RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Ask the Experts

The Irish-English conflict comes near to being racial because the British were beginning to believe that the Irish were inherently incapable of being civilized. That is a fundamentally extreme sense of ethnocentrism, just as the Hutu Tutsi example is. The latter was turned into a racial conflict by European colonists who interpreted this conflict as racial when it wasn't at all. We have to make a distinction between extreme ethnocentrism and racism. Racism involves a sense of biological differences that cannot be transcended.

I would say there's a fine line between ethnocentrism of an extreme form and racism, because at a certain point, culture is assumed to be unchangeable. In other words, these people have a particular culture; they're not going to change it. There's no possibility they will change it, therefore they're inherently other. In other words, they're different.

Sometimes it's very hard to draw the line. For example, in studying German anti-Semitism, you see a movement from a very strong cultural nationalism to one that becomes biologized, but still has a sort of more mystical cultural aura to it. It's less of an emphasis on physical characteristics, although they do try to bring that in as much as they can, so it becomes a way in which extreme ethnocentrism meets racism at a certain point and it's very hard to tell the difference.

I agree with that. At some point extreme ethnocentrism that is not countered by something else can become racism.

Yes. The British scholar Paul Gilroy said that culture can do the work of race. He sees now, in other words, the equivalent of biology because of its determinative characteristics. It's turning culture into a kind of essence that creates something very close to racism, if not racism itself.

There's an analogy here - I mean, we haven't talked a lot about Native Americans or Indians and how they've been treated, but there is an analogy with the dominant attitude toward American Indians in the late 19th century. Essentially that it's their culture that matters; biologically they're not necessarily inferior, probably not. But we have to assimilate the Indians by force if necessarily: take the Indian children and put them in boarding schools, and so forth. However, eventually the point is reached where people say, "Well, this isn't working. And why isn't it working?"

Well, it's because the Indians have refused to assimilate, and therefore there's only so much we can do for them. It's their culture holding them back so they cannot be assimilated, they cannot be educated, they cannot be given equal opportunity. The cultural aspect played itself out in the attitude towards Indians at a time when blacks were not seen as even possibly civilizable through education. But you know, the attitude toward blacks today somewhat resembles the attitude towards Indians in the late 19th century. People argue that blacks have decided not to do what maybe they could do if they wanted to. So it's their disposition, their will that's defective, not necessarily their biology, but that has the same kinds of consequences. You're classifying people, attributing certain characteristics to them, and then believing they can't be changed or certainly not giving it much chance to be changed.