violence with

altruism, which be defines as the human recognition of personal responsibility to

another in his or her difference. Unlike altruism, violence, he argues, denies otherness

its legitimate right to exist and to be different (Levinas 1987). Hence, I want to put to

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you, there is a critical difference between processes of objectification and reification -

between 'ethnicity' as a shifting, situational politics of identity or collective representation,

and racism or xenophobia - ethnic absolutism – which is an essentialising politics of

violation and absolute negation.

By combining the two dualisms suggested by Zygmunt Bauman and Michel Wievroka into a

single theoretical framework, we can arrive at the multiple types of violent strategies

deployed by racist and xenophobic movements and structures. In this model, the logic of

racism is triadic: first, of self-purification through physical expulsion/elimination; secondly, of

subordination through physical exploitation of labour; and thirdly, of assimilation through

cultural destruction. These strategies are intended to control or banish forever the fantasised

demons that threaten in this dystopic vision to destroy the social order.

The three folk devils I have depicted may be contextualized within the three logics of racism

outlined here. In the case of the mugger, the insurrectionist slave, the hidden fear is of

unemployment and destitution - the loss of jobs and home and all that this would imply. The

slave need not be expelled but he must be subordinated.

In the case of the witch, that is, Jews and other economically successful middlemen minority

groups (Bonacich 1973), often highly assimilated, cultured, and wealthy, the fear is of trust

and order breaking down inexplicably, with all social relations becoming uncertain and

threatening. The witch must be expelled or destroyed.

Finally, if all racist imaginaries construct moral allegories of fear, violence and evil, it is

currently the figure of the Muslim terrorist, the religious fanatic - fantasised as the violent and

intolerant jihadist fundamentalist – who feeds a special, perhaps historically unique, racist

imaginary. To interpret the significance of Islamophobia as a form of differentialist racism, I

have suggested that we draw on psychoanalytic theory and, more directly, on the work of

Frantz Fanon in particular (1965) who recognised that the coloniser and the colonized cannot

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escape each other - their internalised subjectivities mirror each other’s hates and fears so that

the colonised assumes the image of radical difference imposed upon him or her by the

coloniser, and comes to be deracinated, marked by self-hatred for his/her own culture and

people, while in the face of popular insurrection the coloniser is filled with the bestiality and

violence he attributes to the colonised. The ‘third’ space that is thus created through this

encounter between colonised and coloniser is a pathological space of distorted specularities

where the stress on radical difference is transmuted into a dialectical mirroring of violence,

inhumanity and self-denial.15

Such an approach illuminates why Islamophobia may be conceived of as a very postmodern

kind of fear. The insurrectionist slave is a powerful iconic embodiment of the id - of sexuality

unbound - but in the permissive society of today such an icon loses much of its terror. The

nefarious Jewish merchant, icon of suppressed greed, undermines the integrity of the ego, but

seems less threatening in a postmodern age that celebrates consumption and individual self-

gratification, thus necessarily less obsessed than previous generations with the fear of hidden

forces of disorder, desire and greed. By contrast, the Muslim fanatic mirrors European society

by evoking the spectre of a past puritanical Christianity, a moral crusade, European sectarian

wars, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the attack on the permissive society. Undoubtedly such a

figure must be contained, subordinated or assimilated but cannot be allowed to remain within

the society.

So, to repeat my argument: racist folk devils are no mere illusions and fantasies. For those

who imagine them, they represent deep-seated, atavistic, real fear, displaced onto strangers

and what strangers come to represent symbolically. Racism, the racist imagination, is

fundamentally violent and violating and it generates violence as a performative act.

15 Wieviorka (1995, p. 23) lucidly sums up a related theory: ‘Racism, particularly in the psychoanalytic perspective, comes to be seen as the incapacity of some people to manage difference, but also with the incapacity to cope with resemblance with the Other, the foreigner and, also, women.’

50

Kit

It’s great to be able to follow such a firm assertion of our position, which I think is quite

correct and I think we’ve come back again and again to the role that violent differentiation

plays in social life even though it is socially constructed and there’s a kind of an ontological

projection that justifies it.

I know that the habit is to reassert the position in the conclusion, but, I want to move in a

forward looking way rather than feeling hopelessly enmired in the totemic apparatus itself.

Let’s look at the transformations and see what happens. First of all, everyone talks about how

love trumps hate, but actually empathy is a lot harder than hatred is. Hatred is simpler, is

easier, it makes things clear, it means you do not waste your emotional energy on a whole

bunch of people that you don’t even know, and that makes your emotional economy so much

simpler. I think that what we have to do, as anthropologists, is to take that seriously. It’s

difficult for us because our disciplinary practice has to do with methodological empathy.

Think about colleagues who are difficult, who are the most impossible people on the planet,

and still, people talk to them. Somebody will come and help them and explain things to them.

There’s clearly something in the method that taps into a sort of humanity that we all share. So,

I’ve been thinking about how we evolve our social thinking away from a tendency towards

fundamentalisms, of which racial fundamentalism is one.

In liberal democracies our very idea of freedom is distorted by the shadow of slavery, because

most of our concepts of democracies have put forward an idea of individual autonomy, self-

sufficiency and personal independence that was sustained from the beginning and most often

by the subordination of other people who were not so free. So, if when we’re singing ‘Rule

Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves’, we imagine

the deck of a slave ship, the celebration of freedom is a little contradictory, especially when

you think what the 18th century was actually like for most people who were on the high seas.

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We need to be able to move away from an idea of freedom that is overly based on autonomy

and self-sufficiency and instead we think of it in terms of idioms of kinship, and the reduction

of human exceptionalism as a model. In other words, the way forward is really looking at the

devaluation of self-sufficiency and the celebration of certain kind of constraints in order to

care; things that have been feminized, for example, and not very highly valued as a

consequence.

My last little point is to say that we do see models of advanced inclusion where we find two

elements, the mind free from cares as Levi-Strauss would say about pensée sauvage, and the

least political resistance and the most financial gain. The two things I would bring to your

attention as ethnographic examples are, firstly, Rihanna’s launch of Fenty beauty, her

cosmetics line which has forty different shades of foundation going from the whitest of white

to the blackest of black skin tones. I met a friend for a coffee in Knightsbridge and there was a

line outside Harvey Nichols that went outside the door, down the street and around the

corner, of black and brown, a few white women and a few men as well. I said “what are you

waiting for?” and they said “Foundation!” And if you look online at her advertisement, it

totally shifts the spectrum of beauty away from a Europeanized white model. The other thing

is a Toyota advertisement, which targeted eight different kinds of people: Black, Latinos,

women … and shows us a kind of inclusion that’s possible when there’s the least political

resistance and the most financial gain.

Pete

I’ve been struck by how the arguments of the proposers really depend on showing how racism

involves violence. There’s no debate about that, that’s not what’s at issue here. It’s whether

violence lies at the heart of racism. My argument is that you can’t think violence without

thinking of non-violence. When Pnina says that racists performatively erase conviviality, yes

precisely, that’s what they’re erasing: conviviality. If it wasn’t there to begin with, they

52

wouldn’t be able to erase it and the meaning of their act, of erasure, of violence, takes its

meaning precisely from the existence of something called conviviality. It’s an abstract

argument, but I think it’s a powerful one.

The other thing that I want to emphasize is that the focus on violence inevitably reduces us to

a binary between the victim and the victimizer, which is a very powerful binary opposition, I

would urge you not to be drawn in by its power because it’s too simple. Now Dick [Werbner]

says that I’m on that side too, that I’m myself drawn in by the power of that binary, because I

emphasise the role of colonialism in defining a sphere of phenomena called race, racism etc.

This is true, I do emphasise colonialism as a kind of constitutive defining element in my

approach to race, but emphasizing that doesn’t mean to say that I only think about colonialism

as a violent act. You know, the de-colonial approach that’s associated with Latin American

theorists, like Walter Mignolo and Ramon Grosfoguel, is again a very attractive approach. Like

Marxism, if you put on a pair of Marxist glasses you can understand every phenomenon in the

world and talk about it in terms of class. If you put on a pair of de-colonial glasses you can

understand every phenomena in the world in terms of the colonial difference and race and so

forth. But that’s too simple. For me de-coloniality is a very simplistic way of thinking about

colonialism and post-colonialism and so-forth because it ignores exactly those processes of

conviviality which are constitutive of processes of oppression, subordination, and violation. It

ignores how conviviality interpenetrates with violence. They’re not opposed things, they

interpenetrate with each other. And it ignores the ambivalence of othering, that when you

create the other you want to exclude it, erase it, but also, as Penny [Harvey] said, know it, be

curious about it, love it, desire it and so on.

John

What I’ve tried to do today is approach the proposition by challenging how we conceptualise

racism. I’ve said it’s a belief in race first and foremost, and that has entailed disrupting some

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of the scholarly frames that you have seen mobilised today; ones that I was inculcated with

when I began my studies and what I’m trying to turn away from at this point. Sometimes I felt

very oblique to the proposition and sometimes I feel like, yes, I have something to contribute

to it. By way of closing I’ll give you two glimpses of that trajectory for me. I began my study on

poor whites in Detroit and these are ‘white trash’ or ‘hillbilly’, and if you listen to their talk

they sound completely racist, with the most kind of racial language. Yet they had biracial

families, biracial social networks and, importantly, these were whites who stayed behind

when white flight occurred and the many whites left Detroit. I was able to contextualise how

race mattered for them by looking into other class neighbourhoods: a working class areas and

a gentrified area. These whites were much more deft in not saying something racist, and far

more effective in controlling their circumstances based on their race. This led me to think

racism is poorly conceptualised here.

My current work is a study of razas de mais, races of maize in Mexico. When I began my work

in Mexico on the human genome project, I had no idea that maize could have a race and that

not only is it a racial subject, there are some 59 razas de mais in Mexico. It also depends on

whether you talk to a genetist or a botanist, some will say 62 and some will say 48. When I

began talking about it I said, ‘hey, guess what, they think there are these races of corn and

they can’t figure out how many they are so it’s got to be a social construct, you know this is

racial ideology.’ And I continued in that manner for about a year when I realised I had no

ability to actually talk about the maize and no ability to distinguish the way they do between

highland and lowland varieties. Picture 59 phenotypically very distinct ears of corn, some are

purple, some are yellow, large, tall, etc. This is racial thinking, but there’s no ostensible racism

there. They aren’t saying that this breed is a better race that than breed. The genetic

difference between any two razas de mais is larger than between us and chimpanzees. This

use of race, I thought initially, is projecting racial categories from human onto non-humans,

but what I’ve tried to convey a little bit in my responses to questions is that this is an earlier

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form of thinking about race. It was articulated and developed on non-humans. It’s not the case

that this is simply a projection of our current racial sensibilities onto this non-human maize.

So that’s my basis for arguing that racism is the belief in race and racial thinking is far broader

than just the act of violence that most stunningly brings race into view for us. We have to be

able to think through this question of ‘is it racial or not’ in a far broader frame than the focus

on violence permits.

THE VOTE

For the motion: 29

Against the motion: 27

Abstain: 4

The motion ‘Violence and Violation are at the heart of racism’ is upheld.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In 2016 when we decided that we wanted a debate on the question of racism, we were very

clear that it had to be a theoretical debate, which would allow us to think about how to

approach racism as a practice and a concept, to ask what counts as racism (for instance do

Islamaphobia or anti-Semitism counts as racism?), is there one racism or many racisms.

Following a workshop in Manchester, we ended up with ten possible motions, and selected

one in consultation with the debaters. My thanks to everyone who participated in the

workshop. My thanks also to the debaters and the audience, who turned up in numbers, some

from very far away, and made the debate lively and sharp. Nada Al-Hudaid, recorded the

proceedings and Rosa Sansone and Ahmad Moradi transcribed the recording. As ever, GDAT is

grateful to Critique of Anthropology and the department of Social Anthropology at Manchester

for their support. Soumhya Venkatesan.

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