'Racism without races' - Thought Leader

In the late eighties French thinker Etienne Balibar wrote an essay in which he considered the question of “neo-racism”, that is, a form of racism that is distinct from earlier models.

Balibar’s point of departure is a description of racism as inscribing itself in “practices (forms of violence, contempt, intolerance, humiliation and exploitation), in discourses and representations which are so many intellectual elaborations of the phantasm of prophylaxis or segregation (the need to purify the social body, to preserve ‘one’s own'” or ‘our’ identity from all forms of mixing, interbreeding or invasion) and which are articulated around stigmata of otherness (name, skin colour, religious practices).”

Essentially, Balibar is interested in how new categories (for instance, immigration) are used as substitutes for the notion of race, thereby creating a neo-racism which fit into a “framework of ‘racism without races'”.

Balibar describes this racism as having as its dominant theme not biological heredity “but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of lifestyles and traditions”.

The argument of neo-racism grants from the outset that races are not isolable biological units and that there are in reality no human races. Balibar writes that neo-racists might even admit that the behaviour of individuals cannot be explained with reference to their blood or genes but are the result of cultural belonging. He continues that for anti-racism, this shift of the racist argument from nature to culture, presents a particular challenge — the old arguments which countered the reliance on biological factors in racist arguments no longer apply.

In neo-racism, “culture functions as a nature” and “as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable”. Neo-racism (what Balibar also calls differential racism) “presents itself as having drawn the lessons from the conflict between racism and anti-racism” and argues that if you want to avoid racism, you must maintain cultural differences and, “in accordance with the postulate that individuals are the exclusive heirs and bearers of a single culture”, separate collectivities.

Neo-racists argue that it was the anti-racists who created racism by provoking mass sentiments. Accordingly, neo-racism presents itself as “the true anti-racism”.

Balibar goes on to make the point that in neo-racism the theme of the supposed suppression of racial hierarchy “is more apparent than real”. Particularly, argues Balibar, neo-racism is a product of the celebration of individualistic culture: “the cultures supposed implicitly superior are those which appreciate and promote ‘individual’ enterprise, social and political individualism, as against those which inhibit these things”.

In short, neo-racism pretends to argue that skin colour doesn’t matter, as long as one is prepared to abandon one’s primitive culture in favour of the assimilation of the superior culture of individualism.

A report on the ‘colour-blindness’ of white educators in America explains succinctly why this new approach is racist: “The core of ‘I don’t see colour,’ is ‘I don’t see my own colour, I don’t see difference because my race and culture is the centre of the universe.'” In the same article, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, sociology professor at Duke University, is interviewed on his book White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era.

Bonilla-Silva regards ‘colour-blindness’ as the most common manifestation of neo-racism. According to Bonilla-Silva the civil rights struggles of the Sixties and Seventies produced an alteration which upended the rhetoric of the civil rights struggle itself, so that “historically oppressed groups would seem to be the perpetrators of discrimination, not its victims”.

To me the crux of neo-racism is summarised in the following quote by Kwame Turé (Stokely Carmichael) from 1987:

“Where the old racism was overt, frankly announcing its hatred and opposition to peoples of colour, the new racism smiles and insists it is our friend. Where the old racism ruled through physical violence, racism in its new form asserts its dominance through sheer mendacity. Racism has become covert in its expression, hiding behind a mask of calm and reason. The key to understanding racism today is that it inevitably parades itself about, cloaked in the garb of anti-racism. It is therefore far more dangerous, powerful and difficult to combat than before.”

There are many South Africans who argue, in different contexts, for colour-blindness, yet insist on the protection and promotion of their culture; (unconsciously perhaps) believing in the superiority of their culture.

In my own current context colleagues continue to debate UCT’s admissions policy that requires prospective students self-identify their race on application forms. It is time to seriously consider the simultaneous insistence on colour-blindness and the protection of one’s culture, belief and opinion which currently permeates this debate) in the context of Balibar’s writing on neo-racism.