Overview

1. The Modern Making of Race

2. Scientific Racism
3. Racialization (Du Bois & Hall)
4. Whiteness (Wekker)
5. Race and Materiality (STS) (M’Charek)
6. Race and Political Economy (Kundnani)
The Modern Making of Race
Race-making
& Christianity

• Limpieza de sangre (cleanliness/purity of blood)

• First mention in 1447 (= towards end of Reconquista)
• Technique to distinguish “old Christians” from “new
Christians” (Background: Fall of Granada, forced
conversion of hundreds of thousands of Jews
(“conversos”) & Muslims (“moriscos”)
• Distinction Christianity – Semitic religions
• Superiority of Christianity (>< Semitic & pagan
traditions)

• ~ at the cusp of the formation of modernity (Hall et

al. 1992), initial modern understanding of race
 Race-making
& Colonization

Valladolid debate (1550-1551)

= first public moral debate in Europe about
treatment of the colonized by their colonizers

Two different racial logics at work:

• Naturalism (naturally inferior): unacceptable
• Historicism (humanity in need of “civilization”):
“acceptable” racism + importance of religion

➤ question of universalism & definition of human Bartholomé de las Casas: Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda:
(and the development of modern racial thought) humanity of the natural disposition to
“Indians” slavery
Race-making
& Slavery

16th-19th century:
Transatlantic trade of enslaved people
(Portugese, English, Spanish, Dutch,
French…)

U.S.:
1619: first enslaved Africans arrived in
Virginia
1865 (1866): abolition of slavery in the U.S.
Race-making
& Genocide

Native Americans in U.S (settler colonialism)

• From 1630s onwards: massacres in different places in New
England
• 1846-1873: Native American population in “gold rush”
California decimated from 150.000 to 30.000

Jews in Europe
• From 19th century onwards: “the Jewish Question” in Europe
• Nazi-regime (1933-1945): 6.000.000 (~60% of European
Jewish population at the time)

Other dimensions of genocide: boarding schools, sterilization,

etc.
Active Genocide Alerts last year:

- Israel/Palestine (West Bank)

- Sudan
- Israel/Palestine (Gaza)
- Ethiopia (Amhara, Tigray)
- Azarbaijan (Artsakh)
Scientific Racism
Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) G. Cram, 1884, “Types of the races of man” (1994)
UNESCO
1950
The Race
Question
 Racialization

Geraldine Heng, 2018, The Invention of

Race in the European Middle Ages.
Cambridge University Press. (p. 19)
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
- Born in Massachusetts, USA
- Studied at Harvard and University of Berlin
- First African American scholar to earn a doctoral degree
at Harvard (1895)
- Doctoral Thesis: Suppression of the African Slave Trade
in the United States of America: 1638–1871
- Professor of History, Sociology, and Economics at the
University of Atlanta
- One of the founders of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1909
- Prolific writer (notably The Philadelphia Negro (1896);
The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Black Reconstruction in
America (1935))
- civil rights activist

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“The Color Line”

Frederick Douglass “The Color Line”,

North American Review (1881)

W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) The Souls of Black Folk.

“The problem of the twentieth century

is the problem of the color-line.”

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Du Bois’ elaboration of the concept of race - Stuart Hall (2017, p. 37)

- The Conservation of Races (1897): the differences (“of color, hair, and bone”) upon which
humanity was distinguished into groups sometimes “followed the natural cleavage of common
blood, descent and physical peculiarities” while at other times “swept across and ignored
these.” (Hall 2017, p. 37)

- “Races” (1911): speaking of “civilizations”, with even “the physical characteristics, excluding the
skin color… are to no small extent the direct result of the physical and social environment”, as
well as being “too indefinite and elusive to serve as a basis for any rigid classification or division
of human groups.” (Hall 2017, p. 38)

- Dusk of Dawn (1940): mark of heritage in color and hair - “these are obvious things, but of
little meaning in themselves”, what matters is “that these ancestors of mine and their other
descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long
memory”. “The real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery.” (Hall 2017, p. 38-9)
~ shared history
 Visits to Poland: 1893; 1936; 1949.

“The result of these three visits, and particularly of my view of the Warsaw ghetto, was not so much
clearer understanding of the Jewish problem in the world as it was a real and more complete
understanding of the Negro problem. In the first place, the problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste
in the United States was no longer in my mind a separate and unique thing as I had so long conceived it.
It was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly a
hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery.
It was not merely a matter of religion. I had seen religions of many kinds I had sat in the Shinto temples
of Japan, in the Baptist churches of Georgia, in the Catholic cathedral of Cologne and in Westminster
Abbey. No, the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief
and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which
reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men. So that the ghetto of Warsaw helped me to
emerge from a certain social provincialism into a broader conception of what the fight against race
segregation, religious discrimination and the oppression by wealth had to become if civilization was
going to triumph and broaden in the world.”
Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Born in Jamaica
Lived and worked in the UK from 1951
One of the founders of the New Left
Review, in 1960
One of the founding figures of British
Cultural Studies (Birmingham School of
Cultural Studies or CCCS, in 1964)
Put race on the agenda of Cultural Studies
and Sociology at large
Professor Sociology at Open University
(Milton Keynes) from 1979 onwards
President BSA 1995-97

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 Race as a Floating Signifier (1997)
(directed by Sut Jally, 1997, Media Education Foundation)

• Race works like a language

= race has a discursive structure
• Builds on linguistic theory, in particular
structuralist theory
De Saussure:
. sign = signifier (object) + signified (meaning)
. connection is arbitrary
• Race = empty sign
• Meaning-making
• Relational in character (>< essentialist)
• Socio-historical context

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“I do nevertheless want to advance the scandalous argument that, socially, historically, and politically,
race is a discourse; that it operates like a language, like a sliding signifier; that its signifiers
reference not genetically established facts but the systems of meaning that have come to be fixed in the
classifications of culture; and that those meanings have real effects not because of some truth that inheres
in their scientific classification but because of the will to power and the regime of truth that are instituted
in the shifting relations of discourse that such meanings establish with our concepts and ideas in the
signifying field.” (Hall 2017, p. 45-6)

“To put it crudely, racial discourses constitute one of the great, persistent classificatory systems of human
culture, and as such, they are also always discursive systems – systems for the representation of, and the
organization of practices around, one of the great facts about human society, namely, the fact of
difference.” (Hall 2017, p 46)

3 options (1) biological differences exist: we put them into language (language as representation)
(2) purely linguistic-textual position (only language)
(3) wide range of material differences => only get meaning within discourse

Example: M.I.A. Born free (warning: graphic/violent content)

Grounds for race-making/racialization

Religion
Biology

Culture

- Racism re-coded from biology into culture

- Classification of different cultures/civilizations
(with focus on West vs. Rest, and West vs. Islam)
- Superiority of Western civilization (cfr. Huntington 1993/1996)
- Centrality of “norms and values”
- Cultural differences are used to explain oppression & social inequality
- Culturalization of citizenship
- Crucial role of gender and sexuality!

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 Racialization

Racialized groups are

hierarchically ordered and
“social relations” and “practices”
emerge that fit the position of
the groups in the racial regime

Racial Regimes

• Not one racism, but

variations in how racial
regimes are organized
• Racial contestation (relations
of opposition, different
interests, etc.)
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva:
Racialized social systems

“societies in which economic, political, social, and

ideological levels are partially structured by the
placement of actors in racial categories or races.”
(p. 75)

• Analytic for understanding racism: uncovering

the mechanisms and practices at the social,
economic, ideological, and political levels
responsible for the reproduction of racial
domination

• This is a materialist approach / Ideology is

important for the maintenance of racial order
but cannot by itself guarantee racial
domination
Philomena Essed:
Everyday Racism

• systematic, recurrent,
familiar practices (p. 177)
• socialized attitudes
and behaviour (p. 178)
• cumulative
instantiation (p. 178)

(1) notion of racism (ideology/structures/process)

(2) notion of everyday (interactional perspectives,
scripts)
(3) notion of everyday racism
(4) idea of experience (cf. DuBois ‘double-
consciousness’)
(5) notion of accounts of racism (specific rules of
interpretation and evaluation)
Whiteness
▸ Notion of “cultural archive” (E. Said)

▸Exploring and mapping out racism and colonialism

in the Dutch cultural archive (“ethnography of
dominant white Dutch self-representation”)

▸point of departure: implausible that 400 years of

colonialism did not leave any traces

▸“zwarte piet” /Black Pete

▸gendered/sexualized

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Cultural archive
- foregrounds the centrality of imperialism to Western culture (in historical cultural
configurations and current self-representations)
- Edward Said: the cultural archive as a storehouse of “a particular knowledge
and structures of attitude and reference . . . [and,] in Raymond Williams’ seminal phrase, ‘structures of
feeling.’ . . . There was virtual unanimity that subject races should be ruled, that there are subject races,
that one race deserves and has consistently earned the right to be considered the race whose main
mission is to expand beyond its own domain” (1993, 52, 53).
- racial grammar of 19th century European imperialism – grounds of sense of self
- Bourdieu’s notion of habitus

Innocence
- not knowing/not wanting to know (Charles Mills “epistemology of white ignorance”)
- denial / disavowal / entitlement / …

White Dutch self-representation

- absence of race (“race has been sorely missing from dominant accounts of the Netherlands”, p. 21)
- white/European/Christian/…
 Race and Materiality (STS)

• What to do with the materiality of race?

• “So, how can I simply answer the question
that biological race does not exist, when it is
constantly produced?” (p. 2)
• Case-study: femicide (Marianne Vaatstraa,
1999) that evoked racist violence against
asylum seekers
• Staying with the trouble… (Haraway)
 Race and Political Economy

Neoliberalism constitutes its own structures of racism

Neoliberalism and race:
(1) Mask of racelessness…
(2) Neoliberalism’s privatising of public life has racially
disparate consequences
Arun Kundnani
(3) This privatisation makes it harder to remedy the
legacies of racial inequality Born in London
Based in New York since 2010
Racial capitalism Former Editor journal Race & Class
2007 The End of Tolerance
2014 The Muslims are Coming!
2023 What is Antiracism? And
why it means anticapitalism
 The term “racial capitalism” emerged in the mid-1970s

• South Africa: movement against apartheid (does post-

apartheid demand the dismantlement of capitalism?)
• Cedric Robinson – Black Marxism (1983) (racism part
of European feudalism, gets reproduced in capitalism
through relations of production)
• Journal Race & Class

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Two different understandings of racialization:

(1) Racialization in biopolitical approach

(2)Racialization approached as de-humanization (cfr. Fanon’s zone of non-being)

Following up (electives 3rd year bachelor):

Studies in Black Visual Culture, Postcolonial and Decolonial

Media, and Black Feminist Theory Perspectives in Sociology and Beyond
Dr. Jan Mendes Dr. Ladan Rahbari