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White Man’s Burden
White Southern Strategy
Whiteness
Whites
Willing Suspension of Disbelief
World Bank
World Trade Organization
WTO
Definitions
9/11: The shorthand name given to a terrorist event in United States that took place on September 11, 2001.1
Accumulation: The limitless acquisition of wealth (made possible by the invention of money) on the basis of expanded reproduction of capi-
tal through the mechanism of surplus appropriation within the sphere of production in capitalist societies. (See also capitalism)
African Americans: See U.S. African Americans.
Agency: A concept that denotes volition (as in “self-determination”), that is, the ability to shape one’s destiny—but of course within limits im-
posed by history and circumstance—as a constitutive characteristic of a thinking being. Agency may operate at a group level as well (as in the
idea of social agency or historical agency.) Note that social change, from the perspective of this course, should be considered as an outcome of a dia-
lectic in the agency/structure binary.2 The dialectic between the agency/structure binary is one of the fundamental divides in the ideological
thinking of the left and the right where both the left and the right fail to recognize this binary and instead overemphasize the one (structure, in
the case of the left) in opposition to the other (agency, in the case of the right). To explain further: in this course our discussion of such social
structural factors as class, race, ethnicity, gender, etc. have emphasized society-level, that is institutional, structures that create impediments for
people who are marginalized in accessing opportunities (that would fulfill the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) in a
capitalist democracy, such as the United States. The reason for this approach is that the ideology of meritocracy that the bourgeoisie so reli-
giously espouse, perfidiously neglects to consider structural impediments given their exclusive emphasis on factors of personal agency as the
determinant of marginality. In their view, institutional impediments that are driven by such social structural factors as race, class, gender, disabil-
ity, and the like, are a thing of the past. So, for example, if people are poor and homeless, it is because they have chosen to be so by their per-
sonal actions. Such views may appear bizarre, but not so, for example, to at least one U.S. president, Ronald Reagan—an arch conservative
whose deleterious socio-economic policies and programs, undergirded by the anti-working class ideology of neoliberalism, in the areas of em-
ployment, taxation, the social safety net, etc. helped to deepen socio-economic inequality to unprecedented levels in United States and else-
where (and the legacy of which continues to negatively affect the lives of the working classes in general and the marginalized in particular to
the present day, not just in United States but across the world). This once B-grade film actor and two-term president would repeat to David
Brinkley of ABC News, in a farewell interview, his firm belief that for many, homelessness was a matter of choice: “There are shelters in virtu-
ally every city, and shelters here, and those people still prefer out there on the grates or the lawn to going into one of those shelters.” Similarly,
he suggested that unemployment too was a matter of choice because there were hundreds of want ads in newspapers every week and they go
unanswered. (See news report on the interview in the New York Times, dated December 23, 1988.)
Yet, I want to suggest to you that, in one sense, conservatives are not entirely wrong in their view that the poor and the marginalized are
to blame for their predicament, especially in capitalist democracies like the United States. Leaving aside the fact that they do not often partici-
pate in avenues of procedural democracy at all levels—local, state, and national—thereby taking themselves out of the decision-making pro-
cesses (because when you don’t vote, for example, you are not represented), they also engage in a variety of negative behaviors that are not
necessarily driven by ignorance (perhaps a forgivable trait) but by choice. Consider for example, the findings of that well-known self-help guru,
Tom Corley. He claims that he spent five years studying the daily habits of 233 self-made millionaires and 128 poor people in United States
and as a result he came up with 300 habits that “separate the rich from the poor.” He concludes: “The fact is, the poor are poor because they
have too many Poor Habits and too few Rich Habits. Poor parents teach their children the Poor Habits and wealthy parents teach their chil-
dren the Rich Habits. We don’t have a wealth gap in this country we have a parent gap. We don’t have income inequality, we have parent ine-
quality.”3 So, what are some of these habits he is talking about? Here is a selection from his website (which you will notice are worth pursuing
even if you don’t stand a chance of becoming a member of the bourgeoisie):
1. There now exists thousands of books on this event which involved the hijacking of four planes by suicide bombers, who claimed to profess Islam, and their
use as missiles (two in New York, and one in Washington, D.C.—the third was foiled and ended in a crash south of Pittsburgh), with devastating consequences,
in terms of lives lost. Consequently, those who would like guidance on what to read about this event, its consequences, and its significance, will find the follow-
ing books (but only when considered together) helpful: Ahmed (2005); Ahmed and Forst (2005); Anonymous (2004); Chermak, Bailey and Brown (2003);
Dudziak (2003); Holbein (2005); McDermott (2005); Marlin (2004); Nguyen (2005); and Qureshi and Sells (2003).
2. This frequently quoted line by Karl Marx from his book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (published in 1852) admirably captures this dialectic: “[Peo-
ple] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing
already, given and transmitted from the past” (p. 15, from the edition published by International Publishers and reprinted by Wildside Press, 2008).
3. From his website at: http://richhabits.net/20-learned-habits-that-will-make-your-child-rich-or-poor/#more-5331.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-5-320.jpg)
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GamblingHabits–6%ofself-mademillionairesplayedthelotteryvs.77%ofthepoor.16%ofself-mademillionairesgambledatleastoncea
weekonsportsvs.52%ofthepoor.
HealthHabits-21%ofself-mademillionaireswereoverweightby30poundsormorevs.66%ofthepoor.76%ofthesemillionairesexercised
aerobically30minutesormoreeachdayvs.23%ofthepoor.25%ofthesemillionairesatelessthan300junkfoodcalorieseachdayvs.5%of
thepoor.25%ofthesemillionairesateatfastfoodrestaurantseachweekvs.69%ofthepoor.13%ofthesemillionairesgotdrunkatleastoncea
monthvs.60%ofthepoor.
TimeHabits–63%ofself-mademillionairesspentlessthan1hourperdayonrecreationalInternetusevs.26%ofthepoor.67%ofself-made
millionaireswatched1hourorlessofT.V.perdayvs23%oftheparentsofthepoor.67%ofthesemillionairesmaintainedadaily“to-do”listvs.
6%ofthepoor.44%ofthesemillionairesgotup3hoursormorebeforetheyactuallystartedtheirworkdayvs.3%ofthepoor.
LivingBelowYourMeansHabits–73%ofself-mademillionairesweretaughtthe80/20rulevs.5%ofthepoor(liveoff80%save20%).
RelationshipManagementHabits–6%ofself-mademillionairesgossipvs.79%ofthepoor.75%ofthesemillionairesweretaughttosendthank
youcardsvs.13%ofthepoor.6%ofthesemillionairessaywhat’sontheirmindvs.69%ofthepoor.68%ofthesemillionairespursuerelation-
shipswithsuccess-mindedpeoplevs.11%ofthepoor.
LearningHabits–88%ofself-mademillionairesreadforlearningeverydayvs.2%ofthepoor.86%ofthesemillionaireslovetoreadvs.26%of
thepoor.11%ofthesemillionairesreadforentertainmentvs.79%ofthepoor.
Let us take another, example, one that is very close to home: meaning yourselves and your performance in this course (and other courses you
are taking in this school). While it is true that because most of you come from working-class backgrounds (or “middle-class” if that will make
you feel better—but remember, class categories in this course is about which class has the power to make society-level decisions and not things
like income, which in capitalist societies like this one is the bourgeoisie), you are burdened by the need to have a part-time paid employment,
for financial reasons—which, of course, is a burdensome structural impediment that kids from bourgeois backgrounds do not face—this fact
does not excuse you from engaging in a variety of behaviors that can enhance your ability to succeed in your educational endeavors generally,
and in your courses, such as this one, particularly. To those of you who are not doing well, have you tried to observe what your more successful
peers are doing behaviorally to enhance their chances of success (which I define as getting a 4.0 grade point average or coming as close to it as
possible)? They engage in a set of structural behaviors that I label as “professional” behaviors. Folks, after talking to students who have received
A’s in most of their courses, over the years, I have found, not surprisingly, that a common strategy pursued by all of them is to build for them-
selves a “behavioral structure” designed to put them on a grade path toward a 4.0. (Reminder: success in college is not just about "intelligence"
but it is also about how you deploy that intelligence in terms of things like self-discipline, deferred gratification, professionalism, and so on.)
This structure comprises a package of key elements, listed below in no particular order. (You may also notice that one or two elements of this
structural package are specifically meant to positively influence teachers, by indicating to them their seriousness and professionalism in approach-
ing their courses.)
Before you study the list below, let me emphasize something else that may never have crossed your minds: to a considerable extent, new
research in neuroscience is telling us, that the ability to permanently change your brain physically so as to enhance its intellectual abilities as well
as its executive functions are within your control—it is not just a matter of genetics and nutrition. This is a revolutionary, revolutionary finding.
However, there is one big catch: it requires exercising personal agency by engaging in persistent and appropriate learning behaviors (such as those
listed below) over the entire duration of the period up to the point when this second window of opportunity given to humans by nature clos-
es, which is from the teen years to around the mid-twenties (by the way, the first window is during infancy—roughly the first six years or so).
Here is an appropriate quote from an article on this matter, by Sharon Begley: “Until now, studies of the brains of children and adolescents
have shown that their gray matter decreases with age. The rule seems to be “use it or lose it”: connections among neurons that are not used
wither away, a process called pruning…. [While] Toddlers are pretty much at the mercy of their parents when it comes to the kind and amount
of environmental stimulation they get, and thus which connections remain. Teenagers, however, create their own world.” Begley then quotes a
neuroscientist: “Teens thus have the power to determine their own brain development, to determine which connections survive and which
don’t. Whether they do art, or music, or sports, or videogames, the brain is figuring out what it needs to survive and adapting accordingly.” In
other words, to quote her again: the teen brain reprises one of its most momentous acts of infancy, the overproduction and then pruning of
neuronal branches… Think of it as nature’s way of giving us a second chance.”4 Now you know. Laziness coupled with foolishness has a very
heavy price: missing the opportunity to build a better brain (in much the same way that athletes build muscles through training). Here is a listof
goodacademichabitsthatwillputyouontothepathofsuccesswithlifelongbenefits.
Majors/minor:Carefullychoosingthecorrectfieldstomajorandminorinthatarecommensuratewithone’sintellectualabilitiesandnotwhetherit
willbringyoustatusandwealth.(Yes,Iknowyouwanttobearocketscientist,butyouwerenevergoodinmathandphysicsinhighschool.So,
whichgeniusconvincedyouthatonceincollegeeverythingwillchangeandyouwillbecomegoodatthesesubjects?Alwaysremember,thepri-
maryreasonforattendingcollegeshouldbetohaveachoiceonhowyouwillearnalivingfortherestofyourlives;thisisachoicethatbillionsof
peoplearoundtheworlddonothave.)
Credithours:Carryingnomorethan15credithourstotal(mostespeciallywhenonealsohasapart-timejob).
SyllabusPacket:Carefullygoingthrougheachandeveryoneofthedocumentsintheentiresyllabuspacketandbecomingfamiliarwithallessential
information(includingevensomethingasmundaneasthecoursedescription).
Attendance:Comingtoclassontimeandrarely,ifever,missingaclass.(Ifaclassismissedbecauseofalegitimatereason,thenalwaysmakingsure
thatthemissedattendanceformiscompletedandhandedinassoonaspossible.)
Classhomepage:Becomingthoroughlyfamiliarwiththeentireclasshomepageonthewebbymakingsurethateverylinkonthatpageisexplored
(regardlessofwhetheritappearsrelevantornot).
Announcements:Alwaysvisitingtheannouncementssectionoftheclasshomepageonaregularbasis.
4 Begley’s article is available here: http://www.newsweek.com/getting-inside-teen-brain-162273 or here:
http://www.sharonlbegley.com/getting-inside-a-teen-brain.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-6-320.jpg)
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Americans: In my classes this nationality refers to all the peoples who reside in the continents of North and South America. Reference to
Americans who live in the United States is by the designation U.S. Americans.5
Antisemitism: See Race/Racism
Apartheid: This is an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness” that came to signify the juridical-based, racially defined neo-fascist socio-political
order (that had its roots in the colonial era at a time when the European settler struggle to dispossess aboriginal Africans off both their land
and labor, in the context of the globally determined emerging capitalist order, overrode all else) in which the concept of “whiteness” was
foundational, and fashioned by the Afrikaner segment of the white polity following its accession to power in 1948 when their party, the Na-
tional Party, won the all-white national elections. It is important to point out that apartheid was both a racist ideology (white versus black), and
an ethnically defined ideology in which the Afrikaners sought to gain ascendance over the English segment of the white polity for both eco-
nomic and cultural reasons.6 The specific guiding principles of the agenda of this new apartheid government are summarized best in a sen-
tence or two by Kallaway (2002: 13): “They were keen to promote the interests of Afrikaner politics against English domination of economic,
social and cultural life, against big business and its control by ‘alien forces of Anglo-Jewish capitalism,’ and against ‘black encroachment’ on
‘white interests.’ They were for the promotion of Afrikaner business and culture and the ‘salvation of ‘poor whites.’’’ In other words, and it is
important to stress this, apartheid was at once an economic project and a political project—the two were intimately and dialectically related—
that sought to promote Afrikaner supremacy in the first instance and white supremacy in the second. Apartheid was never meant to wish black
people away, on the contrary it needed black people, but only as sources of cheap labor (and to this end it meant dominating and controlling
them on the basis of that classic “separate-but-equal” ruse first perfected in the United States following the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v.
Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 [1896]). Ergo, to say that apartheid was a modernized form of serfdom is not to engage in cheap theatrical polemics, but
to describe it as it really was designed (and came) to be. Building on existing racist legislation (such as the 1907 Education Act No. 25, and the
1913 Natives Land Act) and centuries old customary Jim Crow practices, various National Party-led governments systematically erected and
perfected a highly oppressive, neo-fascist, racially segregated, super-exploitative, sociopolitical economic order that came to be called apartheid.7
Initially, the system would rest on a base of three socially constructed races: Africans, Coloreds, and whites; but later, a fourth would be
added: Indians (Asians). A little later, the system would be modified to fragment the African majority into its smaller ethnic components fictive-
ly rooted geographically in separate rural labor reservations (which would be first called Bantustans and later dignified with the label “home-
lands”) carved out of the measly 13% of land that had been allocated to Africans by the 1913 Native Land Act and its subsequent modification.
(In other words, apartheid was also a form of colonialism—internal colonialism.) Of the various legislation that underpinned the system,
among the more salient were the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act; the 1950 Population Registration Act; the 1950 Group Areas Act; the 1950
Suppression of Communism Act; the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act; the various internal security acts that not only proscribed any form
of opposition to the apartheid system, but permitted imprisonment without trial; the various pass laws that severely curtailed the freedom of
movement of Africans by requiring them to carry a pass—a form of internal passport—at all times; and the 1959 Promotion of Bantu
5. In 1820, the Mexican rabble-rousing cleric Servando Teresa de Mier, during a visit to Washington, D. C. wryly indicated this problem of nomenclature:
“Since the Europeans believe that there is no other America than the one their nation possesses, an erroneous nomenclature has formed in each nation.” He
explained:
The English call their islands in the Caribbean Archipelago, our Indies or the West Indies; and for the English there is no other North America than
the United States. All Spanish North America is to them South America, even though the largest part of the region is in the north. The people of the
United States follow that usage and they are offended when we, in order to distinguish them, call them Anglo Americans. They wish to be the only
Americans or North Americans even though neither name is totally appropriate. Americans of the United States is too long; in the end, they will have
to be content with the name guasintones, from their capital Washington,… just as they call us Mexicans, from the name of our capital. (From Rodri-
guez O [2000: 131])
On this subject, see also the article by Hanchard (1990).
6. Afrikaners are descendants of the original European colonial settlers (mainly Dutch, French and Germans), who arrived at the Cape beginning in 1652
under the initial leadership of one, Jan Van Riebeeck, at the behest of his employers, the Dutch East India Company, to set up a shipping station for their ships
enroute to and from the East. They would later migrate out of the Cape region shortly after the British arrived to rule the Cape (in 1806) to form the autono-
mous states of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Along the way they would engage in frequent warfare with the African peoples they encountered.
(Compare, the settlement of the West in the U.S. by European colonial settlers.) This migration (taking place roughly from mid-1830s to mid-1840s), prompted
by dissatisfaction with British liberal policies, especially with their decision to free the slaves and abolish slavery in the Cape, came to be known as the Great Trek,
has great symbolic significance in Afrikaner history. Afrikaners are also sometimes referred to as the Boers (Dutch word for peasant farmer). Note: The conflict
with the British that led to the Great Trek would never completely abate; it would eventually develop into a full-scale war between them (1899-1902) known as
the Anglo-Boer War or the South African War. During that war most of the U.S. public was on the side of the Boers, but the U.S. Administration and its allies
took the side of the British. The Boers were defeated, but they would later emerge victorious through the ballot-box in 1948, by which time the British, through
the 1909 South Africa Act, had facilitated the formation the following year of the now self-governing Union of South Africa (formed out of the original colo-
nial settler states of Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State). The constitution of this new country largely excluded the majority of the popula-
tion, the Africans and other black peoples, from any form of political participation. It was as if they did not exist. Until 1994, when for the first time in its histo-
ry South Africa would hold a nation-wide multi-racial national elections leading to the election of the majority black peoples to power (under the leadership of
the ANC and Nelson Mandela), South Africa would remain a white minority ruled country.
7. Recall that some of the architects of this order were open admirers of Nazi Germany!](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-8-320.jpg)
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Second, from the perspective of audience appreciation, works of art (f) involve an aesthetic experience (delightful, in some way, to one or
more of the senses); (g) elicit contemplative cognition; and (h) they stand the test of time. (Note, however, that these last three characteristics
may also be relevant from the perspective of the artist—but not always.) Given that we live in the era of capitalism as the dominant mode of
production, a problem that often presents itself is how to evaluate an activity that seeks to be labeled art, expressed, for instance, by the by the
question: is it art or is it entertainment? Consider, for example, cinema. A solution to the problem that I have found works well here is to seek
refuge in a definition that distinguishes between art versus commercial entertainment along the lines best captured by Youngblood (1979:754)
while discussing this very subject:
By perpetuating a destructive habit of unthinking response to formulas, by forcing us to rely ever more frequently on memory, the
commercial entertainer encourages an unthinking response to daily life, inhibiting self-awareness.... He[/she] offers nothing we haven't
already conceived, nothing we don't already expect. Art explains; entertainment exploits. Art is freedom from the conditions of
memory; entertainment is conditional on a present that is conditioned by the past. Entertainment gives us what we want; art gives us
what we don't know what we want. To confront a work of art is to confront one self—but aspects of oneself previously unrecog-
nized.”10
From this perspective, then, a film is a cinematic work of art when all its constitutive elements (the screenplay, the acting, the cinematog-
raphy, the editing, the film score, the production design, the sound design, costumery, and so on) work in concert to render the film, at once:
intelligently entertaining, powerfully thought-provoking, emotionally challenging, and intellectually enriching. Yet, the fact that the predominant
characteristic of most Hollywood films is their obsessive quest for entertainment value—of the lowest common denominator at that—above
all else (violence and debauchery being their signatures) speaks to the corrupting influence of corporate capitalism in its obsessive and obscene
pursuit of profits.
Authentic democracy: See Democracy
Aversive Racism: See Race/Racism
BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation
BCE: Before the Common Era (C.E.)—equivalent to the period that historians used to refer to as B.C.
Big History: See Macro-history
Blacks: An ethnic category that refers to all peoples who can trace their ancestry to peoples of Africa, Asia and the Americas living in the
period before the Age of European Voyages of Exploitation. Whites, using a similar line of reasoning, are those peoples who can trace their
ancestry to peoples of the European peninsula before the Age of European Voyages of Exploitation. In the U.S. context, blacks generally
refers to U.S. African Americans, and whites refers to U.S. Euro-Americans.
Blowback: This term was originally minted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to refer to the unintended consequences of, usually,
secret operations by intelligence agencies, against those deemed as enemies, taking the form of serious negative repercussions for those sponsor-
ing these operations, including their citizenry (who, of course, remain unaware of the source of this blowback and are left to assume that it is
random unexplained terrorist events perpetrated by “evil” people—hence prompting them to ask such naïve and banal questions as “why do
they hate us”?)11 Another way of understanding this term is to consider it as a synonym for comeuppance, as in “they got their comeuppance,”
or as an equivalent of what economists refer to as a negative externality. A good example of blowback is what appears to be now a cyclical
retributive “terrorism” that has emerged in places where the United States is engaged in drone warfare, which has led to the deaths of count-
less innocent civilians, including women and children, against those it has classified as terrorists. An example from an earlier period, according
to Professor Chalmers A. Johnson, who wrote a book on this topic, is the tragedy of 9/11 (2001) itself: “The suicidal assassins of September
11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy. Em-
ploying the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders who then became enemies only because they had already become victims.
Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable.” He further explains: “On the day of
the disaster, President George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because we are ‘a beacon for freedom’ and because the
attackers were ‘evil.’ In his address to Congress on September 20, he said, ‘This is civilization’s fight.’ This attempt to define difficult-to-grasp
10. Youngblood, Gene. “Art, Entertainment, Entropy.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, pp. 754-760.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979.
11 This term first appeared in a March 1954 CIA report by agent Donald Wilber on its secret 1953 operation in Iran aimed at overthrowing the
democratically elected government of Mohammed Mosadegh in which it succeeded. (Specifically, the term appears in Appendix E of the re-
port that outlined the military lessons learned on plotting coups against governments deemed hostile by the United States: “Possibility of
blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers involved in this type of operation.” [p. 21].)
The negative reverberations (blowback) of that operation, which led, in time, to the Iranian revolution by the clerics and their declaration of
the United States as the “Great Satan,” hence a major enemy, continue to haunt the United States to this day. See the book Blowback: The Costs
and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) who also explains that “In a sense, blowback is simply
another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-10-320.jpg)
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Charter Schools: In United States, these are privately run schools but publicly funded (mainly through property taxes) like regular public
schools. Those on the right love charter schools because they blame the ills of the inner-city public school system (which, because of de facto
residential segregation, serves mainly racial minorities) on, supposedly, a bloated educational bureaucracy; inadequately motivated schoolchil-
dren; and poorly trained and/or lazy teachers who cannot be fired from their positions because of the power of the teachers’ unions. Charter
schools are supposed to be the panacea; taking care of these kinds of problems. As is so often the case with the positions of the right on so-
cio-economic issues, evidence does not bear them out—for the most part. This makes sense, because the problems of these schools are not
rooted primarily in factors to do with agency (bad kids, bad teachers, and bad administrators) but rather factors of structure: most important
among them being, not surprisingly, underfunding.17
CIA: Central Intelligence Agency (a U.S. government entity that began its life as a spy agency but which today undertakes all kinds of clandes-
tine activities abroad, beyond spying).18
Cinéma Vérité: A style of making films that seeks to capture “realism”—but as perceived and manipulated by the filmmaker. The term, as
well as the style, is of French origin and means “truth cinema.” Although this style comes close to the documentary style of filmmaking the two
styles should not be confused with each other. Cinéma vérité does not necessarily require filming of actual reality, it can simply mimic it but still
be fiction; whereas a documentary film is, at its foundation, the filming of true reality (even if the filmmaker may be “creative” with the truth
in what and how that reality is captured). Note: the documentary style is sometimes referred to as direct cinema where the filmmaker avoids any
participation in the ongoing action; even avoiding, if possible, narration. A good example of this “fly on the wall” style—that is, unobtrusively
listening and observing—is to be found in C-Span’s TV broadcasts of news events.
Civil Society: This term has probably as many definitions as the number of persons willing to define it; for our purposes this one will have to
do: the collectivity of all voluntary institutions—ranging from trade unions to professional organizations, from activist organizations dealing
with the environment to organizations concerned with human rights—in a society that are constituted from outside the arenas of the family,
the state, and the market place. In a democracy, civil society is its basic foundation (to put it bluntly: no civil society, no democracy). There is a
dialectical relationship between civil society and democracy, where one nourishes the other.19
Civilization: See political consciousness
Class: The economy-based hierarchic division of the social structure—especially as it relates to the ownership of the means of production.
For example, in capitalist societies, one can identify, at the very minimum, two fundamental interdependent but antagonistic classes: the working
class and the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) where neither of whom can exist without the other. From the perspective of capitalist societies,
a full definition of this concept requires knowledge of these contingent concepts:
Class Consciousness: a conscious awareness of one’s class position from the perspective of power relations (not from the perspective
of income). See also Ignorantsia
Class Reproduction: the intergenerational transmission of class positions that ensures the permanence of classes. In capitalist de-
mocracies two very important mechanisms behind class reproduction is manipulation of the tax code (to benefit the rich at the
expense of the poor) and the educational system. Considering the latter, the educational system exists as a two-sector system:
private and public where the private is the exclusive preserve of the rich. However, where schools in the public sector are attend-
ed by the rich, then they are engineered to favor the rich through such means as admissions policies, curricula, differential fund-
ing, and so on. See also Meritocracy.
Class Struggle: refers to struggles in capitalist societies between the economically powerless—the working classes—and the power-
ful—big business or the corporate capitalist class—over issues of authentic democracy, which concerns the third part of that
famous phrase in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the absence of meaningful
procedural democracy, in a capitalist society the minority (the capitalist class) has the economic power, through its monopolistic
ownership and control of society’s major means of economic production (factories, farms, etc.), to determine if the majority will
have food on the table and a roof over its head at the general level and, at the specific level, how it will be treated in the work-
17. One of the best works that exposes the structural problems of the inner-city public school system is that by Jonathan Kozol (the title of his book says it all:
The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America [New York, Three Rivers, 2005]). See also the book by Peter Sacks: Tearing Down the Gates:
Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). As for an evaluation of the performance of charter schools
see, for example, the June 2009 report by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (titled Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16
States) which concludes that while the picture is a little mixed, the basic pattern nevertheless is clear:
Charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers across the country, with every expectation that they will continue to figure prominently in
national educational strategy in the months and years to come. And yet, this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not
faring as well as their TPS [traditional public schools] counterparts. Further, tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the ex-
ception. The problem of quality is the most pressing issue that charter schools and their supporters face.
18 See these sources to get a glimpse into the range of activities that the CIA is engaged in (which are not all necessarily legal under both U.S. law and interna-
tional law):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14745941;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11469369;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-14862161; and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15012962
19. An introductory text worth looking at that explores this concept in its various manifestations is the anthology edited by Glasius, Lewis, and Seckinelgin
(2004).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-14-320.jpg)
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These contradictions and hypocritical behavior that so characterized the cold war, especially as it related to the PQD countries, raised the ques-
tion of what the cold war was really about. Was it simply a war over “ideology” aimed at stemming the spread of totalitarianism—in the form
of Soviet communism given that China was almost a Western ally in everything but name following President Richard Nixon’s visit to that
country in 1972—in favor of the ideology of Western “democracy” because communism was supposedly antidemocratic, oppressive, and
totalitarian in nature? Or was it in actuality more than a question of ideology? That is, was it a war over resources, profits, and potential mar-
kets? For there is no question that given that capitalism can only survive in an economic environment that permits unbridled accumulation of
wealth via unrestricted flow of labor, raw materials, goods and profits (subject only to the law of supply and demand), any portion of the
globe that functions under an alternative economic system represents a threat to the long-term interests of capitalism everywhere (see below).
In light of this point, and the contradictions mentioned above, the cold war was, in truth, not a war about “good” versus “evil,” or about free-
dom versus tyranny, or about totalitarianism versus democracy, but rather it was fundamentally a war over access to markets and resources,
especially in the PQD countries, since the West had long exhausted its own raw materials, and since capitalism could not (and cannot) survive
without the relentless quest for profits. Thus the cold war was, ultimately, about ensuring that the historically-determined imperialist economic
advantages enjoyed by Western capitalist transnational firms were in no way compromised by governments trying to protect their own re-
sources within their own national borders—which alternative economic systems, such as the socialist system, enjoined them to do. 27 Is it any
wonder then that it was precisely in those parts of the world where tyranny and repression would reach unimaginable levels, but where the
capitalist economist system would be fully entrenched, that the West would find its strongest allies and a source for much economic gain—
often at the expense of the local populations, excluding the compradorial elites. (Compare today’s warm relations between the United States
and most of the West with totalitarian “Communist” China—or even the Vladimir-Putin-led Russia for that matter as it regresses back to its
old totalitarian ways under the guidance of a leadership comprising many former KGB men.) Nor is it surprising that the “freedom-loving”
democratic West would have no difficulty whatsoever in not only turning a blind eye to mass human rights violations (that included torture and
murder—supposedly the natural province of communists) that would endemically be perpetrated by governments against their own people in
countries that the West considered as their allies but on the contrary provided them access to the economic and military means necessary to
continue inflicting these horrors on their peoples. For, if freedom and democracy had truly been at the heart of U.S. foreign policy concerns
then it would not have been consistently on the side of every brutal blood-soaked tyrannical dictator that paid homage to the U.S. flag around
the world throughout the postWorld War II era: from the regimes of Antonio Salazar and Marcelo Caetano in Portugal to those of the Euro-
South African racists in Pretoria and the military thug in the then Zaire (Mobutu Sese Seko), and from the regimes of Agusto Pinochet in
Chile and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua to the regimes of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and the Shah of Iran.28 Many of these re-
gimes far outdid some of the Communist regimes in the tyranny that they inflicted on their peoples; yet the United States supported them
because their tyranny was in the service of capitalist interests: domestic and foreign, short-term and long-term and actual and potential.29
Colonialism. The process of forcibly imposing on other peoples territorial hegemony (in contrast to the nonterritorial hegemony of imperial-
ism and neocolonialism) by the colonizing power.30 The actual practice of colonialism is termed colonization. By its very nature, colonialism
carries with it the imperative of the abrogation of the rights of the colonized as subsumed by the Natural Law of Prior Claim; and there-
was really the motivating factor, as the Cold war fanatics asserted, then one must pose this question: Would the Soviet Union have changed sides in South Afri-
ca, for example, if the West had changed sides? That is, if USGs, for instance, had decided to drop their support of SAAG and instead had begun to support
the ANC in every way possible (in the same manner that they would support the “Contras” in Nicaragua and the “Mujahiddin” in Afghanistan), then would the
Soviet Union have begun supporting SAAG? The answer obviously has to be a firm “nyet.” But what had motivated the Soviet Union to support the liberation
forces among the PQD nations if not opportunism? The answer simply is that it was, in the main, ideology. Ideologically, the Soviet Union was predisposed
toward supporting antiracist and anti-imperialist forces. In fact, its very constitution enjoined it to do so. Whether the cold war fanatics liked it or not, a very large
dose of altruism (with some opportunism mixed-in of course) had been involved in Soviet foreign policy behavior—especially regarding the PQD countries.
There is one qualification that must be entered here. To some degree, Soviet support of the nationalist forces in specific instances was also motivated by its
rivalry with China (with whom it became embroiled in a “cold war” of sorts following the Sino-Soviet split around 1962 over strategic and ideological differ-
ences).
27. Of course, ideology (often couched in the simplistic terms of “democracy” versus “totalitarianism” against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race) had to
and did play a part in the cold war. Otherwise, how would it have been possible for the West, especially the United States, to convince its citizenry to commit
enormous resources to the war effort for almost half a century. However, to say that ideology was important in the cold war is not to suggest that it was the
cause of that war. The cause lay elsewhere: in the confrontation between capitalism and socialism—as understood in its economic sense. (See, for example,
Robin [2001] for an insightful study of one mechanism by which the cold war ideology was sustained in the United States: “rumor—an amalgam of opaque
knowledge and cultural codes,” which “transformed a distant adversary into a clear and present danger.” In other words, “[t]he nation’s policy makers and mili-
tary strategists stalked and feared an elusive predator based on suggestion and autosuggestion, the blurring of fact and fiction, and the projection of collective
fears and desires” [p. 3].)
28. Compare the open use of torture by the United States itself today in its so-called “war on terror.”
29. Even today, the real concern that the United States and its allies have in the Middle East is not over the matter of freedom and democracy but to what ex-
tent can the interests of Western capital be secured in that region. The cozy relationship with the butchers of Beijing that the Bush Administration (Sr.) had
maintained—continued by successive USGs to the present day—provides further testimony on this point. In the eyes of the Bush Administration (as with
subsequent administrations) the Chinese dictators were acceptable because of their pro-capitalist economic policies. And even during the height of the renewed
cold war early in the administration of Ronald Reagan there was no lack of enthusiasm to sell U.S. grain to the Soviet Union, even though from a U.S. strategic
point of view this did not make sense because grain sales to the Soviet Union meant that it (the Soviet Union) could neglect agriculture and continue to expend
its scarce resources on the defense industry; such was the pressure on the administration from U.S. agricultural capitalist interests. Therefore, the cold war was
not fought for the sake of a mythical “national interest” but the more narrow but real international capitalist interest where globalized U.S. capital always stood
to lose from the appearance of socialist economic systems anywhere in the PQD ecumene because of the inherent capitalist need for a policy of “open door”
to profits, resources, and markets. In other words, the forces that had driven Europeans to colonize the world during the era of merchant capitalism never really
abated during the cold war era. What is more, today, in the current era of “globalization,” they have actually intensified.
30. It should be pointed out that “colonialism” is another one of those highly contested concepts (like imperialism)—see the discussion by Ostler (2004), for
example, in his introduction, paying particular attention to his footnotes (as well as the sources indicated for imperialism).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-17-320.jpg)
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fore colonization is always a two-stage process: conquest followed by the imposition of structures of hegemony (which range from forces of
direct coercion to forces of economic subordination to forces of ideological manipulation [such as education and other aspects of culture]), by
the colonizers. This entire process should not, it is important to stress, be regarded as an entirely one-way street in which the colonized lie su-
pine as victims; on the contrary, even in defeat on the battlefield they do not abandon other forms of resistance elsewhere in the economy,
polity and society generally—thereby exhibiting historical agency, as one would expect of thinking beings. Further, in my classes, colonialism
refers specifically to that of the modern era (see imperialism for an explanation of the distinction). At the same time, unless indicated other-
wise, colonialism in my classes refers to that variant of it that we may term settler colonialism. Note that as one can deduce from the forego-
ing, colonialism, by its very nature, was also an inherently racist project. Only racists can take over other people’s lands, regardless of the justifi-
cation—in the case of the European colonialism, “the white man’s burden,” etc. However, most European peoples would not have considered
colonialism as racism at all. (In fact, in a most bizarre way—characteristic of those who arrogantly think they belong to a “chosen” race—even
at the height of barbaric predation, exploitation, and oppression they thought they were doing something good for those they had colonized.)
Color-blind Racism: See Race/Racism
Columbian Exchange: A term used to describe a historical process that occurred over several centuries and the legacy of which continues to
reverberate to the present day (but which in its ubiquity we take for granted and in terms of its full macrohistorical impact is probably un-
fathomable). Yet, it was a process whose beginning had a very precise date and place: October 12, 1492, Hispaniola (signifying, to put it differ-
ently, the date and place of the inadvertent arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas). It was a process marked by both triumph and
tragedy—involving, over the centuries, a human-engineered planetary interchange of peoples, cultures, and ideas on one hand, and simultane-
ously on the other, plants, animals, and microorganisms—which was inadvertently inaugurated by the Columbian Project that would link
together the three continents of Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia and which may be described as globalization. Today, because of the Co-
lumbian Exchange, hot peppers are grown in China, tomatoes are an integral part of Italian cuisine, chocolate is consumed by the ton in Eu-
rope, apples are common in the United States, corn and cassava are staples of many communities in Africa, and we associate beef with Argen-
tina and the music jazz is played worldwide. Crops such as tobacco, cotton, sugar, potatoes, and bananas that would play such a pivotal role in
the socio-economic transformation of both Europe and the Americas were part of the Columbian Exchange. Plus, of course, because of the
Columbian Exchange, millions of peoples native to the Americas perished from diseases, brought by foreign usurpers of their lands, to which
they had no immunity. At the same time, in addition to Native Americans, representatives of virtually every culturally diverse human grouping
on this planet (races and ethnicities)—from Arabs to the Chinese, from Europeans to Africans—can be found in the Americas today; heirs to
a brutal and violent blood-soaked process of mass-killings, dispossession, colonization, and enslavement that also accompanied the Columbian
Exchange. Moreover, the Columbian Exchange sowed the seeds of the industrial revolution (and its corollary industrial capitalism—the suc-
cessor to merchant capitalism---which among its many social consequences pauperized millions of Europeans, forcing them to migrate to
other lands, as the European feudal system was dismantled, often by means of force and violence).
Columbian Project: See the Great European West-to-East Maritime Project.
Comprador/ Compradorial Elite: In the literature dealing with colonialism/imperialism this term evolved from its European imperialist
Chinese context to refer to an intermediary from among the colonized who emerges to serve the interests of the colonial or imperial power in
exchange for personal (material) benefits (but within the limitations of the colonial/imperial system). In the case of the Belgian-ruled colonial
Congo, the compradorial elite were referred to as the évolués (Western-educated Africans who had evolved to become “civilized,” as defined by
the colonialists). The comprador’s position in the colonial or imperial order is analogous to that of the much despised position of the “trustee”
in a prison system in that the comprador is, in the final analysis, also an oppressed person like the rest of the population even while he helps in
the maintenance of the system. Remember, it is impossible for colonization/imperialism to succeed without the cooperation of some from
among the colonized, who are willing to participate in the new system of oppression that is brought forth by colonialism/imperialism, in ex-
change for the limited benefits dispensed by the colonial/imperial order that accrues to the position of a “trustee.”31 Very often the compra-
dorial elite were drawn from the traditional pre-colonial elites where they existed, or where no such elites existed, or where there was resistance
from such elites, a wholly new group of people were selected for the compradorial role. In rare circumstances, the comprador may undergo a
change in political consciousness and emerge to challenge the colonialists/ imperialists with the objective of not simply supplanting the coloni-
alists (the usual trajectory pursued by most compradors) but creating a new political and economic order that will truly reflect the interests of
the entire citizenry. In the African context, Patrice Lumumba was, for example, one such évolué. In today’s post-colonial but neo-imperialist
world, compradorialism is still very much alive with, depending upon the specific circumstances of the country or territory under focus, ethni-
cism, political corruption, economic corruption, kleptocracy, brutality, a deep disdain for human rights, cultural subservience, etc., an integral
part of compradorialism.
Concept: generically speaking, this word refers to an abstract idea or a theme; in other words, it refers to a product or object of the mind.
From my perspective, concepts are the essential building blocks of theories. However, on their own they can also (like theories of course)
serve as tools of analysis. Many of the terms in this glossary (democracy, class, globalization, meritocracy, etc.) qualify as concepts. (See also
Theory.)
31. To give a graphic example: Consider, by around the middle of the nineteenth century the British were in complete colonial control of India, a process that
had begun some hundred or so years before. Now, this country of some 150 million people was ruled by a force of Britons numbering only a few thousand!
This could have only been possible through the cultivation by the British of a mentally-enslaved Indian compradorial “yes, massah” (or more correctly, “yes,
sahib”) class willing and able to do their bidding—and the legacy of which continues to this day where East Indians (and their fellow Southeast Asians in gen-
eral) often betray a tragic, comical, and deeply embarrassing inferiority complex vis-à-vis Westerners.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-18-320.jpg)
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Conjuncture of Fortuitously Propitious Historical Factors: A concept that seeks to explain major social transformations—of the order
that can change societies permanently—by positing that they are as much a product of chance and circumstance as directed human endeavors
(in the shape of “social movements,” broadly understood).32 In other words, such transformations are always an outcome of a fortuitous rela-
tionship between agency and “historical structures” (the latter being understood, in this instance, as major historical factors, be they natural or
human, that originate outside the dictates of the agency in question and therefore are bereft of intentionality, that is, in terms of the transfor-
mations). (See also Social Change.)
Conservatism: This is an ideology that, obviously, the conservatives espouse; however, please note that one must make a distinction here
between political conservatism, and social (or cultural) conservatism—it is quite possible for a person adhere to one, but not the other—and
our concern here is with the former. So, what then is political conservatism? Very briefly it is an ideology that advocates the preservation of the
existing or a bygone political, social, and economic order. In other words it is an ideology that justifies maintenance of the status quo or its
overthrow in favor of a past order (status quo ante) from the perspective of dominant power relations in society (in other words, it is an ideol-
ogy that justifies an arrangement where those who are on top remain on top and those who are at the bottom remain at the bottom—from
this perspective conservatism is inherently opposed to authentic democracy even while it may champion procedural democracy).
Historically, as an ideology, conservatism in the Western world arose in opposition to the revolutionary political, economic, and social
changes wrought first by the French Revolution and later by the Industrial Revolution. For example, Edmund Burke, one of the prominent
conservatives of the 18th century England, and whose thoughts would influence conservative political theory in the 19th century, believed in
the preservation of the power of the monarchy and the landed gentry (the upper class); retention of a close relationship between the State and
the Church; and the limitation of voting rights to a select few in society. Political conservatism in the twenty first century has tended to empha-
size laissez-faire (meaning to “leave alone” in French) economics, where there is, supposedly, no State intervention in the economy—except in
circumstances explicitly requiring the protection, hypocritically, of the interests of capitalists, of course—and virulent opposition to the devel-
opment of a social safety net oriented State (usually referred to by conservatives as the “Welfare State”). Political conservatives, therefore,
believe in absolute minimal government—except where capitalist interests are threatened (for example, conservatives do not object to the use
of State power to smash trade unions—especially in situations of conflict between capitalists and workers).
Since conservatism harks back to a past social order it follows that present day conservatives (such as those in the United States), are op-
posed to many of the advances that have been made in the area of human and civil rights since the end of the Second World War, including
rights for people of color, women, the working classes, and even children. They are also opposed to efforts by the federal government to regu-
late industries in order to protect consumers directly (e.g., from fraud, unsafe products, false advertising, etc.) and indirectly (e.g., from envi-
ronmental pollution), and of course are vehemently opposed to almost any social safety net program designed to protect the less well-off from
destitution. On the basis of their pronouncements, and on the basis of the foregoing, it can be safely asserted that in general (there will always
be exceptions of course) conservatives—depending upon the degree of intensity of adherence to their ideology—tend to display the follow-
ing attributes (listed here in no particular order): classism; racism; sexism; authoritarianism; intolerance toward alternative viewpoints, ideologies
and lifestyle; patriarchal tendencies; unquestioning obedience to law—even if unjust; disdain for programs, projects and ideas aimed at pro-
tecting the environment because they believe environmental protection costs capitalists money (and since they have money they do not have to
worry about their own health: e.g., if you can drink imported mineral water why worry about water pollution); disdain for the less well-off and
those with disabilities (the former because they are considered lazy and the latter because they are considered a burden on society); and jingo-
ism accompanied by much belligerency (since the wealthy tend to profit from war and usually their children are able to avoid military service).
It is necessary to stress, however, that not all conservatives will share all of the attributes mentioned above; though all will share most of them.
Notice too that from the perspective of capitalist democracies of the twenty first century, political conservatism is ultimately about the bour-
geoisie waging class warfare on the working classes by means of neo-liberalism.
In a nutshell, then, true conservatives (excluding the ignorantsia--see note below) are those who believe in a political and economic order
that would protect to the maximum possible privileges that they (or their allies) have garnered over the long course of human history at the
expense of other human beings. (For an excellent account of the genesis of the conservative ideology see Moore [1966]). The sad truth, to put
the matter differently, is that after one has cut through the thick jungle of pseudo-intellectualism, one is confronted with the incontrovertible
fact that in every field of human endeavor (from the arts to the sciences), conservatism has stood as a reactionary bulwark against almost all
human progress. That said, one can still champion a serious study of conservatism much in the same way that one would study, say, fascism.
(See also Left/Right.)
Note: In the United States, in general, but not always, conservatives of today tend to be Republican Party members and/or usually vote for
Republican candidates, and while in general they are wealthy or come from wealthy backgrounds, the party also attracts large sections of the
working classes or self-styled "middle classes" (meaning working classes with bourgeois pretensions). How does one explain the latter fact?
The explanation for this irrational behavior is their deep ignorance--in the sense of their profound inability, due to their lack of political con-
sciousness, to disentangle their subjective interests from their objective interests which then blinds them to the fact that the neo-liberal (and military-
industrial complex-oriented) policies pursued by this party are so fundamentally opposed to their objective interests. Consider: the resolution
32. This is a very important concept because it helps to debunk the myth propagated by the powerful, the conquerors that their power is rooted in their own
genetic makeup (that is that they are a naturally superior people born to rule, dominate exploit, etc. others). Whereas the truth is that this power and domination
is an outcome of being in the right place at the right time, so to speak. In other words, no group of human beings (by whatever means you categorize them:
race, class, gender, etc.) have a monopoly over intelligence and creativity. If they did have such a monopoly then how come they or their empire and civilizations
are no longer with us today. (The passage into the dustbin of history of numerous civilizations and empires—e.g. the Egyptian Civilization, the Greek Civiliza-
tion, Roman Empire, the Chinese Civilization, the Byzantium Empire, the Islamic Empire, the Aztec Civilization, The British Empire, the Soviet Empire, and so
on—attests to this point) Civilizations or empires are not preordained, whether by nature or God. Today the dominant civilization is the Western Civilization,
but will it last forever? History tells us that the answer is no, but only time will tell.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-19-320.jpg)
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or amelioration of the very socio-economic circumstances that creates a deep disenchantment among them with the economic and political
status quo (that is, circumstances that are rooted in a politically-driven economically dysfunctional and unconscionable income inequality, cou-
pled with a weak social safety net) cannot be possible by supporting a political party that champions and pursues policies that are responsible
for these circumstances in the first place! What is more, to the extent that they are beneficiaries of policies pursued by the party they have igno-
rantly come to disdain (the Democratic Party), there is a profound inability to acknowledge their ignorance-based hypocrisy: benefiting from
policies that their party of choice (the Republican Party) fundamentally opposes.33 However, awareness of these facts requires possession of
political consciousness!
Reminder: this definition concerns political conservatism, and not social conservatism. Social conservatism, for most people, is ultimately
about subjective interests (even if they may not be aware of it because of the absence of political consciousness). However, one may concede
here this fact: for a minority, the super-religious, social conservatism does represent objective interests.
Contradictions: unintended and usually unforeseen oppositional outcomes in a social system that threaten its survival—unless they are re-
solved by fundamentally transforming it—and which are rooted within the operational parameters of the system. It may be noted that contra-
dictions first usually come to light as contradictions through scholarly analysis whereas they are incorrectly manifest to the architects of the system
as merely disruptive symptoms (e.g. crises) of “imbalances” in the system which can be dealt with by simply fine-tuning the system (e.g. re-
forms—rather than fundamentally transforming it).
Critical Thinking: a mode of thinking that is specific to true intellectuals (not pseudointellectuals), which is characterized by—in addition to
its foundational principle that information as distinct from knowledge is only a means to the acquisition of the latter and that all knowledge
rests on a matrix of logically interconnected ideas and concepts and which themselves are a product of disciplined analytical reasoning—
among other things:
a fiery passion for truth (and a willingness to speak truth to power);
a profound belief in the value of honest research;
patience and open-mindedness to take seriously the views of others;
a deep sense of commitment to the acquisition of knowledge and information on a variety of issues, both, personal as well as
public;
uncompromising honesty in confronting personal biases, prejudices, stereotypes, etc.;
possession of limitless curiosity regarding almost all kinds of subject matter;
a willingness to confront, where necessary, accepted theories, concepts, modes of thinking, worldviews, etc. in the service of ad-
vancing knowledge; and
a refusal to make judgments that are not based on reasoned reflection.
Culture: Refers to the different cumulative adaptive responses of human societies to the different physical (natural) environment they live in
which is the product, in the first instance, of a dialectic between agency and structure (in this instance, environmental structures). However, be-
cause we are intelligent beings cultures are never static; they are constantly developing, that is they are a permanent work-in-progress. This cul-
tural development is never entirely self-generated; it always includes cross-cultural fertilizations through both deliberate and fortuitous cultural
“border-crossings” facilitated by such things as migrations, wars of conquest, trade, commerce, and so on. And when it comes to “civiliza-
tions” (which are simply complex cultures) there is absolutely (repeat, absolutely) no way that a civilization can arise without cross-cultural ferti-
lizations or border-crossings (implication: no cultural diversity, no civilization). In other words, the idea of a “Western” civilization, to give one
example, is not only a bogus idea, but it is also a racist idea! (Think about this: if we went far back in time when human societies were still
forming, it is quite possible that we would find evidence of humans borrowing elements from animal “cultures”—e.g. cultures of apes—as
they developed their own human cultures [now, how about them apples!]). Second, the fuzzy zone that marks off one culture from another
can be termed as a cultural border or boundary. In a truly democratic society that encompasses many cultures, among the objectives of de-
mocracy in such a society includes the twin-goals of acceptance (not just tolerance) of cultural borders and the simultaneous facilitation of bor-
der-crossings as essential to democracy, progress, and the quality of life. Two further points, but about border-crossings: where communities
involved insist on maintaining strict boundaries in enforced hegemonic opposition to border-crossings then one should view it as symptomatic
of racism/ ethnicism and the like. Second, where there are deliberate border-crossings, even in the face of opposition, it does not always signi-
fy respect and acceptance of the culture of the Other. The same can also hold true for fortuitous border-crossings (arising for instance out of
one or more of such avenues as conquest or colonization or trade and commerce). In such instances, that is border-crossings in the absence of
respect and acceptance of other peoples' cultures, we can call these border-crossings as “appropriation” (sometimes also referred to as “going
native,” especially in the context of settler colonialism). Note, however, that appropriation is further characterized by a refusal to
acknowledge the appropriation (in this sense appropriation is really theft). A good example from history is the appropriation of the contribu-
33. The suggestion here is not that the Democratic Party is fundamentally any different from the Republican Party when it comes to taking care of the interests
of the working classes (after all, it not only firmly believes in the essential soundness of capitalism as a cure-all for everything that ails humanity and the planet as
a whole, but also champions and pursues policies that strengthen the military industrial complex). No, the suggestion here is that Democratic Party, from the
perspective of the majority (that is, the working classes), constitutes, in a sufficiently meaningful way, the lesser of two evils. Ideally, there ought to exist a politically
viable party of the working classes, by the working classes, and for the working classes (to paraphrase an oft-quoted line from that brief but poignant and majestic speech by
President Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address). However, such a party can only come into existence if a significant section of the working classes acquired
political consciousness. What about the Communist Party USA? Isn’t that a worker’s party? Yes, but it is too doctrinaire to be a viable political party (and to that
extent it will always be a fringe party, especially in the face of the power and might of the two current dominant parties).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-20-320.jpg)
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tions of the Egyptian civilization to the development of the Greek civilization conducted by Western historians in the service of the racist
project of denying the contribution of black people to the development of Western civilization. A contemporary example of appropriations
and which you should be able to relate to easily is the appropriation of black music (such as hip-hop) by young whites. When young white kids
listen to hip-hop music they are not necessarily engaged in a “democratic” border-crossing, but may instead be engaging in exoticism and/or
transient teenage rebellion (the latter referring to the use of this music as a means of rebelling against their parents—but while at the same
time sharing with their parents racist stereotypes of black people in general 34).
Curse of Ham: See Hamitic Theory
Dead Peasant Insurance: Refers to insurance, usually tax-free, bought by businesses that insure the lives of their employees for the benefit
primarily—or entirely, which is often the case (meaning if the employee dies her/his family receives no insurance payout of any kind, only the
business gets the payout)—of the business. The ostensible rationale behind this practice is that businesses can suffer financial losses when their
employees die; so, the insurance shields them against these losses. While this may be true of some key high-level employees, in practice, busi-
nesses have discovered that their employees’ poor health habits and/or access to inadequate or no healthcare—especially at the lower ranks of
their workforce—considerably improves their chances of collecting on this insurance (with the added bonus of minimal or no costs to them
in terms of replacing these lower-ranked employees). Additionally, there are significant tax-benefits as well for carrying this insurance. All in all,
today, this type of insurance, which businesses prefer to call “corporate-owned life insurance,” has proven to be one more device for augment-
ing their profits at the expense, one can reasonably argue, of their workers; and in a sense constitutes a form of class warfare.
Deferred Gratification: See Marshmallow Test
Democracy: Democracy, in its true sense, has two related halves: the procedural and the authentic (or substantive) where the former is the means
to the latter. In a capitalist democracy, like this one, the tendency is to emphasize the procedural at the expense of the authentic because it serves
the interests of the capitalist class (as will be evident shortly). However, one without the other simply reduces democracy to a well-meaning but
empty slogan.35 The first half refers to majority rule (but qualified by a bill of rights that protects minorities) and the accompanying institutional
processes of voting, elections, term-limits, legislative representation, and so on. This narrowly defined understanding of democracy can be
labeled as procedural democracy. Democracy, however, also has a broader substantive meaning (second half), as captured, for example, by the pre-
amble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. To quote the key paragraph: “WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all [Persons] are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness.” (Of course, even as one turns to that document, one cannot help but imagine how great that document could have really been if
only its architects had at the same time not refused to consider other peoples, such as the enslaved African Americans and the Aboriginal
Americans, worthy of these same rights; instead they even went on to label the latter as “merciless Indian Savages,” and made them the source
of one more grievance among the many listed by the document against the British Crown.) Authentic democracy then, in essence, is about
equitably securing access for all human beings to the four fundamental needs: food, shelter, health, and security. (See Development for further
elaboration on these needs.) One cannot be certain whether President Abraham Lincoln had authentic democracy or procedural democracy in
mind when he concluded his short but powerful speech (which we have come to know as The Gettysburg Address and fittingly reproduced on
the Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C.36) that he delivered several months following the culmination of one of the most horrific battles
of the U.S. Civil War, at Gettysburg—where in this small rural town in south central Pennsylvania over a period of just three days, July 1
through 3, 1863, General George G. Meade’s Union Army and General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces fought an unplanned battle that
consumed perhaps seven thousand lives but with thousands upon thousands more wounded, captured, or missing—with the words “…and
34. An extreme example of such behavior is when a neo-Nazi Skinhead listens to rap music. (See Yousman, Bill. “Blackophilia and Blackophobia: White Youth,
the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy.” Communication Theory 13 (no. 4): 366-91.)
35. There is another definition of procedural versus substantive (or authentic) democracy available in the literature on political theory. However, for our purposes it
remains a narrow definition, compared to the one presented here, in that it does not consider the end goal of procedural democracy, namely, authentic democ-
racy as defined here (and captured by that magnificent phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”). Its focus still remains simply the one half of democracy:
procedural democracy as defined here (in other words, it does not deal with means versus ends).
36. Here is the full text of the Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all
men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a
great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation
might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled
here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to
that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this na-
tion, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-21-320.jpg)
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that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” but they certainly capture what a truly demo-
cratic government, which, remember, is constituted from and funded by a vast majority of ordinary tax payers, should be concerned with up-
permost: the promotion of, both, procedural and authentic democracy.
In practice, authentic democracy finds expression, along two fronts: First, in all those tax-payer funded expenditures designed to improve
the lives and working conditions of all in society. These range from the social safety net to transportation infrastructure (e.g. roads, bridges, and
airports), on to social amenities and services (e.g. the postal system, schools, colleges, libraries, and parks)—and which may all be collectively
referred to as public wages. Second, it finds expression in all those legislative measures enacted, in spite of politically myopic opposition from
the bourgeoisie, at the behest of the lower classes at opportune historical moments—the appropriate people are in Congress and the appropri-
ate person is in the White House—for the purpose of curtailing the excesses of capitalism (constituting a form of class-struggle aimed at re-
sisting the class warfare of the bourgeoisie); such as: the creation of safe working conditions; giving worker’s the right to organize (trade un-
ions) and pursue collective bargaining; protection of the biosphere to ensure access to clean air and water, maintain biological diversity, etc.;
creation of agencies to monitor safety in food supply, medicines, health care, air-travel; consumer rights, etc.; establishment of the minimum
wage; enactment of child labor laws; the creation of a social safety net (see below); and so on. In other words, authentic democracy constitutes
a form of redistributive justice. Viewed differently, all these are measures that via the so-called “big government” (that bogey man of the capitalist
class) severely interfere with that capitalist mandate to maximize profits without regard to the wellbeing of the citizenry or the planet; that is,
they help to “humanize” or tame capitalism—and thereby eliminate the potential for its revolutionary overthrow, benefiting, ironically, the
entire capitalist class in the process.
Folks, it is important to emphasize that both kinds of democracy are essential for a society to function as a democratic society because
both procedural democracy and substantive democracy are dialectically intertwined—one without the other renders both a sham. Of course,
as implied here, the very idea of democracy in a capitalist society is problematic. The issue is not only one of the inherent contradictions of the
capitalist production system in which the nature of exploitation is rarely if ever transparent (leaving aside the more obvious forms of exploita-
tion ranging from slave labor to underpayment of wages). The problem is that even within the confines of a narrower definition of what au-
thentic democracy implies (one that leaves the basic parameters of the capitalist order unchallenged) the relatively more simpler and accessible
matter of making the apparatus of procedural democracy (elections, legislation, etc.) responsive to the agenda of the objective interests of the
mass of the citizenry is constantly (and often flagrantly) subjected to subversion by capital and its allies by constantly waging class warfare. In
other words, authentic democracy also concerns, as noted above, public wages (includes the social safety net), and champions of public
wages will be, more often than not, the masses—at least the self-enlightened among them—and not the capitalist class and its allies. In fact, on
the contrary, high on the legislative agenda of the capitalist class in all democracies is the reduction of the public wage, in opposition to what
true democracy is supposed to be about. Seen from this standpoint, the function of democracy (in both its senses) in capitalist democratic
societies is to mitigate the predatory and destructive tendencies of capitalism (here, see also negative externality) by “humanizing” it. Note:
Whatever the merits of capitalism as a system of economic production, at the most fundamental level, it is about unsustainable exploitation (of
human beings, of the environment, and so on); it is NOT about doing good, regardless of what capitalists will tell you. (Reminder: capitalism
is not about philanthropy—nor is it primarily about creating jobs (there would be no unemployment, if that was the case)—it is simply about
making money, for the sake of making money, in whatever way possible.) One solution that societies have found to the inherently exploita-
tive/destructive tendencies of capitalism is to regulate it so that it does not completely destroy society. Note, however, that from the perspec-
tive of capitalism itself, it is possible, up to a point, to engage in capitalist entrepreneurial activity that at the same time does as much as possible
to minimize the exploitative/destructive consequences of that activity. This kind of capitalism is usually referred to as “socially responsible
capitalism” or sometimes “ethical capitalism.”
In my classes, I also talk about interpersonal democracy, by which I mean interpersonal relations among individuals in a society that are gov-
erned by the principle of equality of opportunity for respect, acceptance, and non-discrimination—regardless of age, class, color, ethnicity,
gender, and other similar social structural markers.
To provide you with an illustration of what is meant by procedural in contrast to authentic democracy in practice (from a U.S. perspective), I
have listed in Appendix 1 at the end of this document tax-payer funded programs and services, as well as democratic rights, by year of enabling
legislation. As you go through this listing of key legislative examples of procedural versus authentic democracy, please note that the legislative
authority indicated refers to the initial legislation and not the subsequent modifications most such legislation have undergone since their origi-
nal enactment, for good or ill, across various U.S. administrations. Notice also, that, not coincidentally, the original legislation was passed, with
rare exception, when Democrats occupied the White House and/or were the majority in the U.S. Congress. In fact, astounding as it may ap-
pear today, the enabling legislation for many of these programs and services were enacted during a one-term presidency (technically) of Presi-
dent Lyndon B. Johnson, the architect of the War on Poverty and the Great Society programs.37 Note: asterisked items (dark brown) concern pro-
cedural democracy and the rest relate to authentic democracy, while the letters in brackets after a president’s name refer to either Democrat [D]
or Republican [R]).
Procedural versus Authentic Democracy in
the U.S. (Legislative Examples)
37. Something for you to ponder: as someone who attends a tax-payer funded university in the richest country on the planet, which of these laws, programs,
and services would you be willing to do away with? Are you sure that you or your relatives/friends will never have a need for them? In other words, the persis-
tent attack on the positive role of government in a capitalist democracy, like this one, to ensure authentic democracy for all should be viewed with deepest suspi-
cion—because it is motivated either by ignorance (if supported by the working classes), or cynical self-interest (if supported by the capitalist class and their
bourgeois allies).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-22-320.jpg)
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performs the same function as Otherness, it often masquerades as acceptance of difference, that is “multiculturalism.” For instance, the Thai sex
industry, which has its roots in the Vietnam War when U.S. soldiers visited Thailand for so called “R & R” (rest and recreation) and which rests
primarily on Western middle-aged male clientele sexually exploiting poor rural Thai girls (and boys), is a perfect example of Western exoticism
at work today. Another example, is the portrayal of Africa in films and documentaries as a continent full of wonderfully exotic wild animals—
but minus human beings who would spoil the scenery—for the titillation of the Western “couch-potato” adventure seeker. To give yet another
example, but one closer to you guys, is the seeming penchant for hip-hop culture among white suburban youth who even as they indulge in
this culture, especially its music, continue to view black people from the perspective of Otherness. (Remember: imitation does not mean ac-
ceptance.) Question: to what extent was the election of a black president for the first time in the history of this country a function of exoti-
cism?
Externality: This is a term from the field of economics. An externality can be positive or negative. Stated in very simple terms, a negative exter-
nality is the unintended and unwelcome consequences in a capitalist society for those who are not part of a business transaction, the bystanders
(the third party). At the macro level, the bystander can be society and the cost of the negative externality that results from a given profit-
making activity of a business ends up being borne by society. In other words, where a society “willingly” puts up with negative externalities
(mainly because the government refuses to regulate businesses effectively because it is too closely allied to them) it allows businesses to increase
their profit margins at the expense of society—meaning of course the citizenry. A good example of a negative externality is environmental
pollution generated by a business, such as, for example, an electricity producer who uses coal-fired power plants that release pollutants into the
air. Here is another example (but this time instead of turning to economics we turn to every day interpersonal relations): smoking. When
smokers smoke in the presence of non-smokers, they create a negative externality with their activity because it results in harm to the non-
smokers (depending upon the duration and frequency, ranging from secondhand smoke inhalation to plain inconsiderate annoyance). From
the perspective of a democracy, the net effect of negative externalities that result from capitalist activities is to degrade the quality of life of the
citizenry, thereby undermining authentic democracy.
Fascism: A political ideology that first rose to national prominence in Nazi Germany, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy which combined jingoism,
militarism, authoritarianism, virulent ethnicism/racism, and capitalism into one ideological package (and which saw the use of violence and
terror as legitimate instruments for achieving its ends). It may be noted that, considered generically, a modified form of fascist ideology existed
in South Africa and the Jim Crow South in the United States (and which may be labeled as semi-fascism or para-fascism). (See also Totalitari-
anism.)
Feudalism/Feudal System: Although most of you, at one time or another, have probably come across this word either in its purely descrip-
tive sense and/or in its pejorative sense, it will come as a big surprise to you to learn that despite its continued ubiquitous usage today there has
been considerable disagreement among modern historians as to whether or not such a socio-economic and political system ever existed in
Europe and in fact many have simply dismissed the term as nothing more than a historiographical construct (similar to the concept of the
“Dark Ages, ” that is, a period invented by historians for their own purposes). The fundamental definitional problem has been the concept’s
historiographically portmanteau, hence meaningless, character, encompassing a socio-economic and political order spanning some one thou-
sand years—roughly from the time of the disintegration and decay of the Roman Empire around the fifth century CE, to the twelfth century
when urbanization was beginning to move apace against the backdrop of the dissolution of slavery in Europe together with the loosening of
peasant ties to land—across a wide geographic terrain stretching from England to Russia that never exhibited, in reality, uniformity of the type
that is commonly associated with the concept: of contractual reciprocity, embedded in both tradition and law, across three primary levels of a
relatively unified socio-economic and political hierarchy comprising the monarch at the apex and the serf at the base and vassals in between
(sometimes referred to as the “feudal pyramid”) involving provision of security in terms of law and order by those at the top in exchange for,
on one hand, land-use rights and a portion of its proceeds, and on the other, a labor levy for the maintenance of the vassals’ demesne for
those at the bottom; in other words, a form of a protection racket run by the monarch and the nobility and in which the Church was fully
complicit. The truth is this: what is commonly understood as feudalism (or feudal system) simply never existed in Europe. Yet, these terms
continue to remain in vogue in books and in classrooms. As Elizabeth A. R. Brown, who was among the first to challenge the continued usage
by historians of a term that described a mythological European past in an aptly titled article “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and His-
torians of Medieval Europe” observed: “Since the middle of the nineteenth century the concepts of feudalism and the feudal system have
dominated the study of the medieval past. The appeal of these words, which provide a short, easy means of referring to the European social
and political situation over an enormous stretch of time, has proved virtually impossible to resist, for they pander to the human desire to grasp-
or to think one is grasping-a subject known or suspected to be complex by applying to it a simple label simplistically defined.”39 The variation
in the kinds of societies that emerged on the heels of the disappearance of the Roman Empire was such that it escapes the imposition of a
single concept to describe it; however much one would wish otherwise for the sake of historiographical order and clarity. The question you
may ask is why, then, am I still using the term in this course? The reason is that the term has some utility when used in a very specific sense for
our purposes, which is to comprehend the radical transition that took place, beginning first in England and then spreading to the rest of Eu-
39. From page 1065 of her article that was published in the American Historical Review, 79, No. 4 (1974), pp. 1063-1088. More recently, another historian, Susan
Reynolds, helped to complete the project started by Brown with the publication of her monumental work: Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinter-
preted (Oxford University Press, 1994)—she, in fact, not only indicates that her book was inspired by Brown’s article, but she dedicates it to Brown. In this
painstakingly researched work she lays to rest the inaccurate model of medieval European society that the term feudalism has traditionally been used to describe.
Note that she makes a clear distinction between feudalism as used by traditional historians, which is her primary concern, and that used to describe a particular
mode of production; as she points out: “I have deliberately omitted almost all of the vast and important subject of relations between lords and peasants—in
other words the whole subject of feudalism in its Marxist sense. Such relations seem to be of only indirect relevance to the concepts of fiefs and vassalage
[meaning feudalism traditionally defined] as they have been understood since the sixteenth century.” (p. 15)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-24-320.jpg)
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the escalation of the global movement of students in pursuit of higher education;
the immense escalation of the global trade in illicit narcotics and allied substances sponsored by global drug cartels; and
the escalation of the global arms trade.
While the view of globalization as a fundamentally malignant development in the eyes of some may be debatable, there are clear instances
where globalization is, without question, simply that: such as in the case of global terrorism, the international narcotics trade, human-
trafficking, transnational migration of diseases (e.g. AIDS), labor exploitation, and global warming. In the future, the emergence of alternative
centers of world power (e.g. in Asia) may lead to a different conception of globalization from the one we understand today—especially in the
realm of culture and politics, if not necessarily economics. From the perspective of the world’s poor, globalization can also have a very nega-
tive consequence. This is because at the simplest level globalization, in economic terms, has come to mean the relentless drive by corporate
capitalism to penetrate every corner of the planet on the much ballyhooed premise—especially in Western countries like the United States—
that everyone so effected by this drive will benefit equally via the logic of the so-called “trickle-down economics” (meaning in effect that, most
bizarrely, if you allow the rich to get even richer by means of untethered capitalist accumulation the poor will also benefit). One does not have
to be a rocket scientist to realize that in a world that was made economically unequal and politically fragmented over a period of several centu-
ries as a result of Western imperialism (forms of which continue to persist to this day) the push for globalization on balance has simply made
the rich richer and the poor poorer between and within countries. From an ecological perspective too, globalization has not been healthy for the
planet, as we can see with the rise of global warming, the destruction of rain forests, the pollution of the oceans, and so on.
The Great East-to-West Diffusion: At the simplest level, I use this phrase to refer to the transmission from the East to the West over a
period of several thousand years (roughly from the beginning of the Egyptians and Mesopotamian civilizations around 3500 BCE to the con-
summation of the Columbian Project with the inauguration of the European sea routes connecting all parts of the planet, which occurs by
around 1700 CE) of ideas, products, and technologies through trade, war, conquest, etc. across both space and time. Although it may initially
appear to be a term analogous to the Columbian Exchange there are two fundamental and important differences between the two processes
of globalization to which these two terms ultimately refer: first, the Great East-to-West Diffusion was, for the most part, a unidirectional
phenomenon as the term so evidently makes it clear, and, second, unlike in the case of the Columbian Exchange, it is a deliberately politically
loaded term. That is, in coming up with this phrase (Great East-to-West Diffusion), my concern is to restore to universal memory the historical
truth that many of the roots of the so-called “Western Civilization” are to be found in the East, broadly understood to include the entire Afro-
Asian ecumene. Why is this so important? Well, for one it speaks to truth (as in do not tell lies by fabricating history) which is one of the foun-
dational purposes of all true education. The second reason is that ever since the emergence of Western global hegemony in the aftermath of
the Columbian Project, Western historians of world history have seen their role—for the most part—to advance, in various guises, sometimes
overt and sometimes covert, the fallacious notion of “European exceptionalism” (meaning Europeans, compared to others on this planet,
have been genetically endowed with superior intelligence) to explain this hegemony, which if not racist in intent at least borders on it. To know
about the East-to-West Diffusion and to make it central to the study of world history is to help counter what I call civilizational hubris (and
which in turn would help to foster humility and gratitude, two of the several human attributes that are foundational to harmony between peo-
ples). So, from the perspective of true education, to establish, for example, who were the first this and first that (astronomers, inventors, scien-
tists, mathematicians, etc.) would be simply a question of learning facts and no more. It would not be, as it has usually been in the study and
teaching of world history by Western historians, an effort to deny the commonality of all humanity in which every ethnic variation of human-
kind has made some contribution at some point (even if only at the most rudimentary level of domestication of plant and/or animal life) to
the totality of the modern human cultural development and experience. (See the fascinating study by Weatherford [1988], with respect to the
last point.) As Joseph Needham (1954: 9) sagely observed in volume 1 of his work: “Certain it is that no people or group of peoples has had a
monopoly in contributing to the development of science.” For all its proclamation of the virtues of “civilization” (to be understood here in its
normative sense) the denial of this fact has been, sadly, as much a project of the West as its other, laudable, endeavors—for reasons that, of
course, one does not have to be a rocket scientist to fathom: domination of the planet under the aegis of various forms of imperialism (an
endeavor that, even now in the twenty-first century, most regrettably, has yet to see its demise).
Consequently, under these circumstances, true history is burdened by the need for constant vigilance against this Western intellectual tradi-
tion of erasure of universal historical memory for the purposes of rendering irrelevant the contributions of others.46 Moreover, one must be
cognizant of the fact that it is a tradition that relies on a number of techniques: the most direct of which is “scholarly silence”—where there is
a complete (or almost complete) absence of any recognition of a contribution. However, given the obvious transparency of this technique, it
has increasingly been replaced by one that is more subtle (hence of greater intractability): achieving erasure not by a total lack of acknowl-
edgement, but by the method of token (and sometimes even derisory) acknowledgement where the object of the erasure is mentioned in pass-
ing and then promptly dismissed from further consideration despite its continuing relevance to the subject at hand. As an extension of this last
point, it is questionable to talk about a Western civilization at all; so much of its inheritance is from outside Europe—a more fitting term per-
haps would be Afro-Eurasian civilization. To the ignorantsia, who are heirs to a Western ethnocentric mind-set honed over a period of some
600 years, of seeing humankind in no other terms than a color-coded hierarchical cultural fragmentation, this new appellation may, at first
blush, appear hysterically preposterous; yet, in actuality, there is a growing body of literature that cogently demonstrates that the so-called
Western civilization is simply a developmental extension of Afro-Asian civilizations.47 After all, if one were to take the entire 5,000-year period
46. Consider, for example, the long line of Western science historians who have grappled with the issue of the origins of Europe’s scientific revolution and who
feature in Cohen’s overview of their work (1994) but yet almost none of them deigned to even nod at the precursory presence of Islamic science.
47. Of course, the adoption of “civilization” as a unit of analysis presents its own set of problems given that it is more a historian’s imaginary construct than a
construct of reality. Guys, this entire definition in this glossary, in a sense, stands in complete opposition to a historiography that relies on encapsulating human
experiences into normatively hierarchical, discrete, time, and spatially bounded categories labeled “civilizations.” Hodgson (1974: 31) alludes to the difficulties
when he questions the delimitations of boundaries in the “Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene.” As he observes, “it has been effectively argued on the basis of cultural](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-27-320.jpg)
![Page 27 of 89
of recorded human history, commencing from say approximately thirtieth-century B.C.E. to the present twenty-first-century C.E., the Europe-
an civilizational imprint, from a global perspective, becomes simply an atomized blip (the notion of an unbroken path going from the Greeks to
the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, is just that, an illusory fabrication), and what is more, geographically, demographically, and cultur-
ally, a peripheral one at that when viewed against that of the neighboring Afro-Asian civilizations, taken together (ranging from the Sumerian
to the Egyptian to the Chinese to the Islamic).48 It is only in the last 300 years or so that, civilizationally, Western Europe has taken center stage.
The fact that many European and U.S. historians appear to be unaware of this simple fact is testimony to the enduring Western ethnocentric
teleological tunnel vision that thoroughly imbues their work. Note that Western ethnocentrism is to be understood here as an ideology that is
shared by all classes of Western Europeans and their diasporic descendants that is rooted in the assumption that, to quote Harding (1993: 2),
“Europe functions autonomously from other parts of the world; that Europe is its own origin, final end, and agent; and that Europe and peo-
ple of European descent in the Americas and elsewhere owe nothing to the rest of the world.” See also Amin (1989) and Blaut (1993, 2000),
for a brilliant, but scathing critique of the Western ethnocentric paradigm that undergirds much of Western historiography.
Yet, consider that if one were to turn one’s historical gaze back to as recently as the beginning of the eighth-century when the Muslims
(sometimes referred to as Moors by Western historians) arrived in Europe one has no difficulty whatsoever in categorically stating that there
was nothing that one could read in the entrails of Europe then—comparatively backward as it was in almost all ways—that pointed to any-
thing that could predict its eventual rise to global hegemony. What is more, even after fast forwarding 700 years, to arrive in the fifteenth-
century, a different reading would still not have been forthcoming. In other words, folks, after you have ploughed through this definition there
should be no difficulty in accepting the fact that at the point in time when Columbus left Europe in what would eventually prove to be a por-
tentous journey for the entire planet, the cultures of many developing parts of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene outside the European peninsula
were no less rational, achievement-oriented, materialistic, predatory, belligerent, ambitious, scientific, capitalistic, technologically innovative, ur-
banized, capable of ocean navigation, and so on, than were the cultures of developing parts of Europe of the period (nor should it be difficult
to accept that the opposites of these qualities, for that matter, existed at comparable levels of magnitude in both areas of the world).49 In fact,
on the contrary, in some respects they were more advanced than those of Europe.
Now, of course, it is true that when one considers where Europe was some 700 years earlier (at the time of the Islamic invasion), the ra-
pidity of the European cultural advance is nothing short of miraculous! No, this is not in the least a hint, even remotely, of the much-vaunted
but illusory “European miracle.” Because this progress was not achieved by the Europeans autarkicly; they did not do it alone (on the basis of
their own intellectual uniqueness, inventiveness, rationality, etc.) that the Eurocentrists are so fond of arguing. Rather, it was an outcome of
nothing less than a dialectical interplay between European cultures and the Islamic and other cultures of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene. Hodgson,
for instance, is adamant that one must cast ones historiographical gaze across the history of the entire ecumene, for, as he explains, “most of
the more immediately formative elements that led to the Transmutation, both material and moral, had come to the Occident, earlier or later,
from other regions,” (p. 197). In other words, as he puts it: “[w]ithout the cumulative history of the whole of Afro-Eurasian ecumene, of
which the Occident had been an integral part, the Western Transmutation would be almost unthinkable” (p. 198). Or in the words of Frank
(1998: 4): “Europe did not pull itself up by its own economic bootstraps, and certainly not thanks to any kind of European exceptionalism of
rationality, institutions, entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word—of race.”
To really drive home this fundamental truth some examples may help, and here I will concentrate on the role of Islam (especially consider-
ing that it has become a favorite sport of politicians and pseudo-intellectuals alike in the West, since 9/11, to malign this religion at every op-
portunity in the name of the very legitimate need to severely castigate the terrorists and extremists who have hijacked this religion for their
misguided and nefarious ends) in the development of Western modernity. Through the agency of Islam—involving a variety of mechanisms
of diffusion, such as direct residential contacts with immigrant Muslims (e.g., in Muslim Sicily and Muslim Spain), the Arabic to Latin transla-
tion movement during the Reconquista, the Crusades, and long-distance trade—Europe was introduced to a range of technological artifacts and
methods derived from within the Islamic empire, as well as from without (from such places as China and India).50 Note, however, that the
techniques and resources to be found there, that all the lands from Gaul to Iran, from at least ancient classical times onward, have formed a single cultural
world.” “But,” he argues, “the same sort of arguments would lead us on to perceive a still wider Indo-Mediterranean unity, or even (in lesser degree) the unity of
the whole Afro-Eurasian citied zone.” To decisively drive home the point: the myth of “civilization” becomes readily apparent when one turns one’s gaze to the
present and pose the question—regardless of one’s geographic place of abode in this age of “globalization”—What civilization are we living in today? A world
civilization, perhaps? (See also Wigen and Martin 1997.)
48. Consider what Hodgson says in Volume 1 of his work on the matter of the geographic peripherality of Western Europe: “[T]he artificial elevation of the
European peninsula to the status of a continent, equal in dignity to the rest of Eurasia combined, serves to reinforce the natural notion shared by Europeans
and their overseas descendents, that they have formed at least half of the main theater (Eurasia) of world history, and, of course, the more significant half. Only
on the basis of such categorization has it been possible to maintain for so long among Westerners the illusion that the ‘mainstream’ of world history ran
through Europe” (p. 49).
49. This issue, to drill home the point, can be presented in another way: all human progress, in the “civilizational” sense, ultimately rests either on structural fac-
tors (both contingent and conjunctural) or ideational factors. If one accepts the former then it becomes easy to explain, for example, the rise and fall of civiliza-
tions and empires throughout history (including the collapse of the British and the Russian empires not too long ago). Moreover, one can enlist the support of
science here in that it is now an incontrovertibly established scientific fact that there is no fraction of humanity (whatever the social structural criteria for the
division: ethnicity, sex, age, class, etc.) that holds a monopoly over intelligence and talent. If, on the other hand, one privileges the latter, then one must be con-
tent with ethnocentrically driven historiography unsupported by evidence, other than fantastical conjectures. Yes, yes… people! Of course, ideas do matter; but
only when placed within the context of structures. (This applies even to religious ideas—at the end of the day the metaphysical and the transcendental are still
rooted in the material; for, how else it can it be as long as human beings remain human, that is biological entities.)
50. Regarding the Crusades, even though intuition alone would suggest otherwise (the Crusaders had colonized parts of the Islamic lands for considerable
periods of time spanning almost two centuries), some Western scholars have tended to downplay the role of the Crusades in accelerating Eastern influences on
the development of the West. However, there are at least three areas of Crusader activity that bore considerable fruit in this regard: namely, emulation of sump-
tuous lifestyles of the Muslims by wealthy resident Crusaders (yielding influences in art and architecture, for example); agricultural production (especially sugar-
cane); and trade and commerce. About the last: Hillenbrand’s fascinating study clearly points to remarkable interchange between the Franks (Europeans) and the
Muslims, even—unbelievable this may appear—during times of ongoing conflict. Consider this: while the robust siege of Karak by the forces under the com-](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-28-320.jpg)
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concept of “technological diffusion” itself requires some analysis. As Glick’s study (1979) of Islamic Spain, for example, attests, one of the
most important handmaidens of technological innovation is technological diffusion. However, one must be specific about what this concept
means. It should be understood here to refer not only to the direct passage of artifacts and techniques from one culture to another (usually
known as technology transfer), but also the indirect form of transmission that Pacey (1996) points to: the spread of information (actively or
passively via travelers, traders, books, letters, etc.) about a given technology from one culture to another provoking an “independent” develop-
ment of similar or even improved technology in the latter culture. Pacey refers to this technology as “responsive inventions.”
Further, in the category of responsive inventions one may also throw in inventions arising out of direct imitation of technological artifacts
acquired through trade (for commercial purposes), or acquired through some other means (including illegal means) for the explicit purpose of
local manufacture. It follows then that the concept of technological diffusion also embodies (seemingly paradoxically) the possibility of inde-
pendent inventions. A good example of this that immediately comes to mind is the windmill. It has been suggested (Hill 1993: 116), that
whereas in all probability the European windmill—considering its design—was independently invented sometime toward the end of the
twelfth-century, the concept of using wind as an energy source may, however, have arrived in Europe through the agency of Islam (wind-
mills—of a different design—had long been in use in the Islamic empire). Another example is the effort by Europeans to imitate the manufac-
ture of a high-quality steel common in the Islamic empire called Damascus steel (primarily used in sword making). Even though, observes Hill
(1993: 219), in the end Europeans never learned to reproduce Damascus steel, their 150-year-long effort in this direction was not entirely in
vain: it provided them with a better insight into the nature of this steel, thereby allowing them to devise other methods to manufacture steel of
a similar quality.
Anyhow, whatever the mode of diffusion, the truth, folks, is this: the arrival of Islamic technology and Islamic mediated technology of
non-Islamic (e.g., Chinese, Indian) and pre-Islamic (e.g., Egyptian, Persian, etc.) provenance—examples would include: the abacus; the astro-
labe; the compass; paper-making; the ogival arch; gun powder; specialized dam building (e.g., the use of desilting sluices, the use of hydropow-
er, etc.); sericulture; weight-driven clocks; the traction trebuchet; specialized glass-making; sugarcane production and sugar-making; the triangu-
lar lateen sail (allowed a ship to sail into wind more efficiently than a regular square sail common on European ships); and cartographic maps
(upon which the European nautical charts called portolans were based)—had profound catalytic consequences for Europe.51 It became the basis
of European technological advancement in a number of key areas and which in turn would help to propel it on its journey toward the fateful
year of 1492 and therefrom modernity.
Contemplate this: four of the most important technological advancements that would be foundationally critical to the development of a
modern Europe (navigation, warfare, communication and plantation agriculture) had their roots outside Europe, that is, in the East! Reference
here, is, of course, to the compass (plus other seafaring aids such as the lateen sail, etc.); gunpowder; paper-making and printing (that is, block
printing and printing with movable type); and cane sugar production. All four technologies first originated in the East and then slowly found
their way to the West through the mediation of the Muslims.52 Along the way, of course, the Muslims improved on them. Now, it is true that
Europe’s ability to absorb these technologies was a function of internal developments, some unique to itself. As Pacey (1996: 44) observes: “if
we see the use of nonhuman energy as crucial to technological development, Europe in 1150 was the equal of Islamic and Chinese civiliza-
tions.” But, as he continues, the key point here is this: “In terms of the sophistication of individual machines, however, notably for textile pro-
cessing, and in terms of the broad scope of its knowledge, Europe was still a backward region, which stood to benefit much from its contacts
with Islam.”
Islam introduced Europe to international commerce on a scale it had never experienced before. The characterization by Watt (1972: 15)
that “Islam was first and foremost a religion of traders, not a religion of the desert and not a religion of peasants,” is very close to the truth.
Not surprisingly, then, the twin factors of geographic breadth of the Islamic empire (which included regions with long traditions of commerce
going back to antiquity, such as the Mediterranean Basin) and the acceptance of commerce as a legitimate occupational endeavor for Mus-
lims—one that had been pursued by no less than Prophet Muhammed himself—had created a vast and truly global long-distance trade un-
matched by any civilization hitherto. In fact, the reach of the Islamic dominated commercial network was such that it would embrace points as
far apart as China and Italy on the east-west axis and Scandinavia and the deepest African hinterland on the north-south axis, with the result
that the tonnage and variety of cargo carried by this network went far beyond that witnessed by even Greece and Rome in their heyday
(Turner 1995: 117). Al-Hassan and Hill (1986: 18) remind us that the discovery of thousands upon thousands of Islamic coins dating from the
mand of Salah Ad-din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (Saladin) was underway in 1184, trading caravans from Egypt on their way to Damascus were allowed to pass through
Crusader-held territories unhindered. This phenomenon would lead one Muslim chronicler of the period to remark: “One of the strangest things in the world
is that Muslim caravans go forth to Frankish lands, while Frankish captives enter Muslims lands” (Hillenbrand 1999: 399). That the Muslims and the Franks
refused to put aside the peaceful activity of trade and commerce between them on many an occasion (which it should be noted often required the conclusion
of treaties and agreements), even as they fought each other, is indicative of how important such activity was for both sides. What is more, the Crusaders under-
took these economic relations often in the face of strong strictures on the part of various Popes condemning such activity. Note also that the importance of
trade is also attested to, of course, by the currency in Crusader-held territories: it was an imitation of Islamic currency—in terms of design. (See also Bates and
Metcalf [1989]; Ballard [2003]; and Verlinden [1995]). In other words, then, through trade and commerce, regardless of whether it was local trade or internation-
al trade, Europe opened yet another door to Eastern influences. (For more on this topic, see Abulafia [1994], and Ashtor [1976], and the Dictionary of the
Middle Ages. About the last item, as already pointed out, you will do well to mine it for a number of other issues too, covered in this definition.)
51. A note on the portolans, given their critical importance to the European sea navigators, that should further give pose to those who continue to insist on
European exceptionalism: while the immediate provenance of many of them was Islamic, the Muslims themselves were also indebted for some of their maps
to the Chinese. Of singular importance are those that were of relevance to the European Atlantic voyages given that the Chinese had, probably, already preced-
ed Columbus to the Americas—vide for example the voyage of Zhou Wen described by Menzies (2003). (Note: Menzies also discusses the Chinese contribu-
tion to the development of the portalans.)
52. There is some doubt as to exactly how the compass arrived in the West from the East in that, according to Watt (1972), it was probably invented jointly by
the Muslims and Westerners (one reciprocally improving on the creation of the other) on the basis of the original Chinese discovery of the magnetic properties
of the lodestone. Be that as it may, it is yet another instance pointing to the fact that the story of the diffusion to the West (via the Islamic intermediary) of the
products of the Eastern technological genius is one that has yet to be told in its entirety.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-29-320.jpg)
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seventh to thirteenth centuries in Scandinavia and the Volga basin region highlights the fact that for many centuries Europe relied on Islamic
currency for its commercial activities, such was the domination of international trade by the Muslims (see also Watson 1995 for more on the
East-West numismatic relations).
Recall also that the wealth of the Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa (the latter being the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, it may
be noted) in medieval Europe rested to a considerable degree on trade in Eastern luxury and other commodities. Now, to be sure, it is mainly
Italian and Jewish merchants, trading in places such as Alexandria, Aleppo, and Cairo, who were responsible for the final Mediterranean leg of
the huge transoceanic trade that spanned the entire Indian Ocean (see the remarkable study by Goitein [1967] of the awesome treasure house
of Jewish historical documents, known as the Cairo Geniza documents, that span a period of nearly three centuries, eleventh through thir-
teenth, and discovered in Old Cairo around 1890). However, as Chaudhuri (1985) shows us in his fascinating history of this trade, it is Muslim
merchants who recreated and came to dominate this transoceanic trade—the same pattern held also for the transcontinental trade that was
carried on in the hinterland of the Indian Ocean, behind the Himalayan range.
Consider the list of luxury and other commodities that Europe received from the East (including Africa) through the agency of the Mus-
lim merchants: coffee; cotton textiles (a luxury commodity in Europe prior to the industrial revolution); fruits and vegetables of the type that
medieval Europe had never known (e.g., almonds, apricots, bananas, eggplants, figs, lemons, mangoes, oranges, peaches); gold; ivory, paper;
tulips; porcelain; rice; silks; spices (these were especially important in long-distance trade and they included cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cori-
ander, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, saffron, and turmeric); alum; dyes and dye-making products; medicinal drugs; aromatics (e.g., frankin-
cense, myrrh, musk); cane sugar and sugarcane; and so on. (The last is of special historical significance, sadly, considering the ignominious role
it would play in the genesis of the Atlantic slave trade.) What is more, with the exception of a few items such as gold, silk, some aromatics, and
a few spices like cinnamon and saffron, medieval Europe had not even known of the existence of most of these products prior to the arrival
of Islam.53
In other words, the Islamic civilization, through its commercial network, introduced Europe, often for the first time, to a wide range of
Eastern consumer products (the variety and quantity of which was further magnified via the agency of the Crusades) that whet the appetite of
the Europeans for more—not surprisingly, they felt compelled to undertake their voyages of exploitation, a la Bartolomeu Diaz, Vasco da Gama,
Christopher Columbus, Fernao de Magalhaes (Ferdinand Magellan), and so on.54 This quest for an alternative trade route to the East—one
that would have to be seaborne—was also, of course, a function of the desire to bypass the very people who had introduced them to the
Eastern luxury commodities they so eagerly sought: their hated enemies, the Muslim intermediaries, who straddled the land-bridge between the
East and the West and who at the same time held a monopoly over this ever-increasingly important and obscenely profitable East/West trade.
(Only a few decades earlier [on May 29, 1453], prior to the departure of Columbus [on August 3, 1492] on his historic sea quest, Constantino-
ple had fallen before the victorious forces of the Muslim Turks under the leadership of Sultan Mehmed II, thus effectively and permanently
placing the landbridge in the hands of the Muslims.)55
53. One can hardly imagine what would have been the fate of Europe if it had never found out about some of these commodities. Take, for instance, that
absolutely wondrous plant fiber called cotton. Ahhhh … cotton!… cotton! … Guys, what would our lives be like without cotton? Cotton was first domesticat-
ed, records so far indicate, in the Indus Valley civilization of India thousands of years ago. The cultivation of cotton and the technology of manufacturing cot-
ton textiles (which in time would become the engine of the European industrial revolution) eventually spread from India to the rest of the world, and Islam was
highly instrumental in this diffusion. What did Europe export to the Islamic empire (specifically the Mediterranean region) in return for its imports, one may ask
out of curiosity? According to Watt (1972), the principal exports comprised raw materials, such as timber and iron, and up to the eleventh-century, European
slaves from the Slavic region. (About the latter export: following the conversion of the Slav peoples to Christianity in the eleventh-century, observes Watt, the
enslavement of the Slavs soon petered out. Incidentally, this aspect of European history points to the etymology of the word “slave.”)
54. The use of the phrase “voyages of exploitation” instead of the more common “voyages of exploration,” here should not be considered as an expression of
gratuitous churlishness; rather it speaks to that popular misconception well described by Hallet (1995: 56): “It is commonly assumed that it was a passionate
desire to expand the boundaries of knowledge or, more sharply defined, the rational curiosity of scientific research that formed the mainspring of the Europe-
an movement of exploration. Undoubtedly such motives have inspired many individual explorers; but a review of the whole history of exploration reveals a
process more complicated than is generally realized…. Three motives had led Europeans to venture into the unknown parts of the world: the search for wealth,
the search for political advantage, the search for souls to save.” An excellent example of how these factors were played out in practice is provided by Newitt’s
(1995) fascinating exegesis on the origins of the Portuguese voyages of exploitation down the coast of West Africa and finally on to the other side of the conti-
nent and therefrom into the Indian Ocean basin. Even the long cherished myth of Henry the Navigator as the heroic architect of the mission to the East and as
“scientist and scholar of the Renaissance, the founder of the School of Navigation at Sagres,” is laid to rest and in its place we are presented with the real “Hen-
ry the consummate politician” as a shrewd, powerful and wealthy man in fifteenth-century Portugal whose preoccupations were primarily with matters much
more closer to home; such as the colonization of Morocco, piracy, and rent (levying taxes and dues on others involved in maritime profiteering activities in
places like the Canaries and off the coast of West Africa). See also the riveting account by Bergeen (2003) of the three-year harrowing odyssey (1519–22) of
Magellan’s fleet, Armada de Molucca (named, tellingly, after the Indonesian Spice Islands), as it circumnavigated the globe and the motivating forces behind it,
including the powerful lure for the West of Eastern spices which, as in this case, literally propelled it to the “ends of the earth” despite unimaginable hardships.
Moreover, the veracity of his conclusion that “[I]n their lust for power, their fascination with sexuality, their religious fervor, and their often tragic ignorance and
vulnerability, Magellan and his men,” as with the other similar voyages, “epitomized a turning point in history,” for, “[t]heir deeds and character, for better or
worse, still resonate powerfully,” is absolutely incontrovertible (p. 414). (Incidentally, Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the planet—though perhaps he
was the first European—the Chinese, probably, had already preceded him in that effort. See Menzies 2003.)
55. Taking Columbus’s project specifically: that Islam is written all over it, directly and indirectly, is attested to, for instance, by the fact that only a few months
prior to the departure of Columbus under the sponsorship of Spain, the Spanish crown, in what may be considered Europe’s final crusade against the Muslims,
had just taken over (on January 2) the last Muslim Spanish stronghold (the province of Granada). In bringing to an end the 700-year Muslim presence in Spain,
the Spanish crown, after it had initially rejected Columbus’s project on two different occasions as a hair brained scheme, now saw it in an entirely new light. The
victory over the Muslims allowed the Spanish crown (specifically Queen Isabella) to dream of even grander possibilities of sidelining the Muslims (as well as
Spain’s other arch enemy, the Portuguese) in its quest for “Christian” glory, gold, spices, and perhaps even an empire that Columbus’s project so coincidentally
now promised. In fact, Columbus himself was present at the siege of Granada, and he was quick to bring to the queen’s attention the larger import of the fall
of Granada in the context of his project. As he would write in his log of the first voyage while addressing the Spanish monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella): “Be-
cause, O most Christian, most elevated, most excellent, and most powerful princes, king and queen of the Spains and of the islands of the sea, our lords in this](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-30-320.jpg)
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Yet, the European commercial debt to Islam goes even deeper. For, as Fernand Braudel (1982) reminds one in volume 2 of his three-
volume magnum opus (grandly titled Civilization and Capitalism), a number of critical elements of European long-distance trade were of Islamic
origin; such as the “bill of exchange,” the commenda (a partnership of merchants), and even the art of executing complex calculations—without
which no advanced commerce is possible.56 In fact, as Braudel further points out (p. 559), the very practice of long-distance trade itself in
medieval Europe was an Islamic borrowing. Now, without long-distance trade, it is quite unlikely that Europe would have experienced the rise
of merchant capitalism (and therefrom industrial capitalism following the colonization of the Americas); for, while such trade may not be a
sufficient condition for its development, it is a necessary condition.
Of course, it is not, it must be stressed here, that Europe had never engaged in long-distance trade before—consider the long-distance
trade of the Greeks and the Romans with the East (e.g. via the famed Silk Road)—but, like so many other things, it was reintroduced to them
by the Islamic civilization, since the Europeans had, for all intents and purposes, “lost” it over the centuries with their retrogressive descent into
the post–Alaric world of the Germanic dominated European Early Middle Ages.57 On the basis of these observations, Braudel, is compelled
to remark: “To admit the existence of these borrowings means turning one’s back on traditional accounts of the history of the West as pio-
neering genius, spontaneous inventor, journeying alone along the road toward scientific and technical rationality. It means denying the claim of
the medieval Italian city-states to have invented the instruments of modern commercial life. And it logically culminates in denying the Roman
empire its role as the cradle of progress” (p. 556).
However, it wasn’t only in the area of technology alone that Islam came to play such an important role in the genesis of Western moderni-
ty as we know it today. Consider the foundational role of the modern university in Europe in the journey toward the European Renaissance,
but from the perspective of its origins. From a broader historical perspective, the modern university is as much Western in origin as it is Islamic (that
is Afro-Asiatic) in origin. How? Nakosteen (1964: vii) explains it this way: “At a time when European monarchs were hiring tutors to teach them
how to sign their names, Muslim educational institutions were preserving, modifying and improving upon the classical cultures in their pro-
gressive colleges and research centers under enlightened rulers. Then as the results of their cumulative and creative genius reached the Latin
West through translations... they brought about that Western revival of learning which is our modern heritage.” Making the same observation,
James Burke (1995: 36) reminds us that at the point in time when the first European universities at Bologna and Charters were being created,
their future as academic centers of learning was far from certain. The reason? He explains: “The medieval mind was still weighed down by
centuries of superstition, still fearful of new thought, still totally obedient to the Church and its Augustinian rejection of the investigation of
nature. They lacked a system for investigation, a tool with which to ask questions and, above all, they lacked the knowledge once possessed by
the Greeks, of which medieval Europe had heard, but which had been lost.” But then, he further explains: “In one electrifying moment it was
rediscovered. In 1085 the [Muslim] citadel of Toledo in Spain fell, and the victorious Christian troops found a literary treasure beyond anything
they could have dreamed of.” Through the mediation of Spanish Jews, European Christians, and others, much of that learning would now be
translated from Arabic, which for centuries had been the language of science, into Latin, Spanish, Hebrew, and other languages, to be dissemi-
nated all across Europe. (This translation activity, one would be remiss not to point out here parenthetically, was a replication of an earlier
translation activity undertaken by the Muslims themselves over a 300-year period, eighth to tenth centuries, when they systematically organized
the translation of Greek scientific works into Arabic—see Gutas 1998, and O’Leary 1949, for a detailed and fascinating account.)58
present year of 1492, after your highnesses had put an end to the war with the Muslims, who had been reigning in Europe, and finished the war in the great city
of Granada, where on January 2 in this same year I saw the royal standards of your highnesses raised by force of arms atop the towers of the Alhambra, which
is the fortress of that city, and I saw the Muslim king come out to the gates of the city.... your highnesses, as Catholic Christians and princes who love the holy
Christian faith, exalters of it and enemies of the sect of Muhammad and of all idolatries and heresies, thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to those
aforementioned regions of India to see the princes, peoples, and lands, and their disposition and all the rest, and determine what method should be taken for
their conversion to our holy faith.... So it was that, after having expelled all the Jews from your kingdoms and domains, in that same month of January, your
highnesses commanded that I should go to the said regions of India with a suitable fleet” (from his journal—part of the Repertorium Columbianum edition, vol. 6
[ed. by Lardicci 1999], p. 37). Then there is the matter of Columbus’s monumental navigational blunder: Alioto (1987: 163) reminds one that even the chance
“discovery” of the Americas by Columbus has its root in the mathematics of an Islamic scholar, Al-Farghani—albeit involving erroneous mathematical calcula-
tions on the part of this ninth-century astronomer. (In the Latin West, where his work, titled The Elements, on Ptolemaic astronomy had achieved considerable
popularity, he was known by the name of Alfraganus.) On the basis of these calculations, Columbus came to conclude that Cathay (China) lay only 2,500 miles
due west of the Canary Islands! For good or ill, depending on whose interests one has in mind, how wrong he would turn out to be.
56. In a riveting exegesis, Benoit (1995) not only demonstrates the Islamic roots of Western mathematics, but also alerts one to a less well-known fact: it is pri-
marily through the agency of commerce that Islamic mathematics in general was diffused to the West and it is in the environment of commerce that it first
began to undergo innovation—greatly helped of course with the introduction of those seemingly mundane (as seen from the vantage point of today) artifacts
of Eastern origin: Indo-Arabic numerals, and paper! This process especially got underway in Europe in the fourteenth-century as parts of it, notably the Italian
city states like Florence, evolved on to the path of merchant capitalism.
57. The importance of the development of European long-distance trade (and Islam’s role in it) cannot be overemphasized. For, long-distance trade had the
indirect outcome of accelerating a number of internally rooted, but incipient transformations in Europe, that in time would be of great import, including: its
urbanization, the emergence of merchant capitalism, and the disintegration of European feudalism (the last precipitating, in turn, the massive European di-
asporic movement to the Americas, and elsewhere, with all the other attendant consequences, including the monumental Columbian Exchange).
58. There is a clarifying point of context that must be dispensed with concerning the presence of Arabic names in the historical literature dealing with the Is-
lamic empire. An Arabic name does not in of itself guarantee that the person in question is an Arab Muslim; it is quite possible that the person is a Muslim of
some other ethnicity. The reason is that for a considerable period of time not only was Arabic the lingua franca of such activities as learning and commerce in
the Islamic empire, but then as today, for all Muslims throughout the world, Arabic is their liturgical language and this also often implies taking on Muslim (and
hence Arabic) names. Therefore, the Islamic empire and civilization was not exclusively an Arabic empire and civilization, it was an Islamic empire and civilization
in which all manner of nationalities and cultures had a hand, at indeterminable and varying degrees, in its evolution. Consider, for example, this fact: over the
centuries—from antiquity through the Islamic period—millions of Africans would go to Asia (as slaves, as soldiers, etc.) and yet the absence, for the most part,
of a distinct group of people today in Asia who can be categorized as part of the African diaspora—akin to African Americans in the Americas—is testament
to the fact that in time they were genetically and culturally absorbed by the Asian societies. To be sure, in the early phases of the evolution of the Islamic empire,
Arab Muslims were dominant; but note that domination does not translate into exclusivity. Ultimately, then, one can assert that the Islamic civilization was and is
primarily an Afro-Asian civilization—which boasted a web-like network of centers of learning as geographically dispersed as Al-Qarawiyyin (Tunisia), Baghdad](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-31-320.jpg)
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During the long periods of peaceful co-existence among Christians, Jews, Muslims and others in Spain, even after the surrender of Toledo,
was also highly instrumental in facilitating the work of translation and knowledge export into Western Europe. To a lesser extent, but im-
portant still, the fall of Muslim Sicily, beginning with the capture of Messina in 1061 by Count Roger (brother of Robert Guiscard), and end-
ing with his complete takeover of the island from the Muslims in 1091, was yet another avenue by which Muslim learning entered, via transla-
tions, Western Europe (see Ahmed 1975, for more).59 This export of Islamic and Islamic-mediated Greek science to the Latin West would
continue well into the thirteenth-century (after all, Islam was not completely vanquished from the Iberian peninsula until the capture of the
Muslim province of Granada, more than 400 years after the fall of Toledo, in 1492). Among the more prominent of the translators who
worked in either Spain or Sicily (or even both) included: Abraham of Toledo; Adelard of Barth; Alfonso X the El Sabio; Constantine the Afri-
can (Constantinus Africanus); the Archdeacon of Segovia (Dominicus Gundissalinus); Eugenius of Palermo; Gerard of Cremona; Isaac ibn
Sid; John of Seville; Leonardo Pisano; Michael Scott; Moses ibn Tibbon; Qalonymos ben Qalonymos; Robert of Chester; Stephanus Arnoldi,
and so on. (See Nakosteen 1964 for more names—including variants of these names—and details on when and what they translated.) Of
course, it must be conceded, that the contributions by the Muslims to the intellectual and scientific development of Europe was made unwit-
tingly; even so, it must be emphatically stressed, it was of no less significance. Moreover, that is how history, after all, really unfolds in practice;
it is not made in the way it is usually presented in history textbooks: as a continuous chain of teleological developments.
So, guys, the truth of the matter really, then, is this: during the medieval era, the Europeans acquired from the savants of the Islamic em-
pire a number of essential elements that would be absolutely central to the foundation of the modern Western university: First, they acquired a
huge corpus of knowledge that the Muslims had gathered together over the centuries in their various centers of learning (e.g., Baghdad, Cairo,
and Cordoba) through a dialectical combination of their own investigations, as well as by gathering knowledge from across geographic space
(from Afghanistan, China, India, the Levant, Persia, etc.) and from across time: through systematic translations of classical works of Greek,
Alexandrian, and other scholars.60 Lest there is a misunderstanding here, it must be stressed that it is not that the Muslims were mere transmit-
ters of Hellenic knowledge (or any other people’s knowledge); far from it: they, as the French philosopher Alain de Libera (1997) points out,
also greatly elaborated on it by the addition of their own scholarly findings. “Yet it would be wrong to think that the Arabs [sic] confined them-
selves to a slavish appropriation of Greek results. In practical and in theoretical matters Islam faced problems that gave rise to the development
of an independent philosophy and science,” states Pedersen (1997: 118) as he makes a similar observation—and as do Benoit and Micheau
(1995), Huff (1993); King (2000); and Stanton (1990), among others).
What kinds of problems is Pedersen referring to here? Examples include: the problems of reconciling faith and scientific philosophy; the
problems of ocean navigation (e.g., in the Indian Ocean); the problem of determining the direction to Mecca (qibla) from the different parts of
the Islamic empire for purposes of daily prayers; the problem of resolving the complex calculations mandated by Islamic inheritance laws; the
problems of constructing large congregational mosques (jami al masjid); the problems of determining the accuracy of the lunar calendar for
purposes of fulfilling religious mandates, such as fasting (ramadhan); the problems of planning new cities; and so on. Commenting on the sig-
nificance of this fact, Stanton (1990) reminds us that even if the West would have eventually had access to the Greek classical texts maintained
by the Byzantines after the fall of Constantinople, it would have missed out on this very important Islamic contribution of commentaries,
additions, revisions, interpretations, and so on, of the Greek classical texts.61 A good example of the Muslim contribution to learning derived
from Greek sources is Ibn Sina’s Canon Medicinae, and from the perspective of medieval medical teaching, its importance, according to Peder-
sen (1997: 125) “can hardly be overrated, and to this day it is read with respect as the most superior work in this area that the past has ever
produced.”
Now, as Burke explains, this knowledge alone would have wrought an intellectual revolution by itself. However, the fact that it was accom-
panied by the Aristotelian concept of argument by syllogism that Muslim philosophers like Ibn Sina had incorporated into their scholarly
work, which was now available to the Europeans for the first time, so to speak, that would prove to be an explosive “intellectual bombshell.” In
other words, they learned from the Muslims (and this is the second critical element) rationalism, combined with, in Burke’s words “the secular,
investigative approach typical of Arab natural science,” that is, the scientific experimental method (1995: 42). Pedersen (1997: 116) makes the
same point in his analysis of the factors that led to the development of the studium generale and from it the modern university: “To recreate
(Iraq), Cairo (Egypt), Cordoba (Muslim Spain), Damascus (Syria), Jundishapur (Iran), Palermo (Muslim Sicily), Timbuktu (Mali), and Toledo (Muslim Spain)—
and in which, furthermore, the Asian component ranges from Arabic to Persian to Indian to Chinese contributions and influences. As Pedersen (1997: 117)
points out: “Many scholars of widely differing race and religion worked together…to create an Arab culture, which would have made the modest learning of
the Romans seem pale and impoverished if a direct comparison had been possible.” In other words, the presence of Arabic names in relation to the Islamic
civilization can also indicate simply the Arabization of the person’s name even though the person may not have been a Muslim at all! (Take the example of that
brilliant Jewish savant of the medieval era, Moses Maimonides; he was also known by the Arabic name of Abu Imran Musa ibn Maymun ibn Ubayd Allah.)
This fact is of great relevance whenever the issue of Islamic secular scholarship is considered. Secular knowledge and learning in the Islamic civilization (re-
ferred to by the Muslims as the “foreign sciences” to distinguish it from the Islamic religious sciences) had many diverse contemporary contributors; including
savants who were from other faiths: Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and so on. Consequently, when one talks about the Islamic contribution to
knowledge and learning, one does not necessarily mean it is the contribution of Muslim scholars alone, but rather that it is the output of scholars who included
non-Muslims (albeit a numerical minority in relative terms), but who all worked under the aegis of the Islamic civilization in its centers of learning and whose
lingua franca was primarily Arabic. My use of the phrase Islamic scholars or Arabic scholars in this definition, therefore, should not imply that the scholars were
necessarily Muslim scholars (or even Arab scholars for that matter), though most were—that is, most were Muslim scholars, but here again they were not all
necessarily Arabs; they could have been of any ethnicity or nationality. (See Iqbal 2002; Nakosteen 1964; and Lindberg 1992, for more on this point.)
59. While it is true that evidence so far indicates that the bulk of Greco-Islamic learning arrived in Europe through the translation activity in Spain and Italy,
Burnett (2003) shows that some of this learning also seeped into Europe by means of translations of works that were imported directly from the Islamic East,
but executed by Latin scholars in other places (like Antioch and Pisa).
60. See, for example: Grant (1996); Gutas (1998); Huff (1993); Nakosteen (1964); O’Leary (1949); Schacht and Bosworth (1974); Stanton (1990); and Watt
(1972).
61. It should be remembered that the Byzantines did almost nothing, in comparative terms, with the Greek intellectual heritage they had come to possess;
though they had the good sense to at least preserve it (see Gutas 1998, for an account of the Byzantine role in the Muslim acquisition of Greek scientific
knowledge).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-32-320.jpg)
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Greek mathematics and science from the basic works was obviously out of the question, since even the knowledge of how to do research had
passed into oblivion....That the study of the exact sciences did not end in a blind alley, was due to a completely different stream of culture now
spilling out of [Islamic] civilization into the Latin world.”62
The third critical element was an elaborate and intellectually sophisticated map of scientific knowledge. The Muslims provided the Europe-
ans a body of knowledge that was already divided into a host of academic subjects in a way that was very unfamiliar to the medieval Europe-
ans: “medicine, astrology, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, physiology, zoology, biology, botany, mineralogy, optics, chemistry, physics,
mathematics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, music, meteorology, geography, mechanics, hydrostatics, navigation, and history” (Burke 1995:
42).63 The significance of this map of knowledge is that the European university, as de Libera (1997) observes, became its institutional embod-
iment. As he states: “The Muslim learning that was translated and passed on to the West formed the basis and the scientific foundation of the
university in its living reality—the reality of its syllabus, the content of its teaching.”
In other words, the highly restrictive and shallow curriculum of Martianus Capella’s Seven Liberal Arts (divided into the trivium and the
quadrivium), which the Carthaginian had promulgated sometime in the middle of the fifth-century C.E. to become, in time, the foundation of
Latin education in the cathedral schools—the forerunners of the studium generale—would now be replaced by the much broader curriculum of
“Islamic” derived education. It ought to be noted here that the curriculum of the medieval universities was primarily based on the teaching of
science; and it was even more so, paradoxically, than it is in the modern universities of today. The fact that this was the case, however, it would
be no exaggeration to state, was entirely due to Islam! As Grant (1994), for example, shows, the growth of the medieval European universities
was, in part, a direct response to the Greco-Islamic science that arrived in Europe after the fall of Toledo (see also Beaujouan [1982], Grant
[1996], Nakosteen [1964], and Stanton [1990]).
The fourth was the extrication of the individual from the grip of what de Libera describes as the “medieval world of social hierarchies, obli-
gations, and highly codified social roles,” so as to permit the possibility of a civil society, without which no university was possible. A university
could only come into being on the basis of a community of scholars who were individuals in their own right, intellectually unbeholden to no
one but reason, but yet gathered together in pursuit of one ideal: “the scientific ideal, the ideal of shared knowledge, of a community of lives
based on the communication of knowledge and on the joint discovery of the reality of things.” In other words, universities “were laboratories
in which the notion of the European individual was invented. The latter is always defined as someone who strikes a balance between culture,
freedom, and enterprise, someone who has the capacity to show initiative and innovate. As it happens, and contrary to a widely held view, this
new type of person came into being at the heart of the medieval university world, prompted by the notion—which is not Greek but [Mus-
lim]—that [scientific] work liberates” (de Libera 1997).
A fifth was the arrival of Islamic inspired scholarship, such as that of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), that helped to extricate the curriculum from
the theological oversight of the church. In the struggle over the teaching of “Averroeism” in the academy, for example, the academy tri-
umphed and the church retreated behind the compromise that there would be two forms of knowledge: divine or revealed knowledge that
could not be challenged, and temporal knowledge that could go its separate way. (See Iqbal [2002] and Lindberg [1992], for an accessible sum-
mary of this struggle.) Henceforth, academic freedom in terms of what was taught and learned became an ever-increasing reality, jealously
guarded by the academy. The implications of this development cannot be overstated: it would unfetter the pursuit of scientific inquiry from
the shackles of religious dogma and thereby permit the emergence of those intellectual forces that in time would bring about the scientific
revolution in the seventeenth-century (see also Benoit [1995]).
The sixth critical element was the standardization of the university curricula across Europe that the arrival of Greco-Islamic learning made
possible. Independent of where a university was located, Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and so on, the general pattern was that the curriculum rested
on the same or similar texts addressing the same or similar problems in philosophy, science, theology, and so on, regardless of the curricular
emphasis or specialty of the institution. What benefit did this standardization of the curricula confer on the development of universities in
Europe? “For the first time in history,” as Lindberg (1992: 212) explains, “there was an educational effort of international scope, undertaken by
scholars conscious of their intellectual and professional unity.”
On the basis of the foregoing, then, what has been established? That the modern university is an Islamic invention? Not at all. Rather, that
it is an institutional expression of a confluence of originality and influences. Makdisi (1981: 293) sums it up best: “The great contribution of
Islam is to be found in the college system it originated, in the level of higher learning it developed and transmitted to the West, in the fact that
the West borrowed from Islam basic elements that went into its own system of education, elements that had to do with both substance and
method.” At the same time, “[t]he great contribution of the Latin West,” Makdisi continues, “comes from its organization of knowledge and
its further development—knowledge in which the Islamic-Arabic component is undeniably considerable—as well as the further development
of the college system itself into a corporate system.” (See also Textual Erasure.)
Great European West-to-East Maritime Project: In their pursuit of actual and fabled Eastern riches, the quest for a sea route to Asia by,
initially, the Iberian seafaring nations became a European obsession in the fifteenth century (in order to circumvent the domination of the land
62. Until recently, the traditional Western view had been that the father of the scientific experimental method was the Englishman, Roger Bacon (born c. 1220
and died in 1292). However, as Qurashi and Rizvi (1996) demonstrate, even a cursory examination of the works of such Islamic savants as Abu Musa Jabir ibn-
Hayyan, Abu Alimacr al-Hassan ibn al-Haitham, Abu Raihan al-Biruni, and Abu al-Walid Muhammed ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammed Ibn Rushd proves this view
to be patently false. What Bacon ought to be credited with is the fact that he was a fervent proselytizer of the experimental method, the knowledge of which he
had acquired from the Muslims through their translated works while studying at Oxford University. Bacon, it should be remembered, was well acquainted with
the work of the university’s first chancellor, Robert Grosseteste, who was an indefatigable apostle of Greco-Islamic learning in the Latin West (see also Crombie
[1990]).
63. The European scientific debt to Islam is also attested to by etymology: Consider the following examples of words in the English language (culled from Watt
1972: 85–92) that have their origins in the Arabic language (either directly, or indirectly—that is, having originally come into Arabic from elsewhere): alchemy,
alcohol, alembic, algebra, algorithm, alkali, amalgam, arsenal, average, azimuth, camphor, chemistry, cupola, drug, elixir, gypsum, natron, rocket, saccharin, sugar,
zenith, zero.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-33-320.jpg)
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routes by Muslims and their Genoese and Venetian merchant allies). I have coined this phrase to name that project of which there were two
competitive initiatives: one led by the Portuguese and the other by the Spanish (the latter initiative may also be referred to as the Columbian Pro-
ject for reasons that will become clear in a moment). Preliminary success was first achieved by the Portuguese when in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias,
Portuguese sea captain, sailing down the western coast of Africa eventually doubled the Cape of Good Hope (albeit sailing no further into the
Indian Ocean). The consummation of this tentative opening of a European sea route to Asia would therefore be left to another Portuguese
seafarer, Vasco da Gama, who managed to sail to India in 1497—the first European to do so. Despite this success by the Portuguese, it is the
Columbian Project, however, that finds pride of place in most Western history books. This is not without reason. For, while in terms of its
immediate objective it was an unsuccessful project, in time it would turn out to be of monumental macrohistorical significance for the entire
planet. It was masterminded and led by a Genoese mariner—an ambitious and enterprising commoner who began his life with the baptismal
name of Cristoforo Colombo, to later become Cristóbal Colón, and who we generally know today as Christopher Columbus—while in the
employ of the sovereigns of Spain, Queen Isabella I of Castile and her husband King Ferdinand II of Aragon. After much persistence against
considerable political odds, initially, he eventually received the authority (privileges and prerogatives) from the monarchs to embark on his bold
and imaginative quest for a European sea route to the East by sailing west complete with the pompous title of “Admiral of the Ocean Sea”
crowning his ego. The Columbian Project, whose historical antecedents lay in the early phase of the European Renaissance and involving
three small ships the Santa María, the Pinta, and the Niña sailing from the Spanish port of Palos on August 3, 1492—the same year in which,
not coincidentally, the centuries-long Reconquista launched by various European kingdoms to retake the steadily weakening nearly 800-year old
Islamic Iberia culminated in the reluctant but peaceful transfer of the last Muslim stronghold of Granada in Spain to the Spanish monarchy—
inadvertently linked together, for both good and ill, the three continents of Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia in a process that historians call
the Columbian Exchange. It is important to point out here that from a macrohistorical perspective, the Columbian Project incorporated
within it not simply the ambitions of one person and the monarchy that backed him but was also driven by three European-inspired sub-
projects that had evolved within the crucible of the roughly 800-year long blood-soaked crusade against the Muslims, the “racial project” (en-
slavement, dispossession, and colonization of other peoples and lands), the “capitalist project” (merchant capitalism), and a “religious project”
(Christian proselytism), and the execution of which, over time, would effectively render the Americas a geographic, economic, and cultural
extension of the European peninsula and thereby laying the groundwork for the economic domination to come of the planet by a hitherto
historically marginal and ethnically diverse peoples, the Europeans. Note too that the Columbian Project, in terms of both motivation and
facilitation, was also a product of the European encounter with the Islamic Civilization—see the Great East-to-West Diffusion).
Hajj: An Arabic word that refers to the annual pilgrimage to the Islamic holy city of Mecca mandatory on all Muslims who can afford it at
least once in their lifetime. Its significance in world history stems in part from the fact that this annual gathering of representatives of diverse
cultures from the Afro-Eurasian ecumene served as a crucible for the interchange and dispersal of ideas, commodities, and the like.
Hamitic Theory: When Europeans first stumbled across the architectural and artistic expressions of the wondrous achievements of Africans
of antiquity (e.g., the Pyramids, the Zimbabwe Ruins, etc.) a dominant view that emerged among them to explain their origins, as I explained in
class, was that they were the handiwork of a race of people from outside Africa.64 As Edith Sanders (1969) explains, while tracing the origins
of this particular Western myth: “[t]he Hamitic hypothesis is well-known to students of Africa. It states that everything of value ever found in
Africa was brought there by the Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race.” However, she further explains, “[o]n closer examination of
the history of the idea, there emerges a previous elaborate Hamitic theory, in which the Hamites are believed to be Negroes.” In other words,
as she observes, “[I]t becomes clear then that the hypothesis is symptomatic of the nature of race relations, that it has changed its content if
not its nomenclature through time, and that it has become a problem of epistemology” (p. 521). Not surprisingly, her carefully reasoned exege-
sis unveils a wicked tale of the lengths to which Westerners have gone to deny an entire continent part of its history; all for the purpose of
constructing a racist ideology that could permit the rape of a continent without causing so much as a twinge in the consciences of even the
most ardent of Christians. In fact, with great convenience, the myth actually begins in the Christian cosmological realm. The necessity to de-
scribe the origins and role of this myth here (albeit briefly) stems, of course, from its pervasive influence on Western attitudes toward the dark-
er peoples of the world ever since the rise of Christianity in the West, generally, and more specifically, its subterranean influence on how West-
ern colonial policies on education (as well as in other areas of human endeavor) in Africa were shaped and implemented—as will be shown in
the pages to come. Furthermore, there is also the fact of its continuing lingering presence even to this day, in various permutations at the sub-
conscious and conscious levels, in the psyche of most Westerners when they confront Africa—symptomatic of which, to give just one exam-
ple, is the virulent attack on Bernal by the Eurocentrists (mentioned earlier).
Now, as just noted and bizarre though this may appear, the Hamites make their entry into the Western racist discourse initially as a degen-
erate and accursed race, not as an exemplary, high achieving race (relative to black people) that they were eventually transformed into. Those
familiar with the Bible will recall that in it there are two versions of Noah, the righteous and blameless patriarch who is saved from the Great
Flood by a prior warning from God that involves the construction of an ark by Noah (Genesis 6: 11–9: 19); and the drunken Noah of Gene-
sis 9: 20–9: 27 who inflicts a curse on one of his three sons, Ham. It is the latter version that is of relevance here. Here is how the story goes in
the King James version of the Bible:
20. And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: 21. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was un-
covered within his tent. 22. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. 23. And
Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father;
64. For a discussion of the politics behind the anthropological explanations of the origins of the Zimbabwe Ruins (Great Zimbabwe) see Kuklick (1991) who
describes the depth of ridiculousness to which they had sunk—exemplified by a decree by the white minority government of Ian Smith that government em-
ployees who publicly disseminated the now long established fact (e.g., through carbon dating) that the Zimbabwe Ruins were of indigenous (African) prove-
nance and not some mythical foreign race would lose their jobs.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-34-320.jpg)
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and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. 24. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger
son had done unto him. 25. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. 26. And he said, Blessed
be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. 27. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and
Canaan shall be his servant.
Thus was born the Biblical curse of Ham (which in reality was a curse on his son Canaan).65 Initially, in the period of Latin Christianity of the
Middle Ages, the curse of Ham was used as a justification for the existence of slavery in a generic sense, that is without reference to skin color.
Considering that slavery during this period encompassed all manner of European ethnicities and was not restricted to people of African de-
scent alone, this is not surprising. However, by the time one arrives in the seventeenth-century when the enslavement of Africans is now well
underway in the Americas, the curse of Ham becomes the justification for this enslavement; that is Ham and his progeny have been trans-
formed into an accursed black people ordained by God to be slaves of white people (the progeny of Japheth) in perpetuity. (Aside: placed
hierarchically in between these two groups were the progeny of Shem, namely, Jews and Asians.) Before reaching this point, however, first
there had to be a connection made between the color black and the curse of Ham. The problem is best described by Goldenberg (2003: 195):
To biblical Israel, Kush was the land at the furthest southern reach of the earth, whose inhabitants were militarily powerful, tall, and good-
looking. These are the dominant images of the black African in the Bible, and they correspond to similar images in Greco-Roman culture.
I found no indications of a negative sentiment toward Blacks in the Bible. Aside from its use in a proverb (found also among the Egyp-
tians and the Greeks), skin color is never mentioned in descriptions of biblical Kushites. That is the most significant perception, or lack of
perception, in the biblical image of the black African. Color did not matter.
So, the question is how did color enter into the curse? Here, there is some disagreement. Goldenberg suggests that the linkage takes place
through two principal exegetical changes: the erroneous etymological understanding of the word Ham as referring, in root, to the color black
(which also spawns another serious exegetical error, the replacement of Canaan with Ham in the curse); and the exegetical seepage of black-
ness into the story of the curse (which originally, he observes, was colorless) as it was retold, beginning, perhaps, in the third or fourth-century
C.E. with Syriac Christians via a work titled the Cave of Treasures, and then further taken up by the Arab Muslims in the seventh-century follow-
ing their conquest of North Africa (and the two, in turn, later influencing the Jewish exegetical treatment of the story). Goldenberg further
observes that the Cave of Treasures in its various recensions down the centuries extends the curse to not just Kushites, but all blacks defined to
include, for example, the Egyptian Copts, East Indians and Ethiopians (that is they are all descendants, according to the Cave of Treasures, of
Ham). Hence, Goldenberg quotes one version as reading “When Noah awoke…he cursed him and said: ‘Cursed be Ham and may he be slave
to his brothers’…and he became a slave, he and his lineage, namely the Egyptians, the Abyssinians, and the Indians. Indeed, Ham lost all sense
of shame and he became black and was called shameless all the days of his life forever” (p. 173).
On the other hand, taking the lead from Graves and Patai (1966)—as for example Sanders (1969) does—the connection, it is suggested,
occurs via the agency of Jewish oral traditions (midrashim), specifically those contained in one of the two Talmuds, the Babylonian Talmud
(Talmud Bavli)—the other Talmud is the Palestinian Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi). The Talmuds were a compilation of midrashim, which for cen-
turies had been transmitted orally, put together by Jewish scholars in their academies in Palestine and in Babylonia. Although the Talmud Bavli
was compiled in fifth-century C.E., it did not make its appearance in Europe until probably sixth-century C.E. Now, the midrash relevant here
was concocted, according to the gloss by Graves and Patai (1966: 122), in order to justify the enslavement of the Canaanites by the Israelites;
and here is how it goes (reproduced from the version compiled by Graves and Patai 1966: 121):
(d) Some say that at the height of his drunkenness he uncovered himself, whereupon Canaan, Ham’s little son, entered the tent, mischie-
vously looped a stout cord about his grandfather’s genitals, drew it tight, and [enfeebled] him…. (e) Others say that Ham himself [enfee-
bled] Noah who, awakening from his drunken sleep and understanding what had been done to him, cried: “Now I cannot beget the
fourth son whose children I would have ordered to serve you and your brothers! Therefore it must be Canaan, your first-born whom they
enslave….Canaan's children shall be born ugly and black! Moreover, because you twisted your head around to see my nakedness, your
grandchildren's hair shall be twisted into kinks, and their eyes red; again because your lips jested at my misfortune, theirs shall swell; and
because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked, and their male members shall be shamefully elongated.” Men of their race are
called Negroes, their forefather Canaan commanded them to love theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their masters
and never to tell the truth.
Anyhow, regardless of whether it was early Eastern Christians, or Jews or Muslims who were responsible for corrupting the biblical story along
two axes, replacing Canaan with Ham and rendering Ham black, this much is incontrovertible: Medieval Christians in the West would in time
adopt it as their very own because it would allow them to develop an ideology of exploitation and oppression of black peoples, especially be-
ginning in the fifteenth-century onward, without violating their religious sensibilities.
Notice then that through this mythological trickery two basic elements of Christian cosmology are retained: that one, all human beings are
descended from a common ancestor (Adam whose line of descent includes Noah) and that, two, not all human beings are equal. Hence, the
peoples of the European peninsula (the conventional use of the term continent in relation to Europe is an ideologically driven misnomer as a
65. It may be noted here that it is the ancestors of Canaan, the Canaanites, who are conquered by the Israelites giving rise to that well-known passage in the
Bible (Joshua 9: 21) “And the princes said unto them, Let them live; but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation; as the
princes had promised them” (emphasis added). The Canaanites living in the city of Gibeon saved themselves from the possibility of being massacred by Joshua
(for no other reason beyond the fact that their land had now been promised by God to the Israelites) by pretending to be foreigners from outside the Land of
Canaan and entering into a peace truce with Joshua. However, upon discovering this deception, Joshua cursed the Gibeonites relegating them forever to be-
come “hewers of wood and drawers of water” in the service of the Israelites.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-35-320.jpg)
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must be understood in the sense of a perversion of the edificatory and consciousness-raising potential of cinema (even as it entertains) in the
relentless quest for profits—the latter achieved by pandering to the lowest common denominator in the values and tastes of the ignorantsia.
(Guys, remember my formula of frustration (with the masses): masses – m = ignorantsia. You still don’t get it? What are you left with when you
remove the letter “m” from the word “masses?”) Note: Even those films that appear to subvert, at least on the surface, the basic cultural ethos
of the Hollywood film by challenging some of its racist, sexist, etc. values, in the end fall in line with the dictates of the TMMC mass market-
ing machine—symptomatic of which is the simultaneous denial (usually subtextually) of the possibility of challenging the system through
collective action. That is, from the perspective of social change, the dominant motif is one of anarchy (to be understood here in its ideological
sense and as a synonym for chaos). A good example of such a film is Crash.
Hubris: Generically speaking, this term simply means, going by its Greek etymology, self-destructive arrogance. However, this ordinary word, as
is often the case in my classes, has very specific conceptual meaning: beginning with its antonym, humility, it is used in the sense of an antithesis
to what it means to be civilized person (in all senses—see, for example, Civilization above) and as such it has a number of variants; they in-
clude:
technological hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that not only all problems can be resolved through science/technology but the notion
that scientific/technological mastery makes a given people and their technology infallible 69;
civilizational hubris: the arrogant fallacious notion that your civilization is not only superior to all others but that it owes nothing to other
civilizations and that it will last forever;
racial hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that not only is your ethnicity race superior to other races/ethnicities but that you are entitled
to more than everyone else simply because of your physiognomy;
environmental hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that the environment can be abused, exploited, polluted, etc. at no cost to human life;
ahistoric hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that the present has always been a present with no historical background where things may
have been (or actually were) different;
teleological hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that the current domination of a society, or a nation, or the world by… whoever it may
be… was always meant to be, because of their superior intellectual, creative, etc. prowess (in other words, chance or accident has no
part to play in this dominance);
evolutionary hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that because human beings have evolved to have a higher order brain they are entitled to
dominate and exploit other animal species; and
the hubris of ignorance: a better way to put this is the arrogance of ignorance. It is not unusual for many among those who are privileged (as
expressed by their relative power and wealth) to adopt an attitude of arrogance toward the matter of knowledgeability of the world
around them--be it at the local, national, or international levels--by choosing to deliberately remain ignorant (e.g. refusing to keep up
with the news--especially from reputable sources); preferring instead to wallow in the mundaneness of their quotidian lives. What is
amazing is that even in those circumstances where there is a clear need to be knowledgeable, they remain arrogant about their igno-
rance. (A good example here is the tragedy perpetrated by some terrorists in New York City that commonly came to be referred to as
9/11. This event should have spurred all who were literate in North America and elsewhere in the West to make an effort to learn
about the historical antecedents that precipitated this event as well as the proposed military response to it by the governments of the
United States and its Western allies to determine its appropriateness. But of course the ignorantsia did neither; the consequences of
which continue to haunt us to this day.)
Ideology: Throughout this course, unless indicated otherwise, this term is used to mean a “style of thought” or a system of ideas and con-
cepts which may or may not be cogent and correct, but which color world views and shape behavior. The term, therefore, is used in the Parsonian neu-
tral sense (that is, as an internally consistent cognitive system). Consequently, it must be distinguished from the Marxian usage of the term (the
antithesis of “true” political consciousness), as well as the positivist usage (the antithesis of “true” social science).
Ignorantsia (or Ignoranti): In my classes these terms are used interchangeably to signify a body of people in a society who share one com-
mon characteristic: the absence of “political consciousness” among them (which renders them incapable of distinguishing between their objec-
tive interests and their subjective interests and thereby making themselves available for ideological manipulation by means of the mass media,
think tanks, and the like, owned and/or controlled by the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie).70 It is important to note, therefore, that the term is
used in a social structurally neutral sense. That is, members of the ignorantsia transcend the conventional boundaries of class, gender, national-
ity, ethnicity, race, religion, age, educational qualifications, and so on. In the West, this lack of political consciousness is attributable to the sur-
render of the critical intellect on the part of the ignorantsia in exchange for crumbs scattered by corporate capital from its (capital’s) table. A
problem that W. E. B. Du Bois (1996: 642), for example, sagely described thusly:
If we are coming to recognize that the great modern problem is to correct maladjustment in the distribution of wealth… [then] in this
crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital. Unconsciously and consciously, carelessly and deliberately, the vast power of the
white labor vote in modern democracies has been cajoled and flattered into imperialistic schemes to enslave and debauch black, brown
and yellow labor, until with fatal retribution they are themselves today bound and gagged and rendered impotent by the resulting mo-
nopoly of the world’s raw material in the hands of a dominant, cruel and irresponsible few [bourgeoisie]
69. This term may also be used to refer to the arrogantly fallacious equation of technological superiority with moral superiority.
70 These terms are a polite version of the arithmetic result of this formula: masses minus m.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-37-320.jpg)
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Mesmerized by the ideology of capitalist consumerism, members of the ignorantsia are unwilling to question the domination of their lives by
the dictates and demands of corporate capital. A classic example of this behavior in the economic arena is the rising popularity of bottled
potable water among the ignorantsia today. There is an inability to see that it is the activities of corporate capital that are polluting water sup-
plies, and, therefore, there is a concomitant inability to seek a political solution to this problem by means of legislative restraints on corporate
capital. Instead, however, the ignorantsia simply goes along with the solution that corporate capital has devised: marketing to the consumers,
the ignorantsia, bottled potable water (which itself has a negative impact on the environment because of the resources needed to mine, bottle,
transport, and market the water)—needless to say this is a win, win situation all around, but only for corporate capital. Note that, as an antonym of
the word intelligentsia (defined for our purposes as those who navigate between the mediocrity of the ignorantsia and the decadence and hu-
bris of the bourgeoisie), the term is suffused by a pejorative flavor; this is not accidental: it is an outcome of frustration and exasperation (but
not hopelessness) with the behavior of the ignorantsia. Consider the deeply depressing spectacle, in this second decade of the twenty-first
century, of the U.S. ignorantsia being led to the slaughter house like sheep by U.S. corporate capital and its acolytes—symptomatic of which is
the former’s apparent indifference to deeply profound matters, ranging from the ever-widening politically engineered quality-of-life chasm
between the super-rich and the rest, to the systematic attack on human and civil rights in the name of a mythical “national interest;” from the
misuse of national resources on ill-fated imperial adventures to make the world “safe” for capital, to the acceleration of the journey toward the
abyss of irreversible planetary environmental destruction; from the relentless unconscionable pursuit of wanton materialism on the backs of
slave and semi-slave labor domiciled in the countries of the Afro-Asian and South American ecumene, to the unjustified and ever-widening
local as well as global economic inequality; and so on. At the same time, the use of this term is an effort at steering away from the romanticiza-
tion of the unwashed (the working classes) by the radical left—a pastime in which it often revels. However, the term also signifies a belief that
there is sufficient room in Western capitalist societies, in terms of procedural democracy, for the ignorantsia to develop alternative ways of
thinking and behaving in order to break the mental chains that binds it to capital. The term ignorantsia, therefore, must be seen to incorporate
two implicit messages: despair and hope. (See also Political Consciousness)
IMF: International Monetary Fund
Imperialism: The imposition of nonterritorial hegemony (or as in the case of colonialism territorial hegemony). Further, in my classes it refers
to the imperialism that arose upon the heels of the launch of the European Voyages of Exploitation (the conventional usage of the word
“exploration” is a clear Eurocentrist misnomer), and therefore must be distinguished from all other forms of imperialism that preceded it—
such as those of the Ancient world. The distinction is an important one in that “modern” imperialism was a symptom of the development of
the capitalist mode of production in a particular cultural milieu (specifically that of Europe) that saw religious proselytization as a duty incum-
bent upon all—including the state—against the backdrop of the rise of the modern nation state. In other words, imperialism was an outcome
of the dialectic in the structural/ideational binary. (Note that this is one of those concepts where there are as many definitions as those willing
to define it.71) See also Neoimperialism
Institutional Racism: See Race/Racism
International Monetary Fund (IMF): Like the World Bank, this is also an international capitalist financial institution (that also excludes
communist countries from membership) but whose purpose is different from that of the World Bank in that its main concern is to help main-
tain the stability of the international financial system—one tool that it uses toward this end is to provide emergency loans to governments that
are unable to pay their foreign debts but with strict and often onerous conditions attached to the loans that usually impact the poor and the
vulnerable in most egregious ways. The IMF was set up following a conference in July 1944 of non-communist nations in Bretton Woods (in
New Hampshire, United States), as the Second World War was about to end, called the Bretton Woods Conference or officially the United
Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Note that the IMF was one of the two financial institutions (the other was the World Bank) that
the conference inaugurated and hence the two together are also often referred to as the Bretton Woods institutions. (Note that the legacy of
the Bretton Woods institutions after more than sixty years of existence is that inequality in the world between countries and within countries
has grown exponentially—a clear indication of their true purpose: the promotion of unbridled corporate capitalism on a world scale.)
Interpersonal Democracy: See Democracy.
Intersectionality Theory: See Race/Racism.
Ironical Allegory: An important ingredient of satire is irony. Irony refers to the production of double meanings via any one or more of sev-
eral devices: contrast, contradiction, incongruity, etc. Irony is especially present in satire made up of indirect aggression. A well known ironic
device used by literary satirists is the irony of allegory. An allegory is an entire story created and presented for the purpose of producing two
71. Those wishing a quick entry into the various theories behind this concept will do well by thumbing through these five separate collections of essays on the
subject: Chilcote (2000a, 2000b), Mommsen and Osterhammel (1986), Owen and Sutcliffe (1972), and Patnaik (1986). For a critique of the current resurgence
of nostalgia for European imperialism among neoliberals and right wing conservatives in the West, couched in advocacy of what we may term as “imperialism
with a human face,” see Amin (1992), Bartholomew (2006), and Foster (2006), who all provide us with a look from various angles at the most enduring and core
feature of European imperialism of whatever age, and most aptly described by Amin thusly:
The intervention of the North [OD countries of the Euro-North American ecumene] in the affairs of the South [all PQD countries] is—in all its aspects,
at every moment, in whatever form, and a fortiori when it takes the form of a military or political intervention—negative. Never have the armies of the North
brought peace, prosperity, or democracy to the peoples of Asia, Africa, or Latin America. In the future, as in the past five centuries, they can only bring to these
peoples further servitude, the exploitation of their labor, the expropriation of their riches, and the denial of their rights (pp. 17–18).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-38-320.jpg)
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assertion of collective identity. Like nationalism, it may harbor a variety of contents or purposes. Consequently it may take many forms, de-
pending on the social and political contexts in which it is expressed. Like nationalism in a colonial situation, however, it becomes a vehicle for
collective action when alternative channels are suppressed or lose their legitimacy” (Moore 1994: 213).72
Islamophobia: See Race/Racism.
Jihad: struggle for the sake of Al’lah. (There are two related meanings of struggle here: at the community level the struggle takes the form of
a defensive war; at the individual level it takes the form of a personal quest for salvation.)
Jim Crow: A phrase that refers to the racial segregation that had existed de facto in the United States prior to the Civil War (primarily brought
about as a result of the massive immigration of the European working class and peasantry to the United States in the early 1800s) that became
de jure, mostly but not only in the South, following the abolition of slavery. This juridical-based form of segregation arose by means of a set of
racist discriminatory laws that were enacted by mostly Southern states on the back of the old “slave codes” and the newer (1865-1866) racially
discriminatory “black codes” with the return to power of the former confederate governments (effected through political corruption and ter-
rorism—see Nieman [1991]) in the post-Reconstruction era, in spite of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S.
constitution that had firmly established the civil and human rights of African Americans.73
The power of an alliance of Euro-American agrarian and urban capitalist classes in the U.S. South bent on restoring as many features of
the old slave order as possible, operating through such terrorist groups as the Ku Klux Klan, was such that not only did they systematically and
brutally disenfranchise African Americans (and other racial/ethnic minorities), but managed to create a political and legal environment in
which a racist U.S. Supreme Court unjustly reversed the legislative intent of the amendments—by means of a ruling in an infamous case called
Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) in which the Court came up with the bogus doctrine of “separate but equal.” (This doctrine would not be overturned
until a ruling in another Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education [1954]). However, like its counterpart, apartheid, Jim Crow evolved to
be more than simply racial segregation; it was a neo-fascist political economic order, a proto-totalitarian system, at the heart of which was the
massive economic exploitation of African Americans and in which the civil and human rights of those whites who opposed racial segregation
(albeit a courageous but very tiny minority) were also wiped out.
The term “Jim Crow” itself is said to have originated from a song sung by an enslaved and disabled African American “owned” by a Mr.
Jim Crow and overheard and later popularized (beginning in 1828 in Louisville) by Daddy Rice (Thomas Dartmouth Rice) through the medi-
um of black minstrel shows—comedic song and dance routines performed by whites in blackface based on highly demeaning negative stereo-
types of African Americans. The song’s refrain went:
Wheel about and turn about
And do jis so,
Ebry time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow
Jingoism: See Nationalism.
KGB: Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security)—the notorious Russian secret police and intelligence agency
of the Soviet era.
Labor-aristocracy: A derogatory term originally used by Lenin which in my classes is used fairly similarly to refer to a section of the proletari-
at that delusively sees its objective interests to lie more closely with that of capital than other workers because of access to privileges not enjoyed by
all workers (e.g., possession of “whiteness” that permits the “purchase” of better pay and working conditions relative to those who lack this
property value; or possession of a relatively well-paying job in an environment of massive underemployment and unemployment.)74
72. For more on Islamism see the following: Beinin and Stork (1997), Ciment (1997a), Entelis (1997), Naylor (2000), Sonbol (2000), and Wickham (2002).
73. The text of the Amendments (but only the relevant parts from the perspective of this course) are as follows:
Thirteenth Amendment (ratified December 18, 1865): Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this
article by appropriate legislation.
Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 23, 1868): Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of
the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws.
Fifteenth Amendment (ratified March 30, 1870): Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or
by any State on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate
legislation.
74. In its original usage, Lenin was commenting on the politics of trade unions, that is whether they were an institutional embodiment of pro-capital proclivities
and therefore not suited to revolutionary politics or whether they were authentic proletarian organizations but often hijacked by labor “aristocrats.” Here is the
key paragraph:
But we wage the struggle against the “labor aristocracy” in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them to our side; we wage the strug-
gle against the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class to our side. To forget this most elementary and most self-evident truth
would be stupid. And it is precisely this stupidity the German “Left” Communists are guilty of when, because of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary
character of the trade union top leadership, they jump to the conclusion that… we must leave the trade unions!! that we must refuse to work in them!! that we](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-40-320.jpg)
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of social structures for most people in the Euro/American ecumene in their illusory quest for upward socio-economic mobility. Hence,
if you were to trace your ancestry there is an almost one hundred percent chance that you would end up with ancestors who were ei-
ther slaves from Africa or slaves in the Roman times in Europe. Focusing on Europe, the slaves from Greek and Roman times eventu-
ally became serfs in the feudal era and who then, in turn, became the modern working classes in the era of industrial capitalism, mil-
lions of whom along the way ended up in the European Diaspora scattered across the planet—an immensely brutal and painful pro-
cess—from Australia to Brazil, and from Canada to South Africa.
Incidentally, the first usage of this term (American Dream) and its definition is credited to the historian James Truslow Adams,
who, writing in 1931 (at the height of Jim Crow, one may ironically recall), stated that the American Dream was
that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to
ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves
have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in
which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recog-
nized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. (p. 404, The Epic of America
[Boston: Little, Brown, 1931])
Notice that unlike the way it has come to be understood today, in this definition of the American Dream, materialism is not the
defining quality, but rather egalitarianism (and, therefore, in this sense the American Dream is about life, liberty and the pursuit of hap-
piness for all, that is authentic democracy—in contrast to procedural democracy). It is also worth pointing out that today the
“American Dream,” for most EuroAmericans also means the opportunity to live in racially segregated neighborhoods.84
To conclude, one of the most important ideological concepts in a capitalist democracy is that of meritocracy, and in United States
meritocracy is expressed as the “American Dream.” The ideological role of this concept is to help underwrite political stability for the
capitalist system. As long as the masses believe in the concept of meritocracy they will not challenge the system, in fact, on the contra-
ry, they will become its most ardent supporters. However, given the nature of capitalism, meritocracy, whether considered in its generic
sense or in the sense of the American Dream, is, by and large, a mythological concept—and this is doubly so when considered from the
perspectives of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and so on.
Notice the qualifier in the preceding sentence. In other words, to make you feel better, the foregoing should not imply, however,
that the concept of the American Dream is completely bogus (after all, to some degree, the concept is a subjective one—what consti-
tutes the American Dream is not necessarily the same for everyone). While those who attempt to pursue their American Dream are not
immune from systemic or structural oppression (racism, sexism, classism, and so on) in a capitalist democracy like the United States,
one must also acknowledge that this is not just a capitalist society but it is also a democracy. That is, in a post-civil rights era United
States there is sufficient space for some individuals to successfully confront structural oppression by exerting their agency (instead of
waiting for the revolution, which, trust me, is not coming any time soon no matter what the bourgeois-left says). If all oppression was
structural then there is absolutely no hope for a better tomorrow. Yes? The fundamental truth is this: capitalist democracies may be
meritocratic, but only at the level of a few (relatively speaking) “lucky” individuals but not at the level of social groups as a whole. But
who are these lucky individuals? They are those who through chance and design manage to achieve their American Dream by being in
the right place at the right time.
There is, in fact, a vast “self-help” cottage industry in the United States that aims to teach you how to improve your chances of
achieving the American Dream. A well-known guru, for example, of this industry is one Tom Corley. He claims that he spent five years
studying the daily habits of 233 self-made millionaires and 128 poor people in United States and as a result he came up with 300 habits
that “separate the rich from the poor.” He concludes: “The fact is, the poor are poor because they have too many Poor Habits and too
few Rich Habits. Poor parents teach their children the Poor Habits and wealthy parents teach their children the Rich Habits. We don’t
have a wealth gap in this country we have a parent gap. We don’t have income inequality, we have parent inequality.”85 So, what are
some of these bourgeois habits he is talking about? Here is a selection from his website (which you will notice are worth pursuing even
if you don’t stand a chance of becoming a member of the bourgeoisie):
Gambling Habits – 6% of self-made millionaires played the lottery vs. 77% of the poor. 16% of self-made millionaires gambled at
least once a week on sports vs. 52% of the poor.
Health Habits -21% of self-made millionaires were overweight by 30 pounds or more vs. 66% of the poor. 76% of these million-
aires exercised aerobically 30 minutes or more each day vs. 23% of the poor. 25% of these millionaires ate less than 300 junk food
calories each day vs. 5% of the poor. 25% of these millionaires ate at fast food restaurants each week vs. 69% of the poor. 13% of
these millionaires got drunk at least once a month vs. 60% of the poor.
84. As Daniel Denver, in his article “The 10 Most Segregated Urban Areas in America,” accurately observes: “For the besieged white subdivision
dweller, the American Dream means freedom from society’s poor and black.” (Article published by www.salon.com at
http://www.salon.com/news/race/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/03/29/most_segregated_cities.
See also a feature story titled “Cyberdiscrimination in Dallas,” available through this link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregory-d-
squires/cyberdiscrimination-in-da_b_574008.html by Professor Gregory D. Squires). Of course, race is not the only relevant matter here, class is
too in the sense that the American Dream also means the opportunity for the rich (regardless of color) to live as far away from the poor (regard-
less of color) as possible.
85. From his website at: http://richhabits.net/20-learned-habits-that-will-make-your-child-rich-or-poor/#more-5331 (accessed June 14, 2015).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-45-320.jpg)
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sult of their support of the Allied cause, or lending credibility to documents such as the Atlantic Charter, were to quickly founder on the rocks
of post-World War II reality in which a new “war” was being fomented by the United States and its allies: the cold war.90
Those in London, Washington, and Paris who saw the imperialism of the Nazis as an evil that had to be destroyed took a different (hypocriti-
cal) view when it came to their own imperialism vis-à-vis the peoples of the Afro-Asian ecumene; they deemed it a good thing—even for its
victims! Therefore, despite the U.S. stance (at least at the level of rhetoric) during the war, of anticolonialism and support for majority rule—as
evidenced in the speeches of President Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and others—the United States at the end of World
War II would inaugurate an era in which the old European form of imperialism (colonialism) would eventually be supplanted by a new and
modern form of imperialism: that of “neoimperialism” (for want of a better word) in which the United States would become a dominant
partner, involving the subordination of the legitimate aspirations for freedom and democracy among the colonized peoples to the require-
ments of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Initially, however, the commencement of the cold war, as the decade of the 1940s came to a close, would be accompanied by a renewed
effort on the part of the European colonizers to cling to their colonial possessions, even as they began the long and arduous task of rebuilding
their own war-torn countries and even after having saved themselves from the same fate that they were now so keen to continue foisting on
other peoples. In this ignoble task, however, they would have behind them the unexpected, tacit and sometimes overt, support of the United
States. From the point of view of the United States, the struggle for freedom and democracy in the colonies, it was felt, could only lead to
expansionary opportunities for its cold war opponent, the Soviet Union; therefore such struggles had to be opposed. Consequently, many
colonies in Africa and Asia discovered that contrary to war-time promises made, or expectations falsely engendered, freedom from coloniza-
tion would entail their own “mini-world wars.” Colonies ranging from Vietnam through India to Algeria all found themselves involved in vari-
ous types of bitter, anticolonial struggles in which thousands amongst the colonized would perish.
While many of these colonies would eventually achieve political independence by the early 1960s, that is, once it had become clear to the
European colonizers that the costs of maintaining direct political control had been rendered prohibitively high by the anticolonial insurrections
(hence indirect control via economic domination was preferable), in one part of the world political independence and democratic majority rule
would be a longtime coming: in Africa, especially Southern Africa. There, in the countries of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa,
and Zimbabwe, Portuguese colonialism and racist minority rule would continue well into the 1970s and 1980s. Behind this awful fate that dog-
ged the black majorities of these countries was the ubiquitous hand of U.S. administrations, sometimes hidden and sometimes overt. Thus
tyrannical minority rule in Southern Africa would receive nourishment from the U.S. administrations, ironically on grounds that such rule was
the guarantor of freedom! But freedom for whom? And freedom from what?
The story of U.S. relations with much of the PQD world in the post-World War II period, right up to the beginning of the closing decade
of the twentieth century, must therefore be seen as a story of the contradiction between, on one hand, the ideological dictates of historically-
rooted notions (of support for freedom and democracy and opposition to imperialism) that abound in a country that itself had once fought a
war of liberation, and, on the other hand, the reality of the demands of waging a global “cold” war with the former communist nations of
Eastern Europe over the Western world’s need to continue to preserve at all costs the dominance of capitalism within the international eco-
nomic system—but set against the ideology of whiteness.91
NGO: refers to organizations formed outside governmental jurisdiction by the citizenry (civil society) and it is an abbreviation for non-
governmental organizations.
Nonviolent Civil Disobedience: A strategy for political change, but one that should not be confused with a “pacifist strategy.” That is, it is
not a “do-nothing” strategy. As Gandhi practiced it in South Africa (and later India) and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States, the non-
violent civil disobedience strategy involves creative resistance to tyranny (sit-ins, boycotts, demonstrations, petitions, and so on) that stops short
of using violence, even in the face of the violence of the enemy. The strategy is to appeal to the conscience of the oppressor by refusing to
answer the oppressor’s violence with one owns violence, but all the time refusing to submit to the unjust laws of the oppressor.
Objective Interests: All human beings, both individually and collectively (as specific groups or as societies as a whole), have objective interests
and subjective interests. Now, the difference between the two is that the first (objective) set of interests are those that an independent observer can
90. The Atlantic Charter, which was a press release issued on August 14, 1941 (following a secret meeting on a ship off the coast of Newfoundland between the
U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill), had made reference in Article III to the right of all peoples to
self-determination of government and political freedom. (“Third, they [the United States and Britain] respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of
government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”
Note: the document is available on the Internet.) Even though the charter was formulated with the European peoples in mind, elites in the PQD countries, in
bouts of grandiose optimism, looked upon the document as the death knell for imperialism everywhere. The United States was perceived by many Asian and
African leaders as the harbinger of their freedom. This was an illusion; for, as Noer (1985: 17) says, the United States did not really include the PQD colonies in
its rhetoric on self-determination, freedom, and human rights. (Of course, in a very different sense, both Britain and the United States were indirectly responsi-
ble for the present freedom of these former European colonies. One only has to surmise with horror what their fate would have been had the Germans and
their fascist ally, Italy, won the Second World War.)
91. Among the many theoretical weaknesses of mainline international relations theory—see, for example, Chowdhry and Nair (2002); Dunn and Shaw (2001);
Jones (2001); and Scott (2002)—and here the Marxists are also at fault, has been the deafening silence on the matter of “race” despite the fact that race has
always been an integral element of international relations going all the way back to the Crusades, and most certainly in the post-Columbian period. Writing some
three decades ago Bandhopadhyaya (1977/78) reminded us that a fuller comprehension of international relations required consideration of what he called
“global racism” as a legitimate independent category of analysis. (What is more, even in the current post-9/11 era, the race problematic has not withered away
but has, instead, transmuted into a race-plus-xenophobia problematic that may be termed as “Islamophobia.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-49-320.jpg)
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objectively identify.92 Subjective interests, on the other hand, are interests that are unique to specific individuals or groups and which only they can
point to them—that is, an objective observer would have to be told about them. To make this difference clearer some examples are in order.
From a biological point of view, an objective interest that all human beings have is access to adequate nutritionally rich food. Another objective
interest is access to decent affordable shelter; another objective interest is access to adequate affordable health care; and so on. On the other
hand, what particular kinds of foods (e.g. bread versus rice or meat versus fish or mangoes versus apples, etc.), or what kind of housing (e.g.
apartments versus houses), are subjective interests. Some more examples: in modern societies, access to affordable quality schooling is an ob-
jective interest; whereas access to public versus private schooling or access to a boarding school versus a day school are subjective interests.
From the perspective of who is teaching this course, your objective interests in this class are matters like: fairness (that is, not biased in terms
of raced, gender, class, ethnicity, etc.); excellent mastery of subject matter; ability to communicate effectively; a passion for teaching; a well-
organized syllabus; punctuality; and flexibility when circumstances call for it. Your subjective interests, on the other hand, are being concerned
about things like the gender of the teacher or ethnicity or race or religion; whether the teacher is disabled or not, or whether the teacher wears
a suit versus casual dress, or whether the teacher is fat or thin, or whether the teacher’s personality is one of a smiley happy-go-lucky person or
not; and so on. In capitalist societies, the objective interests of the masses (that is the working classes) primarily concerns undermining the
class warfare of the capitalist classes waged against them—by demanding such things as decent wages, safe working conditions, universal access
to affordable health care, a pollution-free environment, a robust social safety net, fair tax policies, and so on (all of which undermine the key objec-
tive interest of the capitalist class, namely surplus appropriation).
On the basis of the foregoing, you should now be able to distinguish between objective interests versus subjective interests. At the same
time, you should also be in a position to think of situations where you are hurting your objective interests by confusing your subjective interests
with your objective interests.93
From the perspective of capitalist democracies, this concept in my view is of great importance in helping us analyze the political behavior
of the masses; especially behavior that does not further their objective interests but, on the contrary, undermines them. That is, the penchant
for self-oppression that one witnesses time and time again among the masses (that is the working classes—like yourselves) can only be ex-
plained by a lack of political consciousness that allows them to be manipulated by the bourgeoisie into “objectifying” their subjective inter-
ests and “subjectifying” their objective interests. Here are some examples of such behavior: being obsessed with banning abortion than being
concerned about access to a robust social safety-net; being more concerned about owning guns (here in the U.S.) than access to decent af-
fordable housing or decent well-paying permanent jobs; being more concerned about the race or ethnicity of fellow citizens than about the
unconscionably spiraling income inequality brought about by the class warfare of the rich that undermines the overall quality of life of all;
being more incensed with the very poor accessing the social safety net (e.g. food stamps—here in the U.S.) than being concerned with the
lower-than-the cost-of-living minimum wage levels; being more concerned with the political status of one’s country in the world (jingoism)
rather than being concerned about the absence of the rule of law and other similar democratic protections; and so on.
OD Countries: Over-Developed/Developed. Used in my classes (together with PQD countries) to refer to the comparative socio-economic
status of different countries across the planet.94
Other/Otherness: This term refers to the ideology of the Other in which human beings of a different skin color, or gender, or class, or na-
tionality, or culture (understood in the broadest sense to include everything about human existence that is learned and not biologically inherit-
ed, ranging from food to music to politics to religion to economics, etc.) are consistently portrayed/treated as inferior beings for the purpose
of dehumanizing them—as a device for their “erasure” or exclusion from the mainstream of society (marginalization) for the purposes of ex-
ploitation or dispossession or the political expediency of scapegoating, the extreme form of which can even culminate in genocide. This ideology
can only emerge in the context of a hierarchic notion of “us” versus “them” (in other words, otherness requires a dyadic sense of a self: one
that is incapable of standing alone but must permanently stand in opposition to someone else). Among the key instruments behind the manufac-
92. There are some who argue that the distinction between objective interests versus subjective interests is an illusory distinction; it doesn’t really exist. One
person’s subjective interest can be another person’s objective interest and vice versa. In some unique circumstances, this may be so. For example, it is possible
that for someone on hunger strike access to food may no longer be an objective interest; whereas for the vast majority of people it is. In short, with the excep-
tion of such unique circumstances, this concept does have heuristic value; that is for our purposes in this course it has meaningful analytical usefulness.
93. Here is homework for you that may help you become a happier person: list all your major worries and then divide them into subjective interests versus ob-
jective interests. After that train your mind not to worry about subjective interests; and instead concentrate on finding solutions to problems associated with your
objective interests.
94. Following the thought-provoking work of Lewis and Wigen in their Myth of Continents (1997), an effort has been made in this work to dispense with two
egregious terms: the “Third World” and “developing countries.” The normative hierarchy implicit in the term Third World is simply unwarranted in this day and
age. Moreover, it is an erroneous term now given the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the rapid erosion of communism in China (the so-called “Second
World”). As for developing countries it simply does not make sense today (if it ever did). New categories are needed to designate the different levels of econom-
ic development. Leys (1971: 32), writing more than three decades ago pointed out the problem: “The very expression developing countries has come to sound
embarrassing precisely because it so obviously rests on the linear conception [of development] and sometimes refers to countries which are in fact stagnating or
even regressing.” While any categorization will, to some degree, be arbitrary, it must do the best it can to come as close to reality as possible without, however,
becoming so unwieldy that it loses its user-friendly value; but certainly anything is probably better than the current scheme that lumps, for example, Burkina
Faso and Djibouti in the same category with Brazil and India or Ireland and Hungary with Germany and United States. Toward this end, five categories appear
to strike a proper balance: pre-developing (e.g., Burkina Faso, Jamaica, Zambia); quasi-developing (e.g., Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa); developing (e.g.,
Brazil, India, Poland, Russia, South Korea); developed (e.g., Australia, Canada, Denmark); and over-developed (e.g., Britain, Germany, United States). Sometimes,
where necessary, in the text these five categories will be collapsed into two primary divisions expressed as: pre/quasi/developing (PQD) countries, and
over/developed (OD) countries. Of course, no one ever dares to admit, be it academics or politicians, the inherent dissemblance that undergirds such terminol-
ogy—that in order for all to achieve the much sought after status of “developed” we would need the resources of three or more planet earths combined since
the present status of the over developed is being maintained on the basis of their consumption of more than two-thirds of the world’s resources (even though
they constitute a mere one third of the world’s population).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-50-320.jpg)
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Political consciousness: A concept that refers to a state of mind characterized by an unending desire to acquire knowledge and information
about society against the background of specific ideational and methodological approaches, of which these four are central: (1) civilization; (2)
objectivity; (3) truth; and (4) the status quo. (1) Civilization. A politically conscious person recognizes that civilization has two dimensions to it:
the moral, and the material; and it is the former that is of paramount importance. By moral civilization I mean the attainment of civilized atti-
tudes and behavior vis-à-vis other human beings, and other forms of life on this planet. Central to moral civilization is the attitude and behav-
ior that is motivated by concrete efforts to respond to the question: What can I do, in terms of my personal attitudes and behavior toward all
life forms (beginning with my immediate family and then extending outward to my relatives, friends, community, other communities, society,
other societies and other planetary life forms, etc.) to make this planet a better place for them to live in? Underlying this question would be
such positive behavioral things as altruism, love, morality, humanity, magnanimity, forgiveness, charitability, amicability, open-mindedness, and
so on.
(2) Objectivity. Conservatives like to talk about being “objective,” but the quest for “objectivity” as normally understood is inherently chimer-
ical. The problem was raised by, among others, Gunnar Myrdal (1969) two decades ago. He framed it thus:
The ethos of social science is the search for “objective” truth . The most fundamental methodological problems facing the social scientist
are therefore, what is objectivity, and how can the student attain objectivity in trying to find out the facts and the causal relationships be-
tween facts? How can a biased view be avoided? More specifically, how can the student of social problems liberate himself from [a] the
powerful heritage of earlier writings in his field of inquiry, ordinarily containing normative and teleological notions inherited from past
generations and founded upon the metaphysical moral philosophies of natural law and utilitarianism from which all our social and eco-
nomic theories have branched off; [b] the influences of the entire cultural, social, economic, and political milieu of the society where he
lives, works, and earns his living and his status; and [c] the influence stemming from his own personality, as molded not only by traditions
and environment but also by his individual history, constitution and inclinations? (1969:3-4.)
The answer to his question, as he himself, implied is that objectivity is impossible in the social sciences in the sense in which conservatives (also
referred to as positivists) advocate. Consequently, any study of any phenomenon or “object” in the social sciences will invariably be colored
(not necessarily consciously) by the researcher’s own subconscious proclivities, and manifest at the level of choice of questions asked, choice
of data collected and examined, choice of methods used, and so on. There is, however, another problem too: all work in the social sciences,
even that which purports to be for the sake of the advancement of basic knowledge alone, is ultimately (and if not directly at least indirectly)
programmatic. That is, all studies in the social sciences contain within them a mission—whether articulated or not—relating to the ultimate
value or purpose of the study: which is to either preserve or change the status quo; this also has a bearing on “objectivity” in the social scienc-
es. (Some, such as Kuhn [1970], have gone so far as to say that even in the natural sciences there is no such thing as “objective” science.) How-
ever, guys, I must also emphasize here that the position that “objective” social science does not exist is not to say that anything goes; that any-
thing any one says about anything is all valid. Rather, it is to say that the quest for knowledge must adhere to the principle of critical thinking.
(3) Truth. A person who is politically conscious is a person who seeks the truth in relation to society as a whole with the objective of under-
standing how that society can become a better society for all its members in terms of social justice, economic progress, environmental safety,
and so on. What kind of truth? It is truth relating to how the status quo has come about and how it is maintained—that is who benefits from
it and who suffers from it. This task requires one to be fully conversant with all historical processes that explain the status quo, which in turn
requires him or her to be multi-disciplinary in approach given the multidimensional nature of all human existence. For, in the words of that
brilliant intellectual, Paul A. Baran, “ the seemingly autonomous, disparate, and disjointed morsels of social existence under capitalism—
literature, art, politics, the economic order, science, the cultural and psychic condition of people—can all be understood (and influenced) only
if they are clearly visualized as parts of the comprehensive totality of the historical process” (1961:12-13). Since no society is perfect in terms
of social justice, human advancement, and general human happiness, the politically conscious person is of necessity continuously questioning
the status quo and striving for its perfection. Consequently he/she is by definition an insurrectionist, a revolutionary (but whose weapons are
pens and whose ammunition are words) because he/she does not wish to permit the beneficiaries of the status quo (the rich and the powerful)
from obfuscating the truth: that the status quo, especially in capitalist societies, benefits primarily the rich and the powerful and that it has
evolved to this end through human agency and not some supernatural being or even just “nature.” This point was best presented by Barring-
ton Moore, Jr. in his magnum opus some thirty years ago:
[A]ny simple straightforward truth about political institutions or events is bound to have polemical consequences. It will damage some
group interests. In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works. Very often therefore
truthful analyses are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like exposures rather than objective statements, as the term is conventionally
used.… For all students of human society, sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victors’ claims pro-
vide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology (1966: 523).
It follows from this that even in those instances where an unjust order has been overthrown and a new just order is being constructed, the task
of those who are politically conscious is not over. The new order will still have imperfections. Hence, as long as human societies remain imper-
fect the job of the politically conscious is a permanent one. To put it differently: a politically conscious person is someone who is essentially, to
use Baran’s words: “a social critic, a person whose concern is to identify, to analyze, and in this way to help overcome the obstacles barring the
way to the attainment of a better, more humane, and more rational social order. As such he[/she] becomes the conscience of society and the
spokes[person] of such progressive forces as it contains in any given period of history. And as such he[/she] is inevitably considered a “trou-
blemaker” and a “nuisance” by the ruling class seeking to preserve the status quo.” (1961:17)
(4) Status quo. A politically conscious person is never satisfied with the status quo. Or to put the matter differently: a politically conscious
person is not a political conservative; that is he/she shuns the ideology of political conservatism.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-52-320.jpg)
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race morally superior to others (even if you are tempted to believe that you belong to one because of all the suffering that your race has en-
dured at the hands of others). If we could go back two thousand years into history and were able to ask God, or some other supernatural
power of your choice, to make this one change for us but keep everything else the same: transpose Africans with Europeans in their respective
places, today we would be grappling with black “Euroracism” instead of white “Euroracism” (and whites of course would be the victims). In
other words, racism is not genetically-rooted within a particular group of people—who today happen to be mostly those of European ances-
try, as a consequence of historical serendipity. Fifth, from the perspective of analysis be extremely vigilant against the temptation to reify socie-
ties. To explain: societies do not exist as concrete objects that you can see, touch, or feel. Rather, they are intangible social constructions. There-
fore, if you, as an individual, find that your personal experiences do not reflect some of the statements made in this entry, it does not imply that
the statements are not applicable to a broad group of others. You, by yourself, are not society. So, take a chill pill, calm down, and carry on.
Mention the words race or racism in most Western countries today, such as the United States, and immediately most people become up-
tight, defensive, and even angry: the racists because they claim that it no longer exists today, or if they agree that it does exist then at least they
themselves are not racists; and the targets of racism because they know all too well that racism is all around them, institutionally as well as in-
terpersonally. Yet, the irony is that the racists and their victims, both, have a very poor understanding of why racism persists, what forms it
takes, what role it plays in society, and how (or whether) it can be ever be eradicated. Folks, what you must know is this: while we who live in a
society such as this one are ALL affected by racism in one way or another from the time we are born, that does not in itself guarantee that we
will understand it fully. The fact is racism, like its other counterparts (classism, sexism, etc.), is a very complex ideology and system of oppres-
sion. Its complexity stems from the dialectical interplay between structure, ideology, and behavioral practice at both institutional and interpersonal
levels. There are nine critical issues associated with this interplay: (1) the mythical basis of the ideology; (2) the mode of its origins and trans-
mission; (3) the variety of forms it takes, depending upon historical time period; (4) the role it performs in society; (5) its relationship to other
ideologies of oppression: sexism, ethnicism, classism, etc., (6) the problem of contradiction: the futile attempt to create a racially egalitarian
society in an inherently non-egalitarian one; and (7) the fallacy of the concept of “reverse racism” (or “reverse discrimination”). Then there is
the matter of (8) the geographic specificity of certain forms racism. Three such forms are well-known today. So, with specific reference to
most Western countries (such as Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States), racism, at the ideological
level, takes the specific form of what some sociologists term as whiteness. This kind of geographic specificity is akin to two other forms, An-
ti-Semitism and Islamophobia, which however are found across the world today. And as if all this is not enough, there is (9) the problem of
what theoretical approach to take in the study of racism generally, as an intellectual endeavor (such as in colleges and universities).
1. Mythical basis of the Ideology
In addition to the fact that racism refers to behavioral practice, it should also be understood in terms of an ideology that is based on a mythical
conception of the category race. All scientific evidence to date points to only one fact: that there is only one race on this planet: the human race
(and the origins of which can be traced to Africa). Whatever racial categories “societies” have come up with are categories that have been cre-
ated artificially by those in power in order to create a basis for otherness as a means for justifying prejudice and discrimination for the purpose
of legitimating what I call “unjustifiable entitlement” (to land, labor, and other resources). Before Columbus set sail from Europe there was no
“white” race or “black” race or “red” race, or even “yellow” and “brown” race. It is the European domination of the world unleashed by the
Great European West-to-East Maritime Project that created a need among the Europeans to produce these artificial categories (hence the
legitimate view among sociologists today that race is a socially-constructed category). Before Columbus there were only ethnicities based on
learned, not genetically determined, distinctions of language and culture, such as: in Africa: the Akan, Malinke, Ngoni, Yoruba, Zulu, etc.; in
the Americas: the Aztec, Cherokee, Inuit, Maya, Sioux, etc.; in Asia: the Arab, Berber, Han, Jews, Korean, Mongol, Indo-Aryan, Dravids, etc.;
and in Europe: the English, French, German, Irish, Spanish, etc. Remember also that all human beings originate out of the same place, regard-
less of what you believe in: religious explanation (Garden of Eden [if you are a Christian, Jew or Muslim]) or scientific explanation (Africa). In
other words: whether you believe in God or in science, both recognize only one race: the human race. However, having said that it is important
to emphasize that in singing this favorite mantra of many intellectuals that “race” is nothing more than a social construction, the fact remains that
for most in a racialized society phenotypical markers are embodied with what Loury (2002), for example, calls “social signification.”
For victims of racism (and other similar forms of prejudice and discrimination based on superficial biologically-determined criteria), at one
level, it is not difficult to determine what racism is. They really do not need to be told what it is and what it does to them, as attested by their
everyday lived experience. In racist societies (as in the United States, or England, or India, or France, or Brazil, or South Africa, or Ireland, or
Malaysia, or Sudan, or Mauritania, or Australia, and so on) racism for them involves encounters with a poisoned environment in which, de-
pending upon the society and/or circumstance in question, their dignity and/or their lives are constantly under assault as the racists, by under-
going a process of “uncivilization,” attempt to harass or dehumanize or brutalize or terrorize or murder their victims merely because they be-
long to a different racial, ethnic, linguistic or other similar grouping.95 Yet, the ubiquity of racism in racist societies at the personal (or micro)
level tends to blind both victims and victimizers to its origins, forms and functions in society as a whole (macro or institutional level), making it
difficult to work toward the eradication of this heinous human social disease. At the outset, following Nash (1972) it would help by establishing
95. Although examples used in this section come primarily from the United States, it should be stressed that the aim of this section is not so much to show that
the United States is a racist society—a fact that cannot be disputed—but rather to arrive at an understanding of what racism is and what functions it performs
in racist societies. Racism, today is found in almost all societies, except that it takes a different form in those societies where all belong to the same race. This
form can be “ethnicism” for example. In many countries of Africa and Asia, the role performed by racism is performed by “ethnicism.” In some societies rac-
ism is substituted with discrimination based on linguistic and/or religious differences. Plus one must not forget that in almost all societies today one will find
discrimination of another kind: it is a type that is even more pervasive than racism, though it operates in almost the same way as racism does and performs
almost the same functions: sexism. But whether bigotry and discrimination are based on racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, gender (or any other biologically-
determined immutable factors) the end-goal remains the same for those who practice this bigotry and discrimination: to dominate and exploit their victims on
the basis of “unjustified entitlement.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-54-320.jpg)
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the fact that racism is an ideology (that is a “style of thought” or a system of ideas and concepts that, in this instance, is neither cogent nor
correct). As an ideology, racism has no scientific basis given its essential purpose: to impose a social and cultural significance on the genetic and
morphological diversity found in the human race (usually undertaken for the purposes of justifying and maintaining racially-based hierarchical
power relations). At its root therefore, racism does not seek to study and explain this diversity (which remains the legitimate project of science),
but rather seeks to illegitimately (in terms of science) use this diversity to arrive at explanations for social and cultural differences among differ-
ent population groups as identified by diverse phenotypes and genetic frequencies. As Nash (1972: 112–13) explains:
The ideology of race is a system of ideas which interprets and defines the meanings of racial differences, real or imagined, in terms of
some system of cultural values. The ideology of race is always normative: it ranks differences as better or worse, superior or inferior, desir-
able or undesirable, and as modifiable or unmodifiable. Like all ideologies, the ideology of race implies a call to action; it embodies a politi-
cal and social program; it is a demand that something be done. The ideology of race competes in a political arena, and it is embraced or
rejected by a polity, not a scientific community.… [Moreover], [o]n these grounds, that is, the functional consequences of ideologies, no
amount of evidence (even were it scientifically impeccable) will destroy an ideology, or even, perhaps, modify it.
It is necessary to stress, therefore, that the ideology of racism was “invented,” it did not emerge naturally out of supposed innate differences in
intelligence (despite assertions to the contrary by racist hate groups), in order to facilitate the domination of their victims by means of an un-
ending series of “racial projects.”96 In the case of racism in the Western world, for example, racism emerged to facilitate the racial project of
European domination of PQD peoples and the plunder of their resources by denying their humanity. This is not to suggest by any means that
a conspiracy took place in Europe in the fifteenth century when the so-called “voyages of discovery” (in actuality a misnomer because as
Burman [1989] clearly demonstrates much of the world was already known by the fifteenth century) would commence and propel Europeans
to the far reaches of the earth, and in the process unleash a nightmare on PQD peoples from which many have yet to recover. Rather, it is that
the combination of (a) an Occidental version of the Christian religion (which in reality was a corrupted form of an Eastern religion—Christ, it
must be remembered, was not a European), developed against a backdrop of the Crusades, with (b) a revolutionary form of economic system
that would first emerge in Europe on a large society-wide scale, merchant capitalism, proved to be a potently fertile mixture for the evolution
of a European racist ideology. Only racism, backed by a self-conjured device of the “divine mandate,” for example, could have made possible
such behavior of “God-fearing Christians” as that mentioned in the following account of a European slave raiding expedition in Africa:
Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best as he could. Some drowned
themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts; others stowed their children among the sea weed, where men
found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice… . And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed,
willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a
payment for all their labor and expenses; for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165 besides those
that perished and were killed… . (From in Kaufman and Guckin 1979: 2)
Therefore, armed with a racist ideology sanctified by European Christianity, and possessing technological superiority (in terms of weapons) to
implement this ideology, it became relatively easy for European imperialists to venture abroad into the lands of other peoples and proceed to
unleash an orgy of rapine terror and wholesale thievery of resources. And once the ideology of racism had emerged, it was not difficult to
soak the entire fabric of European societies in this ideology via the ubiquitous, but powerful process of socialization for generations to
come—that is long after the original economic roots of this ideology had disappeared from public consciousness.97 Although the seeds of
modern racist ideology in Europe were long planted in the debate that took place between those among the Spanish who decried the brutal
exploitation of Native Americans in the sixteenth century and those who argued that the exploitation was supported by Christian theology
(See McNutt 1909),98 racism, as an ideology, first received widespread respectability in the Western world via a perversion of the Darwinist
theory of evolution with its application to the explanation of the pigmentary, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the human community in the
nineteenth century by pseudo-scientists. These pseudo-scientists would claim that biological science (Darwinism) provided “proof” of the
inherent inferiority of the black peoples: that is that their evolution was on a different time scale from that of whites, placing them (blacks)
closer to apes than to humans (whites).
96. I am borrowing this concept from a theory known as racial formation theory developed by Omi and Winant (1994) to explain the persistence of racism
in modern societies.
97. From the perspective of transmission, racist ideologies depend on the creation of stereotypes and their transmission through agencies of socialization.
Racists rely on stereotypes to create otherness because stereotypes permit them to dehumanize their victims. These stereotypes can be both “positive” (intelli-
gent, industrious, ambitious), and negative (lazy, dumb, thieving, etc.) but, above all, in the arsenal of all racists three stereotypes are universal and salient: one has
to do with dirt, the other with sex, and the third with trust. For example, those who hold a monopoly over power and resources in the United States, the Eng-
lish, have portrayed all these groups at various times in history as unhygienically dirty, animalistically oversexed, and highly untrustworthy: Native Americans, U.S.
African Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. But where do stereotypes come from? They come from those who are involved
in producing the content of what we today call the media (books, cinema, television, theater, newspapers and magazines, radio, museums, etc.): writers, actors,
musicians, entertainers, artists, scholars, museum curators, travelers and explorers, etc. All of these people are involved in the creation, dissemination and
maintenance of stereotypes. As stereotypes become widespread in a society over time, other agencies of socialization besides the media become involved: the
family, the church, schools, and so on.
98. In actuality, the historical antecedents of the origins of the European ideology of racism lie in the first encounters between Europeans and Jews on one
hand (following the adoption of Christianity by the Romans under Constantine I in the fourth century), and Europeans and Muslims (following the Muslim
invasion of Europe in the eighth century) on the other. Remember too that the Muslims who arrived in Europe were made up of many different races and
ethnicities. Further down the road, in the eleventh century, came the Crusades, and this was one more formative influence in the genesis of European racism as
an ideology.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-55-320.jpg)
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(c) Consistent, persistent and spirited leadership from the highest levels of government and other public and social institutions in con-
demning racism and racial discrimination. (In the United States and in Britain, it is not a coincidence that the resurgence of virulent rac-
ism in the 1980s came with the election of government leaders with racist proclivities.)
It is important to point out that the institution of such measures is aimed at undermining the mechanism by which the racist ideology per-
forms its “economic” function: the cultivation of a mythology of racial superiority that is imbibed by both victimizer and victim. The victimiz-
er proclaims his/her racial superiority to justify all racially-inspired injustices inflicted on victims, while victims are rendered impotent against
racist tyranny—until exceptional consciousness raising circumstances surface—because of a racist-inspired (‘blame the victim’) inferiority
complex. It is a complex that rests on a dialectic in which the inferior material conditions of the victim are explained by the racist victimizer on
the basis of the victim’s supposed inherent inferiority, rather than the racist discrimination that is responsible for the inferior material condi-
tions in the first place. Given this critical function that the mythology plays in racist ideologies it should be noted that its cultivation is not a
consequence of irrationality and ignorance. Hence, not surprisingly, antiracist strategies that depend on debunking the mythology stand little
chance of success. Only “political” measures such as those just mentioned can undermine racism. In fact, the enormous amounts of time and
energy spent on debunking the racist mythology are simply a waste of time and may even play into the hands of the racists.
2. Origins and Transmission
In terms of origins and transmission, racist ideologies depend on the creation of stereotypes and their transmission through agencies of so-
cialization. Racists rely on stereotypes to create otherness (you are not one of us), because stereotypes permit them to dehumanize their
victims. These stereotypes can be, both, positive (intelligent, industrious, ambitious), and negative (lazy, dumb, thieving, etc.), but above all, in
the arsenal of all racists three stereotypes are universal and salient: one has to do with dirt, the other with sex and the third with trust. For exam-
ple, those who have monopoly of power and resources in this country, the English, have portrayed all these groups at various times in history
as unhygienically dirty, animalistically oversexed, and highly untrustworthy: Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Italian
Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. But where do stereotypes come from? They come from those who are involved in producing the content
of what we today call the media (comprising electronic social and mass media, and traditional media: books, cinema, television, music, theater,
newspapers and magazines, radio, museums, etc.): writers, actors, musicians, entertainers, artists, scholars, museum curators, travelers and ex-
plorers, etc. All of these people are involved in the creation, dissemination and maintenance of stereotypes. As stereotypes become widespread
in a society over time, other agencies of socialization besides the media become involved: the family, the church, schools, and so on.
3. Varieties
Racism can take the following fairly distinct, but NOT unrelated, structural forms: genocidal racism, dominative racism, aversive racism, institu-
tional racism, juridical racism, and internalized racism.
Genocidal racism, as the term implies, is the attempt to totally annihilate a group of people for whatever reason. Some classic examples of
this most brutal form of racism would include: The settlement of the Americas by Europeans at the expense of Native Americans; the Shoah
(the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe); and the Rwandan Genocide.
Dominative racism is racism aimed at dominating victims in order to directly exploit their labor, as in the case of the racist exploitation of
African Americans in the South. Note that at the level of interpersonal relations, under conditions of dominative racism, intimate relationships
between the racist and the victim are common. Not surprisingly, in the racist South of the past enslaved African American women often ran
the household of the white master: from house cleaning and cooking to child-rearing--and sometimes even child-bearing! (By the way, a similar
situation obtains to day in the West [California, Texas, etc.] but involving primarily Hispanic American women.)
Aversive racism, as the term implies, denotes the type of racism where the racist wants to put the greatest physical and social distance possi-
ble between himself/ herself and the target. For example: aversive white racists would never dream of permitting African Americans to enter
their homes, let alone cook their food or baby-sit their children. The logical conclusion of this kind of discrimination from the perspective of
the victim is genocide. The European Jews were victims of aversive racism. In this country, wherever dominative racism disappeared it was
replaced by aversive racism; consequently, today it is aversive racism that is the most common form of racism. At the structural level, aversive
racism is manifest in such ways as de facto residential segregation. At the interpersonal level, the desire by aversive racists for as much physical
and social distance as possible between themselves and other races stems from the incorporation into their psyche, through early childhood
socialization, at the minimum the triple racist stereotypes of dirt, sex and trust (mentioned above). As you can guess, laws cannot really over-
come this form of racism. Why? Because it is too pervasive and yet very subtle to the point where, sometimes, both the racist and the victim
may not even be aware of its existence at a given moment. A classic example of the latter phenomenon, in this society, is the subconscious
belief by almost all whites (including, ironically, non-racist whites) that their whiteness entitles them to a place above everyone else, regardless
of what aspect of society is under consideration: employment, housing, health, religion, culture, language, etc., etc. The only whites who do not
foreign governments) and what should not be fought for (e.g., against censorship of racist propaganda aimed at hurting and psychologically destroying other
human beings, as well as fomenting race hatred among the vulnerable—such as working-class youth.) To defend racists who use words to attack and wound
people simply because their skin color is different from theirs by arguing that racist speeches and writings are constitutionally protected is a gross perversion of
the intent of the First Amendment. What about the rights of the victims? Don’t victims have a right to be protected from the verbal abuse of bigots (who
derive their strength, like the typical cowards they are, from the fact that they have the power of numbers, being in the majority); abuse that produce in victims
all kinds of mental anguish ranging from shame through anger and from defensiveness to withdrawal; abuse that undermines their self-worth and esteem?
Champions of anti-censorship on any grounds may be surprised to learn that the United States is, perhaps, the only country in the Western world that offers
governmental protection to bigots and hatemongers. (See Matsuda [1989] for more on this issue; see also Wiener [1990] who discusses this matter in relation to
bigots and racists on university campuses.)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-57-320.jpg)
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Juridical racism, in this country, is closely linked to dominative racism because it was racism that was instituted through law in order to exploit
African Americans and other minorities directly. The slave codes and the Jim Crow laws are classic examples of laws that established a juridi-
cal racist society in the South.
Internalized racism, refers to the hatred of and discrimination against people of one’s own race/ethnicity. In other words, it is a form of self-
hatred that emerges as a consequence of a lack of political consciousness in the context of a pervasively racist/ethnicist society. A very com-
mon example of internalized racism in United States is the deliberate refusal to learn one’s own mother tongue or practice one’s culture by
second generation immigrant children. Another common example is discrimination against people of one’s own race/ethnicity who are recent
immigrants (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “fresh off the boat”). Internalized racism allows people who suffer from this form of racism
to delude themselves into believing that they themselves will be spared racist discrimination by the wider (white) society. It’s a delusion because
white racists do not make a distinction between recent immigrants and those who have been in the country for generations when they discrim-
inate against a particular group—it is skin color that matters, not language and culture.
4. Societal Role
The role of racist ideologies in societies such as this one is that it assists the capitalist classes in doing three things: (a) Achieve political and
economic stability by using racial/ethnic minorities as scapegoats for the severe problems that the activities of the capitalist classes as a whole
produce: unemployment, falling standards of living, environmental destruction, scarcity of resources, etc. Racism helps to deflect resistance
and rebellion away from the capitalist class and the capitalist system. (Note: in the absence of race, other ideologies of oppression become
salient: sexism, classism, etc.)100 (b) Permit the direct exploitation of victims through measures such as low wages, dispossession of their lands,
etc. (c) Allow them to sow division among the working classes so that they can keep each other in check in their struggles with the capitalist
classes. A classic example is the use of African Americans and other minorities to break up labor strikes of Euro-American workers. Histori-
cally, and up to the present, racism has been one of the most important tools used in this country to buy the allegiance of white workers by
capitalists. By allowing white workers to exchange their whiteness for a few privileges, the capitalist classes have kept all working classes from
demanding a fundamental change to the entire political and economic system for the benefit of all. Racism creates an us and them mentality,
whereas genuine progress in a society is only possible under conditions of cooperation and mutual respect. To be sure, the white working class
(to take the U.S. example) may maintain a short-term advantage relative to the black working class in terms of better employment opportuni-
ties relative to the black working class, but in the long-run the fact that it is not united with the black working class prevents it from demanding a
greater share of the total profits generated from its labor but kept by the capitalist class. At the same time, working-class disunity prevents it
from mounting successful struggles in increasing the “public wage” (which takes such forms as unemployment insurance, life-long medical
insurance, public schooling, environmental protection measures, and so on).101 Racism therefore serves as an additional factor, besides the
workings of impersonal “market forces,” in hiding the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class—an exploitation that many
workers in capitalist societies deny because of their ignorance of the workings of the capitalist system. (See also the Southern Strategy.)
One legitimate question that may be asked is that considering that some of the most virulent, moronic, and highly objectionable racist
behavior is to be found among the white blue- and white-collar working classes even though it is immoral, uncivilized and not in their econom-
ic self-interest, what explanation can one offer for this behavior. The explanation is two-fold: One, propaganda by capitalists and their allies via
the media often elevates blacks to the level of scapegoats for the inequality, alienation and powerlessness that the white working class experi-
ences and thereby assure stability for the capitalist system as a whole. Instead of targeting the real sources of their woes (the capitalist class) the
white working class ends up targeting blacks instead. The following example by Reich (1977) will drive home this point: “[M]any whites believe
that welfare payments to blacks are a far more important factor in their taxes than is military spending. Through racism, poor whites come to
believe that their poverty is caused by blacks who are willing to take away their jobs, and at lower wages, thus concealing the fact that a substan-
tial amount of income inequality is inevitable in a capitalist society. Racism thus transfers the locus of whites’ resentment towards blacks and
away from capitalism.” It should be pointed out here, that historically, the black working class has been used by employers to help break white
trade unions by using black workers as “scabs” when white unions are on strike. In fact Cherry (1991: 61) convincingly demonstrates that
“[t]he post-World War II profit boom [in the United States] resulted from the ability of capitalists to exploit a racially divided southern work-
force and a growing low-wage female workforce. The profitable employment of these workers enabled capitalists to undermine the benefits
obtained by unionized workers.… Thus, race and gender discrimination made the postwar profit boom possible, and provided industrialists
with the opportunity to weaken the power of the unions.” Such strategies are clearly not conducive to healthy race relations among black and
white workers. Two, racism provides for the white working class an avenue of psychic satisfaction: As Reich observes, for example, “the op-
portunity to participate in another’s oppression compensates for one’s misery” (1978: 387). Karp (1981: 91) calls it the displacement of mis-
treatment in which one’s own hurts are taken out on others. Then there is the solace one obtains by seeing oneself as “above” another group
to psychologically compensate for life’s tribulations in capitalist societies. Note, however, that while there may be group-level psychic benefits to
racists in coping with the capitalist system, it is also true that at the individual level racist behavior is a manifestation of a psychosis. It is mani-
fest in the irrational expenditure of mental (and often physical energy) in hating people of color. When a white person undergoes mental dis-
tress every time he or she sees or comes into contact with a person of color (or vice versa) because of their hate and prejudice, there is no
question that the person is not mentally healthy. There are, of course, other personal costs too that go with micro-level racism: the self-denial
of potentially powerful and meaningful friendships with other human beings, the failure to explore the full range of life’s experiences by avoid-
ing experiencing other cultures, the constantly distorted mental world in which the person lives where everything is “lily white,” and so on. (See
Karp 1981)
100. An adage I have coined that is worth remembering: prejudice is a powerful antidote to truth.
101. It should be remembered that capitalists need workers to survive, but workers do not need capitalists to survive; all that the workers would have to do is to
start their own enterprises and redirect all their labor away from capitalists toward their own enterprises in order to survive and thrive. (Where would the workers
get their start-up capital? They would have no need for it; they can use their labor initially and use a barter system to exchange commodities with other workers.)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-59-320.jpg)
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In explaining the genesis and functions of racism, we have seen that the best approach to understanding racism is to see it as an ideology,
and as an ideology it has evolved to play a very specific function in society: the structural domination and exploitation of one group of people
by another. (A question for you guys: So, which came first: the ideology or the structure? The answer is that both came first in a process of
dialectical evolution. Hence, Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, for example was, at once, a racist project and a capitalist venture.) And that
this function has not evolved in contradiction to the evolution of the dominant socio-economic system: capitalism. On the contrary, the rela-
tionship between capitalism and racism has been one of symbiosis. After all, capitalism is like racism in the sense that whereas racism involves
exploitation on the basis of pigmentation, capitalism involves exploitation on the basis of class. But the analogy does not end here. Compare
the role of ideology: the exploitation within the capitalist system is legitimated among both the exploiters and the exploited via an ideology (the
capitalist ideology) that includes among its tenets the elevation of this exploitation to the level of “natural law”—expressed through the con-
cept of meritocracy, namely the proposition that it is “natural” that some in society (capitalists) deserve to be richer than others (the working
class) since not all are equally endowed with intelligence, discipline, self-sacrifice, capacity for hard work, etc. and other similar attributes that
capitalists mythically assign exclusively to their class via a perversion of the history of societal evolution. Within racist societies the exploitation
is similarly legitimated via a perversion of the scientific explanation for biologically determined phenotypic differences in which the inferiority
of the target victims is mythically deemed to be naturally ordained. And in the case of both capitalism and racism this legitimation of exploita-
tion serves to perform two complementary roles: to “dehumanize” the victims and to “uncivilize” the victimizer.102
In light of the foregoing, the principal conclusion that we may draw is this: racism is unacceptable in civilized and democratic societies; yet
its eradication is bound up with the very structuring of their dominant economic system: capitalism. Unless the capitalist system is changed in a
radical way, the ideology of racism is here to stay.103 The problem was best described by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French social philosopher,
writing in 1830 about racism in the United States—albeit his identification of the root cause of the problem, democracy, was well off the
mark:
I do not believe that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still
greater in the United States than elsewhere. An isolated individual may surmount the prejudices of the religion of his country or his race
but a whole people cannot rise, as it were, above itself. A despot who should subject the American and his former slaves to the same yoke
might perhaps succeed in co-mingling the races but as long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will under-
take so difficult a task and it may be foreseen that the freer, that is the more democratic the white population of the United States be-
comes, the more isolated it will remain. (From Bell 1991: 44).
It is not democracy that has underwritten the racist ideology in the United States, it is capitalism. In fact, without democracy it is unlikely that
progress would have been made in the area of civil rights for blacks (and, of course, women too).104
While racism is functional for capital as a whole, it is not necessarily so for individual capitalists—at least the theory of capitalism would
suggest that. Individual capitalists seeking to lower their production costs relative to their competitors may find the artificially high wages of
white workers (as in South Africa for example prior to 1992, made possible by apartheid laws enacted at the behest of racist white unions),
dysfunctional. For the individual capitalist the only criterion that should be of significance in a worker is his/her ability to do the work at the
lowest wage rates that a free labor market can bear, not his/her color, gender, religion, etc. This argument is ably summarized by Edwards,
Reich and Weisskopf (1978: 362):
[T]he capitalist drive to rationalize production, lower costs, and expand profits is itself a strong force for the elimination of racial discrim-
ination. Employers are trying to maximize their profits, and in organizing their workforce they will be interested in a worker’s productivity
and potential contribution to profits and not in his or her skin color. The pressures from other firms competing for workers will over-
come the resistance of racist employers who persist in discriminating. … Thus, market forces, by allocating labor to its most efficient use,
are themselves a strong stimulus for ending discrimination.
Consequently, racism in capitalist societies can, in principle, play both a functional and dysfunctional role. Yet, as Edwards, Reich and
Weisskopf (1978) point out, in practice, to take the U.S. example, this has not always worked out. Just as in South Africa today, the economic
advantage enjoyed by whites as a whole because of their skin color has remained, for the most part, unassailable despite the supposed rationality
of the capitalist system and despite the struggles of the civil rights movement; the lukewarm implementation of the much touted “affirmative
action” programs of the 1970s; and despite even the election of an African American (Barack Obama) to the U.S. presidency in 2008. Neither
the “magic” of market forces, nor obtaining the right to vote has translated into concrete economic progress for the majority of blacks suffi-
102. The irony, ultimately, is that ideologies of exploitation are necessitated by the very fact that human beings have evolved to a level higher than animals and
thereby acquiring the capacity to be “civilized”; otherwise such ideologies would be unnecessary (e.g.: lower order animals such as sharks do not need ideologies
of exploitation to consume other marine animals).
103. Those who may jump to the conclusion, therefore, that the answer is communism of the type this planet has known so far, may do well by looking at the
revelations of unimaginable horrors (not unlike those, in modern times, of Nazi Germany) that emerged out of the secret archives of that Soviet monster
called the KGB. However racist the United States may be today, it is very doubtful that any black person would choose to live in what was once the Soviet Un-
ion (or Communist China for that matter). Though, of course, in saying this one must agree with Cornel West (1991: 61–62) that it is a choice in relative op-
tions: “who wouldn’t choose capitalist democracy? That doesn’t mean we can’t be critical. It means we have lives to lead, kids to feed and dreams of being able
to exercise certain freedoms of speech and worship. We will choose a place where we at least have a chance, even if the odds are against us.”
104. Notice too, however, that democracy has not by itself alone induced this progress. Other forces had to come into play too: in the case of the abolition of
slavery, for example, capitalism had to undergo a radical change in mode: from one based on agriculture to one based on manufacturing and industry (at least in
the North). Similarly, to take another example, the civil rights movement was helped considerably by the onset of the cold war with the Soviet Union where the
United States, in its effort to win over onto its side the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia, was compelled to make progress in the area of civil rights
in order to demonstrate to the PQD nations, what it felt, was the moral superiority of capitalist democracy over Soviet style communism.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-60-320.jpg)
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cient to bring them on par with the majority of whites—except for the tiny emerging black middle class (the “token blacks” [see below]). What
explanation can one offer for the constancy of racial inequality (which most whites, deliberately or because of ignorance, refuse to
acknowledge) in terms of income and employment in the U.S.—especially considering that the U.S. does not have an apartheid system (akin to
the one that South Africa had)? The answer is that, sure, there is no de jure apartheid, but in reality there is a de facto apartheid system of sorts
at work. While logically the theory just outlined above ought to have worked by now to eliminate (or nearly eliminate) racial inequality in the
U.S.—especially in the post-Civil Rights era. The problem, however, is that as was noted earlier racism (or any other fissionary avenues: gender,
religion, ethnicity, linguistic heritage, etc. that fragments the working class) is in the interest of capital as a whole. This is not to say that capital-
ists produced racism in the U.S. (or South Africa for that matter), but they used and maintained it to their own advantage: specifically to keep
the working class divided and as a result pliable—thereby keeping the capitalist system stable. In other words, capitalists will adapt whatever
forms of social structural divisions that may exist in society for their own ends. If there is no racial division, then they may use divisions based
on ethnicity, or religion, or gender, or old age, and so on.
The mechanisms by which racism against racial minorities have continued to operate in the U.S., for example, despite the fact that racial
discrimination in education, employment, housing, etc. is illegal, are subtle and many and involve the operation of both micro (individual-level)
and macro (institutional-level) racism; they include:
(a) psychological assaults on one’s dignity in the media, work-place, and schools—by means of “micro-aggression”—aimed at creating
self-doubts, an inferiority complex, etc.;
(b) physical assaults by the police, and white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan and their allies;
(c) Inadequate funding for de facto black schools leading to inferior education and high drop-out rates;
(d) discrimination by personnel agencies and personnel officers (that is people who ordinarily are not concerned with the health of the
economic unit they work for because they do not own it, and therefore noneconomic factors like race are allowed to intervene in their hir-
ing practices);
(e) “last hired and first fired” tendencies among employers in recessionary periods, which invariably works against black workers;
(f) discrimination in the judicial system;
(g) segregation of residential areas in apartheid fashion, thus facilitating discrimination at the level of city services, loans for housing, police
protection, access to transportation, etc.;
(h) passage of rules and regulations aimed at gutting the intent of civil rights legislation by the federal government—especially under Re-
publican administrations; and so on.
Clearly those who see in market forces as social engineering panaceas are either deluding themselves as a result of ignorance or are simply en-
gaged in fomenting a lie for the consumption of the unwary in order to justify the status quo. To put the matter differently: racism in western
societies (both as an ideology as well as behavioral practice) serves to objectify the subjective (race) and subjectify the objective (class) which
then permits, among other things, the super-exploitation of racial minorities, the scapegoating of racial minorities for the socially disruptive
consequences of the activities of capital, and the fragmentation of the working class as a whole in the context of a permanent class-struggle
intrinsic to all capitalist societies.
5. Relationship to other ideologies.
Racism does not operate in isolation from other ideologies of oppression, but rather a society or an individual often experiences it as part of a
nonhierarchical multidimensional system of oppression. The best illustration of this fact is the case of African American women: they are
victimized, at the same time, by classism (because of capitalism), racism (from white women), racist-sexism (from white men), and sexism
(from black men). To take another example: victims of racism (e.g. Jewish Americans or Asian Americans) will also perpetrate their own rac-
ism on other minorities (e.g. African Americans). One more example: the emerging African American middle-class, who themselves are vic-
tims of Euro-American racism, will perpetrate classism on fellow African Americans. A good example of this are African American Republi-
cans who support racist legislation aimed at barring the means to overcome or mitigate institutional racism: such as, affirmative action and
welfare programs. Today in the U.S., racial categories to some extent do coincide with class categories, not perfectly, but generally. In such circum-
stances, the issue of race rather than class assumes salience in political behavior. However, as structures of juridical institutional racism begin to
be dismantled the situation starts to become more complex because the class factor gains ascendancy in explaining political behavior. (Racism,
therefore, is ultimately an epiphenomenon in capitalist democracies.)105 In the case, for example, of blacks in the U.S. the principal division that
has emerged among them that is of political significance is between the new U.S. African American petite bourgeoisie and the U.S. African
American working and unemployed class.106 Here, it should be pointed out that in suggesting that the blacks have undergone class fragmenta-
tion in the U.S. there is the implicit suggestion that institutionalized racism is assailable to a significant degree via political struggle. The civil
rights movement of the 1960s did make a sufficient dent in it to permit some 5% of blacks to achieve middle class or bourgeois status by the
end of the 1970s. The sad fact, however, is that the result of this class fragmentation has been the divergence of political and economic inter-
ests of blacks along class lines. Thus, for instance, the slowly expanding ranks of black Republicans—of whom people like Condoleezza Rice,
Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas are among the more well-known—is indicative of the fact that the interests of all blacks no longer coin-
105. That is, class as demarcated by ownership or lack of ownership of the principal means of production; not class as determined by such criteria of stratifica-
tion as levels of income (the latter criteria may be relevant, but only tangentially). From this perspective, only two principal classes are of significance here: those
that emerge out of capitalism, namely, capital (or its equivalent the modern bourgeoisie) which has a complete monopoly over the means of production (be it
land, factories, etc.) and the working class which has no access to the means of production, and therefore must sell their labor-power to capital in order to sur-
vive.
106. It is new in the sense that it owes its origins to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-61-320.jpg)
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cide. The class interests of the well-off blacks (the direct beneficiaries of the small political and economic space opened up by the Civil Rights
struggle) are closer to those of the white bourgeoisie than to those of the vast mass of urban and rural black poor, who, if and when they
vote, tend to vote for the Democratic Party.
In other words: with the weakening of institutionalized racism in the U.S., racial discrimination is not as close to watertight as it was before;
it has allowed a number of “token” blacks to achieve upward mobility. However, as their numbers have become politically sizable, their behav-
ior has also changed accordingly in the direction of supporting the status quo. Their interests have now diverged from the rest of the members
of their community to such an extent that they will now, with a perfectly straight face, even deny the existence of white racism. What is more,
others (such as one Shelby Steele [a professor of English] and one Thomas Sowell [a conservative economist]) have begun adopting the same
“blame the victim” racist doctrines held by whites to explain why fellow blacks are not achieving upward mobility.107 Cashman (1991: 240-41)
best describes the political character of these token blacks, this new U.S. African American bourgeoisie (or “elite” as he calls them), as:
“staunch advocates of American capitalism, whose beneficiaries they had become since American capitalism had made significant concessions
to them on such issues as affirmative action.” He notes further on: “They did not want a restructuring of American economics and politics lest
this should endanger their new, hard won advantages. The undoubted prosperity of certain privileged sectors among the fortunate U.S. African
American elite seemed to hide the apparently irreversible drift of numerous U.S. African Americans toward the nation’s poor.” A good exam-
ple of this privileged type of U.S. African American is the current Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. As the Congres-
sional confirmation hearings over his appointment in 1991 revealed, this confused and ignorant arch conservative who had been a beneficiary
of the movement for civil rights was, now that he had done well, no longer interested in supporting policies and programs that had helped to
weaken institutionalized racism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Yet, notice that the majority of the black masses failed to realize that even though Thomas was an African American he was not necessarily
their friend or ally (in fact, as a Republican in the U.S. politics of the 1990s and beyond, how could he be).108 Sure, Thomas did use the “race”
card when it appeared that his confirmation was in jeopardy after a black woman accused him of sexual harassment (though earlier in the hear-
ings he had denied that race had anything to do with his appointment), but that has been a common ploy of this new U.S. African American
elite. The black masses have so far, it appears, failed to realize (like its white counterpart) that in the politics of this first decade of the twenty-
first century, the critical issue, increasingly, has not been and will not be race, but class when it comes to deciding which candidates to vote into
office. If the black working class continues to vote for black candidates, merely and solely because the candidates are black, then they will find
themselves in the same position that the white working class is in (who also—most especially in the South—tends to vote for candidates mere-
ly and solely because the candidates are of a certain color, white). This position is one of increasing economic and political marginalization. In
other words, it is time that the vast majority of U.S. African Americans, the poor and unemployed, realized that even though the struggle for
civil rights was mounted on their backs, the true beneficiaries of the struggle have been this new U.S. African American petite bourgeoisie who
are not interested in the welfare of the rest of their fellow U.S. African Americans. As befits all capitalist systems, they are interested only in
furthering their own interests (which means that from time to time they may still be inclined to play the “race” card, but only when it suits their
interests). Thanks to the struggle for civil rights the political situation in the U.S. has become more complex: race and class are both now signif-
icant factors. Both black and white politicians each appeal to the black and white masses to vote for them because they share their color respec-
tively, and the masses get taken in, without realizing that these politicians often do not necessarily represent their interests, but the interests of
the bourgeoisie.109 Interestingly, a similar situation is now developing in former apartheid South Africa too, of course. There, the abandonment
of the apartheid system in the absence of radical changes in the economic system has created a potential to unleash upon the majority a re-
newed economic tyranny by a reconstituted capitalist class that will now incorporate a fragment of the black population: the emerging com-
pradorial petite bourgeoisie. The struggle against white racist tyranny first begun by blacks from almost the day the European settler first set
foot in South Africa—vainly pitting spears against bullets, and following military defeat, relaunching the struggle via nonviolent strategies
which in turn eventually become transformed into violent struggles in the face of an intransigent neofascist state—culminating in the final
defeat of the apartheid state is but only the first step in a long struggle that has only just begun: the struggle for economic dignity, one that will
take blacks far into this century. And if the experiences of South America are anything to go by, where freedom from colonialism was achieved
over a hundred years ago, the future does not look bright at all. The race struggle is being transformed into a class struggle—testifying to the
inherent epiphenomenal character of racism in capitalist societies.110
107. Notice, however, that these same “token blacks,” whenever they need support from other blacks for their own private projects, will emerge to seek black
support on grounds that all blacks should stick together and support each other. It is in the face of such appeals that the black working class must be wary; for,
in the past such an argument may have been valid, but in the present it is no longer so. For instance, today in the U.S., supporting a white rival over a black rival
(for a given political office) may often be the right course of political action, depending upon their political agendas. This is what is meant by suggesting that
racism (compared to class) in capitalist democratic societies can be an epiphenomenon; it is not to deny the existence of racism.
108. Since his appointment to the Supreme Court, on almost all cases he has sat, this man has not only sided with capital rather than labor, but, acting in consort
with his fellow conservatives, he has sought to weaken respect and protection of civil rights and human rights (in direct contrast to that great Supreme Court
justice Thurgood Marshall, who, most ironically, he was appointed to replace) for all in this country.
109. See Kilson, (1989) and Wacquant (1989) for more on the issue of class formation and its implications for black politics in the U.S. For a sampling of the
right wing ultra-conservative political views of black Republicans see their journal: The Lincoln Review.
110. This should not be taken to imply that racism will not be an issue any more with the elimination of the apartheid system. For, as the experiences of coun-
tries such as the United States, Canada, and Britain so well demonstrate institutional racism—even in the absence of legislative mandate—can thrive via many
devious mechanisms. In these countries, as blacks so well know, elaborate but extremely subtle ways have been found to discriminate against blacks in employ-
ment, housing, education and so on. The point, however, to take the U.S. example, is that given that racism is illegal now racial discrimination cannot be as close
to watertight as it was before; it does allow a number of “token” blacks to achieve upward mobility. However, as their numbers become politically sizable their
behavior also changes accordingly in the direction of supporting the status quo. Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the members of their commu-
nity to such an extent that they may, with a perfectly straight face, deny the existence of racism and begin adopting the same “blame the victim” racist doctrines
held by whites to explain why fellow blacks are not achieving upward mobility. Such people, however, often lead double-faced political lives: whenever they need
support from blacks for their own private projects they will emerge to seek black support on grounds that all blacks should stick together and support each](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-62-320.jpg)
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6. Contradiction.
We live in an inherently inegalitarian society. Why? Because this is a capitalist society. In any capitalist society equality is a concept that is severely
circumscribed by a pyramidal social structure that capitalism demands. Not everyone can be a capitalist, otherwise who would do the work?
You have to have a working class too, who necessarily are below the capitalist class. Within this context what kind of racial equality is possible?
The answer is: one that simply reproduces identical pyramidal social structures across all races, where race is substituted by class distinctions.
Yet to struggle for this form of racial equality is to demand that the historically racially privileged white middle class (to take the example of
this society) shed some of its privileges and join the ranks of the black working class on an equal footing. Which member of the white middle
class is going to agree to this? (We can also apply this same reasoning to the white working class. Which one of them would be willing to join
the black underclass?) The political difficulties involved are best illustrated when we see the frequent inability of, say Jewish Americans and Asian
Americans (many of whom are middle class) to come together with, say, African and Hispanic Americans (many of whom are working class),
and yet they all face racism/ ethnicism to varying degrees.111 (See also Capitalism; Class; Democracy)
7. Reverse Discrimination/Reverse Racism
In their opposition to programs of affirmative action aimed at correcting inequalities brought about by racist/ethnicist discriminatory practices,
racists/ethnicists (for example, in Canada, India, South Africa, and United States) have concocted the mythical concept of “reverse discrimina-
tion” or “reverse racism.” In the United States, the concept of “reverse discrimination” it will be recalled, first entered the U.S. legal lexicon
with the court case of a EuroAmerican, by the name of Allan Bakke, who argued that his rights to further education had been violated as a
result of preferential admission of blacks in public education (that is, affirmative action), and where the Supreme Court in 1978 concurred
with him on the basis of an interpretation of the same Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution that the Court had used in 1954 in
striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine in education in the famous case of Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka. Yet, as Cruse (1987: 31)
points out, the court and those who brought the case neglected to consider that “Allan Bakke had not, prior to his filing of suit for “due pro-
cess,” experienced a lifetime under the onus of ethnic, racial caste, or class oppression, nor had his ancestors. He was as near to the racial ideal
of “Nordic” perfection as any white racist could dream.”112 That decision in favor of Bakke, Cruse further observes, once again raised the
rhetorical question of whether or not the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 was intended to protect the citizenship rights of
blacks. (Notice also the profound irony in all this: EuroAmericans themselves have always been beneficiaries of affirmative action, for centu-
ries!)
The racism embedded in the concept of “reverse discrimination” is also pointed up by the outrageous suggestion that a minority of the
population (in the United States), historically discriminated against to the point where today they continue to remain at the bottom of the eco-
nomic and political ladder, are unjustly threatening the interests of a majority that historically enjoyed and continue to enjoy a monopoly of
political and economic power. Such thinking is, to say the least, one of the most ludicrous arguments ever advanced to continue to justify white
political and economic supremacy (See Grabiner 1980; for more on the concept of “reverse discrimination” see also Gordon, et al. 1978).
Moreover, this false concept hides behind it the stark fact that the wealth the Europeans enjoy today has come about as a consequence of the
economic activities of generations before them. (Even in the most ideal conditions of steady uninterrupted economic growth—not yet rec-
orded anywhere in human history—it takes nearly an entire human life-span for the Gross National Product to simply quadruple.) Therefore,
the wealth that the whites in the U.S. enjoy today came about as a result of unpaid labor of enslaved Africans and underpayment of free U.S.
other. It is in the face of such appeals that the black working class must be wary; for, in the past such an argument may have been valid but in the present it is no
longer so. For instance, supporting a white rival over a black rival (for a given political office) may often be the right course of political action. This is what is
meant by suggesting that racism (compared to class) in capitalist societies is an epiphenomenon; it is not to deny its existence.
111. It is important that I strongly emphasize that in any discussion of racism in this country in this course the objective is not to try and prove that whites are
an evil and nasty people or that this society as a whole is an evil and nasty society that is beyond redemption. Rather, the objective has been to try and understand
what racism/ethnicism is, how it originates and what role it plays in this society, in order to see how we can work toward a society where such forms of preju-
dice and discrimination no longer exist. In advocating a society that is free of such prejudices and discrimination I am not only concerned with issues of morali-
ty and social justice, but my position is that, in the long run, such a democratic and civilized society is good even for the racists, sexists, etc. themselves. Remem-
ber: that a society that tolerates and even encourages discrimination (in whatever form: racist, sexist, ethnicist, etc.) in the end only hurts itself. Since no single
group has monopoly over intelligence and creativity, imagine how far advanced this country would be to day if it had from the very beginning given all minori-
ties, including women, and the white working classes, every opportunity to realize their fullest potential. To further underline this point: a racist society is in one
sense like a racist individual. Such an individual has a very narrow and shallow life experience because he/she denies himself/herself access to the rich tapestry
of cultures, love, and friendship that non-racist/ non-ethnicist contacts with other racial/ ethnic groups permit. For example: a Euro-American who wants to be
truly a racist should refuse to be a Christian, because Christianity is not a European religion, it is a Semitic religion. Take another example: a Euro-American who
wants to be truly racist should refuse to listen to rock (because rock has its origins in African American music), or eat tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, and so on
because they are not of European origin. In other words, racists do not realize how rich their lives are because of the contributions of the very people they
reject; but how much richer their lives would be if they gave up their racism. To immerse one’s life in hate (as opposed to love) surely is not only unnatural, but
mentally unhealthy--perhaps requiring psychiatric treatment. To engage in prejudice and discrimination is to engage in self-hurt, but let me go one step further
and state that it is also to engage in self-destruction. The best example I can give here is that of the Nazis in Germany: in the end their racism/ethnicism
brought on to themselves nothing but death and destruction. Think about this: Hitler and many of his henchmen eventually committed suicide. If you are a
racist (whatever color you may be), or a sexist (whatever sex you may be), etc., I hope that you will work toward eradicating this prejudice in you and in society; it
is not good for you and it is not good for society.
112. In truth, throughout history and up to the present day, Euro-Americans in the U.S. have always had the benefit of “affirmative action” arising out of their
skin color. Today, when two equally qualified individuals, but one white and one black, present themselves for employment at the factory gate, the chances are
that the white will be hired first—if that is not affirmative action the what is? In fact, the problem is more insidious than that: resumes with black-sounding
names are less likely to be read than ones with white-sounding names by employers (see Bertrand and Mullainathan [2004]).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-63-320.jpg)
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African Americans—not to mention the dispossession of Native Americans.113 If the Africans brought over to the U.S. had been given the
same privileges as their white counterparts to terrorize, brutalize and murder Native Americans by the hundreds of thousands in order to steal
and despoil their land, then one can talk about “reverse discrimination” today. But, then, what about the rights of Native Americans? 114
It follows, on the basis of the foregoing, that measures (such as affirmative action programs in the U.S.) aimed at correcting the present-day
consequences of past racially-determined inequities cannot be labeled “reverse racism.” Yet, despite the fallacy of reverse racism (or “reverse
discrimination”), it has now become a much bandied about concept among conservatives in the U.S. to attack whatever progress that has been
made in weakening institutionalized racism in the 1960s and 1970s following the struggles of the civil rights movement. Clearly, in a racist
country, such as the U.S., the concept of “reverse discrimination” is a false concept; it is another racist gimmick dressed up in legal language to
deny victims of centuries of racist discrimination access to what is rightfully theirs.115
8. Geographically-specific Sub-varieties of Racism
In this exegesis of the concept of race/racism so far, the effort has been to look at it mainly from a generic perspective—albeit with a focus
on the U.S. example. However, one would be grossly remiss if we did not also include a description of at least three geographically-specific
sub-varieties of racism as an ideology and practice of oppression: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Whiteness. While all these three forms have their
origin in Europe historically (especially Western Europe), today antisemitism and Islamophobia have become universal, while whiteness re-
mains, for obvious reasons, a feature of Europe and other places where people of European ancestry are dominant (demographically, and/or
socio-economically, and politically).
Antisemitism (or anti-Semitism) is unlike any other kind of racism because it is a unique and exceptionally virulent form of racism in that
genocide is already baked into this racist ideology of oppression (something that Nazi Germany, for example, tried to achieve in practice
through its death squads, gas chambers, concentration camps, and the like, killing millions and millions of Europeans of Jewish ancestry116). In
other words, an anti-Semite is always contemplating and working toward a world where there are no Jews alive at all. It is not simply a matter
of religion, and in fact religion may not necessarily be an issue at all, but rather it is about an ethnic group as a whole—no matter what their
religious beliefs, if any. Here is a thought experiment: what if all the Jews had converted to some other religion (Buddhism, or Christianity, or
Islam, etc.), or had become atheists, in Nazi-occupied Europe? To the European anti-Semite it would not have mattered. But why? Because
Jews had become, for historical reasons—beginning from the time of the Roman occupation of Judaea around 63 BCE, the subsequent revolt
of the Jews against Roman rule, and their forcible dispersal from Judea as refugees, about 2000 years ago—a convenient scapegoat for the ills
of a society, perpetrated by the ruling elites of the day. This scapegoating, initially through religious justification (Christianity being the main
culprit here), and later secular justification (with industrial capitalism being the villain of the piece), was made possible because of their ethno-
religious difference from the rest in their host societies. So, for example, for centuries, Christianity taught its adherents that Jews were “Christ-
killers,” which of course was a complete myth. (Christ was killed by the Romans for political reasons.) Notice, however, that given that Jews
were always a minority group, following their dispersal from Roman-occupied Judea, in any given host society (until the creation of the State
of Israel in 1948), the Jewish identity that was the basis of antisemitism was itself a function of antisemitism—one depended on the other
dialectically. In other words, over the millennia, had Jews not faced antisemitism, they would have disappeared through the natural processes of
demographic and cultural absorption, as a distinctly identifiable ethnicity, because of their circumstance as a minority population. Today, while
it has steadily receded in Europe and North America through the process of “whitening” (meaning Jews being considered a “white” people
rather than an alien minority, as in the past117), antisemitism has become much more prevalent in the Islamic Middle East since the creation of
the State of Israel (and its subsequent and ongoing persecution—aided and abetted by the United States—of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied
Palestine, as well as its occupation of the third holiest city of Islam, Jerusalem). Yes. It is true, that antisemitism has always been present in the
Islamic world too, but it had never been as widespread and horrendously virulent as in Christian Europe. On the contrary, more often than
not, Jewish communities in Islamic lands often thrived, such was the case, for instance, over most of the seven-hundred year Muslim rule of
Spain, which of course was then followed by the infamous Christian-led Spanish Inquisition, as Muslim rule came to an end, that led to anoth-
er massive diasporic dispersal of the Jews. (One reason being that Islam recognizes Judaism, as it does Christianity too, as a legitimate reli-
113. Mention should also be made of the fact that if Africans had not been forcibly brought over to the Americas and instead left alone in Africa to follow their
own historical destiny, without any interference from colonialists and imperialists, today they would probably be as advanced (at the minimum) as Japan—the
only country in the PQD to have escaped imperialist depredation.
114. Perhaps it is time to consider ways of compensating both Native Americans and U.S. African Americans for what the Europeans stole from them. (See
Browne [1972] for a compelling argument on this matter.)
115. One more point worth noting: since racism is a function ultimately of power (and not the mythical superiority of the racist) it follows that: (i) at the societal
level, the racial antagonism of victims against racists provoked by racism cannot be classified as racist behavior given the inability of the victims to negatively
affect the life-chances of the racists with this “rebound” antagonism; and (ii) all human beings are potential victims of racism—including racists themselves—
when racism is allowed to flourish against any group; all it takes is for the balance of power to shift. To take an example: in South Africa it will not be long be-
fore the European racists who had subjected blacks to centuries of brutal racist oppression will begin complaining about “black racism”—though it will quite
likely be more imagined than real (unless South Africa follows the retrogressive path taken by its neighbor, Zimbabwe) given the continuing EuroSouth African
monopoly over economic power. Incidentally, the consequence of reversal of power relations for victimizers is well explored in the motion picture Planet of the
Apes (1968).
116. The estimate used to be that around six million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators (usually ordinary Europeans) in a time
period of roughly no more than ten years (1933-1945)! (And this is not counting probably an equal number of others—Poles, Russians, the Roma people, peo-
ple with disabilities, homosexuals, Germans who opposed the Nazis, and so on, altogether.) New research, however, suggests that the numbers were probably
much, much higher—possibly, ten million or more! See the report in the New York Times by Eric Lichtblau: “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking,” March 1,
2013.
117. See, for example, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America by Karen Brodkin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1988), and The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity by Eric L. Goldstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-64-320.jpg)
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gion—after all, knowledgeable Muslims recognize the fact that their religious roots lie in both these religions, constituting together with the
other two, the three dominant Abrahamic faiths.) So, what then is antisemitism, in a nutshell? It refers, at the ideological level, to the genocidal
hatred (repeat—genocidal) of all peoples of Jewish ancestry on mythical grounds that Jews are a cunning and money-hungry people always
plotting to take over the world (as mythologically outlined in that antisemitic fraudulent tract known as the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion),
and at the socio-economic and political level it refers to such practices targeted at individuals and entire groups as employment discrimination,
residential segregation, enslavement, murder, and mass-killings, often at the behest of ruling elites (as in the case of pogroms, of which the
Holocaust is a prime example).
Islamophobia. As one can surmise by parsing this word, this form of ethnicism has to do with the religion of Islam. One can begin by not-
ing that relations between Islam and the West date back almost to the beginning of the founding of Islam in the 7th century; how-
ever, the West’s view of Islam has almost always been through the lens of what may be called Islamophobia. And this continues to
be true today. (See, for example, the Islamophobic article authored by Wood (2015) popularized by ultra-right zealots, as well as
critiques of it by Dagli (2015); Haqiqatjou and Qadhi (2015); and Jenkins (2015). For a historical perspective, see also Hillenbrand
(2000), and Meserve (2008).) So, what then is Islamophobia? It refers to a variant of racism (much like anti-Semitism) that rests on
essentialist stereotypes that foster an irrational distrust, fear or rejection of Islam and those who are Muslims (or thought to be Mus-
lims).118 While Islamophobia dates back almost to the period of the founding of Islam, as just noted, in recent times it has received
considerable currency and legitimacy (especially in the West with the complicity of much of the Western corporate media, as well as
academics and government officials—often hiding behind “freedom of speech” slogans) following the 9/11 tragedy in United
States. Read, for example, Sandra Silberstein’s well-received book, War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11 that not only documents
how language can be commandeered in the service of objectives that go well beyond simple communication, but also provides an
illuminating window into the mechanics of the construction of ideologies of war (such as the current replacement of the Cold War,
with the “War on Terror”). Of particular relevance is her last chapter (titled “Schooling America: Lessons on Islam and Geogra-
phy”), in which she demonstrates how an opportunity, in the aftermath of 9/11, to mount a genuine effort to provide the U.S. citi-
zenry (and the rest of the planet that subscribe to such U.S. television news channels as CNN) with an objective introduction to
Islam—in terms of its history, basic tenets, and its far from insignificant role in the genesis of modern Western civilization—was,
instead, often subverted to produce a caricatured image of Islam and Muslims well-suited to the task at hand of manufacturing a
new global enemy to replace the one of yesteryear, communism. As she explains: “The geography [of Islam] Americans learned post
9/11 was of a particular sort. This was not a benign travelogue of cultural and historical highpoints. Rather, instruction focused on
the military, political, and economic self-interest of the United States as it became involved in a region in which several of the coun-
tries were presented as dangerous and incompetent. And the metaphors used to describe this area were often military” (p. 149).119
It should be pointed out that from the perspective of the Muslims living in Western countries, Islamophobia has also involved
government sponsored projects to reconstruct the Muslim identity by suggesting implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, that Islam is a
primitive and backward religion practiced by a backward peoples (the darkies) that is intrinsically violent and terrorism prone. Such
an essentialist view, of course, is not only false but completely neglects to consider the historical truth, as those intimately familiar
(in a scholarly sense) with both the history and practice of Islam know quite well, that its appearance on the stage of human history
marked an important turning point toward the better for much of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene (and indirectly the rest of the world).
It is not simply that Islam was marked by such deeply progressive ideas as education and social welfare as constituting the responsi-
bility of the state (baitul mal), or that a highly inegalitarian class-fractured society was unjust (zakaat), or that an economic system
that rested on unbridled capitalism was anti-democratic (laws of equity governing commerce), or that the conduct of war be based
on principles akin to those agreed to at the Geneva Convention of 1864 and its later incarnations, or that reciprocal obligations
between the state and the citizenry be constitutionally codified (dhimma), or that seeking knowledge (ilm) was an exceptionally wor-
thy attribute, and so on, long, long before such ideas came into vogue elsewhere, but that without the Islamic civilization it is quite
conceivable that there would be no Western civilization as we know it today. The question that emerges here, however, is this: Is the
problem of Islamophobia simply one of ignorance and misunderstanding? Or is there something more going on in that Islamophobia is a
symptom of a wider problem: the use of ideologies of prejudice in Western societies to underwrite domination and exploitation, internally and
externally? The answer is that it’s the latter. That is, Islamophobia, whether in its past (Crusader era) or current (“war on terror”) guises, is not
an aberration, but tied up with the construction of the Euro-Americo-Australasian identity. It is one of several ideologies of the “Other” that
aims to render non-European peoples as merely “resident aliens” of this planet and which has been so instrumental in justifying and explain-
ing both the past and the current global domination by the West.
Whiteness. To start with, this is a sociological term—no, folks I did not invent it—and it refers to a racial ideology that is unique to those socie-
ties today where Europeans (whites), or their colonial descendants, dominate other peoples in political and/or economic terms, against the
backdrop of capitalism, and which is characterized by a number of fallacious beliefs—held consciously or subconsciously—that are all rooted
in the notion of the supremacy of the “white race” (captured by the common phrase: white is right! white is might!). In other words, this is a
sub-variety of racism (much like Antisemitism, and Islamophobia). In order to explain further what “whiteness” really means let me ask you
118. It ought to be mentioned here that sometimes one gets the sense as one travels around Europe and North America that the issue is not Islamophobia but
what may be called “Arabophobia,” where the age-old racial hatred of Arabs is trundled out under the pretext of a “freedom of speech” criticism of Muslims.
Of course, ignorance is also tied in because there is a lack of conscious awareness that not all Arabs are Muslims and vice versa. (On Muslims and the “freedom
of speech” issue that the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in France highlighted see the excellent address (Trudeau, 2015) by the celebrated U.S. cartoonist Garry Tru-
deau—of the Doonsbury comic strip fame—at an award ceremony.)
119. For additional sources on Islamophobia, past and present, see: Ahmed (2013); Allen (2010); Helbling (2014); Kundnani (2014); Lyons (2012); Meer (2014);
Omidvar and Richards (2014); Rane, Ewart, and Martinkus (2014); Shyrock (2010); Trudeau (2015); and Van Driel (2004).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-65-320.jpg)
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to consider the following two quotes: The first is by Etherington (1989: 286-87) and it is part of his account of relations between the Europe-
an settlers and missionaries in the colony of Natal (that would later become part of South Africa and which today is called KwaZulu-Natal) in
the nineteenth-century.
[A] settler complaint was that… missionaries attempted to convert people who were not capable of becoming true Christians. According
to a Methodist district superintendent, the major reason why settlers would not contribute to missions was “skepticism as to the convert-
ing power of the gospel upon the native population.” A candidate for the Legislative Council once told an election rally that a “corps of
police officers could do more to civilize the Kaffirs, than all the missionaries in the Colony.” Lieutenant-Governor Pine reinforced local
prejudice by telling the Methodists that experience had taught him “the extreme difficulty of really converting savage nations to a
knowledge of our religion.…” It was as though the settlers unconsciously feared that Christian Africans would have a more powerful
claim to equal rights than an uneducated population devoted to their ancient beliefs.
This second quote is from Ostler (2004: 17-18) who seeks to explain the ideological premises of the dispossession of the U.S. Native Ameri-
cans in the U.S. West following the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803 (as if it was theirs to sell in the first place).
Though many men and women who “settled” western frontiers became virulent Indian haters and advocated extermination, most theo-
rists offered assimilation as an alternative. Assimilation resolved the contradiction between a commitment to dispossession with its impli-
cations of genocide on the one hand, and Enlightenment and Christian principles of the common humanity of all people on the other.…
Yet the basic premise of assimilation, that Indian ways of life were inferior, was linked to increasingly systematized theories of racial classi-
fication and hierarchy that tended to reinforce ontological thinking about race.… American elites eventually tried to resolve the contradic-
tion between imperialism and humanitarianism through the idea that whereas rare individuals might become “civilized,” Indians were an
inferior race that was inevitably destined to vanish. Although Americans knew at a practical level that Indians controlled a significant pro-
portion of North America, on an ideological level they conceived of the entire continent as empty.
O.K. So, what is my point? It is impossible for the psyche of a people to remain completely unaffected by their unprincipled and violent abro-
gation of the rights (that is those subsumed by the Natural Law of Prior Claim) of other peoples over a period spanning centuries and on a
scale that is simply unfathomable by the human mind—most especially when those so victimized continue to live among the interlopers. It is
not surprising then that the denouement of such shameful markers in the history of the colonization of the United States and South Africa as
the enslavement of Africans and Asians (in South Africa—1650s–1830s) and First Americans and Africans (in the United States—1500s–
1863/1865); the Hundred Year War (1799–1879); the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase (1803); the Trail of Tears (1838); and Wounded
Knee (1890), on the ideological plane has been the development among the descendants of the European settlers of what may be described as
the hegemony of the ideology of “whiteness.” United in their common history—that transcends class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and any oth-
er social structural division one may care to identify—of gross criminality (in terms of crimes against humanity), a perverse racist sense devel-
oped among them of entitlement to human and natural resources, before all other peoples, on the basis of nothing more than their skin pig-
mentation. Fortified by the power to continue across centuries, all the way to the present, to impose hegemony upon others (and contrary to
the logical expectation of feelings of remorse, the quest to seek forgiveness, the magnanimity to consider restitution, and so on, befitting a
people that have never ceased to trumpet to this day their membership of a supposedly superior civilization) the descendants of the European
colonial settlers elevated the notion of whiteness as signifying entitlement to privilege to one of Darwinian naturalness (or in the case of those
of a religious mind a God-given right).
While the literature on the subject of the hegemony of whiteness is burgeoning, a brief foray into its principal characteristics is all we can
afford, folks, given limitations of time. There are seven central elements around which the ideology of whiteness is organized:
a pervasive and stupefying ahistoricism;
the deep illusion that whiteness is an immutable biologically determined concept, rather than one of contingency (exemplified by
the profound inability to clearly and consistently define who a “white” person is across time and space);
the fallacy that whiteness equals civilizational superiority (a Eurocentrist hubris);
the preposterous belief that whiteness is a synonym for humanness;
the notion of whiteness as “property”;
the belief that possession of this property entitles one to privileges that others without this property are not entitled to;
and the idea that what constitutes knowledge is a prerogative that belongs only to those who possess this property (and therefore,
even describing and questioning whiteness, its practice, its historical antecedents, and so on is akin to dabbling in superstition).
Using this framework as a starting point it is possible to do an analysis of the role of whiteness in society from the perspective of a wide range
of topics, such as:
'White' as an unstable, time and place dependent ethnic category;
Whiteness and 'normality' in the popular consciousness of Western citizenry;
Whiteness as a determinant of social spaces;
Whiteness as a determinant of power relations;
Whiteness and urban planning;
Whiteness and its intersection with class relations;
Whitness and its interaction with race relations;
Whiteness, and settler colonialism;](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-66-320.jpg)
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Racial Formation: See Race/Racism
Rationality Fallacy: By this concept I am challenging the foundational belief of economists and other social science disciplines that human
beings always act in their own self-interest because they are rational beings. Human beings may pride themselves as masters of the planet (an
expression of what I call evolutionary hubris) because they have the most complex brain but that does not imply that they always
think/behave logically or rationally, even when their own self-interest is at stake. In fact, I want to suggest that to act irrationally or illogically, at times,
may be part of our genetic makeup as human beings (to ensure the survival of the species) because the evolution of all life is also a function
of nothing more than serendipity.
Reverse Discrimination/Reverse Racism: See Race/Racism.
Right Wing: See Left/Right.
Right/Left: See Left/Right.
Royal Proclamation of 1763: A decree issued by the British Crown on October 7, that was aimed at eliminating the ever-escalating and costly
armed conflicts between the colonists and U.S. First Americans by, in theory if not in practice, forbidding land-grabs by colonial land specula-
tors of the former’s lands which the Act now specifically designated as lying west of the Appalachian Mountains, the crest of which constitut-
ed the border. It was this decree together with such other legislation as the Quartering Act of 1765; the Stamp Act of 1765; and the Townshend
Acts of 1767 that helped to precipitate the U.S. War of Independence.120 In other words, the fundamental source of the grievances of the
domestic colonial elites against the British lay in such matters as settlement expansion, taxation, and the like that threatened to undermine their
inexorable accumulation-driven greed. Their anti-British ire sprang essentially from the perception that the various measures that the British
Parliament had enacted in the aftermath of the costly Seven Years’ War ([1756–63]—also variously known as The French War, The French and
Indian War, and The Great War for Empire and which had benefited the colonists greatly by securing the defeat of French colonial designs in
North America—for the purpose, quite reasonably and legitimately, of getting the hitherto lightly taxed U.S. colonists to assist with paying off
the huge debts incurred by the British citizenry as a direct consequence of the war (as well as assist with tightening the grip of British suzerain-
ty in the face of an increasingly sullen U.S. colonial elite), were the thin end of a wedge that would lead to unacceptable economic burdens
down the road.121
Rule of Law: This jurisprudential concept is one of the foundational pillars of democracy; that is, no rule of law, no democracy. At the sim-
plest level the concept of the “rule of law” simply means that not only do laws govern relations between the government and the citizenry, but
no one, not even the government, is above the law; everyone must obey the law. (To what extent this concept is implemented in practice in a
given society that professes to be a democracy is, of course, a different matter.) However, like the concept of democracy itself, when one
probes deeper into the meaning of this concept (rule of law), then one finds important variations depending upon which society one is con-
sidering and what time period. For example, in those societies where there are multiple sources of law (e.g. in many countries in Africa and the
Middle East where traditional pre-colonial law exists side by side with Western colonially derived law—a situation that may be referred to as
jurisprudential pluralism) this concept will have different meanings. However, given that our focus is North America, specifically the United States,
for our purposes the concept of the rule of law, at the theoretical level, should be understood to carry with it, at the minimum, these subset of
contingent conditions (listed in no particular order)—which, needless to say, may not all be necessarily practiced:
Theremustbeabodyofrelevantlawsthatthecitizenrymustobey,andtheymustbewrittenclearlywithoutambiguity;andtheymustbepublicly
accessibletoeveryone—thatis,lawsmustbepublishedinsomeformsothatanyonewhowishestodosocanfindoutwhatthelawisregarding
agivenmatter.Notethataccessibilityalsoimpliesthatlawsmusthavesufficientlongevitytopermitthepublictogettoknowwhatthelawisbe-
foreitischangedforwhateverreason.(Forexample,adoptingalawinoneweekandthenchangingitinthenext,andthenchangingitagain—
andsoon—createsuncertaintyastowhatthelawsaysonagivenmatter.)
Lawsareapplicableonlyaftertheyhavebeenadopted(so,forexample,apersoncannotbechargedwithbreakingthelawifatthetimetheper-
sonsupposedlybrokethelaw,thelawwasnotyetonthebooks—thatis,hadnotbeenpassed).Notethattherecanbecircumstanceswherea
lawisapplicableretroactivelybutnotusuallyinthecaseofcriminallaw.
Lawsmustbepassedbyademocraticallyrepresentativelegislativebodywherethesetwoelementsofthepoliticalsystemareinforce:theruleof
themajoritywhileatthesametimeprotectingtherightsoftheminority.
Lawsmustnotexistonlyforthepurposeofcreatingorderandrespectforauthority;therefore,lawsthatviolatethehuman/civilrightsoftheciti-
zenrycannotbeconsideredasinviolable(thatis,lawsmustnotbetyrannical).
120. Although some of these measures were repealed the following year because of impudent intransigence on the part of the colonial elites, the damage to the
legitimacy of continuing British colonial presence was now irreversible.
121. The “American Revolution,” as the War of Independence is also known, was a revolution from above; consequently it had little to do with democracy per
se. The Revolution at its core was nothing more than a conflagratory overthrow of the hegemony of one section of the elite (colonial) in preference for that of
another (domestic), in which the masses, even though participants in the conflagration, did not act to secure their own interests—the existence of the safety
valve of abundant lands to pillage having dulled their senses in this regard, coupled with the elite-inspired emergent ideology of nationalism. The socio-
economic and political consequences of this history continue to hound us to the present day; the clearest symptom of which is the constant glorification of the
hollow shell of procedural democracy (in lieu of building corporeal democracy) by U.S. capital and its allies, even as the masses look on. As Gregg (1997: 273)
states pithily: “the endurance of pluralism and the potential for liberal change in the United States appears less likely to be a rule of history than a luxury enjoyed
by the lucky few.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-69-320.jpg)
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This would be especially the case if the target of the satire joins in with the laughter--as in the case of court jesting or celebrity roasting for
example. In such a situation laughter serves to sugarcoat the aggression of the satirist.
(d) The fourth major element on which satire rests, according to Test (1991), is judgment. That is until the satirist makes a judgment on
who or what should be the target of his/her satire (whether it is a person or a group of people, whether it is an institution or an organization,
whether it is a society or a culture, whether it is a style of life or a fashion of dress, whether it is religion or politics, whether it is a work of art
or music, whether it is a book or an article, whether it is a profession or a vocation, or whatever else it may be) it remains a neutral artistic ex-
pression. As he puts it: ''It is aggression waiting for a target; it is laughter waiting for a stimulant; it is play waiting for a game.'' (p. 27) In other
words, once the satirist has taken hold of satire it ceases to be neutral, it is transformed into a weapon; and the purpose to which it is put is
varied indeed: it has been used for the best of intentions and the worst of intentions, and in support of the best of causes and the worst of
causes. ''It has been used by malicious, envious, and spiteful persons and it has been used by idealistic and moral persons. It has been used by
person in all walks of life, all kinds of cultures and systems of government in countries all over the world. It has been used to attack govern-
ments and to bolster governments, it has been used to attack and to defend religion.'' (p. 28)
Having looked at the key elements that make up satire, it remains to look at a special problem that afflicts almost all satire: that of
communication. In order for satire to succeed it must be perceived by the audience as satire and nothing else. Satire is both highly localized
humor (bound to a specific time and place) and highly demanding. The audience must not only be conversant with the context out of which a
particular piece of satire has emerged (be it political, religious, social, economic, etc.), but must also be in sympathy with the motivations of the
satirist (unless the audience itself is the target of the satire) to the point where it can appreciate the unique elements that make up the satire:
verbal aggression, play, laughter and judgment. Under the circumstances, the potential for communication failure is considerable--for satire
makes a great deal of demand on the knowledge, intellect and tolerance of the audience. In fact, as Test (1991:253) puts it, ''[t]he demands of
satire and its irony for special knowledge and choosing among values gives satire a unique capacity for alienating an audience, quite apart from
any individual irony blindness--inability to pay attention, lack of practice, incapacity for attaining the appropriate emotional state... " (See also
ironical allegory, parody.)
Scapegoat: A person or group of people who become the target of anger, prejudice, resentment, oppression, etc. because of a belief that
he/she/they is/are responsible for one’s problems, failures, immoral behavior, and so on—even though that is entirely untrue, not borne out by facts.
Blaming others not responsible for difficulties one is experiencing appears to be a common human attribute and a favorite political strategy of
demagogues—who, obviously, thrive on bullying the powerless—in their effort to whip up support. When a group of people are scapegoated, a
potent reinforcement for this strategy will usually be found in the deployment of malignant stereotypes of this group (who more often than
not tend to be weak in terms of political and economic power, relative to those targeting them). Not surprisingly, ideologies of oppression
(ethnicism, racism, sexism, classism, etc.) rely heavily on the strategy of scapegoating.
Incidentally, ancient Greeks ritually practiced scapegoating by blaming some calamity and the like on a powerless person or outcast (a
pharmakós) and most unfairly and tragically driving the person out of the community by force. However, the term as we know it today comes
from the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Bible), specifically, the third book known as the Book of Leviticus where the directive is for an actual goat to be
sent into the desert, symbolically carrying with it the sins of the community (the Israelites). Here is the relevant passage:
16:7 Then he is to take the two goats and present them before the LORD at the entrance to the tent of meeting.
16: 8 He is to cast lots for the two goats—one lot for the LORD and the other for the scapegoat.
16:9 Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the LORD and sacrifice it for a sin offering.
16:10 But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the
wilderness as a scapegoat.
Settler-colonialism: A variant of colonialism, referring to colonization that entailed settlement by colonial populations. Such settlement was
usually, but not always, permanent—compare the colonization experiences of Kenya and South Africa.
Shi’a: those who belong to the other (much smaller) part of the major division that arose in Islam over the question of the rightful heir to the
Islamic caliphate. The Shi’a pressed the claims of Ali (the son in law of Prophet Muhammed) and his descendants, in opposition to the Sun’ni
(who supported claims to the caliphate based not on blood lines but consensually determined elections—hence their recognition of the Um-
mayads). It should be noted that neither parts of this major schismatic division recognizes the legitimacy of the other as members of the
Um’mah, that is, as authentic Muslims.
Social Change/Social Transformations: Those who study history, especially comparative history, are burdened by the constant and sober-
ing reminder that no matter how intelligently purposeful human beings may consider themselves, at the end of the day—that is, in the last
instance—social transformations (meaning macro-level social change) are as much a product of chance and circumstance as directed human
endeavors (in the shape of “social movements”—broadly understood). To put the matter differently: any teleological order that may appear to
exist in the history of social transformations is in reality a figment of the historian's imagination. History, in the sense of historiography, is,
ultimately, a selective chronicle of a series of conjunctures of fortuitously 'propitious' factors where the role of human agency, while not entire-
ly absent (hence the qualifier: ultimately), is, more often than not, far from pivotal to the social transformation in question. Stephen K. Sander-
son, in his book Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development (Blackwell, 1995), makes this point with even greater clarity:
[I]ndividuals acting in their own interests create social structures and systems that are the sum total and product of these socially oriented
individual actions. These social structures and systems are frequently constituted in ways that individuals never intended, and thus individ-
ually purposive human action leads to many unintended consequences. Social evolution is driven by purposive or intended human actions,
but it is to a large extent not itself a purposive or intended phenomenon. (p. 13)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-71-320.jpg)
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(See also Conjuncture of Fortuitously Propitious Historical Factors.)
Social Darwinism: A thoroughly misguided and scientifically discredited ideology, that drew succor from the ideology of the Other, popular
in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—propounded by people like Francis Galton,123 Herbert Spencer, Walter Bage-
hot, and William Graham Sumner—that viewed human societies through the lens of the concept of “natural selection” that Charles Darwin
had proposed as part of his theory of evolution and pithily summarized by Spencer with the oft quoted line: “survival of the fittest.” In sum,
the social Darwinists believed that life was akin to a crapshoot and only those (individuals, societies, nations, races, etc.) who possessed, sup-
posedly, “superior” genes were deservedly best suited to survive it; thereby ensuring a continuous evolutionary “purification” process which in
turn would lead to societal “self-improvement.” To varying degrees (depending upon how fervent they were about their ideology), such desira-
ble human qualities as charitableness, kindness, love, generosity, altruism, benevolence, righteousness, justness, fairness, and so on were viewed,
either explicitly or subtextually, as weaknesses that interfered with the “natural law” of the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism, as one can
guess, proved to be of great help in providing the ideological justification for such evil projects and movements as colonialism, imperialism,
eugenics, fascism, racism, and so on. In the twentieth century, social Darwinism’s vilest achievement was, of course, the Holocaust in Nazi
Germany. It is important to note that social Darwinism in its slightly milder form continues to hold sway today, especially on the right (e.g.
among political conservatives and advocates of laissez-faire capitalism). (See also Essentialism, Other/Otherness, Stereotype.)
Social Formation: A sociological concept that, in simple terms, refers to the historically determined totality of institutional structures and practices
at all levels of society: economic, political, and ideological (to name just three).
Social Safety Net: This is a kind of “insurance policy” for the capitalist system against the possibility of ordinary class-struggles (e.g. trade-
union activity) spiraling out of control into revolutionary upheavals that would cripple the system or destroy it altogether. In other words, the
social safety net is one of the key hallmarks of a democratic-capitalist society (respect for the rule of law, human rights, civil rights, etc. being
among others). There is a profound irony here in that even though the capitalist system as a whole benefits from the existence of a social safety
net, it is instituted at the behest of the working classes (by means of class struggle) and not the capitalist class itself.
So, what exactly is a social safety net? It is wages, both monetary and in kind, paid out to the public by society—hence it’s a form of public
wages—that come out of taxes paid by the citizenry in order to ensure that the weak and the vulnerable (the young, the old, the disabled, the
sick, the unemployed, the poor, and so on) are protected to some extent from the negative (predatory) consequences of capitalism that under-
mine the overall quality of life of the citizenry—including protection from utter destitution. As you can guess, the term comes from the fact
that it is analogous to the safety net that hangs below a high-wire act in, say, a circus. However, there is another irony here: many of the benefi-
ciaries of the social safety net, today, do not appear to comprehend this fact.
The social safety net, therefore, is not a charity, as conservatives would like you to believe; rather it is a mechanism for ameliorating (albeit
in the mildest way) the socially deleterious consequences of that axiom of capitalism: “profits before people.” Consider this: it is not a coinci-
dence that in every country in the world today—repeat, every country—where political chaos and mayhem reigns, there is an absence of either
any kind of a social safety net or a social safety net that only exists, for the most part, on paper; that is, it does not work in practice for a num-
ber of reasons, chief among them being corruption and the absence of the rule of law.
Taking the example of the United States, the key components of the social safety net (which for the most part has been, for obvious rea-
sons, the handiwork of Democrats, not Republicans)—depending upon which state you reside in (some states have weaker social safety-nets
than others, especially those in the South)—include:
the minimum wage;
social security;
food stamps;
tax-payer-funded education (schools, colleges, etc.);
tax-payer subsidized transportation services (rail, subway, buses, etc.)
unemployment insurance;
disability insurance;
Medicare;
Medicaid;
personal bankruptcy;
welfare;
tuition assistance;
Head Start Program;
Veterans Affairs Healthcare System;
123. Incidentally, Galton was the first to coin the term eugenics when he proposed the despicable fallacy of “improving” societies by selective breeding of hu-
man beings. As he wrote: “We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious
mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or
strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express
the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viviculture, which I once ventured to use.” (Galton, Francis. Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its
Development. Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT: 2004 [1907] p. 17, footnote 1.)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-72-320.jpg)
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over this issue in some other parts of the world (as in the former Communist countries) has been the basis of revolutionary upheavals.126 The
conventional wisdom of course (especially in the West) is that the democratic capitalist state serves everyone’s interest, not a particular group’s
interests. It is a neutral arbiter among competing interest groups in a context where its principal function is to supply public goods (services)
and to regulate and facilitate the operation of the capitalist market for commodities (understood in the broadest sense to mean anything that
can be bought and sold). People who hold this position (such as Baumol 1965, and Verba and Nie 1972) may be termed pluralists. Others hold
that the state is an epiphenomenon of the economic base where its principal function is to serve as an instrument of the capitalist class (the
wealthy and powerful who own the major means of production)—via the state’s monopoly of the power of coercion—in order to dominate
the working class economically and politically. Those who hold this position (such as Becker 1977 and Miliband 1969) may be called instrumen-
talists. Still others, such as Althusser 1971 and Poulantzas 1978 (who may be called the structuralists) hold that the state, while serving the interests
of the capitalist class, does so in such a way that members of this class do not even have to be directly involved with the state (e.g., occupying a
particular bureaucratic position). This becomes possible because of the way modern capitalist societies are structured where the function of
the state is to (a) maintain societal cohesion via ideological transformation of bourgeois interests into general societal interests in the face of
disintegrative tendencies arising from class antagonisms; (b) engender class cohesion within the bourgeoisie in the face of disintegrative
tendencies arising out of competition between individual capitalists; and (c) engender disunity within the subordinate classes so as to prevent a
concerted opposition against the bourgeoisie. The coincidence of bourgeois interests with the interests of the state is a product of the objec-
tive relationship between the state and the capitalist socio-economic system and not a subjective relationship between the state and the bour-
geoisie; therefore, the bourgeoisie do not have to occupy positions of power within the state apparatuses.
Then there are those such as Habermas (1976), O’Connor (1973), and Offe (1984)—who may be called systems theorists—they theorize that
the state should be seen as a political input-output mechanism that exists to guarantee capitalist accumulation—necessary in part to allow for
the state’s own reproduction. In this role it requires an input of mass political loyalty in order to generate an output of autocratic administrative
decisions aimed at correcting the inherently crisis ridden characteristic of capitalism. This role of the state, however, is contradictory because
intervention within the economy on the side of the capitalist class leads to an erosion of its legitimacy within the rest of society—as its appar-
ent neutrality is stripped away—producing for it a crisis of “legitimation.” Consequently, the capitalist state is immeshed in a crisis laden politi-
cal system and the solution to which can only emerge via the replacement of capitalism with socialism. People such as Altvater (1973) and
Hirsch (1977) represent those who may be termed derivationists; their position is that the specific form of the capitalist state cannot be divorced
from the inherently exploitative nature of the capitalist relations of production, on the contrary it is derived from these relations. However, in
order to obfuscate and thereby render palatable this exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class, the state creates a dichotomy be-
tween the “economic” sphere and the “political” sphere. The domination of the state in the political sphere then allows it to create the illusion
of a democratic political and economic system via its stance of apparent class neutrality—thereby ensuring mass loyalty to the state and
through it the capitalist system, even as the state (as an “ideal collective capitalist”) engages in actions aimed at countering the inherent tendency
for the rate of profit to fall in capitalist systems.127 These actions include: securing those external conditions necessary for maintenance of the
capitalist relations of production that cannot be entrusted entirely to market forces (e.g., infrastructure); redistribute revenues and/or intervene
in the circulation process so as to favor economically strategic capitalists and/or secure the reproduction of wage labor; promote long-term
development of productive forces through such various measures as funding “research and development” programs; and providing support
126. The reason for this disagreement is not far to seek: depending upon what “theory” one has as to whose interests the state really represents, one will be
motivated to adopt certain political positions regarding the legitimacy of the state. Depending upon the theory in question, it can range all the way from apathet-
ic acceptance of the legitimacy of the state to co-operative acceptance on to apathetic non-acceptance and even further: active opposition to the state in the
form of revolutionary war. The contentious basis of the question (i.e., whose interests the state represents) is, therefore, clearly evident. Any theory of the state
is of necessity a composite of two dialectically related halves: the heuristic and the normative; hence this implies that a theory of the state is ultimately a program
of social action. Alford and Friedland (1985) make this very point in a dramatic way when they say that state theories have “power.” This power is manifest in
several ways:
(a) How one interprets state behavior at the political, legislative, or administrative levels depends on the theory one subscribes to.
(b) Theories of the state help to form the consciousness of social groups in terms of what is permissible and what is not with respect to the state, thereby
pointing to the “power” of theory to dominate behavior. They give an example by saying that “a hypothesis about whether the police are likely to arrest some-
one for sitting-in at the mayor’s office is a theory of probable state action” (p. 388)
(c) State theories have hegemonic power over categories of language. This is evidenced via latent assumptions about what behaviors belong to the public do-
main and what behaviors belong to the private domain—thus pointing to an implicit theory about state-society boundaries. Therefore, as they explain, “[c]larity
on the theoretical issues may contribute to a more precise understanding of the potential for new leaders, policies, and social movements to significantly chal-
lenge the drift into economic crises, political and cultural repression, and war. … Theories motivate people to act and rationalize those actions afterward. … If
the theory is correct and the conditions under which the action takes place are compatible with the theory, the intended outcomes are more likely than not. In
this respect, theory has powers” (Alford and Friedland 1985: 3–4).
Consequently, accepting an existing theory of the state, or constructing a new state theory, boils down to making a choice between accepting, for example, the
present political, social and economic practices of modern industrial societies, or working toward their change for the better. For, to construct new theories of
the state is to call for a change in the status quo. It is ultimately for this reason that common agreement on the acceptance of a single theory of the state be-
comes impossible; hence, it is not uncommon to see fur fly when the issue of the state is brought up among political scientists.
127. The concept of the “falling rate of profit” is used to explain the tendency of capitalist economic systems to undergo, over time, cyclic phases of “boom”
and “bust.” It is defined as the phenomenon where businesses, in the face of competition from other businesses, combat both labor costs and the rising unit
cost of production by resorting to increasing mechanization and automation. This increase in the ratio of machinery to labor, however, produces its own con-
tradiction: a declining rate of profit as costs at the macro-economic level, brought about by the increased investment in machinery, accelerates. Therefore, even
though unit costs may decrease, the decrease is achieved on the basis of rising overall production costs that lead to falling profits, especially as the substitution of
labor with machinery reaches the point of saturation imposed by the existing limits of knowledge and technology. The long-term consequence of declining
rates of profit at the macro-economic level is that, eventually, a system wide economic crisis (commonly known as a “recession”) is set in motion as disincentives
to further investment emerge, inventories begin to build up due to lack of sales, labor is fired, and so on. For more on the concept of “falling rates of profit”
see Shaikh (1982).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-74-320.jpg)
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assistance for the entire capitalist class in their competition with other capitalist classes on the world market (e.g., erecting tariff barriers, inter-
vening diplomatically and/or militarily where possible when situations call for it in the world, and so on).
As if these are not enough, there are still more theories of the state: there is the managerial theory of the state. Here people such as Birn-
baum (1981), Block (1980), Dahrendorf (1959) and Evans, Rueschemeyer, Skocpol (1985) argue that the state is controlled by bureaucrats
called “state managers” and not capitalists. However, the coincidence of interests of capitalists and those of the state managers is a function of
the need for the state to maintain its revenue base, as well as guarantee its legitimation vis-à-vis the public. The need to maintain “business con-
fidence” therefore underwrites state activities in the area of reproduction of capitalist relations and accumulation. The state functions as an
autonomous actor, placed intermediately, between the working class and the capitalist class. Then there is the corporatist theory of the state; its
proponents include: Cawson (1986), Grant (1985), Panitch (1980), and Schmitter (1974). Their position is that the state is the embodiment of
the common good and this serves as the basis for its legitimacy. Therefore, the state does not have to reflect the democratic will of the people.
In a corporatist society the state as an independent political authority mediates between, as well as directs, select state licensed organizational-
ly-based economic interests (e.g., employer organizations, trade unions, and so on). In such a society, political participation occurs only through
these officially sanctioned organizations. Corporatism is the logical (and desirable) outcome of the decay of pluralism. Yet another theory is the
racial theory of the state that posits the state, such as the one in United States, as comprising a panoply of institutions—but considered together
with, in the words of its chief proponents, Omi and Winant, “the policies they carry out, the conditions and rules which support and justify them,
and the social relations in which they are imbedded,” —in which race (depending upon the institutions and historical moment in question) occu-
pies “varying degrees of centrality” (Omi and Winant, 1994: 83, emphasis in the original). Here, one can also add some of the work of the
critical race theorists as constituting contributions to a formulation of the racial theory of the state.128
This summary of the major theories of the state will end with one more: it may be called, for want of a better term, the articulated theory of
the state. Chief proponents of this theory are Alford and Friedland (1985). Their argument is that all theories of the modern capitalist state
can be categorized into three principal sets: pluralist, managerial (statist) and class (Marxist). Each set of theories has a home domain in which the
cogency of their analysis is unrivaled: for the pluralists it is at the micro-level analysis of the state (e.g., the individual, such as the chief executive
officer of a corporation), for the managerialists it is at the meso-level (e.g., the organization, such as a business corporation) and for the Marx-
ists it is at the macro-level (e.g., society, such as the capitalist social formation). Each of these three theoretical sets, despite their claims to an
all-encompassing analytical validity, has little theoretical value outside their home domains. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of the state
must rest on an articulation of these three principal sets of theories, each providing a unique and cogent insight into a specific level of analysis
(to which it is best suited) of the advanced capitalist state.
Which among these different theories, then, is the correct theory about the nature and function of the state in modern capitalist democra-
cies? The answer is that all of them but only when considered together. This position in actuality is the one adopted by Alford and Friedland
(1985) in their articulated theory of the state (though this is not what they call it; in fact, they deny that they have constructed a new “theory of
the state”). Each of the theories indicated above address a particular dimension of the role of the state; though they all think that they alone
have the full grasp and understanding of this role; which in truth is impossible to achieve given its enormous complexity, in terms of both its
composition and functioning.129
Stereotype: Refers to the generalization of a quality in an individual to an entire group of people that the individual belongs to. (Note, there-
fore, that stereotypes by definition dehumanize those who are stereotyped.) Stereotypes are created by artists (writers, actors, filmmakers, paint-
ers, musicians, comedians, journalists, etc.) in order to justify discrimination and prejudice. The newest stereotype popularized in the West in
recent years—especially following 9/11—is that Arab and Asian Muslims are all terrorists. Some stereotypes can go out of fashion because of
changed circumstances (e.g. the stereotype that all Russians are communists is no longer in vogue today.) A stereotype, then, is an oversimpli-
fied mental image of groups of people, or categories of institutions (the church, etc.), or even whole countries, continents and regions. This
mental-image is shared by a large number of people and it is usually derived from the extrapolation of the behavior of a single individual (or
entity) to the rest of the community (or entities) from which the individual (or entity) comes. Stereotypes can be of both “positive” types and
negative types. In both instances, however, the fact that this image does not conform to reality, implies that there is an inherent underlying neg-
ative element to it—even in the case of positive stereotypes. This negativity resides in the fact that it conditions behavior toward the target of
the stereotype in a manner that is not warranted by the actual objective reality surrounding the target.
When the target of the stereotype happens to be a group of people or a country then the injustice that underlies this phenomenon is
readily obvious. In such circumstances the behavioral attitude toward the target is preconceived; it is not a product of actual interaction with
the target. For example: it is not uncommon to see immigrants come into the U.S. with preconceived views of African-Americans, even
though they may have never ever actually interacted with a single African-American. 130 Of all the agencies in society that are responsible for
128. An excellent introduction to critical race theory is the comprehensive seminal anthology by Delgado and Stefancic (2000).
129. Here one has to concur with the observation by Jessop (1982) that the quest for a general or grand theory of the state is doomed from the start however
desirable it may be. “For, while any attempt to analyze the world must assume that it is determinate and determined, it does not follow that a single theory can
comprehend the totality of its determinations without resorting to reductionism of one kind or another.” He continues: “(t)he various abortive efforts to devel-
op a general theory of the state get their impetus from conflating the determinacy of the real world with determinacy as a property of a given theoretical sys-
tem, thereby aiming to explain the former in terms of the latter” (p. 211–12). Jessop then goes on to elaborate his point by suggesting that attempts at general
theory construction invariably fall into one or more of the following three traps: (i) Reductionism: using one aspect of theoretical formulation to account for
everything about the state and its politics; (ii) Empiricism: substituting an adequate explanation for a given event with a partial explanation based on either a
synchronic and/or historiographical description of the event; and (iii) subsumptionism, where a particular description of a given event is considered to be “sub-
sumed under a general principle of explanation as one of its many instantiations” (p. 212).
130. While it is humanly impossible to eliminate all stereotypes from one's mind because of the enormous complexity of the world one lives in; there are some
stereotypes [especially those concerning groups of peoples or a country] that demand elimination. Examples of such stereotypes abound; here are a few: whites
are racists; blacks are lazy; Jews own everything; Orientals work too hard; women are weak; women cannot be understood by men; Arabs are wealthy; Ameri-
cans are rich; Americans are uncouth; etc.; etc.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-75-320.jpg)
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generating, disseminating, and sustaining stereotypes the media—especially film and television—is undoubtedly the most powerful. So, for
example, one of the dominant stereotypes that films in the U.S. have perpetuated concerns the racist image of people of color, especially Na-
tive-Americans and African-Americans. In the case of Native-Americans one only has to see the old “Westerns” (the cowboy and “injun”)
films to quickly determine the stereotype. In these films U.S. First Americans are invariably portrayed as vermin and scoundrels who deserve to
be annihilated (and many of whom were annihilated in real life), rather than as victims (which in real life they were) of a voracious and rapine
land-hungry alien settler population that established its legitimacy to rob the land that belonged to the Native-Americans solely on the basis of
their guns and their numbers.
As for African-Americans, the stereotypes in cinema have been at a subtler level. In his excellent book, Bogle (1989) identifies the fol-
lowing types of stereotypes, among others, that African-Americans have been historically burdened with in Hollywood films: the uncle tom
(the polite, patient, uncomplaining 'good negro' who did everything his/her white master desired even in the face severe oppression); the coon
(the comic negro who via his/her buffoonery [either as a child, a pick ninny, or as an adult the uncle Remus] served as an object of amusement
and entertainment); the tragic mulatto (the product of miscegenation who is forever the victim of her mixed parentage); the mammy (a big, fat
and bossy woman, often the female version of the coon); the aunt Jemima (the female version of the uncle tom); the buck (either as brutal and
savage out to destroy the white man's world or as an over-sexed animal lusting after white women); the jester (the comic negro, ''[h]igh-
stepping, and high-falutin' and crazy as all get-out"); the servants (respectable, uncomplaining, and entertaining domestics); the entertainers (the
respectable, well dressed jester); the problem people (the victims of racism of bad whites eliciting sympathy from good whites, or angry vic-
tims of racism turned militant); and the black superstar (the race problem is over, even blacks can be superstars now). As is evident from this
long list of stereotypes, the net effect has been to dehumanize African-Americans by portraying them in a manner that did not correspond
with reality, not so much at the level of the individual (e.g. in reality there are some individuals who do act as uncle toms), but at the level of the
group (e.g. not all African-Americans are uncle-toms). Needless to say, via this dehumanization the ideology of racism has continued to be
propagated through the socialization aspect of film-viewing. (Other examples of racist stereotypes of African Americans are available in this
short but well-illustrated article available here.)
It is important to caution that human behavior, where stereotypes are involved, is not conditioned entirely by the stereotypes—other fac-
tors will also come into play. For example, in the case of racist stereotypes and racism, it would be a mistake to suggest that racist stereotypes
leads to racism; for, in reality, the reverse is probably true. Therefore, in the context of racism, the function of racist stereotypes is that they are
simply one more item in the arsenal of dehumanization. That is, they help to reinforce, not create, racism. Moreover, in the creation and dis-
semination of insidious stereotypes of negativity by the mass media (includes the entertainment industry), nothing compares to the power of
images, regardless of whether they are still images or moving images, in socializing the masses to the acceptance of prejudice and hate of the
“Other” to the point of naturalness—meaning it becomes "natural" to assume, for example here in the United States, that black people are
intellectually inferior or that Jews are a cunning money-grubbing people or that the Irish love their drink (meaning they are brawling drunkards)
or that Italians are lazy, pasta-loving members of the Mafia. However, a common ploy among racists, sexists, etc. in popularizing stereotype
images is to claim that such images constitute "art" and therefore should not be opposed or erased from the media, and what is more, it is
protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Three points emerge here: First what is “art”? Who decides when an "object" is
art? Is the First Amendment about protecting the right to popularize material that contributes to oppression, terrorism, and so on? Or was the
First Amendment originally conceived to protect the citizenry from the tyranny of the State (but today has been hijacked for ulterior purpos-
es)?
One would be remiss not to mention here a very thorough and for the most part (though not entirely) convincing demonstration by Bark-
er (1989) that, in his words, “the concept of a ‘stereotype’ is useless as a tool for investigation of media texts.” Moreover, he continues, “it is
dangerous on both epistemological and political grounds.” (p. 210) While this characterization of the concept may be valid from the perspec-
tive of the uses made of it in different contexts, the position adopted here is that the concept, when properly defined, is not entirely valueless
in some circumstances. What does one mean by 'properly defined?' That the concept should not be freighted with unnecessary baggage (value
assumptions, political agendas, etc.) such as those that he identifies. Therefore, it is possible to use the term (as it is used here) in a neutral sense
to simply signify the process of extrapolation of, for example, the personal characteristics of an individual to all members of the group that the
individual belongs to.
Structural Adjustment: Very simply put this seemingly benign term refers to a policy/program for eliminating the role of government in
every human endeavor that has the potential to be “privatized,” meaning capable of being converted into capitalist profit making ventures by
big business. So, for example, structural adjustment advocates are against the idea of governments providing even such basic services to their
citizenry as water supply, or operating prisons, or providing education because they can all be provided by private entities, that is businesses.
The rationale behind this approach is that, supposedly, capitalist enterprises are not only more efficient than the government in providing these
services, but that they would also help to reduce the tax burden. The foolishness of this kind of thinking is highlighted by the fact that not all
human needs can be adequately provided for on the basis of the profit motive—that is why we have governments in the first place—and that
“efficiency” among corporate capitalist monopolies when it comes to captive markets is simply measured by, to all intents and purposes, how
much they can “steal” through both legal and extra-legal means without getting caught. Notice also that the current economic policies being
pursued by Western countries (such as the United States, one of the foremost champions of structural adjustment) has been, most ironically
(or perhaps most hypocritically) an almost complete repudiation, in effect, of this policy as they have moved to dramatically and directly inter-
vene in the economy by means of various “economic stimulus/bail-out-the-crooks” strategies aimed at trying to rescue their economies from
going into complete free fall!
Structural Racism: See Race/Racism](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-76-320.jpg)
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clouds the issue: Westerners tend to forget that the historical foundations of Western democracy itself rests solidly on violent revolutionary
upheavals: the Puritan Revolution (the English Civil War), the French Revolution and the War of Independence and the Civil War in the Unit-
ed States. (Even the whites in South Africa have their history of revolutionary violence: the Boer War.) More importantly, opposition to revolu-
tionary violence conceals a pernicious hidden agenda arising out of a deliberate tendency for the beneficiaries of the status quo—the rich and
the powerful—to equate, in the words of Barrington Moore (1967: 505) “the violence of those who resist oppression with the violence of the
oppressors,” and thereby promulgate the falsehood that “gradual and piecemeal reform has demonstrated its superiority over violent revolu-
tion as a way to advance human freedom.” Even a cursory examination of history indicates that while violent resistance against oppression by
the oppressed has generally been met with universal condemnation, the violence of the status quo has gone unchallenged, even when it has
been demonstrably greater in magnitude than the revolutionary violence that rose to challenge it. Take for instance the case of the French
Revolution: the number who actually perished at the hands of the revolutionaries (estimated to be about 40,000) were far fewer than those
who died as a result of the injustices of the ancien regime. Consequently, as Moore (1967: 104) so rightly reminds us with reference to this fact:
“to dwell on the horrors of revolutionary violence while forgetting that of ‘normal’ times is merely partisan hypocrisy.” There is one other
point that must be noted on this issue: violence need not necessarily always imply blood-shed. Violence can also take the form of unjust juridi-
cal constraints: a case in point is the entire panoply of laws that made up the apartheid system. Hence the denial of human rights is surely vio-
lence. Clearly then there is more to it than meets the eye when politicians in the West decry revolutionary violence: their agenda has little to do
with morality; rather it has more to do with the preservation of the status quo upon which rests their hegemonic power. Having said this, how-
ever, it should also be pointed out that revolutionary violence, if one can go by the histories of some of the communist nations, e.g., the Soviet
Union, China, and Cambodia, is also heavily tainted with the blood of the innocent: the people at the bottom, the peasantry, who were victims
of the old order yet again found themselves re-victimized by the new order. In fact, the rivers of blood of the innocent have, at times, run very
deep in these societies.
Textual erasure: I have come up with this term to refer to the non-inclusion of a group of people, for discriminatory reasons, in the audio-
visual “texts” of the mass-media in any racist society (films, tv shows, radio programs, and so on). This is most clearly visible, in this country, at
the time of, for example, film casting where ordinary roles, which in real life could be performed by anyone (including blacks, women, etc.), are
assigned exclusively to whites or males. In this instance, textual erasure results from stereotypes or outright racism/sexism on the part of
filmmakers. For example, the stereotype that blacks occupy only lower class positions in society [which of course is not entirely true]—
therefore film roles featuring middle or upper class positions should not be assigned to black actors. A group who are almost always targets of
textual erasure in Hollywood films (for racist reasons) are Asians—even though many of them in this country are middle class and profession-
als. This concept, however, does not apply only to audio-visual texts; it also applies to the erasure of the presence of peoples of color (or
women in general) in regular texts, such as history books by, for example, either completely neglecting their roles in history or subjecting them
to only a cursory nod. The concept of East-to-West Diffusion (see term above) is my response, for instance, to this form of erasure.
Theory: A systematic ideational construction—made of properly defined concepts and logically interconnected propositions—that is at once
verifiable (in the immediate sense of being consistent with known facts and available evidence) and provisional (capable of revision), and that
is built via the dialectic of a humanist (speculative, creative, etc.) and scientific (measurement, predictive power, etc.) method.
Think Tank: The name commonly given to such types of organizational bodies as research centers and research institutes that are set
up for the explicit purpose of gathering together experts (or so-called “experts”) to do research and disseminate their findings on,
more often than not, issues of society-wide implications in order to influence, usually, governmental policy decisions.137 Because think
tanks are for the most part (but not always) set up by non-governmental interests—such as professional organizations, businesses, charita-
ble foundations, like-minded citizens, etc.—the presence of these bodies in any society is considered a foundational element of what is
known as civil society, which in turn is foundational to democracy. Focusing on United States, think tanks are usually tax-exempt (in
other words, they are subsidized, usually unknowingly, by taxpayers) and derive their legitimacy primarily from the First Amendment to
the U.S. constitution.
For our purposes, the importance of think tanks stems from the fact that they are a powerful weapon of class warfare against the
working classes employed by the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) and its allies. To explain: because the power of these bodies to influ-
ence public policy is usually highly correlated, for obvious reasons, to how much money they have at their disposal, which in turn tends
to be a function of who their benefactors are (usually the wealthy and powerful, such as big business), their ability to conduct class
warfare against the working classes on behalf of their benefactors, the bourgeoisie, is considerable. By issuing research reports and
policy documents, by organizing conferences, by sponsoring research in universities, by supplying “experts” to the media (much of
which itself is owned by corporate capital), by lobbying legislatures at both state and federal levels, and so on, these think tanks advance
the agenda of big business (corporate capital) and their conservative allies by means of class warfare.138
137.Sometimes think tanks are also referred to as think factories. (Also note: the terms bourgeoisie, big business, and corporate capital are used interchangeably in
this entry and elsewhere in this glossary.)
138.Examples of conservative (right-wing) think tanks with considerable influence include these (listed alphabetically): American Action Forum; American En-
terprise Institute; American Foreign Policy Council; Brookings Institution; Center for International Private Enterprise; Cato Institute; Center for Immigration
Studies; Center for the National Interest; Center for Strategic and International Studies; Freedom House; The Heritage Foundation; Hoover Institution; Hudson
Institute; Ludwig von Mises Institute; Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; Middle East Forum; Pacific Institute; Petersen Institute for International Eco-
nomics; and Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (It should be noted that allied to conservative think tanks are also a number of right-wing organizations that are not
considered think tanks but nevertheless have a powerful influence, especially on the U.S. Congress and the media, such as: Americans for Tax reform; Citizens
United; Christian Coalition of America; Family Research Council; FOX News Channel; FreedomWorks; John Birch Society; Koch Industries, Inc.; News Cor-
poration; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.) Are there any progressive think tanks? That is, think tanks that attempt to challenge through their work the power](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-79-320.jpg)
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U.S. African Americans: An ethnic category in the United States that refers to all peoples who can trace part or whole of their ancestry to
the peoples of Africa (excluding Afro-Arabs and Afro-Asians) prior to the European intrusion in that continent. In different time periods they
have been variously referred to as blacks, Negroes, and Coloreds. (See also Africans.) 141
U.S. Euro-Americans. See Blacks.
U.S. First Americans: In this course an ethnic category that refers to the Americans who peopled the Americas prior to the arrival of the
European settlers, and their descendants. (Others may refer to them as “Indians” [a gross misnomer if ever there was one] and/or “Native
Americans” and/or “Aboriginal Americans.”)
USSR: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Verisimilitude: Verisimilitude in cinema refers to the appearance or illusion of reality achieved through mimesis which permits what is happen-
ing on the screen “believable”and which in turn allows the filmmaker to commandeer and manipulate the emotions of the audience.142 In
other words, the relationship between verisimilitude and the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of audiences—the fundamental tool
of imagination that permits one to enjoy/appreciate a film—is directly proportional. A documentary film has the greatest amount of verisimil-
itude followed by films made in the cinéma vérité tradition. However, all Hollywood-type films seek maximum verisimilitude, especially
through manipulation of production values, without of course making the film look like a documentary. Notice that there is a fundamental
contradiction here: verisimilitude is highly desirable but it should not have the quality of a documentary. Another major contradiction of
course is that in so far as verisimilitude depends on the manipulation of production values it runs counter to what happens in real life (for
instance, our lives are not accompanied by sound tracks). Verisimilitude in cinema is of particular concern to me because of its dependence on
high production values which in turn demand a high level of technology and financial resources in the production of the film and which in
turn requires corporate mass-marketing. The outcome of this circumstance is that the quest for verisimilitude in cinema becomes the unwitting
tool of the socialization of marginality in racist (or sexist or capitalist) societies. Here is how, beginning with why cinema was invented in the
first place:
1. The human desire for pleasure in the form of performance entertainment (genetically determined? Perhaps).
2. Leads to an eternal and insatiable quest for verisimilitude.
3. Leads to the invention of cinema/television (and mass visual entertainment).
4. Requires expensive technology (production, and distribution).
5. Requires large financial outlays—especially because films are a gamble.
6. Requires marketing to as large an audience as possible to recoup the financial investment.
7. Requires themes and depictions that are in consonance with the outlook of the majority of the audience—Euro-
Americans, males, etc.
8. In the areas of race/ gender/ class relations these themes and depictions will play to pre-existing racist/ sexist/ class ste-
reotypes, as well as act to reinforce them. In other words: There is a dialectical relationship between, say, racism and sexism
in film, and racism and sexism in society at large.
9. Also leads to textual erasure of blacks, women, etc. from scenes and story lines altogether—as if they don’t exist in soci-
ety at all.
141. See the excellent article by Hanchard (1990) that discusses the contested terrain of nomenclature vis-à-vis U.S. African Americans, as well as the ideological-
ly loaded conventional practice of the designation of United States as “America.”
142. Mimesis refers to the art of faithfully copying (to the extent possible), in literature, theater, film, etc., the reality of the human world.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-83-320.jpg)
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heathen darkness and savagery by bringing them into the light of Christian civilization and modernity. Perhaps the most boldly articulated
embodiment of the “white man’s burden” was the mission civilisatrice of the French, which one French colonial governor, Raphael Sallers, de-
scribed it thusly as late as 1944, at the Brazzaville Conference in Brazzaville, Congo:
Evidently, the purpose of our civilization is to bring civilization to others. So we civilize, that is to say, we are not content to provide merely
a surplus of material wellbeing, but we also impose moral rules and intellectual development. And by what methods and according to
whose example should we do this, if not by our own methods and according to the example of our own civilization, in the name of
which alone we may speak? For what authority would we have to speak in the name of the civilization whose people we are trying to im-
prove? (from Shipway 1999: 142).
White Southern Strategy: A political strategy ideologically rooted in whiteness strategically devised by Republicans to secure the electoral
victory of President Richard M. Nixon that rested on convincing the white ignorantsia in the South145 —by appealing to their racism in the
context of the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1960s—that their objective interests lay with the Republican Party.146 This strategy, in
various forms, continues to be wielded to this day (consider that the majority of white males in this country have consistently voted for the
Republican Party since the days of Nixon). The White Southern Strategy was originally devised by one of Nixon’s election strategist Kevin
Phillips (which is most ironic indeed considering that over the years Phillips has become one of the most trenchant critics of the Republican
Party) that sought to electorally realign the Southern white working class voter toward the Republican Party and away from his/her traditional
and unquestioning support of the Democratic Party—a tradition that was an outcome of the gratitude felt for the Democrats for helping to
alleviate, under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the misery of the Great Depression through Roosevelt’s “New Deal” set of
anti-laissez-faire and pro-working-class economic and social programs. (Note, however, that until the arrival of the Kennedy/Johnson presi-
dencies the Democratic Party, especially in the South, had also been a strongly racist Jim Crow-supporting party.) Phillips—who claimed that
he originally got the idea for the strategy from his observations in the New York city borough of Bronx where he grew up of the rising white-
ness-inspired resentment against racial minorities among working class whites with the passage of civil rights legislation and the launch of
President Lyndon Johnson’s exemplary antipoverty “Great Society” programs (to which the racist white working class ignorantsia felt racial
minorities had no right)—explained the strategy to James Boyd (1970) in an article for the New York Times Magazine, which tellingly had labeled
him as a “self-taught [perverse] ethnologist,” thus:
All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even “Jake the Snake” [Senator Jacob K. Javits] only gets
20 percent. From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any
more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes
who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's
where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the lo-
cal Democrats. (p. 106—bracketed interpolation in the original)
The strategy was not a short-term device targeted only at securing Nixon’s victory but a long-term device, aimed at permanently effecting the
realignment and it depended on exploiting the ideology of whiteness—by playing on the racist fears of the white working class, both in the
South and in the North, in the wake of racial desegregation brought about by the civil rights movement—as well as jingoism, machismo-
inspiring militarism, and anticommunist hysteria of the cold war. And even though, the objective interests of the white working class dictated
that they remain aligned to the Democratic Party given that the Republican Party had slowly evolved toward an unrepentant and cult-like
champion of the interests of capital (relative to the Democratic Party) the Nixonites were shrewd enough to realize that race (in combination
with a melange of other ultrareactionary proclivities that have, through the agency over the decades of subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle
relentless corporate media campaigns masterminded by right wing think tanks funded by U.S. capital, become ingrained in the psyche of the
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
(Source: Kipling, R., & Washington, P. (2007). Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 96) Notice the reference to colonized peoples as “half devil and half
child” by a man whose ancestors less than a thousand years before could not have held up a candle, in terms of civilizational achievements, to the ancestors of
those he is now labeling thusly.
145. Those familiar with the literature on this subject will quickly note that the prefix “white” is usually absent—reminding us that most EuroAmericans view
the term “Southerner” to refer to white Southerners, ignoring the fact, with typical hubris, that millions of other people have also been part of the South from
the very beginning of the founding of United States as a European settler nation. (So, for example, southern African Americans in the South are as much
Southerners as southern whites!)
146. In its various guises, the literature on the White Southern strategy is considerable, however, in addition to Boyd (1970) and Cowden (2001) this basket of
sources should more than suffice for an introduction to this one of the most cynical and nefarious of Machiavellian political strategies ever devised to under-
mine democracy in the United States in modern times—to the detriment, in the long run, of all: Carter (1995 and 1996), Cowden (2001), Edsall and Edsall
(1992), Knuckey (2006), Mendelberg (2001), Murphy and Gulliver (1971), Perlstein (2008), and Phillips (1969).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-85-320.jpg)
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white ignorantsia in the United States, such as jingoism, militarism, “states’ rights,” right wing Biblicalism, anti-gun-control sentiments, patriar-
chal beliefs, homophobia, and the like) could be parlayed to subjectify the objective interests of the white working class. Not surprisingly, since
the election of Nixon, to date the majority of the white working class males have never voted for the Democratic Party in presidential elec-
tions. At the same time, despite voting consistently for the Republicans the poverty rate among working class white Southerners has remained
the highest in United States. However, even at the national level, the fact that a party that has so unashamedly groomed itself over the years to
be the loyal tribune of U.S. capital continues to win the presidency time after time by exploiting the racist and other phobias of the white igno-
rantsia has meant a concerted attack on democracy—both procedural and authentic—to the detriment of the objective interests of all the
citizenry (which range from poverty-rate wages and the absence of universal health care to a broken and underfunded public educational sys-
tem and overflowing prisons; from a highly-skewed tax structure that steals from the poor to give to the rich to a bloated and immensely
wasteful military-industrial complex; from a pampered pharmaceutical industry that has little regard for the welfare of consumers to a health-
compromising-additives-polluted agro-food industry; from a Congress that has been virtually bought by the lobbyists of U.S. capital to a presi-
dency that has no compunction in expending seemingly limitless quantities of life and treasure in pursuit of protecting the interests of U.S.
capital abroad; from the egregious violations in favor of the interests of capital of the intent of the U.S. constitution to a relentless assault on
the civil rights of both the white working class and the racially marginalized; from tax-payer funded bailouts of U.S. capital to turning a blind-
eye to the relentless assault on the environment wrought by the activities of capital; and so on).
Four additional points need emphasis: first, that although credit has been usually given to the Nixonites for developing the Southern strate-
gy, it already had a progenitor in the shape of the politics of the Alabama governor George C. Wallace who had established his fame as a stal-
wart racist with the line in his 1962 inaugural speech “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In fact, one can argue
that the germ of the strategy is to be found in the slave era where the slave-owning plantocracy, by means of the manipulation of the ideology
of whiteness, convinced the majority of white Southerners, the poor, that supporting the slave order was in their objective interest—whereas
in reality the reverse was true. Following the abolition of slavery, this strategy was again used to bind the South and the North once more; re-
quiring in the process, the obscenely hasty termination of Reconstruction (symbolically typified by, among other things, the adoption by
Northern whites of no less a scoundrel than the Confederate General Robert E. Lee as a native son147). Second, the concept of “states’
rights,” while of long pedigree dating back to the Civil War era (where the issue was the abolition of slavery) is essentially a white Southern
strategy concept where under the ruse of protecting the states from undue federal interference the effort is to permit the Southern states to
circumvent civil rights legislation—credit for this innovation perhaps goes to Wallace. Third, although at the core of the Southern strategy is
the subjectification of the objective interests of the white working class by objectifying their subjective interests, one must not overlook the
fact that it is also a strategy aimed at erasing from the national agenda the very notion of racial justice despite the centuries-long history of racial
injustice targeted at blacks. In other words, the Southern strategy is not simply a matter of rallying agency, it is also a question of exploiting and
reinforcing dialectically a particular historically-rooted structural attribute of United States: institutionalized racism. Fourth, the Southern strategy
approach has not been restricted only to the South, it has found relevance, not surprisingly given the history of racism in United States, in the
North as well (the target being of course Northern working class whites)—as Cowden (2001: 279) puts it: “the United States has become
Southern.”148
Whiteness: See Race/Racism
Whites: See Blacks.
Willing Suspension of Disbelief: I generally use this phrase in a loose sense to mean the willingness by audiences to allow their emotions to
be manipulated by a beam of light in the form of projected images—which I should remind you can be turned off with a simple switch in the
film projector. A stricter, that is common, definition refers to the willingness of audiences to believe what is happening on the screen in particu-
lar genres of films or specific actions/scenes in a given film as “real,” but only for the duration of the film of course (unless one is a child). One
genre, for example, that requires a very high dose of the willing suspension of disbelief is the science fiction film. Consider: people can only
enjoy a Superman film if they are willing to believe (while watching the film) that Superman can really fly. (Once the film is over they can throw
that silly notion out of the window.) Another good example of films that rely wholly on the willing suspension of disbelief by audiences are
Disney cartoons where animal characters are not only completely anthropomorphic but are capable of fantastical antics. (Compare here too
147. For an illuminating article on the historical significance of Robert E. Lee to EuroAmericans (North and South), to this day, see the one by James C. Cobb
in Humanities (magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities) in the July/August 2011 issue (vol. 32, no. 4) also available on the internet, as of this
writing, here: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2011-07/RobertELee.html
148. Most recently, the strategy even reared its ugly head in the nomination process of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate when Hillary Clinton, sup-
ported by her spouse former president Bill Clinton—both supposedly dyed-in-the-wool liberals—used it against her opponent African American Barack
Obama, thus clearly testifying to the veracity of the adage that scratch a white liberal deep enough and more often than not you will uncover a racist. For an
account of the significance of race and class (and gender) in the Democratic primary elections, see, for example the Newsweek cover stories titled “Only in
America” [May 5, 2008, pp. 28–39] and “A Memo to Senator Obama” [June 2, 2008, pp. 22–30]. Interestingly, the June 2 issue of the newsmagazine also carries
an article titled “A Secret Side to the Secret Service” (pp. 32–33) in which the presence of a racist culture—against the backdrop of the Barack candidacy no
less—in the U.S. secret service (whose job includes protecting the U.S. president) evidenced, for example by the interchange of racist e-mails and an incident
where a noose was hung at one of the training sites. The kicker in the story is this paragraph: “[t]he officer responsible, who hasn’t been named by the agency,
insisted he didn’t mean any offense, and his superiors seem to believe him. ‘At this time, there is no clear indication that he had intended a racial message.’” Giv-
en the potent and inflammatory symbolism in U.S. political culture that a hanging rope with a noose has historically come to acquire as a consequence of the
horrendous terrorist practice of lynching in which more often than not blacks were the target of the depraved vigilante white mob violence this is a typical lie-
in-your-face denial so characteristic of the ideology of whiteness.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-86-320.jpg)
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Appendix I
Procedural versus Authentic Democracy in the U.S.
(Legislative Examples)
Lacey Act of 1900 (named after its principal champion, Representative John Lacey of Iowa). (William McKinley [R]); established:
civil and criminal penalties for violation of laws protecting flora and fauna. Today, with successive amendments over the years, the Act
serves as the principal legislative mechanism for the protection of plants, fish, and wildlife from illegal procurement, or possession, or trans-
portation, or sale. The Act also covers plants, fish, and wildlife obtained from abroad.
Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (also known as the Wiley Act after its principal champion, Harvey Washington Wiley, the chief gov-
ernment chemist) (Theodore Roosevelt [Progressive Party]); established:
The Food and Drug Administration to protect the public from the production and marketing of unsafe and dangerous foods, medicines,
medical equipment, and so on.
Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 (Woodrow Wilson [D]); established:
Federal Trade Commission to protect the public from anticompetitive and deceptive acts and practices of businesses that the same Act
outlawed.
National Park Service Act of 1916 (Woodrow Wilson):
established a formal and more coherent national park system out of existing parks for recreational, educational, etc. use by the public
Social Security Act of 1935 (Franklin D. Roosevelt [D]); established:
Unemployment insurance
Social security (retirement insurance for the retired; financial support for the disabled; etc.)
Medicare: health insurance for the retired
Medicaid: health insurance for the very poor
*National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Franklin D. Roosevelt); established:
Workers’ right to organize unions
Workers’ right to strike to improve their working conditions, including pay
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (Franklin D. Roosevelt); established:
Child labor: prohibition of employment of children under 18 in most non-agricultural occupations
National minimum wage
Overtime pay
Public Health Service Act of 1944 (Franklin D. Roosevelt); established:
Office of the Surgeon General
National Institute of Health
The Reorganization Act of 1939 (Franklin D. Roosevelt) which established the Federal Security Agency that would later, in 1942, establish
the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities which after going through various incarnations in subsequent years would even-
tually become today’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—though still popularly known by the abbreviation of its predecessor, Cen-
ters for Disease Control, as the CDC.
Clean Air Act of 1963 (Lyndon B. Johnson [D]); established:
funding for research into air pollution
enjoined states to establish agencies for controlling air pollution
a legislative avenue for federal involvement in matters of inter-state air pollution
Equal Pay Act of 1963 (John F. Kennedy [D]); established:
Equal pay for men and women
*Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson):
Prohibition of discrimination based on gender](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-88-320.jpg)
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Prohibition of discrimination based on race, religion or nationality
Established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
*Criminal Justice Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson):
mandated the establishment of a public defender system to allow legal representation in federal courts for those charged with a crime but
who could not afford to pay for legal counsel.
Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
Jobs Corps, a national program that provides post-secondary school vocational training and education to low income youth to enable them
to find and keep a good job
Head Start, a national program that promotes school readiness for children from economically disadvantaged families by giving the chil-
dren from birth to age three access to health, educational, nutritional, social, and other services in order to enhance their cognitive, social, and
emotional development
Volunteers in Service to America (now known as AmeriCorps VISTA)
Upward Bound to assist low-income students prepare for college
Food Stamp Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
a permanent food stamp program (originally initiated in 1939 as a temporary executive mandate during the presidency of Franklin D. Roo-
sevelt) to allow indigent families access to food.
Library Services and Construction Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson):
increased federal funding for the construction of libraries as well as the services they provided in communities that had poor access to
library facilities in both rural and urban areas
Wilderness [Protection] Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
the National Wilderness Preservation System and criteria for including lands in this system. This system not only has recreational value but,
among other things, is essential for preservation of biodiversity and the protection of watersheds (sources of drinking water for humans) and
forests (helps with alleviating global warming).
Department of Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
the U.S. Housing and Urban Agency as a Cabinet-level agency for the purposes of promoting access to affordable housing for all.
Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson): provided
federal assistance to K-12 education for low-income schools, communities, and children.
Executive Order 11246 on Affirmative Action of 1965 (amended 1967) (Lyndon B. Johnson):
a presidential order that mandated government contractors to be proactive (“take affirmative action”) in hiring practices with regard to
race, and from 1967, gender. The underlying rationale for this order was described by President Johnson in a powerful commencement address
that he delivered at Howard University on June 4, 1965 wherein he stated: “But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of
centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person
who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete
with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All
our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We
seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a
fact and equality as a result.”
Higher Education Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
student financial aid for higher education—Pell Grants; Stafford Loans; Federal Perkins Loans; Work Study
the TRIO programs (Upward Bound [originally established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964], Talent Search, and Student Sup-
port Services, all aimed at assisting economically disadvantaged students enroll and succeed in higher education institutions)
Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
a funding mechanism for acquisition, preservation, and maintenance of land and water resources for “recreation and to strengthen the
health and vitality of the citizens of the United States.”
Medical Library Assistance Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson):
established programs to provide assistance to medical libraries including the development of a network of regional medical libraries that
would connect with the government’s National Library of Medicine
National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/glossaryofcourserelatedterms-120420232920-phpapp01/85/Definitions-of-Course-Related-Terms-Phrases-89-320.jpg)
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National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Arts (Note: the rationale for this act was, characteristic of much of the Great Society legislation championed
by President Johnson, most eloquently stated. Hence, it read in part: “(1) The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United
States. (2) The encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts, while primarily a matter for
private and local initiative, are also appropriate matters of concern to the Federal Government. (3) An advanced civilization must not limit its
efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in
order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future. (4) Democracy demands
wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed
to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”)
Water Quality Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson): required that
states develop water quality standards and for interstate waters establish water quality goals.
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (but not as a government agency, but as a private corporation so as to, in the words of the Act, “af-
ford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.” The rationale for this legislation included this language: “it is in the pub-
lic interest to encourage the growth and development of public radio and television broadcasting, including the use of such media for instruc-
tional, educational, and cultural purposes;…. expansion and development of public telecommunications and of diversity of its programming
depend on freedom, imagination, and initiative on both local and national levels; the encouragement and support of public telecommunica-
tions, while matters of importance for private and local development, are also of appropriate and important concern to the Federal Govern-
ment; it furthers the general welfare to encourage public telecommunications services which will be responsive to the interests of people both
in particular localities and throughout the United States, which will constitute an expression of diversity and excellence, and which will consti-
tute a source of alternative telecommunications services for all the citizens of the Nation; it is in the public interest to encourage the develop-
ment of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children
and minorities;….” )
Fair Housing Act of 1968 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
Prohibition of discrimination in purchasing or renting housing
Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established:
a national system of outstanding rivers of scenic, recreational, fish and wildlife, cultural, geologic, historical, etc. significance
Clean Water Act of 1972 (vetoed by the Republican president Richard Nixon Republican but overridden by a Democratic majority in the U.S.
Congress):
Established a legislative mechanism (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System—NPDES) for reducing water pollution, a problem
that could not be effectively tackled by the establishment of water quality standards alone, as mandated by the Water Quality Act 1965.
Affordable [Health] Care Act of 2010 (Barack H. Obama [D]):
popularly known as “Obamacare,” established mechanisms for expanding health care coverage to a wider section of the U.S. public and
for reducing health care costs. (Among its many provisions are prohibition of discrimination against those with pre-existing health condi-
tions by insurance companies; prohibiting insurance companies from withdrawing coverage; providing free preventive care; allowing
young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance plans until they turn 26; expanding coverage for early retirees; strengthening communi-
ty health care centers; and understanding and combating health disparities based on race, ethnicity, language, etc.)
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Definitions of Course-Related Terms/Phrases
- 1. Class Notes (Course Glossary) Definitions of select Course-related Terms and Phrases
- 2. Page 1 of 89 Class Notes Definitions of Select Course-related Terms/Phrases Introduction Folks/People/Guys: I must first draw your attention to the purpose of producing this glossary for you. I have not produced this document simply to provide you with helpful definitions of the key terms we have (or will) come across in this course; there is a bigger purpose—in oth- er words, there is a subtext to this glossary, and it is this: Too many students graduate from this school with a very poor understanding of the difference between knowledge and information. The two are not the same, even though in daily parlance they are often used interchangeably. In- formation is what we get, for example, when we do research. It is usually in the form of facts, observations, and the like. After the information has been gathered it must be processed (analyzed) to transform it into knowledge: the body of analyzed information that allows us to under- stand whatever it is that the research was about. To give you an example from your world: to know the different parts of a car engine and their functions is to possess information about that engine. However, that is not knowledge; knowledge of a car engine is when you can explain the physical principles behind the operation of the engine. It is knowledge of these principles that allowed the invention of the engine. (So, do you know the principles behind the operation of the internal combustion engine?…. I thought so.) Now, in order to transform information into knowledge you have to have access to tools of analysis (which usually takes the form of theories, concepts, and the like). The purpose of this glossary, then, is to also introduce you to some of the key concepts and theories that are behind the material that we have covered (or will cov- er) in this course. I must also alert you to the fact that knowledge is not always neutral (and that includes scientific knowledge). Most knowledge is also bi- ased depending upon who is producing it—though that does not automatically mean that such knowledge is incorrect or useless. For example: conservatives tend to be suspicious about knowledge produced by liberals (and vice versa); similarly, radicals are suspicious of knowledge pro- duced by both conservatives and liberals. In my classes, knowledge is always biased toward the view that mutual harmony in society rests on democracy (not in its narrow sense, but in its wider dyadic sense as defined below). It is democracy that separates us from barbarity and chaos. I hope you will consider this document as my gift to you as part of my mission to try and do good in this world—why else do teachers be- come teachers? Enjoy! Instructions on How to Use These Notes 1. This document is a work in progress; meaning it is constantly under revision. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you do NOT print this document but instead only access it through your class home page whenever you want to consult it. This will ensure that you are read- ing the latest version. 2. Not all terms in this glossary may be relevant to this particular course. (See your own notes of class lectures and/or announcements on the class home page and/or the class proceedings schedule in the syllabus packet to determine which terms you must know for the purposes of tests/exams.) 3. Please keep a dictionary handy when going through this document; you may need it. 4. Words highlighted in bold within the text of a definition is an indication that these words are also defined elsewhere in this glossary and therefore they must also be consulted for test purposes, even if they may not have been explicitly assigned. Read this sentence again. 5. Do not succumb to intellectual laziness by omitting to read the footnotes. This is really important! (By the way, where did you get the bril- liant idea that footnotes and end notes are irrelevant? There are over a hundred explanatory footnotes in this document and I did not write them for my own amusement! So, read and study them! Test questions may also come from footnotes and images.) 6. As I have stated in class before (and as common sense would suggest), anything written by me I assign you to read should be considered as an extension of my class lectures. List of Terms/Phrases Defined in These Notes So far, these are the terms/phrases I have defined for you (at widely varying levels of depth and specificity of course, depending upon the needs of my classes) 9/11 Accumulation African Americans Agency Ahistoricism Al’lah American Dream Americans
- 3. Page 2 of 89 Antisemitism Apartheid Appropriation Arrogance of Ignorance Art Authentic democracy Aversive Racism B.B.C. B.C.E. Big History Blacks Blowback Borders (cultural) Bourgeois Left Bourgeoisie Capital Capitalism Capitalist Democracy C.E. Chain of analysis Charter Schools CIA Civil Society Civilization Class Class Consciousness Class Reproduction Class Struggle Class Warfare Climate Change Cold War Colonialism Color-blind Racism Columbian Exchange Columbian Project Comprador Concept Conjuncture of Fortuitously Propitious His- torical Factors Conservatism/Conservatives Contradictions Critical thinking Culture Curse of Ham Dead Peasant Insurance Deferred Gratification Democracy Development Dialectic Direct Cinema Diversity DNA Dominative Racism Erasure Essentialism Ethical Capitalism Ethnicity/Ethnicism Euro-Americans Exoticism Externality Fascism Feudalism G8 Global North Global South Global Warming Globalization Great East-to-West Diffusion Great European West-to-East Maritime Project Hajj Hamitic Theory Hegemony Historicality (of the present) Hubris Hollywood Ideology Ignorantsia/Ignoranti IMF Imperialism Institutional Racism International Monetary Fund Interpersonal Democracy Intersectionality Theory Ironical Allegory Islamism Islamophobia Jihad Jim Crow Jingoism KGB Labor-aristocracy Law of Historical Irreversibility Learned Helplessness Left Wing Left/Right
- 4. Page 3 of 89 Life of the Mind Macro-history Maghreb Marginality Marshmallow Test McCarthyism Meritocracy Military Industrial Complex Millennium Development Goals Misogyny Mode of Production MLK Multiculturalism NAACP Native Americans NATO Nationalism Natural Law of Prior Claim Negative Externality Neocolonialism Neofascism Neoimperialism NGO Nonviolent civil disobedience Objective Interests OD countries Other/Otherness Parliamentary system Parody Patriarchy Peasantry Personal wages Petite bourgeoisie Political consciousness PQD countries Procedural democracy Production Values Proletariat Pseudointellectual Public wages Qur’an Race/Racism Racial Formation Rationality Fallacy Reverse Discrimination/ Reverse Racism Right Wing Right/Left Royal Proclamation of 1763 Rule of Law Satire Scapegoat Settler-colonialism Shi’a Social change/ Social Transformations Social Darwinism Social Formation Social Safety Net Social Structure Socialization Socially Responsible Capitalism Society Southern Strategy Spaghetti Westerns State Stereotype Structural Adjustment Structural Racism Structure Subjective Interests Substantive democracy Sun’ni Surplus appropriation Techno-financial monopoly capitalism Terrorism Textual erasure Theory Think Tank TMMC Totalitarianism Transnational Monopoly Conglomerate Transnational Multimedia Monopoly Con- glomerate Ulama UNESCO U.N. U.S. African Americans U.S. Euro-Americans U.S. First Americans USSR Verisimilitude Voyeurism Wages—Public Washington Consensus WASP West Whistleblower
- 5. Page 4 of 89 White Man’s Burden White Southern Strategy Whiteness Whites Willing Suspension of Disbelief World Bank World Trade Organization WTO Definitions 9/11: The shorthand name given to a terrorist event in United States that took place on September 11, 2001.1 Accumulation: The limitless acquisition of wealth (made possible by the invention of money) on the basis of expanded reproduction of capi- tal through the mechanism of surplus appropriation within the sphere of production in capitalist societies. (See also capitalism) African Americans: See U.S. African Americans. Agency: A concept that denotes volition (as in “self-determination”), that is, the ability to shape one’s destiny—but of course within limits im- posed by history and circumstance—as a constitutive characteristic of a thinking being. Agency may operate at a group level as well (as in the idea of social agency or historical agency.) Note that social change, from the perspective of this course, should be considered as an outcome of a dia- lectic in the agency/structure binary.2 The dialectic between the agency/structure binary is one of the fundamental divides in the ideological thinking of the left and the right where both the left and the right fail to recognize this binary and instead overemphasize the one (structure, in the case of the left) in opposition to the other (agency, in the case of the right). To explain further: in this course our discussion of such social structural factors as class, race, ethnicity, gender, etc. have emphasized society-level, that is institutional, structures that create impediments for people who are marginalized in accessing opportunities (that would fulfill the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) in a capitalist democracy, such as the United States. The reason for this approach is that the ideology of meritocracy that the bourgeoisie so reli- giously espouse, perfidiously neglects to consider structural impediments given their exclusive emphasis on factors of personal agency as the determinant of marginality. In their view, institutional impediments that are driven by such social structural factors as race, class, gender, disabil- ity, and the like, are a thing of the past. So, for example, if people are poor and homeless, it is because they have chosen to be so by their per- sonal actions. Such views may appear bizarre, but not so, for example, to at least one U.S. president, Ronald Reagan—an arch conservative whose deleterious socio-economic policies and programs, undergirded by the anti-working class ideology of neoliberalism, in the areas of em- ployment, taxation, the social safety net, etc. helped to deepen socio-economic inequality to unprecedented levels in United States and else- where (and the legacy of which continues to negatively affect the lives of the working classes in general and the marginalized in particular to the present day, not just in United States but across the world). This once B-grade film actor and two-term president would repeat to David Brinkley of ABC News, in a farewell interview, his firm belief that for many, homelessness was a matter of choice: “There are shelters in virtu- ally every city, and shelters here, and those people still prefer out there on the grates or the lawn to going into one of those shelters.” Similarly, he suggested that unemployment too was a matter of choice because there were hundreds of want ads in newspapers every week and they go unanswered. (See news report on the interview in the New York Times, dated December 23, 1988.) Yet, I want to suggest to you that, in one sense, conservatives are not entirely wrong in their view that the poor and the marginalized are to blame for their predicament, especially in capitalist democracies like the United States. Leaving aside the fact that they do not often partici- pate in avenues of procedural democracy at all levels—local, state, and national—thereby taking themselves out of the decision-making pro- cesses (because when you don’t vote, for example, you are not represented), they also engage in a variety of negative behaviors that are not necessarily driven by ignorance (perhaps a forgivable trait) but by choice. Consider for example, the findings of that well-known self-help guru, Tom Corley. He claims that he spent five years studying the daily habits of 233 self-made millionaires and 128 poor people in United States and as a result he came up with 300 habits that “separate the rich from the poor.” He concludes: “The fact is, the poor are poor because they have too many Poor Habits and too few Rich Habits. Poor parents teach their children the Poor Habits and wealthy parents teach their chil- dren the Rich Habits. We don’t have a wealth gap in this country we have a parent gap. We don’t have income inequality, we have parent ine- quality.”3 So, what are some of these habits he is talking about? Here is a selection from his website (which you will notice are worth pursuing even if you don’t stand a chance of becoming a member of the bourgeoisie): 1. There now exists thousands of books on this event which involved the hijacking of four planes by suicide bombers, who claimed to profess Islam, and their use as missiles (two in New York, and one in Washington, D.C.—the third was foiled and ended in a crash south of Pittsburgh), with devastating consequences, in terms of lives lost. Consequently, those who would like guidance on what to read about this event, its consequences, and its significance, will find the follow- ing books (but only when considered together) helpful: Ahmed (2005); Ahmed and Forst (2005); Anonymous (2004); Chermak, Bailey and Brown (2003); Dudziak (2003); Holbein (2005); McDermott (2005); Marlin (2004); Nguyen (2005); and Qureshi and Sells (2003). 2. This frequently quoted line by Karl Marx from his book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (published in 1852) admirably captures this dialectic: “[Peo- ple] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (p. 15, from the edition published by International Publishers and reprinted by Wildside Press, 2008). 3. From his website at: http://richhabits.net/20-learned-habits-that-will-make-your-child-rich-or-poor/#more-5331.
- 6. Page 5 of 89 GamblingHabits–6%ofself-mademillionairesplayedthelotteryvs.77%ofthepoor.16%ofself-mademillionairesgambledatleastoncea weekonsportsvs.52%ofthepoor. HealthHabits-21%ofself-mademillionaireswereoverweightby30poundsormorevs.66%ofthepoor.76%ofthesemillionairesexercised aerobically30minutesormoreeachdayvs.23%ofthepoor.25%ofthesemillionairesatelessthan300junkfoodcalorieseachdayvs.5%of thepoor.25%ofthesemillionairesateatfastfoodrestaurantseachweekvs.69%ofthepoor.13%ofthesemillionairesgotdrunkatleastoncea monthvs.60%ofthepoor. TimeHabits–63%ofself-mademillionairesspentlessthan1hourperdayonrecreationalInternetusevs.26%ofthepoor.67%ofself-made millionaireswatched1hourorlessofT.V.perdayvs23%oftheparentsofthepoor.67%ofthesemillionairesmaintainedadaily“to-do”listvs. 6%ofthepoor.44%ofthesemillionairesgotup3hoursormorebeforetheyactuallystartedtheirworkdayvs.3%ofthepoor. LivingBelowYourMeansHabits–73%ofself-mademillionairesweretaughtthe80/20rulevs.5%ofthepoor(liveoff80%save20%). RelationshipManagementHabits–6%ofself-mademillionairesgossipvs.79%ofthepoor.75%ofthesemillionairesweretaughttosendthank youcardsvs.13%ofthepoor.6%ofthesemillionairessaywhat’sontheirmindvs.69%ofthepoor.68%ofthesemillionairespursuerelation- shipswithsuccess-mindedpeoplevs.11%ofthepoor. LearningHabits–88%ofself-mademillionairesreadforlearningeverydayvs.2%ofthepoor.86%ofthesemillionaireslovetoreadvs.26%of thepoor.11%ofthesemillionairesreadforentertainmentvs.79%ofthepoor. Let us take another, example, one that is very close to home: meaning yourselves and your performance in this course (and other courses you are taking in this school). While it is true that because most of you come from working-class backgrounds (or “middle-class” if that will make you feel better—but remember, class categories in this course is about which class has the power to make society-level decisions and not things like income, which in capitalist societies like this one is the bourgeoisie), you are burdened by the need to have a part-time paid employment, for financial reasons—which, of course, is a burdensome structural impediment that kids from bourgeois backgrounds do not face—this fact does not excuse you from engaging in a variety of behaviors that can enhance your ability to succeed in your educational endeavors generally, and in your courses, such as this one, particularly. To those of you who are not doing well, have you tried to observe what your more successful peers are doing behaviorally to enhance their chances of success (which I define as getting a 4.0 grade point average or coming as close to it as possible)? They engage in a set of structural behaviors that I label as “professional” behaviors. Folks, after talking to students who have received A’s in most of their courses, over the years, I have found, not surprisingly, that a common strategy pursued by all of them is to build for them- selves a “behavioral structure” designed to put them on a grade path toward a 4.0. (Reminder: success in college is not just about "intelligence" but it is also about how you deploy that intelligence in terms of things like self-discipline, deferred gratification, professionalism, and so on.) This structure comprises a package of key elements, listed below in no particular order. (You may also notice that one or two elements of this structural package are specifically meant to positively influence teachers, by indicating to them their seriousness and professionalism in approach- ing their courses.) Before you study the list below, let me emphasize something else that may never have crossed your minds: to a considerable extent, new research in neuroscience is telling us, that the ability to permanently change your brain physically so as to enhance its intellectual abilities as well as its executive functions are within your control—it is not just a matter of genetics and nutrition. This is a revolutionary, revolutionary finding. However, there is one big catch: it requires exercising personal agency by engaging in persistent and appropriate learning behaviors (such as those listed below) over the entire duration of the period up to the point when this second window of opportunity given to humans by nature clos- es, which is from the teen years to around the mid-twenties (by the way, the first window is during infancy—roughly the first six years or so). Here is an appropriate quote from an article on this matter, by Sharon Begley: “Until now, studies of the brains of children and adolescents have shown that their gray matter decreases with age. The rule seems to be “use it or lose it”: connections among neurons that are not used wither away, a process called pruning…. [While] Toddlers are pretty much at the mercy of their parents when it comes to the kind and amount of environmental stimulation they get, and thus which connections remain. Teenagers, however, create their own world.” Begley then quotes a neuroscientist: “Teens thus have the power to determine their own brain development, to determine which connections survive and which don’t. Whether they do art, or music, or sports, or videogames, the brain is figuring out what it needs to survive and adapting accordingly.” In other words, to quote her again: the teen brain reprises one of its most momentous acts of infancy, the overproduction and then pruning of neuronal branches… Think of it as nature’s way of giving us a second chance.”4 Now you know. Laziness coupled with foolishness has a very heavy price: missing the opportunity to build a better brain (in much the same way that athletes build muscles through training). Here is a listof goodacademichabitsthatwillputyouontothepathofsuccesswithlifelongbenefits. Majors/minor:Carefullychoosingthecorrectfieldstomajorandminorinthatarecommensuratewithone’sintellectualabilitiesandnotwhetherit willbringyoustatusandwealth.(Yes,Iknowyouwanttobearocketscientist,butyouwerenevergoodinmathandphysicsinhighschool.So, whichgeniusconvincedyouthatonceincollegeeverythingwillchangeandyouwillbecomegoodatthesesubjects?Alwaysremember,thepri- maryreasonforattendingcollegeshouldbetohaveachoiceonhowyouwillearnalivingfortherestofyourlives;thisisachoicethatbillionsof peoplearoundtheworlddonothave.) Credithours:Carryingnomorethan15credithourstotal(mostespeciallywhenonealsohasapart-timejob). SyllabusPacket:Carefullygoingthrougheachandeveryoneofthedocumentsintheentiresyllabuspacketandbecomingfamiliarwithallessential information(includingevensomethingasmundaneasthecoursedescription). Attendance:Comingtoclassontimeandrarely,ifever,missingaclass.(Ifaclassismissedbecauseofalegitimatereason,thenalwaysmakingsure thatthemissedattendanceformiscompletedandhandedinassoonaspossible.) Classhomepage:Becomingthoroughlyfamiliarwiththeentireclasshomepageonthewebbymakingsurethateverylinkonthatpageisexplored (regardlessofwhetheritappearsrelevantornot). Announcements:Alwaysvisitingtheannouncementssectionoftheclasshomepageonaregularbasis. 4 Begley’s article is available here: http://www.newsweek.com/getting-inside-teen-brain-162273 or here: http://www.sharonlbegley.com/getting-inside-a-teen-brain.
- 7. Page 6 of 89 Classnotes:DevotingfullattentiontoallclassproceedingsANDnotingdowneverythingthathappens(butwhilethenotesarecomprehensivethey donothavetobedetailed)aspersyllabusinstructions. E-mails:Avoidingtheuseofe-mailsasmuchaspossible,andinsteadmakinganefforttotalktomeinperson—afterclassand/orduringoffice hours.(Andifane-mailisabsolutelynecessarymakingsurethatthecorrecte-mailformat—beginningwith“Dear….”andendingwith“Sin- cerely….”,asindicatedinthesyllabus,isfollowed.) Cellphones:Switchingoffthecellphoneandputtingitawayintheirbookbagsothatthereisabsolutelynotemptationtolookatitoruseit. Classroomsitting:Alwaysmakingsureofchoosingaclassroomseatthatprovidesaclearviewoftheblackboard. Classroombehavior:Behavingprofessionallyby: beingfullyattentivewhenclassisabouttobeginduringthatmomentofsilencejustbeforetheclassgreetingstakeplace; nottalkingtofellowstudentswhenclassisinsession; notputtinguptheirfeetasifsittinginsomeloungesomewhere; maintainingeye-contactwhenIlookedatthem; notleavingtheroominthemiddleoftheclasssession; ifonthatrareoccasiontheycamelatetoclass,closingtheroomdoorgentlyandtip-toeingtothenearestavailableseat; notattemptingtobetheclass-clownormakingidioticcomments;andsoon.(Asoneofthemremindedme,torespectothersistore- spectyourselfandthosewhoraisedyou.) ReadingsANDotherassignments:Alwaysstayingontopofthereadings/assignmentsbykeepingupwiththereadings/assignmentsschedule(even iftheclassfallsbehindwiththereadingsschedule).Priorityinthestudyingthereadingsbeinggiventoanythingwrittenbytheinstructor. Peers:Findinganassociatingwithpeerswhoareseriousabouttheirstudies(thatispossessingbehaviorssuchasthoselistedhere). Studying:Followingthebestpracticesapproach(assuggestedbythelatestneuroscientificfindingsonlearning)tostudying—outlinedbymein classlectures—suchas: studyingaloneatadesk(evenifinthesameroomaspartofagroup); alwaysstudyinginthesameplacewhereitisquietwithnodistractions; notengaginginself-distractionsbylisteningtomusic,readinge-mails,updatingsocialnetworksites,talkingonthephone;andsoon; studyingfromhardcopyprintoutsofassignedmaterialsratherthantheirelectronicversions;and studyingassignedmaterialsatleastmorethanonce. Respect:Behavingrespectfullytoward fellowclassmatesandtowardteachersatalltimes.(Alwaysremember,whenyourespectothersyouarere- spectingyourself.) Courseglossary:Becomingthoroughlyfamiliarwiththecontentsofthecourseglossary(thatis,knowingexactlywhatterms/conceptsarecovered bytheglossaryshouldaneedarisetolookuptheseterms/concepts). Newswebsites:Yes,people,news! Studentswhodowellinschoolasawholeareusuallymoreknowledgeableaboutsocietyandtheworld,havea bettervocabulary,andcanwritebetterasaconsequenceofaccessingthenewsonaregularbasis(repeat—regular)viareputablenewswebsites,not somesocial-mediasite.(Examplesofreputablenewssitesaretheinformation-richwww.bbc.com,www.npr.com,and www.pbs.org/newshour.) Sleep:Doingeverythinghumanlypossibletodevelophealthysleepinghabitsbecausesleepdoesnotonlyaffecttheabilitytolearnintheshortrun butinthelongrunitmaypossiblyhaveanimpactonvulnerabilitytoawfuldiseasessuchasdiabetesandAlzheimers. Classparticipation:Never,neveransweringaconceptualquestion(aquestiondesignedtomakeyouthink,incontrasttoafactualquestion)withthean- swer“Idon’tknow,”butinsteadmakinganefforttocomeupwith,attheveryleast,anintelligentanswer—evenifitisincorrect. So, now you know the secrets of success of your peers who ae doing well in their courses. If you do not have the time and/or the discipline to attend to all of these elements of this structural package then you should be willing to pay the price: the possibility of not succeeding in your academic endeavors (reflected in a 3.0 or less grade point average). To conclude, in a capitalist democracy, such as this one, success in life is a function of both personal agency—and among the key elements of which is the pursuit of professionalism—together with the eradication of institutional impediments arising from classism, racism, sexism, and so on (it is not just one or the other). If a conservative or a member of the bourgeois left tells you otherwise, then what is at play here is simply hypocrisy. Note: I define professionalism as referring to a set of behav- ioral practices that is completely within your control and which is governed by these attributes: diligence, passion, ethics, integrity, civility, digni- ty, and humility. (Do you know the meaning of these words?) Ahistoricism: At the simplest level, the term refers to the disregard of history, either because of ignorance and/or ideological reasons, to explain the present. For example, in this country a common ahistorical view of the present, ideologically propagated by conservatives, is one that does not acknowledge that capitalism, as a dominant mode of production, in Western societies is not only of recent invention (beginning sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century with the onset of the industrial revolution and the demise of an earlier form of capitalism known as mercantilist capitalism where not only was profit-making based primarily on trade and commerce rather than manufacture, but the commodifica- tion of land, labor, and money was still in its infancy) but that its genesis was accompanied by much violence in the effort to proletarianize the European peasantry, on the backs of which, this mode of production arose. Instead, capitalism is often viewed as if it is an inviolable state of economic affairs ordained by God—as natural as air, rain, and fire. Al’lah: God (Islam’s monotheistic deity—the same deity worshipped also by Jews and Christians). American Dream: See Meritocracy
- 8. Page 7 of 89 Americans: In my classes this nationality refers to all the peoples who reside in the continents of North and South America. Reference to Americans who live in the United States is by the designation U.S. Americans.5 Antisemitism: See Race/Racism Apartheid: This is an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness” that came to signify the juridical-based, racially defined neo-fascist socio-political order (that had its roots in the colonial era at a time when the European settler struggle to dispossess aboriginal Africans off both their land and labor, in the context of the globally determined emerging capitalist order, overrode all else) in which the concept of “whiteness” was foundational, and fashioned by the Afrikaner segment of the white polity following its accession to power in 1948 when their party, the Na- tional Party, won the all-white national elections. It is important to point out that apartheid was both a racist ideology (white versus black), and an ethnically defined ideology in which the Afrikaners sought to gain ascendance over the English segment of the white polity for both eco- nomic and cultural reasons.6 The specific guiding principles of the agenda of this new apartheid government are summarized best in a sen- tence or two by Kallaway (2002: 13): “They were keen to promote the interests of Afrikaner politics against English domination of economic, social and cultural life, against big business and its control by ‘alien forces of Anglo-Jewish capitalism,’ and against ‘black encroachment’ on ‘white interests.’ They were for the promotion of Afrikaner business and culture and the ‘salvation of ‘poor whites.’’’ In other words, and it is important to stress this, apartheid was at once an economic project and a political project—the two were intimately and dialectically related— that sought to promote Afrikaner supremacy in the first instance and white supremacy in the second. Apartheid was never meant to wish black people away, on the contrary it needed black people, but only as sources of cheap labor (and to this end it meant dominating and controlling them on the basis of that classic “separate-but-equal” ruse first perfected in the United States following the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 [1896]). Ergo, to say that apartheid was a modernized form of serfdom is not to engage in cheap theatrical polemics, but to describe it as it really was designed (and came) to be. Building on existing racist legislation (such as the 1907 Education Act No. 25, and the 1913 Natives Land Act) and centuries old customary Jim Crow practices, various National Party-led governments systematically erected and perfected a highly oppressive, neo-fascist, racially segregated, super-exploitative, sociopolitical economic order that came to be called apartheid.7 Initially, the system would rest on a base of three socially constructed races: Africans, Coloreds, and whites; but later, a fourth would be added: Indians (Asians). A little later, the system would be modified to fragment the African majority into its smaller ethnic components fictive- ly rooted geographically in separate rural labor reservations (which would be first called Bantustans and later dignified with the label “home- lands”) carved out of the measly 13% of land that had been allocated to Africans by the 1913 Native Land Act and its subsequent modification. (In other words, apartheid was also a form of colonialism—internal colonialism.) Of the various legislation that underpinned the system, among the more salient were the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act; the 1950 Population Registration Act; the 1950 Group Areas Act; the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act; the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act; the various internal security acts that not only proscribed any form of opposition to the apartheid system, but permitted imprisonment without trial; the various pass laws that severely curtailed the freedom of movement of Africans by requiring them to carry a pass—a form of internal passport—at all times; and the 1959 Promotion of Bantu 5. In 1820, the Mexican rabble-rousing cleric Servando Teresa de Mier, during a visit to Washington, D. C. wryly indicated this problem of nomenclature: “Since the Europeans believe that there is no other America than the one their nation possesses, an erroneous nomenclature has formed in each nation.” He explained: The English call their islands in the Caribbean Archipelago, our Indies or the West Indies; and for the English there is no other North America than the United States. All Spanish North America is to them South America, even though the largest part of the region is in the north. The people of the United States follow that usage and they are offended when we, in order to distinguish them, call them Anglo Americans. They wish to be the only Americans or North Americans even though neither name is totally appropriate. Americans of the United States is too long; in the end, they will have to be content with the name guasintones, from their capital Washington,… just as they call us Mexicans, from the name of our capital. (From Rodri- guez O [2000: 131]) On this subject, see also the article by Hanchard (1990). 6. Afrikaners are descendants of the original European colonial settlers (mainly Dutch, French and Germans), who arrived at the Cape beginning in 1652 under the initial leadership of one, Jan Van Riebeeck, at the behest of his employers, the Dutch East India Company, to set up a shipping station for their ships enroute to and from the East. They would later migrate out of the Cape region shortly after the British arrived to rule the Cape (in 1806) to form the autono- mous states of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Along the way they would engage in frequent warfare with the African peoples they encountered. (Compare, the settlement of the West in the U.S. by European colonial settlers.) This migration (taking place roughly from mid-1830s to mid-1840s), prompted by dissatisfaction with British liberal policies, especially with their decision to free the slaves and abolish slavery in the Cape, came to be known as the Great Trek, has great symbolic significance in Afrikaner history. Afrikaners are also sometimes referred to as the Boers (Dutch word for peasant farmer). Note: The conflict with the British that led to the Great Trek would never completely abate; it would eventually develop into a full-scale war between them (1899-1902) known as the Anglo-Boer War or the South African War. During that war most of the U.S. public was on the side of the Boers, but the U.S. Administration and its allies took the side of the British. The Boers were defeated, but they would later emerge victorious through the ballot-box in 1948, by which time the British, through the 1909 South Africa Act, had facilitated the formation the following year of the now self-governing Union of South Africa (formed out of the original colo- nial settler states of Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State). The constitution of this new country largely excluded the majority of the popula- tion, the Africans and other black peoples, from any form of political participation. It was as if they did not exist. Until 1994, when for the first time in its histo- ry South Africa would hold a nation-wide multi-racial national elections leading to the election of the majority black peoples to power (under the leadership of the ANC and Nelson Mandela), South Africa would remain a white minority ruled country. 7. Recall that some of the architects of this order were open admirers of Nazi Germany!
- 9. Page 8 of 89 Self-Government Act, which created the pseudo-sovereign internal African states just mentioned. (Note: the Suppression of Communism Act defined communism so broadly as to include any nationalist or anti-apartheid activities by any one, communist or not.) It is important to point out that the rise and longevity of apartheid as an ideology was also due, to a significant extent, to the fact that the ideology while seemingly at odds with the needs of capital, in reality suited the capitalist order quite well—that is until the accumulated weight of contradictions it spawned would grow to become a serious liability by the 1980s—in that it served to “purchase” the loyalty of white labor (with its electoral power to legitimate capitalist enterprise) in the inherent class struggle between labor and capital by subjectifying the objective at both levels: at the racial level of the white polity as a whole (through the concept of whiteness), and at the specific ethnic level of Afrikaner- dom (through the concept of “Afrikanerism,” for want of a better word). At the same time, needless to say, it facilitated the super exploitation of land and labor that belonged to others, namely the aboriginal African majority. To those familiar with U.S. history, it would not be farfetched to draw parallels (leaving aside the obvious reversal of the black/white population ratios) with the Jim Crow era of the U.S. South in which Jim Crow was aimed at securing political/economic domination over both, in the first instance, blacks, and in the second instance, white northerners, as well as with what came to be called the Southern Strategy.8 The first formal organized resistance to apartheid was launched by the African National Congress (ANC),9 following, initially, in the footsteps of the nonviolent resistance mounted by Mahatma Gandhi some decades earlier when he was in South Africa. Appropriation: This is a fancy word for stealing and then claiming that it has always belonged to you. Conquerors tend to appropriate every- thing: property (such as land), culture (such as language and music), and even knowledge and ideas. Some examples of appropriation: Euro- Americans appropriating African-American music; Europeans appropriating Native American lands; Europeans appropriating Islamic knowledge and culture during the latter half of the Middle Ages. See also Culture. Arrogance of Ignorance: see Hubris Art: This is a very difficult concept to define because of the inherent subjectivity involved—be it from the perspective of the individual or society as a whole—in identifying something as a “work of art.” Consider: among Western thinkers who have grappled with this problem range all the way from Plato to Aristotle to Edmund Burke to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Leon Trotsky. In fact, it may be legitimate to argue that it is impossible to come up with a single definition of what constitutes a work of art that would encompass every form of artwork that people in a given culture have so considered it. (One person's art may be another person's junk; in one culture a painting of a nude can be a work of art while in another it can be viewed as pornography.) At the same time, it is important to emphasize the issue of subjectivity itself cannot be separated from such social structural matrixes as class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. One solution to the problem I have come up with is to define art on the basis of “genres” from the perspective of a given culture or social structural matrix. Hence, the definition of what constitutes art would differ depending upon whether we are considering a painting or literature or a dance performance or a piece of music or a film or a culinary creation, and so on, in the context of, say, Western culture in contrast to, say, African culture (or bourgeois culture versus working class culture, etc.). That said, however, I would suggest that at least eight key characteristics can be identified as intrinsic to all works of art: First, from the point of view of the artist, works of art involve (a) human creativity (where the artist marches to the beat of his/her own drummer); (b) a motivating impulse to do good (in contrast to evil); (c) talent; (d) passion; and (e) motivation that is independent of the pursuit of monetary reward for its own sake. 8. It is also worth pointing out that as in the case of Jim Crow U.S. South, apartheid came to have a highly corrupting influence throughout society, sparing no one. As Lyman (2002: 9) has so well put it: Racial discrimination, when institutionalized, indeed made part of the national ethic, brings out the worst in all people. It attracts the most brutal into positions of authority and gives them an outlet for their brutality; it demeans the victims and forces them into servility to survive; it breeds anger, fear, and timidity on all sides, making efforts at reform tepid and violent by turns. In sum, it corrupts the entire society, oppressor and victim, liberal and conservative. So it was with apartheid. 9. This African nationalist organization and political party originally began its life in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress with the initially limited objective of fighting for the retention of a modicum of voting rights that some sections of colored people (people of mixed racial descent) and Africans en- joyed in Cape Province. The organization changed its name to the African National Congress in 1923, by which time it had begun to expand its objectives to include resistance to racist segregation, so that by the 1940s and the early 1950s it was in the forefront of resisting Apartheid through moderate non-violent strategies. The more famous of these was the Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws of 1952 (organized jointly by the ANC with the South African Indian Congress and others) that included a public transportation boycott. (Compare, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 led by Marin Luther King, Jr.) In 1959, a small splinter group of ultra-nationalists broke away from the ANC to form the Pan African Congress (PAC) and it is as an indirect result of this event that Mandela, Sisuslu, Kathrada and others would be given life imprisonment and be banished to a prison on the Robben Island. To explain: the PAC organized massive demonstrations against laws prohibiting freedom of movement for Africans (known as the “pass laws”) in 1960, and one of these demonstrations (involving peaceful unarmed demonstrators) in a black township called Sharpeville became a police massacre in which scores were shot to death as they fled from the police. The Sharpeville Massacre, in turn, provoked the ANC, now an underground illegal organization following its banning in 1960, to form a unit the following year called Umkhonto We Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”) to commence armed resistance, mainly through sabotage activities, against apartheid given that as the Apartheid state increasingly tightened its grip on South African society, non-violent resistance was not only no longer possible, but it was a suicidal strategy, as demonstrated by the Sharpeville Massacre. In 1962, its leader Nelson Mandela (and other colleagues) were arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for their anti-apartheid activities. Those who had escaped arrest, such as Oliver Tambo, escaped from South Africa altogether to reconstitute the ANC in exile (with the assistance of countries such as the Soviet Union through the agency of ANC’s ally, the Communist Party of South Africa, itself also a banned organization (1950) and in exile, as well as the host countries, such as Zambia and Tanzania). Following the 1976 Soweto Rebellion, which provoked a massive emigration of the young to neighboring countries where the ANC had over the years developed bases, led to the reemergence of the ANC as the preeminent anti-apartheid organization, inside and outside South Africa.
- 10. Page 9 of 89 Second, from the perspective of audience appreciation, works of art (f) involve an aesthetic experience (delightful, in some way, to one or more of the senses); (g) elicit contemplative cognition; and (h) they stand the test of time. (Note, however, that these last three characteristics may also be relevant from the perspective of the artist—but not always.) Given that we live in the era of capitalism as the dominant mode of production, a problem that often presents itself is how to evaluate an activity that seeks to be labeled art, expressed, for instance, by the by the question: is it art or is it entertainment? Consider, for example, cinema. A solution to the problem that I have found works well here is to seek refuge in a definition that distinguishes between art versus commercial entertainment along the lines best captured by Youngblood (1979:754) while discussing this very subject: By perpetuating a destructive habit of unthinking response to formulas, by forcing us to rely ever more frequently on memory, the commercial entertainer encourages an unthinking response to daily life, inhibiting self-awareness.... He[/she] offers nothing we haven't already conceived, nothing we don't already expect. Art explains; entertainment exploits. Art is freedom from the conditions of memory; entertainment is conditional on a present that is conditioned by the past. Entertainment gives us what we want; art gives us what we don't know what we want. To confront a work of art is to confront one self—but aspects of oneself previously unrecog- nized.”10 From this perspective, then, a film is a cinematic work of art when all its constitutive elements (the screenplay, the acting, the cinematog- raphy, the editing, the film score, the production design, the sound design, costumery, and so on) work in concert to render the film, at once: intelligently entertaining, powerfully thought-provoking, emotionally challenging, and intellectually enriching. Yet, the fact that the predominant characteristic of most Hollywood films is their obsessive quest for entertainment value—of the lowest common denominator at that—above all else (violence and debauchery being their signatures) speaks to the corrupting influence of corporate capitalism in its obsessive and obscene pursuit of profits. Authentic democracy: See Democracy Aversive Racism: See Race/Racism BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation BCE: Before the Common Era (C.E.)—equivalent to the period that historians used to refer to as B.C. Big History: See Macro-history Blacks: An ethnic category that refers to all peoples who can trace their ancestry to peoples of Africa, Asia and the Americas living in the period before the Age of European Voyages of Exploitation. Whites, using a similar line of reasoning, are those peoples who can trace their ancestry to peoples of the European peninsula before the Age of European Voyages of Exploitation. In the U.S. context, blacks generally refers to U.S. African Americans, and whites refers to U.S. Euro-Americans. Blowback: This term was originally minted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to refer to the unintended consequences of, usually, secret operations by intelligence agencies, against those deemed as enemies, taking the form of serious negative repercussions for those sponsor- ing these operations, including their citizenry (who, of course, remain unaware of the source of this blowback and are left to assume that it is random unexplained terrorist events perpetrated by “evil” people—hence prompting them to ask such naïve and banal questions as “why do they hate us”?)11 Another way of understanding this term is to consider it as a synonym for comeuppance, as in “they got their comeuppance,” or as an equivalent of what economists refer to as a negative externality. A good example of blowback is what appears to be now a cyclical retributive “terrorism” that has emerged in places where the United States is engaged in drone warfare, which has led to the deaths of count- less innocent civilians, including women and children, against those it has classified as terrorists. An example from an earlier period, according to Professor Chalmers A. Johnson, who wrote a book on this topic, is the tragedy of 9/11 (2001) itself: “The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy. Em- ploying the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders who then became enemies only because they had already become victims. Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable.” He further explains: “On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because we are ‘a beacon for freedom’ and because the attackers were ‘evil.’ In his address to Congress on September 20, he said, ‘This is civilization’s fight.’ This attempt to define difficult-to-grasp 10. Youngblood, Gene. “Art, Entertainment, Entropy.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, pp. 754-760. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979. 11 This term first appeared in a March 1954 CIA report by agent Donald Wilber on its secret 1953 operation in Iran aimed at overthrowing the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mosadegh in which it succeeded. (Specifically, the term appears in Appendix E of the re- port that outlined the military lessons learned on plotting coups against governments deemed hostile by the United States: “Possibility of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers involved in this type of operation.” [p. 21].) The negative reverberations (blowback) of that operation, which led, in time, to the Iranian revolution by the clerics and their declaration of the United States as the “Great Satan,” hence a major enemy, continue to haunt the United States to this day. See the book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) who also explains that “In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.”
- 11. Page 10 of 89 events as only a conflict over abstract values–as a ‘clash of civilizations,’ in current post-cold war American jargon—is not only disingenuous but also a way of evading responsibility for the ‘blowback’ that America’s imperial projects have generated.” 12 Another classic example of blowback is the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, considered by the Israelis and their allies as a terrorist organization, following the illegal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that led to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Lebanese civilians by the time the invasion was over.13 Borders: See Culture Bourgeois Left: On the surface, this appears to be a contradictory term: how can a member of the Left be a member of the bourgeoisie? In coining this derogatory term, I am trying to highlight the hypocrisy of leftist pseudo-intellectuals—usually from bourgeois backgrounds—who espouse Marxist rhetoric but are fully immersed in a bourgeois lifestyle, which, if push came to shove, they would prioritize over everything else, including their supposed working class leanings (in reality, constituting nothing more than a romanticization of the working class a la “no- ble savage” of yesteryear). As if this is not enough, these pseudo-intellectuals are also characterized by holier-than-thou sanctimonious atti- tudes towards others (including those whose interests they claim to be defending: the lower classes). See also Bourgeoisie, Left/Right. Bourgeoisie: A French word popularized by Karl Marx that refers to the wealthy class that emerges as a result of the development of indus- trial capitalism: the modern capitalist “aristocracy.” This term can be used interchangeably with such other terms as the “capitalist class.” Note that this class also includes the minions of corporate capital who sit at the top of corporate hierarchies, as well as its apologists (the ignorantsia, that is, the pseudo-intellectuals who are commonly found in universities and who people right wing think tanks). In capitalist societies, political interests and economic interests are often different; they are rarely unitary because of the divergent objectives of the masses—here, meaning the working class (proletariat) and the peasantry—on one hand and the bourgeoisie on the other imposed on them by the dictates of the capitalist economic system. For example, when it comes to democracy the bourgeoisie tends to be more concerned with the procedural part of it rather than the authentic part, whereas the masses are interested in both. In other words, in general, though not always, on almost all ma- jor societal issues the objective interests of the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie are diametrically different from those of the masses. (See also democracy, Left/Right, and petite bourgeoisie.) Capital: This term is used in two senses in my classes, depending upon the context of its usage. One sense is the more common understand- ing of capital as referring to one of the three key factors of production in a capitalist society, financial resources—the commodity whose func- tion is to marry the other two factors: land (or its equivalent) and labor. The other sense in which the term is used is as a generic term for capi- talists considered as a class. Capitalism: This term refers to both a socio-economic system and the ideology that justifies this system. At the simplest level capitalism, as a socio-economic system, can be described as an inherent antagonistic class-based system in which the overall objective is limitless acquisition of wealth (accumulation) for its own sake by the few (the bourgeoisie) at the expense of the many (the proletariat) on the basis of profit-driven (surplus appropriation) expanded reproduction of investment capital against the backdrop of private ownership of economic property by the few—legitimated by means of monopolization of political power (in practice), and thence the coercive powers of the state, by the bour- geoisie, coupled with the socialization of all members of society in the precepts of capitalist ideology, of which three are salient: the inviola- ble sanctity of private ownership of economic property, the legitimacy of imposing on society negative economic externalities, and the be- lief in the illusory concept of meritocracy. Capitalism as a socio-economic system first emerged in Western Europe around the fifteenth century following the collapse of feudalism, but which does not come into its own until the advent of industrial revolution some three hundred years later, around the middle of the eight- eenth century.14 This is not to suggest that prior to this period there were no capitalists. In fact, capitalists were present as far back as the an- cient civilizations of Babylonia in the form of merchants. The difference however is that in these civilizations capitalism was not a universal economic system in which all members of society were participants—either as workers/peasants or as capitalist entrepreneurs. For capitalism to exist as a universal economic system it is not enough that only some members are involved in profit-making activities whereas the rest are involved in other forms of production systems, such as the feudal system or subsistence system. The entire society must become involved in which there is not only simple profit-making via trade but also profit-making via what may be termed as “expanded reproduction of capital.” That is the continuous process of investment and re-investment of profits (capital) in order to continuously expand its magnitude. In such a system everything has a potential to become a commodity that can be bought and sold, including labor-power (provided by workers) and capi- tal (provided by banks). Therefore, capitalism signifies an economic system in which three types of markets interact: the labor market, the capi- tal market, and the exchange market (the selling and buying of goods) with the sole purpose of generating profits for those who own the means of production: the capitalists. Such a system is only possible under conditions where a group of people in society, workers, are com- pletely at the mercy of another group, capitalists, for their livelihood; for it is only under such conditions that capitalists can obtain labor-power, without which nothing of value can ever be produced. In other words, capitalism by definition implies the emergence of two principal classes: 12. From his article: “Blowback, U.S. actions abroad have repeatedly led to unintended, indefensible consequences” in the Nation, dated October 15, 2001. On 9/11 and its historical antecedents as blowback see also the book by Steve Coll: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York, NY: Penguin, 2004). 13. See Hezbollah: A History of the "Party of God" (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) by Dominique Avon and Anaïs-Trissa Khatchadourian (translat- ed by Jane Marie Todd). 14. The factors that were responsible for this transition to a new economic system is a matter of intense debate—see for example Dobb et al. (1976) and Bren- ner (1977).
- 12. Page 11 of 89 the capitalist class which has a complete monopoly over the means of production (be it land, factories, and so on) and the working class which has no access to the means of production, and therefore must sell their labor-power to the capitalist class in order to survive.15 Folks, in this task of explaining to you what capitalism is, there are a number of additional points to which I must draw your attention: (a) The drive to make profits as a result of competition (see above) not only fuels the innovation process in production techniques as new ways are always being sought to reduce costs as well as improve quality of products (which in turn require greater profits to pay for the re- search and innovation), but also force capitalists to seek out new markets and sources of cheap raw materials beyond the borders of the coun- try in which they are located, giving rise to transnational firms. One implication of this fact is that it is in the interest of transnationals to ensure that no region of the world is closed to them—in case they may need to extend their activities there (to invest, to sell goods, to develop raw materials sources, and so on). The push to open up the Antarctic region to capitalist activities is symptomatic of this inherent need by capital- ists to extend their range of actual and potential activities to all corners of the globe; regardless of the disastrous environmental consequences that may ensue, not only for the Antarctic region but the planet itself. Since socialist economic systems do not permit private capitalist activity countries that acquire socialist economic systems are by definition enemies of transnationals. It is this issue that lay at the heart of what used to be called the cold war; the United States and its allies had an innate fear of the Soviet Union assisting PQD nations in instituting socialist eco- nomic systems. But how does one explain the fact that even a supposedly socialist country such as China now has transnationals operating within its borders? The simple answer is that it no longer has a socialist economic system. Its economy is a mixed economic system comprising partially state-owned and partially (or wholly) privately-owned capitalist enterprises. In fact, with the phasing out of centralized economic plan- ning—an important characteristic of socialist economies—the economy that has emerged is essentially one of a fusion of state and private capitalism. (State capitalism is a system where the owner of the capitalist enterprise is not a private individual or a group of private individuals but the state.) It is for this reason that the cold war is now dead. (b) The political system that accompanies capitalism can be of any kind—so long as it does not interfere with the capitalist processes of making profits. Hence a monarchical form of government, a ruthless military dictatorship, a fascist government, a racist government, a parlia- mentary democratic government, a multiparty presidential government, a benign civilian dictatorship, etc., can all be at home with capitalist economic systems. Democracy therefore is not intrinsic to capitalism, just as political tyranny is not intrinsic to socialist economic systems— except in the case of the Leninist-Stalinist versions (sadly the only ones that have been in existence hitherto). While my classes are usually re- 15. But how does this division arise given that at some point in history all in a society had access to the principal means of production: land? The answer is force and violence; not, as the capitalists tend to assert, talent, ability, or intelligence. To take the examples of the United States and South Africa: the mechanism by which a group of people were rendered workers and another capitalists was force and violence. Through force and violence the early European settlers stole the land from the native inhabitants and divided it up among themselves. Later, once all the land had been taken, newcomers had to buy the land from the original settlers—setting in motion the usual capitalist processes of using land for agricultural, or mining, or residential or other uses to generate profits that would later be invested in factories and other commercial enterprises. In this way there arose two principal classes in both countries: capitalists and workers. Similarly in Western Europe, through force and violence the serfs lost the right to farm their land to an emergent capitalist class (comprising some members of the nobility and newly wealthy entrepreneurs) during the process of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and became as a result agrarian and industrial workers. The roots of capitalist classes therefore are to be found in history where invariably money tainted with the blood of others (e.g., serfs, native inhabitants, slaves, and so on) formed the basis of their genesis. The most recent example of a capitalist class in formation is, of course, in present-day Eastern Europe, China (and South Africa as well, in the case of the emerging compradorial black capitalist class). Those bureaucrats who had managed to accumulate privileges and con- tacts while they were in office are finding it much easier to convert these privileges into sources of support for their entrepreneurial activity. The arrival of capi- talism in Eastern Europe has given a second life to the former high-level Communist bureaucrats (ironically, the very group responsible for bankrupting the economies of Eastern Europe when they were in charge). But how does one explain the fact that today there are examples of people who have become rich through, seemingly, their own talent and ability? The answer is that to be sure some at the individual level do become rich and join the ranks of the capitalist class through their own efforts (perhaps they win a lottery and invest the proceeds, or they have unusual entertainment talent—acting, singing, sports and so on—that allows them access to large sums of money that they then invest in businesses). However, a close scrutiny of the background of the rest of the so- called self-made people will reveal that they had advantages and “breaks” associated with coming from a capitalist class background (e.g., education, the right skin color, the right gender, adequate nutrition that did not stunt their brain development while growing up, right connections through their parents and/or other relatives, and so on), or in the case of the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe associated with coming from a high-level Communist bureau- cratic background. It will, therefore, come as a shock to many to realize that in all modern capitalist countries of the West, the majority of the working class and the capitalist class can trace their roots going as far back as thousands of years in history when the first divisions began to take place in society (with the emer- gence of settled agriculture) between those who produced products via their own labor (the ruled), and those who consumed what others produced (the rulers or the nobility). In other words, regardless of the various transformations of economic systems, class divisions have remained remarkably constant in terms of who the occupants of these divisions have been. Today’s working class in OD countries has a long, long history of being exploited that predates capitalism. Therefore, the idea that people achieve wealth, status and power via their own personal efforts, embodied in the so-called “mobility dream” (meritocracy) that is so widespread in many capitalist societies is in reality a myth. (See Li 1988 for more on this idea and its fallacies, as well as the entry on meritocracy in this glossa- ry.) People do not choose to become poor, homeless and unemployed; structural conditions of the capitalist system ensures that a significant segment of society that has been historically discriminated against, through the use of force and violence, remains within the class of workers and the unemployed. Moreover, a simple thought experiment will drive home the point that other factors besides talent, ability and the capacity for hard work are involved when seeking member- ship to the capitalist class: supposing that all within the United States or South Africa, regardless of race, gender or any other biological attribute, suddenly be- came equal in terms of these three factors, would they all become rich and members of the capitalist class overnight? The answer obviously is in the negative. The fact is that the enjoyment of wealth, power and status by a minority group of people, whether in a single country or in the world, is dependent upon the denial of these to the rest of the population in a context of scarce resources that cannot permit all to have gourmet three-course meals, chauffeur-driven expen- sive luxury cars, unlimited supply of spending money, luxury mansions with tennis courts and swimming pools, vacations in exotic places, servants, expensive cloths, all kinds of sophisticated electronic gadgetry, and so on. The system that today permits this massive inequality without making it appear unfair and unjust to both the capitalist class and the underprivileged is the capitalist system. The idea, propagated via the concept of the “mobility dream,” that all have an equal chance to enjoy such a life-style, but only if they work hard and use their talent and ability, is a myth that helps to justify the existence of a system that conceals the inherent inequalities it engenders via the impersonal operation of market forces where those with initial advantages (derived from the past) remain the con- stant winners. The irony in all this, of course, is that among the staunchest believers of the mythology of the mobility dream are the very victims of the capital- ist system: the workers, the unemployed and the poor.
- 13. Page 12 of 89 plete with criticisms of the capitalist system this should not be taken to imply that there is a surreptitious plea for the wholesale abandonment of it; however desirable that may be, reality (both conceptually and politically) precludes that. On the other hand, it is important to emphasize that in capitalist societies the role of democracy is to temper the worst excesses of the capitalist system, which one must be remember is intrin- sically antithetical to economic development in the fullest sense (requires paying heed to the agenda of authentic democracy) given its obsession with economic growth, the objective of which is accumulation for its own sake. (c) In order to fully comprehend the sources of social change in capitalist societies one must study the political behavior of the two princi- pal groups in these societies: the capitalist class and the working class; that is, the two groups that are mutually antagonistic toward each other as a result of the specific relationship each has to the production process (exploiter and exploited).16 (d) On a global scale, capitalism has evolved over the past several decades, beginning in the 1950s, to become, today, what one may call techno-financial monopoly capitalism where a few large transnational corporations—supported by equally large transnational monopoly banks--- relying on a stupendous base of technical and financial resources unprecedented in human history, dominate the global economy, often stifling competition, fixing prices, brutalizing and super-exploiting labor, globalizing supply chains, etc., in their insatiable thirst for profits as they march to the drumbeat of limitless accumulation of wealth for its own sake. The rise of these capitalist conglomerate behemoths has also been accompanied by a decidedly destructive approach to both people and the environment so that it makes sense today to talk about “de- structive capitalism” versus “constructive capitalism.” (e) A question that emerges whenever capitalism is the subject of discussion at a general level is whether it is possible to make money while doing good? The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that capitalism is a fundamentally exploitative system that requires inequality in society. Yes, in the sense that in a democratic capitalist society that has such key features as the rule of law and a robust social safety net, then the missing piece becomes ethical capitalism or socially responsible capitalism in creating a capitalist society that is humane. In other words, this form of capitalism is a "humanized" form of capitalism (in contrast to a predatory form of capitalism). (f) You will find in the literature a very adamant view that the analysis of the social structures of capitalist societies (like this one) does not need to consider the matter of “race” (or “gender” for that matter) because it is in reality an ideological epiphenomenon. It is “class” that must be the only focus of attention. At one level, this view is correct as this thought experiment should quickly reveal: if tomorrow this entire society became racially homogenous would structural inequality disappear? The answer of course is no. Class would still remain as the determinant of the social structure. To make things clearer, I am briefly laying out below the basic elements of a theoretical formulation that explains the rela- tionship between class and race in a capitalist democracy. However, before I proceed let me first draw your attention to the issue of “specifici- ty”: what follows is not concerned with a “generic” democratic capitalist society, rather it deals specifically with the United States; that is, a soci- ety that is characterized not only by capitalist democracy but also a history in which race has not only been a permanent subtext, but at times the text itself. (Recall that the colonization project that brought the Europeans to the Americas was also at one and the same time a “racist” project involving, at its worst, the genocidal murder of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans.) Given this fact, the theoretical task is to coherently weave together three things: race, class, and law to arrive at a cogent understanding of the nature of U.S. capitalist democracy and there is a “poster flowchart” I have prepared that attempts to do just that. Make sure you study it carefully. Race, Class, and Law in a Capitalist Democracy: A Poster Flowchart This flowchart is available online as a separate document here: http://bit.ly/classrace Note: If this link is not clickable then copy this URL into your browser: http://bit.ly/classrace Capitalist Democracy: See Democracy CE: Common Era—equivalent to the period that historians used to refer to as A. D. (See also BCE) Chain of analysis: I use this term to mean something similar to the term “supply chain” in commerce (or “chain of command” in the mili- tary) with respect to the sequence of analytical steps one must take in bringing together diverse pieces of information for the purposes of answering a question about an issue we want to comprehend to the fullest extent possible. For example: the answer to the question why did World War I (1914-1918) happen would involve a chain of analysis that would begin with the decay of the Ottoman Empire and end with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife by a Serbian student (Gavrilo Princip). Within this chain of analysis, one would also have to consider, of course, the rise of European nationalism as new nation states and empires emerged on the heels of the emer- gence and spread of industrial capitalism in Europe. 16. But there are many people in capitalist societies who are neither capitalists nor workers; does this mean they are irrelevant? Not at all; except that their politi- cal behavior can be best understood by determining how far from or how close to in the production process (or bureaucratic hierarchy) they are to either of the two principal groups. To take an example: in a government bureaucracy the political behavior of those at the top will diverge considerably from those at the bottom; those at the top will most likely have a commonalty of interests with the capitalist class whereas those at the bottom with the working class. (By the way, it is important you understand that it is possible for one person to be classified as either middle class or working class. It all depends on what the purpose of the classification is. Is the purpose to explore power relationships in society, or is it to explore who gets how much in terms of things like income and education.)
- 14. Page 13 of 89 Charter Schools: In United States, these are privately run schools but publicly funded (mainly through property taxes) like regular public schools. Those on the right love charter schools because they blame the ills of the inner-city public school system (which, because of de facto residential segregation, serves mainly racial minorities) on, supposedly, a bloated educational bureaucracy; inadequately motivated schoolchil- dren; and poorly trained and/or lazy teachers who cannot be fired from their positions because of the power of the teachers’ unions. Charter schools are supposed to be the panacea; taking care of these kinds of problems. As is so often the case with the positions of the right on so- cio-economic issues, evidence does not bear them out—for the most part. This makes sense, because the problems of these schools are not rooted primarily in factors to do with agency (bad kids, bad teachers, and bad administrators) but rather factors of structure: most important among them being, not surprisingly, underfunding.17 CIA: Central Intelligence Agency (a U.S. government entity that began its life as a spy agency but which today undertakes all kinds of clandes- tine activities abroad, beyond spying).18 Cinéma Vérité: A style of making films that seeks to capture “realism”—but as perceived and manipulated by the filmmaker. The term, as well as the style, is of French origin and means “truth cinema.” Although this style comes close to the documentary style of filmmaking the two styles should not be confused with each other. Cinéma vérité does not necessarily require filming of actual reality, it can simply mimic it but still be fiction; whereas a documentary film is, at its foundation, the filming of true reality (even if the filmmaker may be “creative” with the truth in what and how that reality is captured). Note: the documentary style is sometimes referred to as direct cinema where the filmmaker avoids any participation in the ongoing action; even avoiding, if possible, narration. A good example of this “fly on the wall” style—that is, unobtrusively listening and observing—is to be found in C-Span’s TV broadcasts of news events. Civil Society: This term has probably as many definitions as the number of persons willing to define it; for our purposes this one will have to do: the collectivity of all voluntary institutions—ranging from trade unions to professional organizations, from activist organizations dealing with the environment to organizations concerned with human rights—in a society that are constituted from outside the arenas of the family, the state, and the market place. In a democracy, civil society is its basic foundation (to put it bluntly: no civil society, no democracy). There is a dialectical relationship between civil society and democracy, where one nourishes the other.19 Civilization: See political consciousness Class: The economy-based hierarchic division of the social structure—especially as it relates to the ownership of the means of production. For example, in capitalist societies, one can identify, at the very minimum, two fundamental interdependent but antagonistic classes: the working class and the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) where neither of whom can exist without the other. From the perspective of capitalist societies, a full definition of this concept requires knowledge of these contingent concepts: Class Consciousness: a conscious awareness of one’s class position from the perspective of power relations (not from the perspective of income). See also Ignorantsia Class Reproduction: the intergenerational transmission of class positions that ensures the permanence of classes. In capitalist de- mocracies two very important mechanisms behind class reproduction is manipulation of the tax code (to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor) and the educational system. Considering the latter, the educational system exists as a two-sector system: private and public where the private is the exclusive preserve of the rich. However, where schools in the public sector are attend- ed by the rich, then they are engineered to favor the rich through such means as admissions policies, curricula, differential fund- ing, and so on. See also Meritocracy. Class Struggle: refers to struggles in capitalist societies between the economically powerless—the working classes—and the power- ful—big business or the corporate capitalist class—over issues of authentic democracy, which concerns the third part of that famous phrase in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the absence of meaningful procedural democracy, in a capitalist society the minority (the capitalist class) has the economic power, through its monopolistic ownership and control of society’s major means of economic production (factories, farms, etc.), to determine if the majority will have food on the table and a roof over its head at the general level and, at the specific level, how it will be treated in the work- 17. One of the best works that exposes the structural problems of the inner-city public school system is that by Jonathan Kozol (the title of his book says it all: The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America [New York, Three Rivers, 2005]). See also the book by Peter Sacks: Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). As for an evaluation of the performance of charter schools see, for example, the June 2009 report by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (titled Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States) which concludes that while the picture is a little mixed, the basic pattern nevertheless is clear: Charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers across the country, with every expectation that they will continue to figure prominently in national educational strategy in the months and years to come. And yet, this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their TPS [traditional public schools] counterparts. Further, tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the ex- ception. The problem of quality is the most pressing issue that charter schools and their supporters face. 18 See these sources to get a glimpse into the range of activities that the CIA is engaged in (which are not all necessarily legal under both U.S. law and interna- tional law): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14745941; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11469369; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-14862161; and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15012962 19. An introductory text worth looking at that explores this concept in its various manifestations is the anthology edited by Glasius, Lewis, and Seckinelgin (2004).
- 15. Page 14 of 89 place in terms of pay and working conditions as the capitalist class seeks to maximize its profits in its unending quest for limitless accumulation of wealth. In fact, the roots of the bulk of the European diaspora all across the planet (from South Africa to Unit- ed States, from Canada to New Zealand) that emerged with the onset of industrial capitalism lies in this fundamentally tyrannical character of laissez faire capitalism. The majority (the working class—includes the so-called “middle class”) has only one source of power to ensure that the minority does not deny them the means of access to life’s necessities and/or exploit them in the workplace, and that is their potential ability to bring a capitalist enterprise to a standstill—by withdrawing their labor through or- ganized industrial action (e.g. a labor strike)—by means of trade unions.20 Not surprisingly, throughout the history of industrial capitalism, up to the very present, the capitalist class has always opposed the formation of trade unions, sometimes using vio- lence if necessary. Therefore, an important inherent dimension of industrial capitalism is class struggle, which is the constant strug- gle between these two dominant classes that emerged with the rise of industrial capitalism, and which has its roots in the produc- tion process where each is pursuing diametrically contradictory ends: profits versus livelihood. Note that the existence of class struggles as a permanent feature of all capitalist societies does not necessarily mean that the working classes will always be aware of all instances of such struggles. What is more, an important weapon of the capitalist class aimed at ensuring their victory in class-struggles is to convince, by means of propaganda through the media (much of which is, by the way, capitalist-owned), large sections of the working class that their interests are the same as that of the capitalist class—usually through the technique of subjectification of objective interests. A well-known tool in the European-American ecumene to facilitate this subjectification is the ideology of racism—which in modern times found its most potent expression in Nazi Germany. This is a classic “divide- and-rule” strategy. (See also Capitalism, Surplus Appropriation.) Class Warfare: refers to the systematic assault in capitalist societies by corporate capital on authentic and/or procedural de- mocracy for purposes of enhancing its accumulation activities, through profit-maximization, by whatever means necessary, legal or otherwise. In other words, any activity on the part of the capitalist class and its allies that is deliberately designed to reduce the pub- lic wage (and thereby undermine authentic democracy) in order to enhance its capitalist accumulation activities qualifies as class warfare. A good example of class warfare is the pollution of the environment by a capitalist enterprise. Another example is the corruption of procedural democracy by means of bribes (including “legal” bribes in the guise of lobbying) paid to legisla- tors, government officials, and so on; and through the deliberate misinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution in favor of corporate capital—e.g. in the instances of First and Fourteenth Amendments—by, historically, one of its key government allies, the U.S. Supreme Court.21 Those consequences of capitalist enterprise that are referred to in standard economics literature as negative externalities can also be considered as an expression of class warfare. Note that this definition does NOT incorporate the Marxist view that any capitalist accumulation activity constitutes class warfare. (See also Capitalism, Class Consciousness; Class Struggle.) Note: even if the following terms have not been explicitly assigned, for test purposes you must also look up these terms in this glossary: Bour- geoisie; Capitalism; and Meritocracy. Class Consciousness: see Class Class Reproduction: see Class Class Struggle: see Class Class Warfare: see Class Climate Change: see Global Warming Cold War: An ideologically-rooted conflict between the United States and its allies and the former Soviet Union and its allies fought through proxy wars during the period following World War II until the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1990s.22 It ought to be noted that there were two variants of cold war thinking in the West: the liberal and the conservative.23 Hence, within the U.S. for- 20. A fallacy perpetrated by capital and its allies is that it has no equivalent organizations to combat the activities of labor unions. Yet, this is completely untrue. It has many and often very powerful organizations to represent its interests except that they are not as obviously visible to the public (as labor unions are) in terms of their activities, which fall into two main categories: representing its interests to the government—usually through lobbying—and influencing public opinion. Examples of such organizations include chambers of commerce (e.g. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce); industry-specific associations (e.g. Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates); research institutes and think tanks (e.g. The Heritage Foundation); and, of course, the various units of the corporate- owned mass-media (e.g. Fox Television). 21. The suggestion here is not that the U.S. Supreme Court is entirely in the pockets of corporate capital. Rather, reference here is to the general historical pat- tern of U.S. Supreme Court decisions favoring, more often than not (and frequently most egregiously), corporate capital to the gross detriment of the demo- cratic interests (procedural and authentic) of the citizenry. 22.This conflict could also be described as class-conflict on a global scale with the West (for our purposes including Japan) representing the capitalist class and the rest of the planet the working class. 23. The literature on the cold war is vast and would fill a small library, however much of it, from the perspective this work, is of little value and in fact often borders on nothing more than propaganda (where it is usually portrayed as a sort of a global chess game in which the United States won). For a credible entry point into the useful part of that literature these three sources should suffice: Borstelmann (2001), Westad (2005), and Statler and Johns (2006). Some may be surprised that there is no reference to the works of John Lewis Gaddis, considered the premier cold war historian by U.S. mainline historians—but that’s the rub: mainline.
- 16. Page 15 of 89 eign-policy-making arena, the cold war would manifest itself in two forms: “regionalism” and “globalism.” Regionalism was a liberal variant of “globalism,” which had been the hallmark of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy, and which saw the world from the perspective of the U.S./Soviet cold war rivalry, where conflagrations in the PQD nations, for example, were perceived to be exclusively the handiwork of the Soviet Union. In this simplistic conservative ideological world view even struggles such as the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa were seen as the work of the Soviet Union. No matter how bizarre this view may have been to rationally thinking people, it does have some logic to it given its roots in Euro-American racist stereotypes of PQD peoples as simple and unintelligent, and therefore easily gullible and manipulable by an external force. Regionalism, or liberal globalism, however, took a slightly more realistic view by suggesting that while U.S. foreign policy had to continue to be pursued ultimately in terms of the cold war, its objectives could be better realized by accepting that the sources of these conflagrations in the PQD were local or regional. Hence in this view the Soviet Union was still enemy number one, but it was no longer seen so much as the instigator, but rather as the exploiter of these conflagrations for purposes of its mission of world-domination. The correct perspective should have been, of course, to view all major events in the PQD nations on their own merits, and not from a cold war perspec- tive. However, that would have required a major transformation in the consciousness of the foreign policy establishment—an impossibility given the nature of the U.S. political and economic system. Needless to say, for the masses of the PQD countries, the cold war—especially in its globalist manifestation—would spell immense suffering, misery, and death for thousands upon thousands.24 For many in the PQD countries the cold war (to which their own fate had been tied willy-nilly by the protagonists) had been a perplexing phe- nomenon.To them not only did it appear to have been a dangerous quarrel among white people, given that they (the whites) possessed weap- ons of global destruction, over alternative ways of organizing society, but the context, terms and character of the quarrel seemed to lack logic too—at least on the surface. For example: instead of witnessing the growth of friendship and long-term alliance between the war-time allies, Western nations (led by the United States) and the Soviet Union, deep mistrust and animosity had developed between them. Yet, strangely, those nations that had once been archenemies of the Allies, the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), were now their bosom friends. Moreover, to further emphasize the seeming contradictions of post-World War II international relations, even those who would logically, it would appear, have been expected to remain enemies forever, the Jewish peoples and the Germans, had overcome most of their animosities and were now friends. At another level the perplexity became even deeper when such facts as these were taken into consideration: The Soviet Union did not possess capitalist transnational corporations that could act as conduits for the domination of PQD economies, thereby siphoning off resources and profits to enable it to enjoy the same high standard of living that the West enjoyed (and continues to en- joy) through the activities of their transnationals. This circumstance therefore raised the serious question of which side in the cold war really had expansionist ambitions and which side had the most to gain from condemning and undermining wars of national liberation and freedom. After all, it is a historical fact that with the exception of that part of the world that is now known as Soviet Asia, it was the West and not the Soviet Union that had historically been in the forefront of colonizing the PQD nations for economic gains. Western assertions that their opposition to the Soviet Union rested on grounds that the Soviet socio-economic and political system (in common parlance known as “communism”) represented the ultimate in dictatorship and tyranny from which the rest of the world—especially the PQD countries—had to be protected by the West at all costs (“better dead than red”) was hypocritical. While all the time condemning the Soviet Union for human rights violations, the United States and its Western allies were busily engaged in setting and/or propping up right wing, pro-capitalist, pro-Western local tyrants of all shapes and sizes in the PQD countries—ranging from the blood-soaked dictatorships in Asia and Latin America, through the racist European regime in South Africa, to the Pol Pots of Africa. These actions would, moreover, seri- ously raise the question of the validity of the oft-proclaimed notion by the West that it was only within a capitalist economic system that free- dom could flourish. The interpretation by the West of any act on the part of a PQD country that led to the development of commercial and political relations with the Soviet Union as indicating that the country in question was now a satellite of the Soviet Union, and therefore had to be considered a worthy target of Western hostility, was infantile and imbecilic—especially considering that Western nations were falling over each other to de- velop commercial and economic relations with both the Soviet Union and China in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, the desire to sustain and ex- pand these relations was so great that one of the first foreign policy acts of the Reagan Administration was to rescind the U.S. grain export embargo that the Carter Administration had imposed on the Soviet Union following that country’s ignominious invasion of Afghanistan.25 Perhaps the assumption—in typically racist fashion—was that the PQD nations were incapable of protecting themselves from any Soviet designs on their sovereignty that might have ensued upon assumption of economic and political relations with it. The reluctance and often outright refusal by Western nations to support wars of national liberation and freedom (in fact branding those waging these wars as “terrorists,” and leaving the freedom fighters no choice but to turn to the only country willing to give them assistance, the Soviet Union) would remain unexplained in the face of claims by them that they alone (and not the Soviet Union) stood for democracy and freedom. Yet, the Soviet Union, which ostensibly was supposed to champion tyranny and oppression, would be in the forefront of supporting liberation movements in their struggles for freedom almost all over the World—at enormous economic cost to itself given that, as noted earli- er, it did not possess transnational capitalist firms that could bring back profits and resources.26 24. For a critical analysis of the regionalist/globalist approaches to U.S. foreign-policy-making see Wolpe (1985). 25. Notice that this was an administration that prided itself in being staunchly anti-communist, hurling such epithets at the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” (fittingly derived from the Star Wars motion picture saga—given Reagan’s acting background—coupled with his fantasies of building Star Wars space weapons for use against the Soviet Union). 26. Now, cold war fanatics were quick to respond with the assertion that whatever help the Soviet Union had provided had been on an opportunistic basis, always with the aim of hurting Western interests. This may be so, but it is not fully convincing for two reasons: First, Soviet assistance to PQD nationalist forces had generally entailed economic sacrifice on the part of the Soviet Union in the vague hope of gaining some political influence in the future. Contrast this with the position of the Western nations whose defense of colonialism and imperialism had always had, at the bottom, direct material interests in the form of access to profits, cheap labor, and cheap raw materials. Therefore, it is doubtful that the Soviet Union’s support of PQD nationalist forces for so long, and on a fairly large-scale, involving considerable economic cost, had been motivated by only the need to achieve propaganda victories against the West. This is especially so when it is considered that political influence can very easily be lost with changes in the political climate within the “target” country—as the Soviet Union was to painfully discover from time to time (a case in point being Egypt following Muhammad Anwar El Sadat’s accession to power in 1970). Second, if opportunism
- 17. Page 16 of 89 These contradictions and hypocritical behavior that so characterized the cold war, especially as it related to the PQD countries, raised the ques- tion of what the cold war was really about. Was it simply a war over “ideology” aimed at stemming the spread of totalitarianism—in the form of Soviet communism given that China was almost a Western ally in everything but name following President Richard Nixon’s visit to that country in 1972—in favor of the ideology of Western “democracy” because communism was supposedly antidemocratic, oppressive, and totalitarian in nature? Or was it in actuality more than a question of ideology? That is, was it a war over resources, profits, and potential mar- kets? For there is no question that given that capitalism can only survive in an economic environment that permits unbridled accumulation of wealth via unrestricted flow of labor, raw materials, goods and profits (subject only to the law of supply and demand), any portion of the globe that functions under an alternative economic system represents a threat to the long-term interests of capitalism everywhere (see below). In light of this point, and the contradictions mentioned above, the cold war was, in truth, not a war about “good” versus “evil,” or about free- dom versus tyranny, or about totalitarianism versus democracy, but rather it was fundamentally a war over access to markets and resources, especially in the PQD countries, since the West had long exhausted its own raw materials, and since capitalism could not (and cannot) survive without the relentless quest for profits. Thus the cold war was, ultimately, about ensuring that the historically-determined imperialist economic advantages enjoyed by Western capitalist transnational firms were in no way compromised by governments trying to protect their own re- sources within their own national borders—which alternative economic systems, such as the socialist system, enjoined them to do. 27 Is it any wonder then that it was precisely in those parts of the world where tyranny and repression would reach unimaginable levels, but where the capitalist economist system would be fully entrenched, that the West would find its strongest allies and a source for much economic gain— often at the expense of the local populations, excluding the compradorial elites. (Compare today’s warm relations between the United States and most of the West with totalitarian “Communist” China—or even the Vladimir-Putin-led Russia for that matter as it regresses back to its old totalitarian ways under the guidance of a leadership comprising many former KGB men.) Nor is it surprising that the “freedom-loving” democratic West would have no difficulty whatsoever in not only turning a blind eye to mass human rights violations (that included torture and murder—supposedly the natural province of communists) that would endemically be perpetrated by governments against their own people in countries that the West considered as their allies but on the contrary provided them access to the economic and military means necessary to continue inflicting these horrors on their peoples. For, if freedom and democracy had truly been at the heart of U.S. foreign policy concerns then it would not have been consistently on the side of every brutal blood-soaked tyrannical dictator that paid homage to the U.S. flag around the world throughout the postWorld War II era: from the regimes of Antonio Salazar and Marcelo Caetano in Portugal to those of the Euro- South African racists in Pretoria and the military thug in the then Zaire (Mobutu Sese Seko), and from the regimes of Agusto Pinochet in Chile and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua to the regimes of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and the Shah of Iran.28 Many of these re- gimes far outdid some of the Communist regimes in the tyranny that they inflicted on their peoples; yet the United States supported them because their tyranny was in the service of capitalist interests: domestic and foreign, short-term and long-term and actual and potential.29 Colonialism. The process of forcibly imposing on other peoples territorial hegemony (in contrast to the nonterritorial hegemony of imperial- ism and neocolonialism) by the colonizing power.30 The actual practice of colonialism is termed colonization. By its very nature, colonialism carries with it the imperative of the abrogation of the rights of the colonized as subsumed by the Natural Law of Prior Claim; and there- was really the motivating factor, as the Cold war fanatics asserted, then one must pose this question: Would the Soviet Union have changed sides in South Afri- ca, for example, if the West had changed sides? That is, if USGs, for instance, had decided to drop their support of SAAG and instead had begun to support the ANC in every way possible (in the same manner that they would support the “Contras” in Nicaragua and the “Mujahiddin” in Afghanistan), then would the Soviet Union have begun supporting SAAG? The answer obviously has to be a firm “nyet.” But what had motivated the Soviet Union to support the liberation forces among the PQD nations if not opportunism? The answer simply is that it was, in the main, ideology. Ideologically, the Soviet Union was predisposed toward supporting antiracist and anti-imperialist forces. In fact, its very constitution enjoined it to do so. Whether the cold war fanatics liked it or not, a very large dose of altruism (with some opportunism mixed-in of course) had been involved in Soviet foreign policy behavior—especially regarding the PQD countries. There is one qualification that must be entered here. To some degree, Soviet support of the nationalist forces in specific instances was also motivated by its rivalry with China (with whom it became embroiled in a “cold war” of sorts following the Sino-Soviet split around 1962 over strategic and ideological differ- ences). 27. Of course, ideology (often couched in the simplistic terms of “democracy” versus “totalitarianism” against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race) had to and did play a part in the cold war. Otherwise, how would it have been possible for the West, especially the United States, to convince its citizenry to commit enormous resources to the war effort for almost half a century. However, to say that ideology was important in the cold war is not to suggest that it was the cause of that war. The cause lay elsewhere: in the confrontation between capitalism and socialism—as understood in its economic sense. (See, for example, Robin [2001] for an insightful study of one mechanism by which the cold war ideology was sustained in the United States: “rumor—an amalgam of opaque knowledge and cultural codes,” which “transformed a distant adversary into a clear and present danger.” In other words, “[t]he nation’s policy makers and mili- tary strategists stalked and feared an elusive predator based on suggestion and autosuggestion, the blurring of fact and fiction, and the projection of collective fears and desires” [p. 3].) 28. Compare the open use of torture by the United States itself today in its so-called “war on terror.” 29. Even today, the real concern that the United States and its allies have in the Middle East is not over the matter of freedom and democracy but to what ex- tent can the interests of Western capital be secured in that region. The cozy relationship with the butchers of Beijing that the Bush Administration (Sr.) had maintained—continued by successive USGs to the present day—provides further testimony on this point. In the eyes of the Bush Administration (as with subsequent administrations) the Chinese dictators were acceptable because of their pro-capitalist economic policies. And even during the height of the renewed cold war early in the administration of Ronald Reagan there was no lack of enthusiasm to sell U.S. grain to the Soviet Union, even though from a U.S. strategic point of view this did not make sense because grain sales to the Soviet Union meant that it (the Soviet Union) could neglect agriculture and continue to expend its scarce resources on the defense industry; such was the pressure on the administration from U.S. agricultural capitalist interests. Therefore, the cold war was not fought for the sake of a mythical “national interest” but the more narrow but real international capitalist interest where globalized U.S. capital always stood to lose from the appearance of socialist economic systems anywhere in the PQD ecumene because of the inherent capitalist need for a policy of “open door” to profits, resources, and markets. In other words, the forces that had driven Europeans to colonize the world during the era of merchant capitalism never really abated during the cold war era. What is more, today, in the current era of “globalization,” they have actually intensified. 30. It should be pointed out that “colonialism” is another one of those highly contested concepts (like imperialism)—see the discussion by Ostler (2004), for example, in his introduction, paying particular attention to his footnotes (as well as the sources indicated for imperialism).
- 18. Page 17 of 89 fore colonization is always a two-stage process: conquest followed by the imposition of structures of hegemony (which range from forces of direct coercion to forces of economic subordination to forces of ideological manipulation [such as education and other aspects of culture]), by the colonizers. This entire process should not, it is important to stress, be regarded as an entirely one-way street in which the colonized lie su- pine as victims; on the contrary, even in defeat on the battlefield they do not abandon other forms of resistance elsewhere in the economy, polity and society generally—thereby exhibiting historical agency, as one would expect of thinking beings. Further, in my classes, colonialism refers specifically to that of the modern era (see imperialism for an explanation of the distinction). At the same time, unless indicated other- wise, colonialism in my classes refers to that variant of it that we may term settler colonialism. Note that as one can deduce from the forego- ing, colonialism, by its very nature, was also an inherently racist project. Only racists can take over other people’s lands, regardless of the justifi- cation—in the case of the European colonialism, “the white man’s burden,” etc. However, most European peoples would not have considered colonialism as racism at all. (In fact, in a most bizarre way—characteristic of those who arrogantly think they belong to a “chosen” race—even at the height of barbaric predation, exploitation, and oppression they thought they were doing something good for those they had colonized.) Color-blind Racism: See Race/Racism Columbian Exchange: A term used to describe a historical process that occurred over several centuries and the legacy of which continues to reverberate to the present day (but which in its ubiquity we take for granted and in terms of its full macrohistorical impact is probably un- fathomable). Yet, it was a process whose beginning had a very precise date and place: October 12, 1492, Hispaniola (signifying, to put it differ- ently, the date and place of the inadvertent arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas). It was a process marked by both triumph and tragedy—involving, over the centuries, a human-engineered planetary interchange of peoples, cultures, and ideas on one hand, and simultane- ously on the other, plants, animals, and microorganisms—which was inadvertently inaugurated by the Columbian Project that would link together the three continents of Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia and which may be described as globalization. Today, because of the Co- lumbian Exchange, hot peppers are grown in China, tomatoes are an integral part of Italian cuisine, chocolate is consumed by the ton in Eu- rope, apples are common in the United States, corn and cassava are staples of many communities in Africa, and we associate beef with Argen- tina and the music jazz is played worldwide. Crops such as tobacco, cotton, sugar, potatoes, and bananas that would play such a pivotal role in the socio-economic transformation of both Europe and the Americas were part of the Columbian Exchange. Plus, of course, because of the Columbian Exchange, millions of peoples native to the Americas perished from diseases, brought by foreign usurpers of their lands, to which they had no immunity. At the same time, in addition to Native Americans, representatives of virtually every culturally diverse human grouping on this planet (races and ethnicities)—from Arabs to the Chinese, from Europeans to Africans—can be found in the Americas today; heirs to a brutal and violent blood-soaked process of mass-killings, dispossession, colonization, and enslavement that also accompanied the Columbian Exchange. Moreover, the Columbian Exchange sowed the seeds of the industrial revolution (and its corollary industrial capitalism—the suc- cessor to merchant capitalism---which among its many social consequences pauperized millions of Europeans, forcing them to migrate to other lands, as the European feudal system was dismantled, often by means of force and violence). Columbian Project: See the Great European West-to-East Maritime Project. Comprador/ Compradorial Elite: In the literature dealing with colonialism/imperialism this term evolved from its European imperialist Chinese context to refer to an intermediary from among the colonized who emerges to serve the interests of the colonial or imperial power in exchange for personal (material) benefits (but within the limitations of the colonial/imperial system). In the case of the Belgian-ruled colonial Congo, the compradorial elite were referred to as the évolués (Western-educated Africans who had evolved to become “civilized,” as defined by the colonialists). The comprador’s position in the colonial or imperial order is analogous to that of the much despised position of the “trustee” in a prison system in that the comprador is, in the final analysis, also an oppressed person like the rest of the population even while he helps in the maintenance of the system. Remember, it is impossible for colonization/imperialism to succeed without the cooperation of some from among the colonized, who are willing to participate in the new system of oppression that is brought forth by colonialism/imperialism, in ex- change for the limited benefits dispensed by the colonial/imperial order that accrues to the position of a “trustee.”31 Very often the compra- dorial elite were drawn from the traditional pre-colonial elites where they existed, or where no such elites existed, or where there was resistance from such elites, a wholly new group of people were selected for the compradorial role. In rare circumstances, the comprador may undergo a change in political consciousness and emerge to challenge the colonialists/ imperialists with the objective of not simply supplanting the coloni- alists (the usual trajectory pursued by most compradors) but creating a new political and economic order that will truly reflect the interests of the entire citizenry. In the African context, Patrice Lumumba was, for example, one such évolué. In today’s post-colonial but neo-imperialist world, compradorialism is still very much alive with, depending upon the specific circumstances of the country or territory under focus, ethni- cism, political corruption, economic corruption, kleptocracy, brutality, a deep disdain for human rights, cultural subservience, etc., an integral part of compradorialism. Concept: generically speaking, this word refers to an abstract idea or a theme; in other words, it refers to a product or object of the mind. From my perspective, concepts are the essential building blocks of theories. However, on their own they can also (like theories of course) serve as tools of analysis. Many of the terms in this glossary (democracy, class, globalization, meritocracy, etc.) qualify as concepts. (See also Theory.) 31. To give a graphic example: Consider, by around the middle of the nineteenth century the British were in complete colonial control of India, a process that had begun some hundred or so years before. Now, this country of some 150 million people was ruled by a force of Britons numbering only a few thousand! This could have only been possible through the cultivation by the British of a mentally-enslaved Indian compradorial “yes, massah” (or more correctly, “yes, sahib”) class willing and able to do their bidding—and the legacy of which continues to this day where East Indians (and their fellow Southeast Asians in gen- eral) often betray a tragic, comical, and deeply embarrassing inferiority complex vis-à-vis Westerners.
- 19. Page 18 of 89 Conjuncture of Fortuitously Propitious Historical Factors: A concept that seeks to explain major social transformations—of the order that can change societies permanently—by positing that they are as much a product of chance and circumstance as directed human endeavors (in the shape of “social movements,” broadly understood).32 In other words, such transformations are always an outcome of a fortuitous rela- tionship between agency and “historical structures” (the latter being understood, in this instance, as major historical factors, be they natural or human, that originate outside the dictates of the agency in question and therefore are bereft of intentionality, that is, in terms of the transfor- mations). (See also Social Change.) Conservatism: This is an ideology that, obviously, the conservatives espouse; however, please note that one must make a distinction here between political conservatism, and social (or cultural) conservatism—it is quite possible for a person adhere to one, but not the other—and our concern here is with the former. So, what then is political conservatism? Very briefly it is an ideology that advocates the preservation of the existing or a bygone political, social, and economic order. In other words it is an ideology that justifies maintenance of the status quo or its overthrow in favor of a past order (status quo ante) from the perspective of dominant power relations in society (in other words, it is an ideol- ogy that justifies an arrangement where those who are on top remain on top and those who are at the bottom remain at the bottom—from this perspective conservatism is inherently opposed to authentic democracy even while it may champion procedural democracy). Historically, as an ideology, conservatism in the Western world arose in opposition to the revolutionary political, economic, and social changes wrought first by the French Revolution and later by the Industrial Revolution. For example, Edmund Burke, one of the prominent conservatives of the 18th century England, and whose thoughts would influence conservative political theory in the 19th century, believed in the preservation of the power of the monarchy and the landed gentry (the upper class); retention of a close relationship between the State and the Church; and the limitation of voting rights to a select few in society. Political conservatism in the twenty first century has tended to empha- size laissez-faire (meaning to “leave alone” in French) economics, where there is, supposedly, no State intervention in the economy—except in circumstances explicitly requiring the protection, hypocritically, of the interests of capitalists, of course—and virulent opposition to the devel- opment of a social safety net oriented State (usually referred to by conservatives as the “Welfare State”). Political conservatives, therefore, believe in absolute minimal government—except where capitalist interests are threatened (for example, conservatives do not object to the use of State power to smash trade unions—especially in situations of conflict between capitalists and workers). Since conservatism harks back to a past social order it follows that present day conservatives (such as those in the United States), are op- posed to many of the advances that have been made in the area of human and civil rights since the end of the Second World War, including rights for people of color, women, the working classes, and even children. They are also opposed to efforts by the federal government to regu- late industries in order to protect consumers directly (e.g., from fraud, unsafe products, false advertising, etc.) and indirectly (e.g., from envi- ronmental pollution), and of course are vehemently opposed to almost any social safety net program designed to protect the less well-off from destitution. On the basis of their pronouncements, and on the basis of the foregoing, it can be safely asserted that in general (there will always be exceptions of course) conservatives—depending upon the degree of intensity of adherence to their ideology—tend to display the follow- ing attributes (listed here in no particular order): classism; racism; sexism; authoritarianism; intolerance toward alternative viewpoints, ideologies and lifestyle; patriarchal tendencies; unquestioning obedience to law—even if unjust; disdain for programs, projects and ideas aimed at pro- tecting the environment because they believe environmental protection costs capitalists money (and since they have money they do not have to worry about their own health: e.g., if you can drink imported mineral water why worry about water pollution); disdain for the less well-off and those with disabilities (the former because they are considered lazy and the latter because they are considered a burden on society); and jingo- ism accompanied by much belligerency (since the wealthy tend to profit from war and usually their children are able to avoid military service). It is necessary to stress, however, that not all conservatives will share all of the attributes mentioned above; though all will share most of them. Notice too that from the perspective of capitalist democracies of the twenty first century, political conservatism is ultimately about the bour- geoisie waging class warfare on the working classes by means of neo-liberalism. In a nutshell, then, true conservatives (excluding the ignorantsia--see note below) are those who believe in a political and economic order that would protect to the maximum possible privileges that they (or their allies) have garnered over the long course of human history at the expense of other human beings. (For an excellent account of the genesis of the conservative ideology see Moore [1966]). The sad truth, to put the matter differently, is that after one has cut through the thick jungle of pseudo-intellectualism, one is confronted with the incontrovertible fact that in every field of human endeavor (from the arts to the sciences), conservatism has stood as a reactionary bulwark against almost all human progress. That said, one can still champion a serious study of conservatism much in the same way that one would study, say, fascism. (See also Left/Right.) Note: In the United States, in general, but not always, conservatives of today tend to be Republican Party members and/or usually vote for Republican candidates, and while in general they are wealthy or come from wealthy backgrounds, the party also attracts large sections of the working classes or self-styled "middle classes" (meaning working classes with bourgeois pretensions). How does one explain the latter fact? The explanation for this irrational behavior is their deep ignorance--in the sense of their profound inability, due to their lack of political con- sciousness, to disentangle their subjective interests from their objective interests which then blinds them to the fact that the neo-liberal (and military- industrial complex-oriented) policies pursued by this party are so fundamentally opposed to their objective interests. Consider: the resolution 32. This is a very important concept because it helps to debunk the myth propagated by the powerful, the conquerors that their power is rooted in their own genetic makeup (that is that they are a naturally superior people born to rule, dominate exploit, etc. others). Whereas the truth is that this power and domination is an outcome of being in the right place at the right time, so to speak. In other words, no group of human beings (by whatever means you categorize them: race, class, gender, etc.) have a monopoly over intelligence and creativity. If they did have such a monopoly then how come they or their empire and civilizations are no longer with us today. (The passage into the dustbin of history of numerous civilizations and empires—e.g. the Egyptian Civilization, the Greek Civiliza- tion, Roman Empire, the Chinese Civilization, the Byzantium Empire, the Islamic Empire, the Aztec Civilization, The British Empire, the Soviet Empire, and so on—attests to this point) Civilizations or empires are not preordained, whether by nature or God. Today the dominant civilization is the Western Civilization, but will it last forever? History tells us that the answer is no, but only time will tell.
- 20. Page 19 of 89 or amelioration of the very socio-economic circumstances that creates a deep disenchantment among them with the economic and political status quo (that is, circumstances that are rooted in a politically-driven economically dysfunctional and unconscionable income inequality, cou- pled with a weak social safety net) cannot be possible by supporting a political party that champions and pursues policies that are responsible for these circumstances in the first place! What is more, to the extent that they are beneficiaries of policies pursued by the party they have igno- rantly come to disdain (the Democratic Party), there is a profound inability to acknowledge their ignorance-based hypocrisy: benefiting from policies that their party of choice (the Republican Party) fundamentally opposes.33 However, awareness of these facts requires possession of political consciousness! Reminder: this definition concerns political conservatism, and not social conservatism. Social conservatism, for most people, is ultimately about subjective interests (even if they may not be aware of it because of the absence of political consciousness). However, one may concede here this fact: for a minority, the super-religious, social conservatism does represent objective interests. Contradictions: unintended and usually unforeseen oppositional outcomes in a social system that threaten its survival—unless they are re- solved by fundamentally transforming it—and which are rooted within the operational parameters of the system. It may be noted that contra- dictions first usually come to light as contradictions through scholarly analysis whereas they are incorrectly manifest to the architects of the system as merely disruptive symptoms (e.g. crises) of “imbalances” in the system which can be dealt with by simply fine-tuning the system (e.g. re- forms—rather than fundamentally transforming it). Critical Thinking: a mode of thinking that is specific to true intellectuals (not pseudointellectuals), which is characterized by—in addition to its foundational principle that information as distinct from knowledge is only a means to the acquisition of the latter and that all knowledge rests on a matrix of logically interconnected ideas and concepts and which themselves are a product of disciplined analytical reasoning— among other things: a fiery passion for truth (and a willingness to speak truth to power); a profound belief in the value of honest research; patience and open-mindedness to take seriously the views of others; a deep sense of commitment to the acquisition of knowledge and information on a variety of issues, both, personal as well as public; uncompromising honesty in confronting personal biases, prejudices, stereotypes, etc.; possession of limitless curiosity regarding almost all kinds of subject matter; a willingness to confront, where necessary, accepted theories, concepts, modes of thinking, worldviews, etc. in the service of ad- vancing knowledge; and a refusal to make judgments that are not based on reasoned reflection. Culture: Refers to the different cumulative adaptive responses of human societies to the different physical (natural) environment they live in which is the product, in the first instance, of a dialectic between agency and structure (in this instance, environmental structures). However, be- cause we are intelligent beings cultures are never static; they are constantly developing, that is they are a permanent work-in-progress. This cul- tural development is never entirely self-generated; it always includes cross-cultural fertilizations through both deliberate and fortuitous cultural “border-crossings” facilitated by such things as migrations, wars of conquest, trade, commerce, and so on. And when it comes to “civiliza- tions” (which are simply complex cultures) there is absolutely (repeat, absolutely) no way that a civilization can arise without cross-cultural ferti- lizations or border-crossings (implication: no cultural diversity, no civilization). In other words, the idea of a “Western” civilization, to give one example, is not only a bogus idea, but it is also a racist idea! (Think about this: if we went far back in time when human societies were still forming, it is quite possible that we would find evidence of humans borrowing elements from animal “cultures”—e.g. cultures of apes—as they developed their own human cultures [now, how about them apples!]). Second, the fuzzy zone that marks off one culture from another can be termed as a cultural border or boundary. In a truly democratic society that encompasses many cultures, among the objectives of de- mocracy in such a society includes the twin-goals of acceptance (not just tolerance) of cultural borders and the simultaneous facilitation of bor- der-crossings as essential to democracy, progress, and the quality of life. Two further points, but about border-crossings: where communities involved insist on maintaining strict boundaries in enforced hegemonic opposition to border-crossings then one should view it as symptomatic of racism/ ethnicism and the like. Second, where there are deliberate border-crossings, even in the face of opposition, it does not always signi- fy respect and acceptance of the culture of the Other. The same can also hold true for fortuitous border-crossings (arising for instance out of one or more of such avenues as conquest or colonization or trade and commerce). In such instances, that is border-crossings in the absence of respect and acceptance of other peoples' cultures, we can call these border-crossings as “appropriation” (sometimes also referred to as “going native,” especially in the context of settler colonialism). Note, however, that appropriation is further characterized by a refusal to acknowledge the appropriation (in this sense appropriation is really theft). A good example from history is the appropriation of the contribu- 33. The suggestion here is not that the Democratic Party is fundamentally any different from the Republican Party when it comes to taking care of the interests of the working classes (after all, it not only firmly believes in the essential soundness of capitalism as a cure-all for everything that ails humanity and the planet as a whole, but also champions and pursues policies that strengthen the military industrial complex). No, the suggestion here is that Democratic Party, from the perspective of the majority (that is, the working classes), constitutes, in a sufficiently meaningful way, the lesser of two evils. Ideally, there ought to exist a politically viable party of the working classes, by the working classes, and for the working classes (to paraphrase an oft-quoted line from that brief but poignant and majestic speech by President Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address). However, such a party can only come into existence if a significant section of the working classes acquired political consciousness. What about the Communist Party USA? Isn’t that a worker’s party? Yes, but it is too doctrinaire to be a viable political party (and to that extent it will always be a fringe party, especially in the face of the power and might of the two current dominant parties).
- 21. Page 20 of 89 tions of the Egyptian civilization to the development of the Greek civilization conducted by Western historians in the service of the racist project of denying the contribution of black people to the development of Western civilization. A contemporary example of appropriations and which you should be able to relate to easily is the appropriation of black music (such as hip-hop) by young whites. When young white kids listen to hip-hop music they are not necessarily engaged in a “democratic” border-crossing, but may instead be engaging in exoticism and/or transient teenage rebellion (the latter referring to the use of this music as a means of rebelling against their parents—but while at the same time sharing with their parents racist stereotypes of black people in general 34). Curse of Ham: See Hamitic Theory Dead Peasant Insurance: Refers to insurance, usually tax-free, bought by businesses that insure the lives of their employees for the benefit primarily—or entirely, which is often the case (meaning if the employee dies her/his family receives no insurance payout of any kind, only the business gets the payout)—of the business. The ostensible rationale behind this practice is that businesses can suffer financial losses when their employees die; so, the insurance shields them against these losses. While this may be true of some key high-level employees, in practice, busi- nesses have discovered that their employees’ poor health habits and/or access to inadequate or no healthcare—especially at the lower ranks of their workforce—considerably improves their chances of collecting on this insurance (with the added bonus of minimal or no costs to them in terms of replacing these lower-ranked employees). Additionally, there are significant tax-benefits as well for carrying this insurance. All in all, today, this type of insurance, which businesses prefer to call “corporate-owned life insurance,” has proven to be one more device for augment- ing their profits at the expense, one can reasonably argue, of their workers; and in a sense constitutes a form of class warfare. Deferred Gratification: See Marshmallow Test Democracy: Democracy, in its true sense, has two related halves: the procedural and the authentic (or substantive) where the former is the means to the latter. In a capitalist democracy, like this one, the tendency is to emphasize the procedural at the expense of the authentic because it serves the interests of the capitalist class (as will be evident shortly). However, one without the other simply reduces democracy to a well-meaning but empty slogan.35 The first half refers to majority rule (but qualified by a bill of rights that protects minorities) and the accompanying institutional processes of voting, elections, term-limits, legislative representation, and so on. This narrowly defined understanding of democracy can be labeled as procedural democracy. Democracy, however, also has a broader substantive meaning (second half), as captured, for example, by the pre- amble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. To quote the key paragraph: “WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all [Persons] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (Of course, even as one turns to that document, one cannot help but imagine how great that document could have really been if only its architects had at the same time not refused to consider other peoples, such as the enslaved African Americans and the Aboriginal Americans, worthy of these same rights; instead they even went on to label the latter as “merciless Indian Savages,” and made them the source of one more grievance among the many listed by the document against the British Crown.) Authentic democracy then, in essence, is about equitably securing access for all human beings to the four fundamental needs: food, shelter, health, and security. (See Development for further elaboration on these needs.) One cannot be certain whether President Abraham Lincoln had authentic democracy or procedural democracy in mind when he concluded his short but powerful speech (which we have come to know as The Gettysburg Address and fittingly reproduced on the Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C.36) that he delivered several months following the culmination of one of the most horrific battles of the U.S. Civil War, at Gettysburg—where in this small rural town in south central Pennsylvania over a period of just three days, July 1 through 3, 1863, General George G. Meade’s Union Army and General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces fought an unplanned battle that consumed perhaps seven thousand lives but with thousands upon thousands more wounded, captured, or missing—with the words “…and 34. An extreme example of such behavior is when a neo-Nazi Skinhead listens to rap music. (See Yousman, Bill. “Blackophilia and Blackophobia: White Youth, the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy.” Communication Theory 13 (no. 4): 366-91.) 35. There is another definition of procedural versus substantive (or authentic) democracy available in the literature on political theory. However, for our purposes it remains a narrow definition, compared to the one presented here, in that it does not consider the end goal of procedural democracy, namely, authentic democ- racy as defined here (and captured by that magnificent phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”). Its focus still remains simply the one half of democracy: procedural democracy as defined here (in other words, it does not deal with means versus ends). 36. Here is the full text of the Gettysburg Address: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this na- tion, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Abraham Lincoln November 19, 1863
- 22. Page 21 of 89 that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” but they certainly capture what a truly demo- cratic government, which, remember, is constituted from and funded by a vast majority of ordinary tax payers, should be concerned with up- permost: the promotion of, both, procedural and authentic democracy. In practice, authentic democracy finds expression, along two fronts: First, in all those tax-payer funded expenditures designed to improve the lives and working conditions of all in society. These range from the social safety net to transportation infrastructure (e.g. roads, bridges, and airports), on to social amenities and services (e.g. the postal system, schools, colleges, libraries, and parks)—and which may all be collectively referred to as public wages. Second, it finds expression in all those legislative measures enacted, in spite of politically myopic opposition from the bourgeoisie, at the behest of the lower classes at opportune historical moments—the appropriate people are in Congress and the appropri- ate person is in the White House—for the purpose of curtailing the excesses of capitalism (constituting a form of class-struggle aimed at re- sisting the class warfare of the bourgeoisie); such as: the creation of safe working conditions; giving worker’s the right to organize (trade un- ions) and pursue collective bargaining; protection of the biosphere to ensure access to clean air and water, maintain biological diversity, etc.; creation of agencies to monitor safety in food supply, medicines, health care, air-travel; consumer rights, etc.; establishment of the minimum wage; enactment of child labor laws; the creation of a social safety net (see below); and so on. In other words, authentic democracy constitutes a form of redistributive justice. Viewed differently, all these are measures that via the so-called “big government” (that bogey man of the capitalist class) severely interfere with that capitalist mandate to maximize profits without regard to the wellbeing of the citizenry or the planet; that is, they help to “humanize” or tame capitalism—and thereby eliminate the potential for its revolutionary overthrow, benefiting, ironically, the entire capitalist class in the process. Folks, it is important to emphasize that both kinds of democracy are essential for a society to function as a democratic society because both procedural democracy and substantive democracy are dialectically intertwined—one without the other renders both a sham. Of course, as implied here, the very idea of democracy in a capitalist society is problematic. The issue is not only one of the inherent contradictions of the capitalist production system in which the nature of exploitation is rarely if ever transparent (leaving aside the more obvious forms of exploita- tion ranging from slave labor to underpayment of wages). The problem is that even within the confines of a narrower definition of what au- thentic democracy implies (one that leaves the basic parameters of the capitalist order unchallenged) the relatively more simpler and accessible matter of making the apparatus of procedural democracy (elections, legislation, etc.) responsive to the agenda of the objective interests of the mass of the citizenry is constantly (and often flagrantly) subjected to subversion by capital and its allies by constantly waging class warfare. In other words, authentic democracy also concerns, as noted above, public wages (includes the social safety net), and champions of public wages will be, more often than not, the masses—at least the self-enlightened among them—and not the capitalist class and its allies. In fact, on the contrary, high on the legislative agenda of the capitalist class in all democracies is the reduction of the public wage, in opposition to what true democracy is supposed to be about. Seen from this standpoint, the function of democracy (in both its senses) in capitalist democratic societies is to mitigate the predatory and destructive tendencies of capitalism (here, see also negative externality) by “humanizing” it. Note: Whatever the merits of capitalism as a system of economic production, at the most fundamental level, it is about unsustainable exploitation (of human beings, of the environment, and so on); it is NOT about doing good, regardless of what capitalists will tell you. (Reminder: capitalism is not about philanthropy—nor is it primarily about creating jobs (there would be no unemployment, if that was the case)—it is simply about making money, for the sake of making money, in whatever way possible.) One solution that societies have found to the inherently exploita- tive/destructive tendencies of capitalism is to regulate it so that it does not completely destroy society. Note, however, that from the perspec- tive of capitalism itself, it is possible, up to a point, to engage in capitalist entrepreneurial activity that at the same time does as much as possible to minimize the exploitative/destructive consequences of that activity. This kind of capitalism is usually referred to as “socially responsible capitalism” or sometimes “ethical capitalism.” In my classes, I also talk about interpersonal democracy, by which I mean interpersonal relations among individuals in a society that are gov- erned by the principle of equality of opportunity for respect, acceptance, and non-discrimination—regardless of age, class, color, ethnicity, gender, and other similar social structural markers. To provide you with an illustration of what is meant by procedural in contrast to authentic democracy in practice (from a U.S. perspective), I have listed in Appendix 1 at the end of this document tax-payer funded programs and services, as well as democratic rights, by year of enabling legislation. As you go through this listing of key legislative examples of procedural versus authentic democracy, please note that the legislative authority indicated refers to the initial legislation and not the subsequent modifications most such legislation have undergone since their origi- nal enactment, for good or ill, across various U.S. administrations. Notice also, that, not coincidentally, the original legislation was passed, with rare exception, when Democrats occupied the White House and/or were the majority in the U.S. Congress. In fact, astounding as it may ap- pear today, the enabling legislation for many of these programs and services were enacted during a one-term presidency (technically) of Presi- dent Lyndon B. Johnson, the architect of the War on Poverty and the Great Society programs.37 Note: asterisked items (dark brown) concern pro- cedural democracy and the rest relate to authentic democracy, while the letters in brackets after a president’s name refer to either Democrat [D] or Republican [R]). Procedural versus Authentic Democracy in the U.S. (Legislative Examples) 37. Something for you to ponder: as someone who attends a tax-payer funded university in the richest country on the planet, which of these laws, programs, and services would you be willing to do away with? Are you sure that you or your relatives/friends will never have a need for them? In other words, the persis- tent attack on the positive role of government in a capitalist democracy, like this one, to ensure authentic democracy for all should be viewed with deepest suspi- cion—because it is motivated either by ignorance (if supported by the working classes), or cynical self-interest (if supported by the capitalist class and their bourgeois allies).
- 23. Page 22 of 89 See Appendix I at the end of this document Development: This term refers to national development in my classes. Although development implies some form of economic growth, it must be distinguished from it because the latter is a phenomenon of a much narrower compass. Development should be defined (in addition to the matter of personal security and the protection of basic human and civil rights), as economically and ecologically sustainable economic growth that leads to a near convergence between the rich and the poor by means of a qualitatively authentic ascendancy in the standard of living and the quality of life of the masses such as to guarantee them a basic minimum in eight key areas: personal safety, nutrition, health, housing, sanitation, environment, employment, and education. (In other words, development must lead to authentic democracy.) Dialectic/Dialectical: This is a concept often associated with philosophy, but it is not the philosophical meaning of the word that is of rele- vance here. Rather, its use in this course is more generic in the sense that it denotes the process where two seemingly unrelated factors impinge on one another cyclically such as to permanently render the circumstance of each, to be in the hands of the other. For example: factor A im- pacts factor B in such a way as to alter factor B, and thereby enhance its capacity to influence factor A, which in turn is altered, enhancing its capacity to continue influencing factor B. Factor B then is further altered, enhancing its capacity to continue impinging on factor A—and so the cycle continues.38 Direct Cinema: See Cinéma vérité Diversity: Generically, the usage of this term is applicable to both nature (e.g. when describing ecosystems) and to human societies; however, for our purposes, it is the latter usage that is of obvious relevance but here one must concede that this term has become so politicized that it probably has as many definitions as those willing to offer one. Be that as it may, diversity, from the standpoint of a capitalist democracy, may be de- fined as a conscious programmatic effort, from the perspective of both personal (individual) agency and institutional structures, at the levels of both ideology and practice, for universal inclusion—be it in terms of race, ethnicity or gender—in the democratic project where democracy is understood, at once, as a work in progress and as a dyadic concept (in the sense of procedural democracy and authentic democracy). Di- versity, then, challenges oppression. Having defined this term thusly, I must draw your attention to the fact that in this definition, glaringly miss- ing, with respect to the matter of inclusion, is any reference to class. Why? Because class is intrinsic to all capitalist societies; that is you cannot have one without the other. In other words, in capitalist societies, what diversity really implies is not the absence of class oppression but pro- portional representation of races, ethnicities and sexes at all class levels in the sense of the identical replication of the pyramidal capitalist class structure across all races, ethnicities, and sexes. In simplest terms, then, diversity is about challenging racism and patriarchy but within the con- fines of a capitalist democracy. (Note: when race and racism is the only subject of attention, then one can substitute the term diversity with multiculturalism.) DNA: abbreviation for the molecules that contain the biological instructions for rendering a species (a group with an ability to interbreed) of an organism uniquely different from other species. (A grouping of them make up the chromosome, a feature of the nucleus of a cell.) DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid and it is made of a double helix of chains of chemicals called nucleotides comprising phosphates and sugars in one of four nitrogen bases (labeled with the letters: A (adenine); T (thymine); G (guanine); and C (cystosine)). Documentary: See Cinéma vérité Dominative Racism: See Race/Racism Erasure: See Textual Erasure. Essentialism: Among its various uses, essentialism is an important weapon in the ideological arsenal of the racist, the sexist, and so on. Con- sidered from this perspective, this concept refers to the fallacy that there is a basket of characteristics—often taking the form of malignant stereotypes—that constitutes the “essence” of whatever group (marked by, either, race, or gender, or religion, or ethnicity, etc.) that is the target of essentialism because these characteristics are biologically-rooted and therefore unchangeable. The common stereotypical beliefs in this soci- ety that for biological (genetic) reasons women are not good at math and science, that Jews are good with money, that Asians are robotically hardworking, that blacks are obsessed with sex, are all examples of essentialist beliefs. (See also Other/Otherness.) Ethical Capitalism: See Democracy Ethnicity/Ethnicism: See Race/Racism Euro-Americans. See Blacks. Exoticism: When you marry Otherness with your own fantasies about the Other then you emerge with exoticism. In the context of West- ern civilization, exoticism has meant projecting on to the culturally different peoples of the entire planet outside Europe, depending upon time and place, such Western-derived fantasies as “uninhibited sexuality,” “innocence,” “simplicity,” and so on. While in the final analysis exoticism 38. Such statements from everyday experience as “they feed off each other,” or “they strengthen each other,” or “they need each other,” are statements that describe dialectical relationships.
- 24. Page 23 of 89 performs the same function as Otherness, it often masquerades as acceptance of difference, that is “multiculturalism.” For instance, the Thai sex industry, which has its roots in the Vietnam War when U.S. soldiers visited Thailand for so called “R & R” (rest and recreation) and which rests primarily on Western middle-aged male clientele sexually exploiting poor rural Thai girls (and boys), is a perfect example of Western exoticism at work today. Another example, is the portrayal of Africa in films and documentaries as a continent full of wonderfully exotic wild animals— but minus human beings who would spoil the scenery—for the titillation of the Western “couch-potato” adventure seeker. To give yet another example, but one closer to you guys, is the seeming penchant for hip-hop culture among white suburban youth who even as they indulge in this culture, especially its music, continue to view black people from the perspective of Otherness. (Remember: imitation does not mean ac- ceptance.) Question: to what extent was the election of a black president for the first time in the history of this country a function of exoti- cism? Externality: This is a term from the field of economics. An externality can be positive or negative. Stated in very simple terms, a negative exter- nality is the unintended and unwelcome consequences in a capitalist society for those who are not part of a business transaction, the bystanders (the third party). At the macro level, the bystander can be society and the cost of the negative externality that results from a given profit- making activity of a business ends up being borne by society. In other words, where a society “willingly” puts up with negative externalities (mainly because the government refuses to regulate businesses effectively because it is too closely allied to them) it allows businesses to increase their profit margins at the expense of society—meaning of course the citizenry. A good example of a negative externality is environmental pollution generated by a business, such as, for example, an electricity producer who uses coal-fired power plants that release pollutants into the air. Here is another example (but this time instead of turning to economics we turn to every day interpersonal relations): smoking. When smokers smoke in the presence of non-smokers, they create a negative externality with their activity because it results in harm to the non- smokers (depending upon the duration and frequency, ranging from secondhand smoke inhalation to plain inconsiderate annoyance). From the perspective of a democracy, the net effect of negative externalities that result from capitalist activities is to degrade the quality of life of the citizenry, thereby undermining authentic democracy. Fascism: A political ideology that first rose to national prominence in Nazi Germany, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy which combined jingoism, militarism, authoritarianism, virulent ethnicism/racism, and capitalism into one ideological package (and which saw the use of violence and terror as legitimate instruments for achieving its ends). It may be noted that, considered generically, a modified form of fascist ideology existed in South Africa and the Jim Crow South in the United States (and which may be labeled as semi-fascism or para-fascism). (See also Totalitari- anism.) Feudalism/Feudal System: Although most of you, at one time or another, have probably come across this word either in its purely descrip- tive sense and/or in its pejorative sense, it will come as a big surprise to you to learn that despite its continued ubiquitous usage today there has been considerable disagreement among modern historians as to whether or not such a socio-economic and political system ever existed in Europe and in fact many have simply dismissed the term as nothing more than a historiographical construct (similar to the concept of the “Dark Ages, ” that is, a period invented by historians for their own purposes). The fundamental definitional problem has been the concept’s historiographically portmanteau, hence meaningless, character, encompassing a socio-economic and political order spanning some one thou- sand years—roughly from the time of the disintegration and decay of the Roman Empire around the fifth century CE, to the twelfth century when urbanization was beginning to move apace against the backdrop of the dissolution of slavery in Europe together with the loosening of peasant ties to land—across a wide geographic terrain stretching from England to Russia that never exhibited, in reality, uniformity of the type that is commonly associated with the concept: of contractual reciprocity, embedded in both tradition and law, across three primary levels of a relatively unified socio-economic and political hierarchy comprising the monarch at the apex and the serf at the base and vassals in between (sometimes referred to as the “feudal pyramid”) involving provision of security in terms of law and order by those at the top in exchange for, on one hand, land-use rights and a portion of its proceeds, and on the other, a labor levy for the maintenance of the vassals’ demesne for those at the bottom; in other words, a form of a protection racket run by the monarch and the nobility and in which the Church was fully complicit. The truth is this: what is commonly understood as feudalism (or feudal system) simply never existed in Europe. Yet, these terms continue to remain in vogue in books and in classrooms. As Elizabeth A. R. Brown, who was among the first to challenge the continued usage by historians of a term that described a mythological European past in an aptly titled article “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and His- torians of Medieval Europe” observed: “Since the middle of the nineteenth century the concepts of feudalism and the feudal system have dominated the study of the medieval past. The appeal of these words, which provide a short, easy means of referring to the European social and political situation over an enormous stretch of time, has proved virtually impossible to resist, for they pander to the human desire to grasp- or to think one is grasping-a subject known or suspected to be complex by applying to it a simple label simplistically defined.”39 The variation in the kinds of societies that emerged on the heels of the disappearance of the Roman Empire was such that it escapes the imposition of a single concept to describe it; however much one would wish otherwise for the sake of historiographical order and clarity. The question you may ask is why, then, am I still using the term in this course? The reason is that the term has some utility when used in a very specific sense for our purposes, which is to comprehend the radical transition that took place, beginning first in England and then spreading to the rest of Eu- 39. From page 1065 of her article that was published in the American Historical Review, 79, No. 4 (1974), pp. 1063-1088. More recently, another historian, Susan Reynolds, helped to complete the project started by Brown with the publication of her monumental work: Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinter- preted (Oxford University Press, 1994)—she, in fact, not only indicates that her book was inspired by Brown’s article, but she dedicates it to Brown. In this painstakingly researched work she lays to rest the inaccurate model of medieval European society that the term feudalism has traditionally been used to describe. Note that she makes a clear distinction between feudalism as used by traditional historians, which is her primary concern, and that used to describe a particular mode of production; as she points out: “I have deliberately omitted almost all of the vast and important subject of relations between lords and peasants—in other words the whole subject of feudalism in its Marxist sense. Such relations seem to be of only indirect relevance to the concepts of fiefs and vassalage [meaning feudalism traditionally defined] as they have been understood since the sixteenth century.” (p. 15)
- 25. Page 24 of 89 rope, in the mode of production—the reverberations of which, for good or ill, we are living with to this day—that is, the transition from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production: a process that was accompanied by much violence and brutality aimed, initially, at the European peasantry as it was forcibly transformed, by design and/or circumstance, into the modern proletariat of today (and of whom most of you are descendants).40 Used in this sense, my concern is with the class relations between the nobility and the peasantry that defined the pre-capitalist agrarian economic system. G8: Short for Group of Eight which refers to the exclusive but informal club of the world’s major economies (namely, Canada, France, Germa- ny, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States) located in the global North and who meet annually to discuss, plan, coordinate matters of mutual concern. Note that this is not a static group in that it can sometimes be enlarged (as in G17 or G20, etc.) depending upon which countries are invited. Global North: another name for Western countries, that is, the rich (and it stands in contrast to Global South, which is roughly the rest of the world, that is, the poor). These terms are of course very broad and often less than satisfactory generalizations but they have their purpose here and there when discussing matters of wealth and power on a world scale. Global South: see Global North. Global Warming: At the simplest level, global warming may be viewed as the greenhouse effect gone awry (that in turn leads to climate change). The greenhouse effect is the dyadic process by which, on one hand, the sun’s energy warms the planet by heating the earth as it passes through the atmosphere, while on the other, the atmosphere acts like a heat blanket (thermal radiation) preventing catastrophic heat loss into space from the heated earth. The best example of the greenhouse effect at work is when you leave a vehicle outside on a hot sunny day to find later that the interior of the car has become hotter than the exterior because the heat that entered through the windshield and closed windows is now trapped inside. Question: if the windshield can let in the heat, why can't it let it out? The answer is that it has to do with the different wave- lengths of energy where the windshield can allow in one wavelength to go through, namely solar radiation (experienced as sunshine), but not another, namely infrared radiation (experienced as heat). When gases, such as carbon dioxide, are poured into the atmosphere at rates faster than the ability of natural processes to handle it then it increases the capacity of the atmosphere to magnify the greenhouse effect producing an increase in planetary temperatures with disastrous long term climatic consequences (melting glaciers leading to rising sea levels; increasing oceanic temperatures leading to the death of ocean life, as well as rising incidence of hurricanes, droughts, floods and similar weather changes; and so on). Three of the biggest processes involved in the transformation of carbon dioxide—ordinarily a life-sustaining gas (necessary for photosynthesis) in a balanced environment—into an atmospheric pollutant are all human-engineered: the massive and relentless burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal), the destruction of forests, and cattle-raising (methane). Guys, no matter what you hear in the media or what conservative politicians (especially in this country) say, there is now near unanimous conclusion on the part of scientists, across the world,41 that unless we embark on a serious program of controlling carbon dioxide emissions (usually referred to as reducing the carbon footprint), the resultant acceleration of global warming and its corollary, climate change, will serious- ly jeopardize the lives of millions of people around the planet. Yet, most tragically, an issue that is a matter of science has now become a politi- cal issue: the chief culprit being corporate capital in the fossil fuel sector. Echoing the nefarious strategies of the tobacco companies of yester- year (regarding the issue of smoking and health), in a coordinated perniciously stealthy campaign, mounted through the media via the agency of right-wing think-tanks it helps to sponsor, it has succeeded, in the name of profits, in creating sufficient doubt among the masses in this country as to the veracity of the conclusions of scientific research on this matter. Remember, that to corporate capital, any forest—to take another example—is nothing more than a stand of commercial timber (instead of recognizing it as a necessary life-sustaining ecosystem); it only has significance when it is reduced to a pile of silver. At the same time, nurtured on the milk of essentialist arrogance ever since the incep- tion of the Columbian Project,42 the masses among Western countries—to the degree they have any interest in this area—working through their representatives at various UN-sponsored world conferences on global warming and climate change, insist that unless the PQD nations, most especially countries like China and India, agree to accept the same targets in reducing carbon dioxide emissions as those being required of Western countries, nothing much can be done, to the delight of corporate capital. Yes, it is true that today China has the largest carbon foot- print on the planet; however, China is also a poor country. How can anyone in good conscience demand that millions of Chinese toiling in poverty, where many cannot even afford more than a single barely adequate meal a day, reduce their carbon footprint at the same rate as the masses in the West whose bloated materialist lifestyle is fueled by the consumption of two-thirds of the world’s resources.43 To add insult to 40. I cannot resist repeating here, for the umpteenth time, that strange as it may appear to many of you, capitalism, as the dominant mode of production in which the pursuit of profit-driven limitless accumulation of wealth for its own sake by a tiny minority, on the basis of its monopolistic ownership and/or con- trol of the means of production, as well as the coercive means to enforce it, entails for the majority the complete surrender of their time and labor to the capi- talist class against the backdrop of pauperization as a permanent feature of capitalism, is a relatively new human invention (and not a dispensation from God). 41. An interesting divide has arisen over the issue of global warming captured by the appellations: deniers, skeptics, and believers. For more on this see, for example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/20/global-warming-study-climate-sceptics 42. Refers to the quest by Christopher Columbus for a sea-route to the riches of the East by means of sailing west (ironically, the West’s obsession with the East, continues unabated to this day). 43 Consider these figures: Per Capita GDP in U.S. Dollars Per Capita CO2 Carbon Footprint in Tons China: 4,428.5 4.5 India: 1,475.0 1.5 United States: 47,198.5 19
- 26. Page 25 of 89 injury, the West conveniently ignores the irony that one of the key factors behind the current size of China’s total carbon footprint is that it has become the world’s major manufacturer of the consumer goods that, in the case of the West, sustain the very lifestyle that the masses have come to consider as sacrosanct—a sense of entitlement being the lifeblood of their essentialist arrogance.44 Globalization: This concept has as many definitions as those willing to define it, in part because some view it as a benign (or even desirable) phenomenon while others see it as a malignant development, and in part because it has several different dimensions: economic, political, social, cultural, and so on. So, what is globalization? In a sense, globalization today is simply a reincarnation of a trend that had been set in motion during the heyday of European imperialism in that at its core it remains an expression of the universalization of industrial capitalism. Simply put, then, globalization is, as the term suggests, the deliberate and/or fortuitous accumulation-driven universalization of institutions, practices, and beliefs across geographic (national) boundaries at all levels (economic, political, cultural, etc.) intrinsic to the development of modern civili- zations and empires. From this perspective, there is a directly proportional relationship between the degree of globalization and the size of the empire or civilization in question: the bigger the empire or civilization, the higher degree of globalization. While there are many examples one can provide to illustrate globalization, one that you should be able to comprehend readily concerns music. So, when we see the emergence of rap music bands in countries as diverse as United States, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, and Russia then we are witnessing an aspect of cultural globalization. From a cultural perspective, in addition to music, films (Hollywood cinema) and television provide us with an excellent example of two more important aspects (and agencies) of globalization. From an institutional perspective, the formation of such multilateral bodies as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court (and even such global NGOs as Oxfam and Doctors without Borders) are an expression of globalization.45 Because of the historically-determined hegemony of Western civilization today, globalization has been characterized by a number of fundamental characteristics, specifically (not listed here in any particular order): the universalization of industrial capitalism and other Western institutions, beliefs, practices, values, norms, and so on; the rise of the transnational corporate conglomerate as the predominant agency of globalization; the continued but now generally restrained use of “gunboat-diplomacy” by Western powers and which is often legitimated through multilateral agencies (such as the United Nations); the invention and worldwide deployment of satellite technology; the invention and worldwide deployment of the internet; the rise of techno-financial monopoly capitalism; the reincarnation and expansion of the compradorial class of yesteryear as today’s modern “middle class” across the planet; the intensification of the relentless predatory exploitation of the world’s natural resources, often at the expense of the human rights of the poor and the marginalized to whom these resources have belonged for millennia and legitimated by the natural law of prior claim; the super-exploitation of labor (including child-labor and in some cases even slave-labor); the globalization of communicable diseases (e.g. HIV/AIDS); the beginnings of climate change induced by the intensification of the phenomenon of global warming; the pernicious global spread of human-trafficking (of primarily but not exclusively children and women); the massive escalation of the global movement of both documented and undocumented workers; United Kingdom: 36,143.9 11.6 Germany: 40,152.2 12.3 Note that the figures represent averages; which means that millions upon millions of people in China and India have access to a standard of living that does not even include something that, like air and water, we in the West take for granted: electricity and all the benefits that come from it. (If you are living in the West as you read this, imagine a life without lights or even a refrigerator !) Considering this unconscionable disparity in the standards of living of most in the West, compared to most in the rest of the world, brings up another related matter. Given the inability of corporate capitalism to permit a drastic policy change in the West to curb greenhouse gases (and we are not even going to mention other forms of pollution that are destroying the planet)---one that would inevitably require a massive alteration in patterns of consumption---in time to halt climate change, the world should perhaps adopt a fatalistic view and carry on as usual: human beings have failed to be good stewards of the planet earth, and, therefore, they deserve whatever climate change has in store for them. 44. If there was a genuine desire among the Western nations, who, one must be reminded, are largely responsible for bringing us to this point over the centuries ever since the launch of the Industrial Revolution, to honestly tackle the problem of global warming then they would have to embark on implementing a whole range of measures that include: Reducing the carbon footprint by radically redefining what the attainment of the good life means (e.g. the American Dream), by moving away from the super-consumerist super-wasteful lifestyle where ownership, for example, of the latest car, the latest electronic gadgetry, etc., is considered almost a birthright to a much simpler life-sustaining lifestyle. Eliminating all tax-payer funded subsidies from the fossil-fuel sector—do the big oil corporations really need subsidies given their obscenely astronomical profits year after year—and redirecting them to the renewable energy sector (e.g. wind, solar, and so on). Drastically reducing the budget (as well as human capital) allocated for the war-making apparatus and redirecting it to research and development of renew- able energy sources. Mounting a sustained campaign of the education of the masses in how they can save on energy consumption as they go about their daily lives. Assisting the PQD nations, that is those that still possess sizeable acreages of forests, in conserving their forests. Developing and implementing strategies of reforestation all across the planet including among the OD nations. 45. NGOs refers to organizations formed outside governmental jurisdiction by the citizenry and it is an abbreviation for non-governmental organizations.
- 27. Page 26 of 89 the escalation of the global movement of students in pursuit of higher education; the immense escalation of the global trade in illicit narcotics and allied substances sponsored by global drug cartels; and the escalation of the global arms trade. While the view of globalization as a fundamentally malignant development in the eyes of some may be debatable, there are clear instances where globalization is, without question, simply that: such as in the case of global terrorism, the international narcotics trade, human- trafficking, transnational migration of diseases (e.g. AIDS), labor exploitation, and global warming. In the future, the emergence of alternative centers of world power (e.g. in Asia) may lead to a different conception of globalization from the one we understand today—especially in the realm of culture and politics, if not necessarily economics. From the perspective of the world’s poor, globalization can also have a very nega- tive consequence. This is because at the simplest level globalization, in economic terms, has come to mean the relentless drive by corporate capitalism to penetrate every corner of the planet on the much ballyhooed premise—especially in Western countries like the United States— that everyone so effected by this drive will benefit equally via the logic of the so-called “trickle-down economics” (meaning in effect that, most bizarrely, if you allow the rich to get even richer by means of untethered capitalist accumulation the poor will also benefit). One does not have to be a rocket scientist to realize that in a world that was made economically unequal and politically fragmented over a period of several centu- ries as a result of Western imperialism (forms of which continue to persist to this day) the push for globalization on balance has simply made the rich richer and the poor poorer between and within countries. From an ecological perspective too, globalization has not been healthy for the planet, as we can see with the rise of global warming, the destruction of rain forests, the pollution of the oceans, and so on. The Great East-to-West Diffusion: At the simplest level, I use this phrase to refer to the transmission from the East to the West over a period of several thousand years (roughly from the beginning of the Egyptians and Mesopotamian civilizations around 3500 BCE to the con- summation of the Columbian Project with the inauguration of the European sea routes connecting all parts of the planet, which occurs by around 1700 CE) of ideas, products, and technologies through trade, war, conquest, etc. across both space and time. Although it may initially appear to be a term analogous to the Columbian Exchange there are two fundamental and important differences between the two processes of globalization to which these two terms ultimately refer: first, the Great East-to-West Diffusion was, for the most part, a unidirectional phenomenon as the term so evidently makes it clear, and, second, unlike in the case of the Columbian Exchange, it is a deliberately politically loaded term. That is, in coming up with this phrase (Great East-to-West Diffusion), my concern is to restore to universal memory the historical truth that many of the roots of the so-called “Western Civilization” are to be found in the East, broadly understood to include the entire Afro- Asian ecumene. Why is this so important? Well, for one it speaks to truth (as in do not tell lies by fabricating history) which is one of the foun- dational purposes of all true education. The second reason is that ever since the emergence of Western global hegemony in the aftermath of the Columbian Project, Western historians of world history have seen their role—for the most part—to advance, in various guises, sometimes overt and sometimes covert, the fallacious notion of “European exceptionalism” (meaning Europeans, compared to others on this planet, have been genetically endowed with superior intelligence) to explain this hegemony, which if not racist in intent at least borders on it. To know about the East-to-West Diffusion and to make it central to the study of world history is to help counter what I call civilizational hubris (and which in turn would help to foster humility and gratitude, two of the several human attributes that are foundational to harmony between peo- ples). So, from the perspective of true education, to establish, for example, who were the first this and first that (astronomers, inventors, scien- tists, mathematicians, etc.) would be simply a question of learning facts and no more. It would not be, as it has usually been in the study and teaching of world history by Western historians, an effort to deny the commonality of all humanity in which every ethnic variation of human- kind has made some contribution at some point (even if only at the most rudimentary level of domestication of plant and/or animal life) to the totality of the modern human cultural development and experience. (See the fascinating study by Weatherford [1988], with respect to the last point.) As Joseph Needham (1954: 9) sagely observed in volume 1 of his work: “Certain it is that no people or group of peoples has had a monopoly in contributing to the development of science.” For all its proclamation of the virtues of “civilization” (to be understood here in its normative sense) the denial of this fact has been, sadly, as much a project of the West as its other, laudable, endeavors—for reasons that, of course, one does not have to be a rocket scientist to fathom: domination of the planet under the aegis of various forms of imperialism (an endeavor that, even now in the twenty-first century, most regrettably, has yet to see its demise). Consequently, under these circumstances, true history is burdened by the need for constant vigilance against this Western intellectual tradi- tion of erasure of universal historical memory for the purposes of rendering irrelevant the contributions of others.46 Moreover, one must be cognizant of the fact that it is a tradition that relies on a number of techniques: the most direct of which is “scholarly silence”—where there is a complete (or almost complete) absence of any recognition of a contribution. However, given the obvious transparency of this technique, it has increasingly been replaced by one that is more subtle (hence of greater intractability): achieving erasure not by a total lack of acknowl- edgement, but by the method of token (and sometimes even derisory) acknowledgement where the object of the erasure is mentioned in pass- ing and then promptly dismissed from further consideration despite its continuing relevance to the subject at hand. As an extension of this last point, it is questionable to talk about a Western civilization at all; so much of its inheritance is from outside Europe—a more fitting term per- haps would be Afro-Eurasian civilization. To the ignorantsia, who are heirs to a Western ethnocentric mind-set honed over a period of some 600 years, of seeing humankind in no other terms than a color-coded hierarchical cultural fragmentation, this new appellation may, at first blush, appear hysterically preposterous; yet, in actuality, there is a growing body of literature that cogently demonstrates that the so-called Western civilization is simply a developmental extension of Afro-Asian civilizations.47 After all, if one were to take the entire 5,000-year period 46. Consider, for example, the long line of Western science historians who have grappled with the issue of the origins of Europe’s scientific revolution and who feature in Cohen’s overview of their work (1994) but yet almost none of them deigned to even nod at the precursory presence of Islamic science. 47. Of course, the adoption of “civilization” as a unit of analysis presents its own set of problems given that it is more a historian’s imaginary construct than a construct of reality. Guys, this entire definition in this glossary, in a sense, stands in complete opposition to a historiography that relies on encapsulating human experiences into normatively hierarchical, discrete, time, and spatially bounded categories labeled “civilizations.” Hodgson (1974: 31) alludes to the difficulties when he questions the delimitations of boundaries in the “Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene.” As he observes, “it has been effectively argued on the basis of cultural
- 28. Page 27 of 89 of recorded human history, commencing from say approximately thirtieth-century B.C.E. to the present twenty-first-century C.E., the Europe- an civilizational imprint, from a global perspective, becomes simply an atomized blip (the notion of an unbroken path going from the Greeks to the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, is just that, an illusory fabrication), and what is more, geographically, demographically, and cultur- ally, a peripheral one at that when viewed against that of the neighboring Afro-Asian civilizations, taken together (ranging from the Sumerian to the Egyptian to the Chinese to the Islamic).48 It is only in the last 300 years or so that, civilizationally, Western Europe has taken center stage. The fact that many European and U.S. historians appear to be unaware of this simple fact is testimony to the enduring Western ethnocentric teleological tunnel vision that thoroughly imbues their work. Note that Western ethnocentrism is to be understood here as an ideology that is shared by all classes of Western Europeans and their diasporic descendants that is rooted in the assumption that, to quote Harding (1993: 2), “Europe functions autonomously from other parts of the world; that Europe is its own origin, final end, and agent; and that Europe and peo- ple of European descent in the Americas and elsewhere owe nothing to the rest of the world.” See also Amin (1989) and Blaut (1993, 2000), for a brilliant, but scathing critique of the Western ethnocentric paradigm that undergirds much of Western historiography. Yet, consider that if one were to turn one’s historical gaze back to as recently as the beginning of the eighth-century when the Muslims (sometimes referred to as Moors by Western historians) arrived in Europe one has no difficulty whatsoever in categorically stating that there was nothing that one could read in the entrails of Europe then—comparatively backward as it was in almost all ways—that pointed to any- thing that could predict its eventual rise to global hegemony. What is more, even after fast forwarding 700 years, to arrive in the fifteenth- century, a different reading would still not have been forthcoming. In other words, folks, after you have ploughed through this definition there should be no difficulty in accepting the fact that at the point in time when Columbus left Europe in what would eventually prove to be a por- tentous journey for the entire planet, the cultures of many developing parts of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene outside the European peninsula were no less rational, achievement-oriented, materialistic, predatory, belligerent, ambitious, scientific, capitalistic, technologically innovative, ur- banized, capable of ocean navigation, and so on, than were the cultures of developing parts of Europe of the period (nor should it be difficult to accept that the opposites of these qualities, for that matter, existed at comparable levels of magnitude in both areas of the world).49 In fact, on the contrary, in some respects they were more advanced than those of Europe. Now, of course, it is true that when one considers where Europe was some 700 years earlier (at the time of the Islamic invasion), the ra- pidity of the European cultural advance is nothing short of miraculous! No, this is not in the least a hint, even remotely, of the much-vaunted but illusory “European miracle.” Because this progress was not achieved by the Europeans autarkicly; they did not do it alone (on the basis of their own intellectual uniqueness, inventiveness, rationality, etc.) that the Eurocentrists are so fond of arguing. Rather, it was an outcome of nothing less than a dialectical interplay between European cultures and the Islamic and other cultures of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene. Hodgson, for instance, is adamant that one must cast ones historiographical gaze across the history of the entire ecumene, for, as he explains, “most of the more immediately formative elements that led to the Transmutation, both material and moral, had come to the Occident, earlier or later, from other regions,” (p. 197). In other words, as he puts it: “[w]ithout the cumulative history of the whole of Afro-Eurasian ecumene, of which the Occident had been an integral part, the Western Transmutation would be almost unthinkable” (p. 198). Or in the words of Frank (1998: 4): “Europe did not pull itself up by its own economic bootstraps, and certainly not thanks to any kind of European exceptionalism of rationality, institutions, entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word—of race.” To really drive home this fundamental truth some examples may help, and here I will concentrate on the role of Islam (especially consider- ing that it has become a favorite sport of politicians and pseudo-intellectuals alike in the West, since 9/11, to malign this religion at every op- portunity in the name of the very legitimate need to severely castigate the terrorists and extremists who have hijacked this religion for their misguided and nefarious ends) in the development of Western modernity. Through the agency of Islam—involving a variety of mechanisms of diffusion, such as direct residential contacts with immigrant Muslims (e.g., in Muslim Sicily and Muslim Spain), the Arabic to Latin transla- tion movement during the Reconquista, the Crusades, and long-distance trade—Europe was introduced to a range of technological artifacts and methods derived from within the Islamic empire, as well as from without (from such places as China and India).50 Note, however, that the techniques and resources to be found there, that all the lands from Gaul to Iran, from at least ancient classical times onward, have formed a single cultural world.” “But,” he argues, “the same sort of arguments would lead us on to perceive a still wider Indo-Mediterranean unity, or even (in lesser degree) the unity of the whole Afro-Eurasian citied zone.” To decisively drive home the point: the myth of “civilization” becomes readily apparent when one turns one’s gaze to the present and pose the question—regardless of one’s geographic place of abode in this age of “globalization”—What civilization are we living in today? A world civilization, perhaps? (See also Wigen and Martin 1997.) 48. Consider what Hodgson says in Volume 1 of his work on the matter of the geographic peripherality of Western Europe: “[T]he artificial elevation of the European peninsula to the status of a continent, equal in dignity to the rest of Eurasia combined, serves to reinforce the natural notion shared by Europeans and their overseas descendents, that they have formed at least half of the main theater (Eurasia) of world history, and, of course, the more significant half. Only on the basis of such categorization has it been possible to maintain for so long among Westerners the illusion that the ‘mainstream’ of world history ran through Europe” (p. 49). 49. This issue, to drill home the point, can be presented in another way: all human progress, in the “civilizational” sense, ultimately rests either on structural fac- tors (both contingent and conjunctural) or ideational factors. If one accepts the former then it becomes easy to explain, for example, the rise and fall of civiliza- tions and empires throughout history (including the collapse of the British and the Russian empires not too long ago). Moreover, one can enlist the support of science here in that it is now an incontrovertibly established scientific fact that there is no fraction of humanity (whatever the social structural criteria for the division: ethnicity, sex, age, class, etc.) that holds a monopoly over intelligence and talent. If, on the other hand, one privileges the latter, then one must be con- tent with ethnocentrically driven historiography unsupported by evidence, other than fantastical conjectures. Yes, yes… people! Of course, ideas do matter; but only when placed within the context of structures. (This applies even to religious ideas—at the end of the day the metaphysical and the transcendental are still rooted in the material; for, how else it can it be as long as human beings remain human, that is biological entities.) 50. Regarding the Crusades, even though intuition alone would suggest otherwise (the Crusaders had colonized parts of the Islamic lands for considerable periods of time spanning almost two centuries), some Western scholars have tended to downplay the role of the Crusades in accelerating Eastern influences on the development of the West. However, there are at least three areas of Crusader activity that bore considerable fruit in this regard: namely, emulation of sump- tuous lifestyles of the Muslims by wealthy resident Crusaders (yielding influences in art and architecture, for example); agricultural production (especially sugar- cane); and trade and commerce. About the last: Hillenbrand’s fascinating study clearly points to remarkable interchange between the Franks (Europeans) and the Muslims, even—unbelievable this may appear—during times of ongoing conflict. Consider this: while the robust siege of Karak by the forces under the com-
- 29. Page 28 of 89 concept of “technological diffusion” itself requires some analysis. As Glick’s study (1979) of Islamic Spain, for example, attests, one of the most important handmaidens of technological innovation is technological diffusion. However, one must be specific about what this concept means. It should be understood here to refer not only to the direct passage of artifacts and techniques from one culture to another (usually known as technology transfer), but also the indirect form of transmission that Pacey (1996) points to: the spread of information (actively or passively via travelers, traders, books, letters, etc.) about a given technology from one culture to another provoking an “independent” develop- ment of similar or even improved technology in the latter culture. Pacey refers to this technology as “responsive inventions.” Further, in the category of responsive inventions one may also throw in inventions arising out of direct imitation of technological artifacts acquired through trade (for commercial purposes), or acquired through some other means (including illegal means) for the explicit purpose of local manufacture. It follows then that the concept of technological diffusion also embodies (seemingly paradoxically) the possibility of inde- pendent inventions. A good example of this that immediately comes to mind is the windmill. It has been suggested (Hill 1993: 116), that whereas in all probability the European windmill—considering its design—was independently invented sometime toward the end of the twelfth-century, the concept of using wind as an energy source may, however, have arrived in Europe through the agency of Islam (wind- mills—of a different design—had long been in use in the Islamic empire). Another example is the effort by Europeans to imitate the manufac- ture of a high-quality steel common in the Islamic empire called Damascus steel (primarily used in sword making). Even though, observes Hill (1993: 219), in the end Europeans never learned to reproduce Damascus steel, their 150-year-long effort in this direction was not entirely in vain: it provided them with a better insight into the nature of this steel, thereby allowing them to devise other methods to manufacture steel of a similar quality. Anyhow, whatever the mode of diffusion, the truth, folks, is this: the arrival of Islamic technology and Islamic mediated technology of non-Islamic (e.g., Chinese, Indian) and pre-Islamic (e.g., Egyptian, Persian, etc.) provenance—examples would include: the abacus; the astro- labe; the compass; paper-making; the ogival arch; gun powder; specialized dam building (e.g., the use of desilting sluices, the use of hydropow- er, etc.); sericulture; weight-driven clocks; the traction trebuchet; specialized glass-making; sugarcane production and sugar-making; the triangu- lar lateen sail (allowed a ship to sail into wind more efficiently than a regular square sail common on European ships); and cartographic maps (upon which the European nautical charts called portolans were based)—had profound catalytic consequences for Europe.51 It became the basis of European technological advancement in a number of key areas and which in turn would help to propel it on its journey toward the fateful year of 1492 and therefrom modernity. Contemplate this: four of the most important technological advancements that would be foundationally critical to the development of a modern Europe (navigation, warfare, communication and plantation agriculture) had their roots outside Europe, that is, in the East! Reference here, is, of course, to the compass (plus other seafaring aids such as the lateen sail, etc.); gunpowder; paper-making and printing (that is, block printing and printing with movable type); and cane sugar production. All four technologies first originated in the East and then slowly found their way to the West through the mediation of the Muslims.52 Along the way, of course, the Muslims improved on them. Now, it is true that Europe’s ability to absorb these technologies was a function of internal developments, some unique to itself. As Pacey (1996: 44) observes: “if we see the use of nonhuman energy as crucial to technological development, Europe in 1150 was the equal of Islamic and Chinese civiliza- tions.” But, as he continues, the key point here is this: “In terms of the sophistication of individual machines, however, notably for textile pro- cessing, and in terms of the broad scope of its knowledge, Europe was still a backward region, which stood to benefit much from its contacts with Islam.” Islam introduced Europe to international commerce on a scale it had never experienced before. The characterization by Watt (1972: 15) that “Islam was first and foremost a religion of traders, not a religion of the desert and not a religion of peasants,” is very close to the truth. Not surprisingly, then, the twin factors of geographic breadth of the Islamic empire (which included regions with long traditions of commerce going back to antiquity, such as the Mediterranean Basin) and the acceptance of commerce as a legitimate occupational endeavor for Mus- lims—one that had been pursued by no less than Prophet Muhammed himself—had created a vast and truly global long-distance trade un- matched by any civilization hitherto. In fact, the reach of the Islamic dominated commercial network was such that it would embrace points as far apart as China and Italy on the east-west axis and Scandinavia and the deepest African hinterland on the north-south axis, with the result that the tonnage and variety of cargo carried by this network went far beyond that witnessed by even Greece and Rome in their heyday (Turner 1995: 117). Al-Hassan and Hill (1986: 18) remind us that the discovery of thousands upon thousands of Islamic coins dating from the mand of Salah Ad-din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (Saladin) was underway in 1184, trading caravans from Egypt on their way to Damascus were allowed to pass through Crusader-held territories unhindered. This phenomenon would lead one Muslim chronicler of the period to remark: “One of the strangest things in the world is that Muslim caravans go forth to Frankish lands, while Frankish captives enter Muslims lands” (Hillenbrand 1999: 399). That the Muslims and the Franks refused to put aside the peaceful activity of trade and commerce between them on many an occasion (which it should be noted often required the conclusion of treaties and agreements), even as they fought each other, is indicative of how important such activity was for both sides. What is more, the Crusaders under- took these economic relations often in the face of strong strictures on the part of various Popes condemning such activity. Note also that the importance of trade is also attested to, of course, by the currency in Crusader-held territories: it was an imitation of Islamic currency—in terms of design. (See also Bates and Metcalf [1989]; Ballard [2003]; and Verlinden [1995]). In other words, then, through trade and commerce, regardless of whether it was local trade or internation- al trade, Europe opened yet another door to Eastern influences. (For more on this topic, see Abulafia [1994], and Ashtor [1976], and the Dictionary of the Middle Ages. About the last item, as already pointed out, you will do well to mine it for a number of other issues too, covered in this definition.) 51. A note on the portolans, given their critical importance to the European sea navigators, that should further give pose to those who continue to insist on European exceptionalism: while the immediate provenance of many of them was Islamic, the Muslims themselves were also indebted for some of their maps to the Chinese. Of singular importance are those that were of relevance to the European Atlantic voyages given that the Chinese had, probably, already preced- ed Columbus to the Americas—vide for example the voyage of Zhou Wen described by Menzies (2003). (Note: Menzies also discusses the Chinese contribu- tion to the development of the portalans.) 52. There is some doubt as to exactly how the compass arrived in the West from the East in that, according to Watt (1972), it was probably invented jointly by the Muslims and Westerners (one reciprocally improving on the creation of the other) on the basis of the original Chinese discovery of the magnetic properties of the lodestone. Be that as it may, it is yet another instance pointing to the fact that the story of the diffusion to the West (via the Islamic intermediary) of the products of the Eastern technological genius is one that has yet to be told in its entirety.
- 30. Page 29 of 89 seventh to thirteenth centuries in Scandinavia and the Volga basin region highlights the fact that for many centuries Europe relied on Islamic currency for its commercial activities, such was the domination of international trade by the Muslims (see also Watson 1995 for more on the East-West numismatic relations). Recall also that the wealth of the Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa (the latter being the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, it may be noted) in medieval Europe rested to a considerable degree on trade in Eastern luxury and other commodities. Now, to be sure, it is mainly Italian and Jewish merchants, trading in places such as Alexandria, Aleppo, and Cairo, who were responsible for the final Mediterranean leg of the huge transoceanic trade that spanned the entire Indian Ocean (see the remarkable study by Goitein [1967] of the awesome treasure house of Jewish historical documents, known as the Cairo Geniza documents, that span a period of nearly three centuries, eleventh through thir- teenth, and discovered in Old Cairo around 1890). However, as Chaudhuri (1985) shows us in his fascinating history of this trade, it is Muslim merchants who recreated and came to dominate this transoceanic trade—the same pattern held also for the transcontinental trade that was carried on in the hinterland of the Indian Ocean, behind the Himalayan range. Consider the list of luxury and other commodities that Europe received from the East (including Africa) through the agency of the Mus- lim merchants: coffee; cotton textiles (a luxury commodity in Europe prior to the industrial revolution); fruits and vegetables of the type that medieval Europe had never known (e.g., almonds, apricots, bananas, eggplants, figs, lemons, mangoes, oranges, peaches); gold; ivory, paper; tulips; porcelain; rice; silks; spices (these were especially important in long-distance trade and they included cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cori- ander, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, saffron, and turmeric); alum; dyes and dye-making products; medicinal drugs; aromatics (e.g., frankin- cense, myrrh, musk); cane sugar and sugarcane; and so on. (The last is of special historical significance, sadly, considering the ignominious role it would play in the genesis of the Atlantic slave trade.) What is more, with the exception of a few items such as gold, silk, some aromatics, and a few spices like cinnamon and saffron, medieval Europe had not even known of the existence of most of these products prior to the arrival of Islam.53 In other words, the Islamic civilization, through its commercial network, introduced Europe, often for the first time, to a wide range of Eastern consumer products (the variety and quantity of which was further magnified via the agency of the Crusades) that whet the appetite of the Europeans for more—not surprisingly, they felt compelled to undertake their voyages of exploitation, a la Bartolomeu Diaz, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Fernao de Magalhaes (Ferdinand Magellan), and so on.54 This quest for an alternative trade route to the East—one that would have to be seaborne—was also, of course, a function of the desire to bypass the very people who had introduced them to the Eastern luxury commodities they so eagerly sought: their hated enemies, the Muslim intermediaries, who straddled the land-bridge between the East and the West and who at the same time held a monopoly over this ever-increasingly important and obscenely profitable East/West trade. (Only a few decades earlier [on May 29, 1453], prior to the departure of Columbus [on August 3, 1492] on his historic sea quest, Constantino- ple had fallen before the victorious forces of the Muslim Turks under the leadership of Sultan Mehmed II, thus effectively and permanently placing the landbridge in the hands of the Muslims.)55 53. One can hardly imagine what would have been the fate of Europe if it had never found out about some of these commodities. Take, for instance, that absolutely wondrous plant fiber called cotton. Ahhhh … cotton!… cotton! … Guys, what would our lives be like without cotton? Cotton was first domesticat- ed, records so far indicate, in the Indus Valley civilization of India thousands of years ago. The cultivation of cotton and the technology of manufacturing cot- ton textiles (which in time would become the engine of the European industrial revolution) eventually spread from India to the rest of the world, and Islam was highly instrumental in this diffusion. What did Europe export to the Islamic empire (specifically the Mediterranean region) in return for its imports, one may ask out of curiosity? According to Watt (1972), the principal exports comprised raw materials, such as timber and iron, and up to the eleventh-century, European slaves from the Slavic region. (About the latter export: following the conversion of the Slav peoples to Christianity in the eleventh-century, observes Watt, the enslavement of the Slavs soon petered out. Incidentally, this aspect of European history points to the etymology of the word “slave.”) 54. The use of the phrase “voyages of exploitation” instead of the more common “voyages of exploration,” here should not be considered as an expression of gratuitous churlishness; rather it speaks to that popular misconception well described by Hallet (1995: 56): “It is commonly assumed that it was a passionate desire to expand the boundaries of knowledge or, more sharply defined, the rational curiosity of scientific research that formed the mainspring of the Europe- an movement of exploration. Undoubtedly such motives have inspired many individual explorers; but a review of the whole history of exploration reveals a process more complicated than is generally realized…. Three motives had led Europeans to venture into the unknown parts of the world: the search for wealth, the search for political advantage, the search for souls to save.” An excellent example of how these factors were played out in practice is provided by Newitt’s (1995) fascinating exegesis on the origins of the Portuguese voyages of exploitation down the coast of West Africa and finally on to the other side of the conti- nent and therefrom into the Indian Ocean basin. Even the long cherished myth of Henry the Navigator as the heroic architect of the mission to the East and as “scientist and scholar of the Renaissance, the founder of the School of Navigation at Sagres,” is laid to rest and in its place we are presented with the real “Hen- ry the consummate politician” as a shrewd, powerful and wealthy man in fifteenth-century Portugal whose preoccupations were primarily with matters much more closer to home; such as the colonization of Morocco, piracy, and rent (levying taxes and dues on others involved in maritime profiteering activities in places like the Canaries and off the coast of West Africa). See also the riveting account by Bergeen (2003) of the three-year harrowing odyssey (1519–22) of Magellan’s fleet, Armada de Molucca (named, tellingly, after the Indonesian Spice Islands), as it circumnavigated the globe and the motivating forces behind it, including the powerful lure for the West of Eastern spices which, as in this case, literally propelled it to the “ends of the earth” despite unimaginable hardships. Moreover, the veracity of his conclusion that “[I]n their lust for power, their fascination with sexuality, their religious fervor, and their often tragic ignorance and vulnerability, Magellan and his men,” as with the other similar voyages, “epitomized a turning point in history,” for, “[t]heir deeds and character, for better or worse, still resonate powerfully,” is absolutely incontrovertible (p. 414). (Incidentally, Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the planet—though perhaps he was the first European—the Chinese, probably, had already preceded him in that effort. See Menzies 2003.) 55. Taking Columbus’s project specifically: that Islam is written all over it, directly and indirectly, is attested to, for instance, by the fact that only a few months prior to the departure of Columbus under the sponsorship of Spain, the Spanish crown, in what may be considered Europe’s final crusade against the Muslims, had just taken over (on January 2) the last Muslim Spanish stronghold (the province of Granada). In bringing to an end the 700-year Muslim presence in Spain, the Spanish crown, after it had initially rejected Columbus’s project on two different occasions as a hair brained scheme, now saw it in an entirely new light. The victory over the Muslims allowed the Spanish crown (specifically Queen Isabella) to dream of even grander possibilities of sidelining the Muslims (as well as Spain’s other arch enemy, the Portuguese) in its quest for “Christian” glory, gold, spices, and perhaps even an empire that Columbus’s project so coincidentally now promised. In fact, Columbus himself was present at the siege of Granada, and he was quick to bring to the queen’s attention the larger import of the fall of Granada in the context of his project. As he would write in his log of the first voyage while addressing the Spanish monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella): “Be- cause, O most Christian, most elevated, most excellent, and most powerful princes, king and queen of the Spains and of the islands of the sea, our lords in this
- 31. Page 30 of 89 Yet, the European commercial debt to Islam goes even deeper. For, as Fernand Braudel (1982) reminds one in volume 2 of his three- volume magnum opus (grandly titled Civilization and Capitalism), a number of critical elements of European long-distance trade were of Islamic origin; such as the “bill of exchange,” the commenda (a partnership of merchants), and even the art of executing complex calculations—without which no advanced commerce is possible.56 In fact, as Braudel further points out (p. 559), the very practice of long-distance trade itself in medieval Europe was an Islamic borrowing. Now, without long-distance trade, it is quite unlikely that Europe would have experienced the rise of merchant capitalism (and therefrom industrial capitalism following the colonization of the Americas); for, while such trade may not be a sufficient condition for its development, it is a necessary condition. Of course, it is not, it must be stressed here, that Europe had never engaged in long-distance trade before—consider the long-distance trade of the Greeks and the Romans with the East (e.g. via the famed Silk Road)—but, like so many other things, it was reintroduced to them by the Islamic civilization, since the Europeans had, for all intents and purposes, “lost” it over the centuries with their retrogressive descent into the post–Alaric world of the Germanic dominated European Early Middle Ages.57 On the basis of these observations, Braudel, is compelled to remark: “To admit the existence of these borrowings means turning one’s back on traditional accounts of the history of the West as pio- neering genius, spontaneous inventor, journeying alone along the road toward scientific and technical rationality. It means denying the claim of the medieval Italian city-states to have invented the instruments of modern commercial life. And it logically culminates in denying the Roman empire its role as the cradle of progress” (p. 556). However, it wasn’t only in the area of technology alone that Islam came to play such an important role in the genesis of Western moderni- ty as we know it today. Consider the foundational role of the modern university in Europe in the journey toward the European Renaissance, but from the perspective of its origins. From a broader historical perspective, the modern university is as much Western in origin as it is Islamic (that is Afro-Asiatic) in origin. How? Nakosteen (1964: vii) explains it this way: “At a time when European monarchs were hiring tutors to teach them how to sign their names, Muslim educational institutions were preserving, modifying and improving upon the classical cultures in their pro- gressive colleges and research centers under enlightened rulers. Then as the results of their cumulative and creative genius reached the Latin West through translations... they brought about that Western revival of learning which is our modern heritage.” Making the same observation, James Burke (1995: 36) reminds us that at the point in time when the first European universities at Bologna and Charters were being created, their future as academic centers of learning was far from certain. The reason? He explains: “The medieval mind was still weighed down by centuries of superstition, still fearful of new thought, still totally obedient to the Church and its Augustinian rejection of the investigation of nature. They lacked a system for investigation, a tool with which to ask questions and, above all, they lacked the knowledge once possessed by the Greeks, of which medieval Europe had heard, but which had been lost.” But then, he further explains: “In one electrifying moment it was rediscovered. In 1085 the [Muslim] citadel of Toledo in Spain fell, and the victorious Christian troops found a literary treasure beyond anything they could have dreamed of.” Through the mediation of Spanish Jews, European Christians, and others, much of that learning would now be translated from Arabic, which for centuries had been the language of science, into Latin, Spanish, Hebrew, and other languages, to be dissemi- nated all across Europe. (This translation activity, one would be remiss not to point out here parenthetically, was a replication of an earlier translation activity undertaken by the Muslims themselves over a 300-year period, eighth to tenth centuries, when they systematically organized the translation of Greek scientific works into Arabic—see Gutas 1998, and O’Leary 1949, for a detailed and fascinating account.)58 present year of 1492, after your highnesses had put an end to the war with the Muslims, who had been reigning in Europe, and finished the war in the great city of Granada, where on January 2 in this same year I saw the royal standards of your highnesses raised by force of arms atop the towers of the Alhambra, which is the fortress of that city, and I saw the Muslim king come out to the gates of the city.... your highnesses, as Catholic Christians and princes who love the holy Christian faith, exalters of it and enemies of the sect of Muhammad and of all idolatries and heresies, thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to those aforementioned regions of India to see the princes, peoples, and lands, and their disposition and all the rest, and determine what method should be taken for their conversion to our holy faith.... So it was that, after having expelled all the Jews from your kingdoms and domains, in that same month of January, your highnesses commanded that I should go to the said regions of India with a suitable fleet” (from his journal—part of the Repertorium Columbianum edition, vol. 6 [ed. by Lardicci 1999], p. 37). Then there is the matter of Columbus’s monumental navigational blunder: Alioto (1987: 163) reminds one that even the chance “discovery” of the Americas by Columbus has its root in the mathematics of an Islamic scholar, Al-Farghani—albeit involving erroneous mathematical calcula- tions on the part of this ninth-century astronomer. (In the Latin West, where his work, titled The Elements, on Ptolemaic astronomy had achieved considerable popularity, he was known by the name of Alfraganus.) On the basis of these calculations, Columbus came to conclude that Cathay (China) lay only 2,500 miles due west of the Canary Islands! For good or ill, depending on whose interests one has in mind, how wrong he would turn out to be. 56. In a riveting exegesis, Benoit (1995) not only demonstrates the Islamic roots of Western mathematics, but also alerts one to a less well-known fact: it is pri- marily through the agency of commerce that Islamic mathematics in general was diffused to the West and it is in the environment of commerce that it first began to undergo innovation—greatly helped of course with the introduction of those seemingly mundane (as seen from the vantage point of today) artifacts of Eastern origin: Indo-Arabic numerals, and paper! This process especially got underway in Europe in the fourteenth-century as parts of it, notably the Italian city states like Florence, evolved on to the path of merchant capitalism. 57. The importance of the development of European long-distance trade (and Islam’s role in it) cannot be overemphasized. For, long-distance trade had the indirect outcome of accelerating a number of internally rooted, but incipient transformations in Europe, that in time would be of great import, including: its urbanization, the emergence of merchant capitalism, and the disintegration of European feudalism (the last precipitating, in turn, the massive European di- asporic movement to the Americas, and elsewhere, with all the other attendant consequences, including the monumental Columbian Exchange). 58. There is a clarifying point of context that must be dispensed with concerning the presence of Arabic names in the historical literature dealing with the Is- lamic empire. An Arabic name does not in of itself guarantee that the person in question is an Arab Muslim; it is quite possible that the person is a Muslim of some other ethnicity. The reason is that for a considerable period of time not only was Arabic the lingua franca of such activities as learning and commerce in the Islamic empire, but then as today, for all Muslims throughout the world, Arabic is their liturgical language and this also often implies taking on Muslim (and hence Arabic) names. Therefore, the Islamic empire and civilization was not exclusively an Arabic empire and civilization, it was an Islamic empire and civilization in which all manner of nationalities and cultures had a hand, at indeterminable and varying degrees, in its evolution. Consider, for example, this fact: over the centuries—from antiquity through the Islamic period—millions of Africans would go to Asia (as slaves, as soldiers, etc.) and yet the absence, for the most part, of a distinct group of people today in Asia who can be categorized as part of the African diaspora—akin to African Americans in the Americas—is testament to the fact that in time they were genetically and culturally absorbed by the Asian societies. To be sure, in the early phases of the evolution of the Islamic empire, Arab Muslims were dominant; but note that domination does not translate into exclusivity. Ultimately, then, one can assert that the Islamic civilization was and is primarily an Afro-Asian civilization—which boasted a web-like network of centers of learning as geographically dispersed as Al-Qarawiyyin (Tunisia), Baghdad
- 32. Page 31 of 89 During the long periods of peaceful co-existence among Christians, Jews, Muslims and others in Spain, even after the surrender of Toledo, was also highly instrumental in facilitating the work of translation and knowledge export into Western Europe. To a lesser extent, but im- portant still, the fall of Muslim Sicily, beginning with the capture of Messina in 1061 by Count Roger (brother of Robert Guiscard), and end- ing with his complete takeover of the island from the Muslims in 1091, was yet another avenue by which Muslim learning entered, via transla- tions, Western Europe (see Ahmed 1975, for more).59 This export of Islamic and Islamic-mediated Greek science to the Latin West would continue well into the thirteenth-century (after all, Islam was not completely vanquished from the Iberian peninsula until the capture of the Muslim province of Granada, more than 400 years after the fall of Toledo, in 1492). Among the more prominent of the translators who worked in either Spain or Sicily (or even both) included: Abraham of Toledo; Adelard of Barth; Alfonso X the El Sabio; Constantine the Afri- can (Constantinus Africanus); the Archdeacon of Segovia (Dominicus Gundissalinus); Eugenius of Palermo; Gerard of Cremona; Isaac ibn Sid; John of Seville; Leonardo Pisano; Michael Scott; Moses ibn Tibbon; Qalonymos ben Qalonymos; Robert of Chester; Stephanus Arnoldi, and so on. (See Nakosteen 1964 for more names—including variants of these names—and details on when and what they translated.) Of course, it must be conceded, that the contributions by the Muslims to the intellectual and scientific development of Europe was made unwit- tingly; even so, it must be emphatically stressed, it was of no less significance. Moreover, that is how history, after all, really unfolds in practice; it is not made in the way it is usually presented in history textbooks: as a continuous chain of teleological developments. So, guys, the truth of the matter really, then, is this: during the medieval era, the Europeans acquired from the savants of the Islamic em- pire a number of essential elements that would be absolutely central to the foundation of the modern Western university: First, they acquired a huge corpus of knowledge that the Muslims had gathered together over the centuries in their various centers of learning (e.g., Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba) through a dialectical combination of their own investigations, as well as by gathering knowledge from across geographic space (from Afghanistan, China, India, the Levant, Persia, etc.) and from across time: through systematic translations of classical works of Greek, Alexandrian, and other scholars.60 Lest there is a misunderstanding here, it must be stressed that it is not that the Muslims were mere transmit- ters of Hellenic knowledge (or any other people’s knowledge); far from it: they, as the French philosopher Alain de Libera (1997) points out, also greatly elaborated on it by the addition of their own scholarly findings. “Yet it would be wrong to think that the Arabs [sic] confined them- selves to a slavish appropriation of Greek results. In practical and in theoretical matters Islam faced problems that gave rise to the development of an independent philosophy and science,” states Pedersen (1997: 118) as he makes a similar observation—and as do Benoit and Micheau (1995), Huff (1993); King (2000); and Stanton (1990), among others). What kinds of problems is Pedersen referring to here? Examples include: the problems of reconciling faith and scientific philosophy; the problems of ocean navigation (e.g., in the Indian Ocean); the problem of determining the direction to Mecca (qibla) from the different parts of the Islamic empire for purposes of daily prayers; the problem of resolving the complex calculations mandated by Islamic inheritance laws; the problems of constructing large congregational mosques (jami al masjid); the problems of determining the accuracy of the lunar calendar for purposes of fulfilling religious mandates, such as fasting (ramadhan); the problems of planning new cities; and so on. Commenting on the sig- nificance of this fact, Stanton (1990) reminds us that even if the West would have eventually had access to the Greek classical texts maintained by the Byzantines after the fall of Constantinople, it would have missed out on this very important Islamic contribution of commentaries, additions, revisions, interpretations, and so on, of the Greek classical texts.61 A good example of the Muslim contribution to learning derived from Greek sources is Ibn Sina’s Canon Medicinae, and from the perspective of medieval medical teaching, its importance, according to Peder- sen (1997: 125) “can hardly be overrated, and to this day it is read with respect as the most superior work in this area that the past has ever produced.” Now, as Burke explains, this knowledge alone would have wrought an intellectual revolution by itself. However, the fact that it was accom- panied by the Aristotelian concept of argument by syllogism that Muslim philosophers like Ibn Sina had incorporated into their scholarly work, which was now available to the Europeans for the first time, so to speak, that would prove to be an explosive “intellectual bombshell.” In other words, they learned from the Muslims (and this is the second critical element) rationalism, combined with, in Burke’s words “the secular, investigative approach typical of Arab natural science,” that is, the scientific experimental method (1995: 42). Pedersen (1997: 116) makes the same point in his analysis of the factors that led to the development of the studium generale and from it the modern university: “To recreate (Iraq), Cairo (Egypt), Cordoba (Muslim Spain), Damascus (Syria), Jundishapur (Iran), Palermo (Muslim Sicily), Timbuktu (Mali), and Toledo (Muslim Spain)— and in which, furthermore, the Asian component ranges from Arabic to Persian to Indian to Chinese contributions and influences. As Pedersen (1997: 117) points out: “Many scholars of widely differing race and religion worked together…to create an Arab culture, which would have made the modest learning of the Romans seem pale and impoverished if a direct comparison had been possible.” In other words, the presence of Arabic names in relation to the Islamic civilization can also indicate simply the Arabization of the person’s name even though the person may not have been a Muslim at all! (Take the example of that brilliant Jewish savant of the medieval era, Moses Maimonides; he was also known by the Arabic name of Abu Imran Musa ibn Maymun ibn Ubayd Allah.) This fact is of great relevance whenever the issue of Islamic secular scholarship is considered. Secular knowledge and learning in the Islamic civilization (re- ferred to by the Muslims as the “foreign sciences” to distinguish it from the Islamic religious sciences) had many diverse contemporary contributors; including savants who were from other faiths: Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and so on. Consequently, when one talks about the Islamic contribution to knowledge and learning, one does not necessarily mean it is the contribution of Muslim scholars alone, but rather that it is the output of scholars who included non-Muslims (albeit a numerical minority in relative terms), but who all worked under the aegis of the Islamic civilization in its centers of learning and whose lingua franca was primarily Arabic. My use of the phrase Islamic scholars or Arabic scholars in this definition, therefore, should not imply that the scholars were necessarily Muslim scholars (or even Arab scholars for that matter), though most were—that is, most were Muslim scholars, but here again they were not all necessarily Arabs; they could have been of any ethnicity or nationality. (See Iqbal 2002; Nakosteen 1964; and Lindberg 1992, for more on this point.) 59. While it is true that evidence so far indicates that the bulk of Greco-Islamic learning arrived in Europe through the translation activity in Spain and Italy, Burnett (2003) shows that some of this learning also seeped into Europe by means of translations of works that were imported directly from the Islamic East, but executed by Latin scholars in other places (like Antioch and Pisa). 60. See, for example: Grant (1996); Gutas (1998); Huff (1993); Nakosteen (1964); O’Leary (1949); Schacht and Bosworth (1974); Stanton (1990); and Watt (1972). 61. It should be remembered that the Byzantines did almost nothing, in comparative terms, with the Greek intellectual heritage they had come to possess; though they had the good sense to at least preserve it (see Gutas 1998, for an account of the Byzantine role in the Muslim acquisition of Greek scientific knowledge).
- 33. Page 32 of 89 Greek mathematics and science from the basic works was obviously out of the question, since even the knowledge of how to do research had passed into oblivion....That the study of the exact sciences did not end in a blind alley, was due to a completely different stream of culture now spilling out of [Islamic] civilization into the Latin world.”62 The third critical element was an elaborate and intellectually sophisticated map of scientific knowledge. The Muslims provided the Europe- ans a body of knowledge that was already divided into a host of academic subjects in a way that was very unfamiliar to the medieval Europe- ans: “medicine, astrology, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, physiology, zoology, biology, botany, mineralogy, optics, chemistry, physics, mathematics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, music, meteorology, geography, mechanics, hydrostatics, navigation, and history” (Burke 1995: 42).63 The significance of this map of knowledge is that the European university, as de Libera (1997) observes, became its institutional embod- iment. As he states: “The Muslim learning that was translated and passed on to the West formed the basis and the scientific foundation of the university in its living reality—the reality of its syllabus, the content of its teaching.” In other words, the highly restrictive and shallow curriculum of Martianus Capella’s Seven Liberal Arts (divided into the trivium and the quadrivium), which the Carthaginian had promulgated sometime in the middle of the fifth-century C.E. to become, in time, the foundation of Latin education in the cathedral schools—the forerunners of the studium generale—would now be replaced by the much broader curriculum of “Islamic” derived education. It ought to be noted here that the curriculum of the medieval universities was primarily based on the teaching of science; and it was even more so, paradoxically, than it is in the modern universities of today. The fact that this was the case, however, it would be no exaggeration to state, was entirely due to Islam! As Grant (1994), for example, shows, the growth of the medieval European universities was, in part, a direct response to the Greco-Islamic science that arrived in Europe after the fall of Toledo (see also Beaujouan [1982], Grant [1996], Nakosteen [1964], and Stanton [1990]). The fourth was the extrication of the individual from the grip of what de Libera describes as the “medieval world of social hierarchies, obli- gations, and highly codified social roles,” so as to permit the possibility of a civil society, without which no university was possible. A university could only come into being on the basis of a community of scholars who were individuals in their own right, intellectually unbeholden to no one but reason, but yet gathered together in pursuit of one ideal: “the scientific ideal, the ideal of shared knowledge, of a community of lives based on the communication of knowledge and on the joint discovery of the reality of things.” In other words, universities “were laboratories in which the notion of the European individual was invented. The latter is always defined as someone who strikes a balance between culture, freedom, and enterprise, someone who has the capacity to show initiative and innovate. As it happens, and contrary to a widely held view, this new type of person came into being at the heart of the medieval university world, prompted by the notion—which is not Greek but [Mus- lim]—that [scientific] work liberates” (de Libera 1997). A fifth was the arrival of Islamic inspired scholarship, such as that of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), that helped to extricate the curriculum from the theological oversight of the church. In the struggle over the teaching of “Averroeism” in the academy, for example, the academy tri- umphed and the church retreated behind the compromise that there would be two forms of knowledge: divine or revealed knowledge that could not be challenged, and temporal knowledge that could go its separate way. (See Iqbal [2002] and Lindberg [1992], for an accessible sum- mary of this struggle.) Henceforth, academic freedom in terms of what was taught and learned became an ever-increasing reality, jealously guarded by the academy. The implications of this development cannot be overstated: it would unfetter the pursuit of scientific inquiry from the shackles of religious dogma and thereby permit the emergence of those intellectual forces that in time would bring about the scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century (see also Benoit [1995]). The sixth critical element was the standardization of the university curricula across Europe that the arrival of Greco-Islamic learning made possible. Independent of where a university was located, Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and so on, the general pattern was that the curriculum rested on the same or similar texts addressing the same or similar problems in philosophy, science, theology, and so on, regardless of the curricular emphasis or specialty of the institution. What benefit did this standardization of the curricula confer on the development of universities in Europe? “For the first time in history,” as Lindberg (1992: 212) explains, “there was an educational effort of international scope, undertaken by scholars conscious of their intellectual and professional unity.” On the basis of the foregoing, then, what has been established? That the modern university is an Islamic invention? Not at all. Rather, that it is an institutional expression of a confluence of originality and influences. Makdisi (1981: 293) sums it up best: “The great contribution of Islam is to be found in the college system it originated, in the level of higher learning it developed and transmitted to the West, in the fact that the West borrowed from Islam basic elements that went into its own system of education, elements that had to do with both substance and method.” At the same time, “[t]he great contribution of the Latin West,” Makdisi continues, “comes from its organization of knowledge and its further development—knowledge in which the Islamic-Arabic component is undeniably considerable—as well as the further development of the college system itself into a corporate system.” (See also Textual Erasure.) Great European West-to-East Maritime Project: In their pursuit of actual and fabled Eastern riches, the quest for a sea route to Asia by, initially, the Iberian seafaring nations became a European obsession in the fifteenth century (in order to circumvent the domination of the land 62. Until recently, the traditional Western view had been that the father of the scientific experimental method was the Englishman, Roger Bacon (born c. 1220 and died in 1292). However, as Qurashi and Rizvi (1996) demonstrate, even a cursory examination of the works of such Islamic savants as Abu Musa Jabir ibn- Hayyan, Abu Alimacr al-Hassan ibn al-Haitham, Abu Raihan al-Biruni, and Abu al-Walid Muhammed ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammed Ibn Rushd proves this view to be patently false. What Bacon ought to be credited with is the fact that he was a fervent proselytizer of the experimental method, the knowledge of which he had acquired from the Muslims through their translated works while studying at Oxford University. Bacon, it should be remembered, was well acquainted with the work of the university’s first chancellor, Robert Grosseteste, who was an indefatigable apostle of Greco-Islamic learning in the Latin West (see also Crombie [1990]). 63. The European scientific debt to Islam is also attested to by etymology: Consider the following examples of words in the English language (culled from Watt 1972: 85–92) that have their origins in the Arabic language (either directly, or indirectly—that is, having originally come into Arabic from elsewhere): alchemy, alcohol, alembic, algebra, algorithm, alkali, amalgam, arsenal, average, azimuth, camphor, chemistry, cupola, drug, elixir, gypsum, natron, rocket, saccharin, sugar, zenith, zero.
- 34. Page 33 of 89 routes by Muslims and their Genoese and Venetian merchant allies). I have coined this phrase to name that project of which there were two competitive initiatives: one led by the Portuguese and the other by the Spanish (the latter initiative may also be referred to as the Columbian Pro- ject for reasons that will become clear in a moment). Preliminary success was first achieved by the Portuguese when in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias, Portuguese sea captain, sailing down the western coast of Africa eventually doubled the Cape of Good Hope (albeit sailing no further into the Indian Ocean). The consummation of this tentative opening of a European sea route to Asia would therefore be left to another Portuguese seafarer, Vasco da Gama, who managed to sail to India in 1497—the first European to do so. Despite this success by the Portuguese, it is the Columbian Project, however, that finds pride of place in most Western history books. This is not without reason. For, while in terms of its immediate objective it was an unsuccessful project, in time it would turn out to be of monumental macrohistorical significance for the entire planet. It was masterminded and led by a Genoese mariner—an ambitious and enterprising commoner who began his life with the baptismal name of Cristoforo Colombo, to later become Cristóbal Colón, and who we generally know today as Christopher Columbus—while in the employ of the sovereigns of Spain, Queen Isabella I of Castile and her husband King Ferdinand II of Aragon. After much persistence against considerable political odds, initially, he eventually received the authority (privileges and prerogatives) from the monarchs to embark on his bold and imaginative quest for a European sea route to the East by sailing west complete with the pompous title of “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” crowning his ego. The Columbian Project, whose historical antecedents lay in the early phase of the European Renaissance and involving three small ships the Santa María, the Pinta, and the Niña sailing from the Spanish port of Palos on August 3, 1492—the same year in which, not coincidentally, the centuries-long Reconquista launched by various European kingdoms to retake the steadily weakening nearly 800-year old Islamic Iberia culminated in the reluctant but peaceful transfer of the last Muslim stronghold of Granada in Spain to the Spanish monarchy— inadvertently linked together, for both good and ill, the three continents of Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia in a process that historians call the Columbian Exchange. It is important to point out here that from a macrohistorical perspective, the Columbian Project incorporated within it not simply the ambitions of one person and the monarchy that backed him but was also driven by three European-inspired sub- projects that had evolved within the crucible of the roughly 800-year long blood-soaked crusade against the Muslims, the “racial project” (en- slavement, dispossession, and colonization of other peoples and lands), the “capitalist project” (merchant capitalism), and a “religious project” (Christian proselytism), and the execution of which, over time, would effectively render the Americas a geographic, economic, and cultural extension of the European peninsula and thereby laying the groundwork for the economic domination to come of the planet by a hitherto historically marginal and ethnically diverse peoples, the Europeans. Note too that the Columbian Project, in terms of both motivation and facilitation, was also a product of the European encounter with the Islamic Civilization—see the Great East-to-West Diffusion). Hajj: An Arabic word that refers to the annual pilgrimage to the Islamic holy city of Mecca mandatory on all Muslims who can afford it at least once in their lifetime. Its significance in world history stems in part from the fact that this annual gathering of representatives of diverse cultures from the Afro-Eurasian ecumene served as a crucible for the interchange and dispersal of ideas, commodities, and the like. Hamitic Theory: When Europeans first stumbled across the architectural and artistic expressions of the wondrous achievements of Africans of antiquity (e.g., the Pyramids, the Zimbabwe Ruins, etc.) a dominant view that emerged among them to explain their origins, as I explained in class, was that they were the handiwork of a race of people from outside Africa.64 As Edith Sanders (1969) explains, while tracing the origins of this particular Western myth: “[t]he Hamitic hypothesis is well-known to students of Africa. It states that everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race.” However, she further explains, “[o]n closer examination of the history of the idea, there emerges a previous elaborate Hamitic theory, in which the Hamites are believed to be Negroes.” In other words, as she observes, “[I]t becomes clear then that the hypothesis is symptomatic of the nature of race relations, that it has changed its content if not its nomenclature through time, and that it has become a problem of epistemology” (p. 521). Not surprisingly, her carefully reasoned exege- sis unveils a wicked tale of the lengths to which Westerners have gone to deny an entire continent part of its history; all for the purpose of constructing a racist ideology that could permit the rape of a continent without causing so much as a twinge in the consciences of even the most ardent of Christians. In fact, with great convenience, the myth actually begins in the Christian cosmological realm. The necessity to de- scribe the origins and role of this myth here (albeit briefly) stems, of course, from its pervasive influence on Western attitudes toward the dark- er peoples of the world ever since the rise of Christianity in the West, generally, and more specifically, its subterranean influence on how West- ern colonial policies on education (as well as in other areas of human endeavor) in Africa were shaped and implemented—as will be shown in the pages to come. Furthermore, there is also the fact of its continuing lingering presence even to this day, in various permutations at the sub- conscious and conscious levels, in the psyche of most Westerners when they confront Africa—symptomatic of which, to give just one exam- ple, is the virulent attack on Bernal by the Eurocentrists (mentioned earlier). Now, as just noted and bizarre though this may appear, the Hamites make their entry into the Western racist discourse initially as a degen- erate and accursed race, not as an exemplary, high achieving race (relative to black people) that they were eventually transformed into. Those familiar with the Bible will recall that in it there are two versions of Noah, the righteous and blameless patriarch who is saved from the Great Flood by a prior warning from God that involves the construction of an ark by Noah (Genesis 6: 11–9: 19); and the drunken Noah of Gene- sis 9: 20–9: 27 who inflicts a curse on one of his three sons, Ham. It is the latter version that is of relevance here. Here is how the story goes in the King James version of the Bible: 20. And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: 21. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was un- covered within his tent. 22. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. 23. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; 64. For a discussion of the politics behind the anthropological explanations of the origins of the Zimbabwe Ruins (Great Zimbabwe) see Kuklick (1991) who describes the depth of ridiculousness to which they had sunk—exemplified by a decree by the white minority government of Ian Smith that government em- ployees who publicly disseminated the now long established fact (e.g., through carbon dating) that the Zimbabwe Ruins were of indigenous (African) prove- nance and not some mythical foreign race would lose their jobs.
- 35. Page 34 of 89 and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. 24. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 25. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. 26. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. 27. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. Thus was born the Biblical curse of Ham (which in reality was a curse on his son Canaan).65 Initially, in the period of Latin Christianity of the Middle Ages, the curse of Ham was used as a justification for the existence of slavery in a generic sense, that is without reference to skin color. Considering that slavery during this period encompassed all manner of European ethnicities and was not restricted to people of African de- scent alone, this is not surprising. However, by the time one arrives in the seventeenth-century when the enslavement of Africans is now well underway in the Americas, the curse of Ham becomes the justification for this enslavement; that is Ham and his progeny have been trans- formed into an accursed black people ordained by God to be slaves of white people (the progeny of Japheth) in perpetuity. (Aside: placed hierarchically in between these two groups were the progeny of Shem, namely, Jews and Asians.) Before reaching this point, however, first there had to be a connection made between the color black and the curse of Ham. The problem is best described by Goldenberg (2003: 195): To biblical Israel, Kush was the land at the furthest southern reach of the earth, whose inhabitants were militarily powerful, tall, and good- looking. These are the dominant images of the black African in the Bible, and they correspond to similar images in Greco-Roman culture. I found no indications of a negative sentiment toward Blacks in the Bible. Aside from its use in a proverb (found also among the Egyp- tians and the Greeks), skin color is never mentioned in descriptions of biblical Kushites. That is the most significant perception, or lack of perception, in the biblical image of the black African. Color did not matter. So, the question is how did color enter into the curse? Here, there is some disagreement. Goldenberg suggests that the linkage takes place through two principal exegetical changes: the erroneous etymological understanding of the word Ham as referring, in root, to the color black (which also spawns another serious exegetical error, the replacement of Canaan with Ham in the curse); and the exegetical seepage of black- ness into the story of the curse (which originally, he observes, was colorless) as it was retold, beginning, perhaps, in the third or fourth-century C.E. with Syriac Christians via a work titled the Cave of Treasures, and then further taken up by the Arab Muslims in the seventh-century follow- ing their conquest of North Africa (and the two, in turn, later influencing the Jewish exegetical treatment of the story). Goldenberg further observes that the Cave of Treasures in its various recensions down the centuries extends the curse to not just Kushites, but all blacks defined to include, for example, the Egyptian Copts, East Indians and Ethiopians (that is they are all descendants, according to the Cave of Treasures, of Ham). Hence, Goldenberg quotes one version as reading “When Noah awoke…he cursed him and said: ‘Cursed be Ham and may he be slave to his brothers’…and he became a slave, he and his lineage, namely the Egyptians, the Abyssinians, and the Indians. Indeed, Ham lost all sense of shame and he became black and was called shameless all the days of his life forever” (p. 173). On the other hand, taking the lead from Graves and Patai (1966)—as for example Sanders (1969) does—the connection, it is suggested, occurs via the agency of Jewish oral traditions (midrashim), specifically those contained in one of the two Talmuds, the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli)—the other Talmud is the Palestinian Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi). The Talmuds were a compilation of midrashim, which for cen- turies had been transmitted orally, put together by Jewish scholars in their academies in Palestine and in Babylonia. Although the Talmud Bavli was compiled in fifth-century C.E., it did not make its appearance in Europe until probably sixth-century C.E. Now, the midrash relevant here was concocted, according to the gloss by Graves and Patai (1966: 122), in order to justify the enslavement of the Canaanites by the Israelites; and here is how it goes (reproduced from the version compiled by Graves and Patai 1966: 121): (d) Some say that at the height of his drunkenness he uncovered himself, whereupon Canaan, Ham’s little son, entered the tent, mischie- vously looped a stout cord about his grandfather’s genitals, drew it tight, and [enfeebled] him…. (e) Others say that Ham himself [enfee- bled] Noah who, awakening from his drunken sleep and understanding what had been done to him, cried: “Now I cannot beget the fourth son whose children I would have ordered to serve you and your brothers! Therefore it must be Canaan, your first-born whom they enslave….Canaan's children shall be born ugly and black! Moreover, because you twisted your head around to see my nakedness, your grandchildren's hair shall be twisted into kinks, and their eyes red; again because your lips jested at my misfortune, theirs shall swell; and because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked, and their male members shall be shamefully elongated.” Men of their race are called Negroes, their forefather Canaan commanded them to love theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their masters and never to tell the truth. Anyhow, regardless of whether it was early Eastern Christians, or Jews or Muslims who were responsible for corrupting the biblical story along two axes, replacing Canaan with Ham and rendering Ham black, this much is incontrovertible: Medieval Christians in the West would in time adopt it as their very own because it would allow them to develop an ideology of exploitation and oppression of black peoples, especially be- ginning in the fifteenth-century onward, without violating their religious sensibilities. Notice then that through this mythological trickery two basic elements of Christian cosmology are retained: that one, all human beings are descended from a common ancestor (Adam whose line of descent includes Noah) and that, two, not all human beings are equal. Hence, the peoples of the European peninsula (the conventional use of the term continent in relation to Europe is an ideologically driven misnomer as a 65. It may be noted here that it is the ancestors of Canaan, the Canaanites, who are conquered by the Israelites giving rise to that well-known passage in the Bible (Joshua 9: 21) “And the princes said unto them, Let them live; but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation; as the princes had promised them” (emphasis added). The Canaanites living in the city of Gibeon saved themselves from the possibility of being massacred by Joshua (for no other reason beyond the fact that their land had now been promised by God to the Israelites) by pretending to be foreigners from outside the Land of Canaan and entering into a peace truce with Joshua. However, upon discovering this deception, Joshua cursed the Gibeonites relegating them forever to be- come “hewers of wood and drawers of water” in the service of the Israelites.
- 36. Page 35 of 89 quick glance at a world atlas will confirm) on one hand, and the peoples of the African and Asian continents on the other, stand in a racial hierarchical relationship of master/ servant/ slave. Since this was a Biblical determined order, it followed then that no Christian need lose sleep over the morality of exploiting and enslaving other human beings. Now the question that one must ask here is, When do the descendants of Ham, while still residing in Africa, rejoin the family of Europeans as a subgroup of Caucasians? It occurs during the period of the beginnings of the colonization of Africa. There are two factors that account for this development: the emergence of scientific explanations of race during the era of the Enlightenment when theological explanations began to give way to scientific explanations of the natural world; and the arrival of Napoleon's Army in Egypt in 1798, accompanied by French sci- entists who would go on to establish the new discipline of Egyptology. The former factor established the possibility of polygenesis as an alter- native to the biblical theory of monogenesis (all human beings were descendants of Adam); that is not all human beings have a common an- cestor, but that some had emerged separately as a subspecies of humankind. The latter factor's role turns on the startling discovery by the French scientists that the Egyptian civilization, that is the civilization of black people, was the precursor of the Western civilization. Now, this finding met with considerable opposition in the West since for some it flew in the face of the prevalent racist notions that dialectically justified and drew succor from the ongoing Atlantic slave trade, while for others it stood in opposition to the biblical notion of black people as accurs- ed descendants of Ham. The resolution of the problem of determining who were the ancient Egyptians, therefore, was resolved by turning to a polygenetic explanation. Specifically, following a rereading of the Bible the notion emerged that the Egyptians were the descendants of that other son of Ham, Mizraim, who it was argued had not been cursed as Canaan had been. By isolating Canaan from his brothers, Mizraim and Cush, it was possible to suggest that only the descendents of Canaan had been cursed, and not those of Mizraim and Cush. The ancient Egyptians therefore were not a black people, it was argued, but a Caucasian subgroup, the Hamites. To provide scientific sup- port for this view, Western scientists in the nineteenth-century, especially those working in the United States (perhaps spurred on by the need to justify slavery in the face of rising abolitionist sentiments), emerged with the bogus “science of craniometry,” that purported to prove on the basis of the measurement of human skulls a hierarchy of intelligence among different groups of people (blacks with supposedly the smallest crania, and hence the smallest brain, falling to the very bottom).66 On the basis of this bogus science it was quickly established that the ancient Egyptians were not black Africans, but Hamites. However, it is important to point out here that the Hamites were not completely shorn off of their early inferior status as descendants of the accursed Ham. Rather they were considered to be an inferior subgroup of the Caucasian group, but superior to black peoples. (In other words, a new internal hierarchy was established among the descendants of Jephet where the Tuetonic Anglo-Saxons were at the very top and the Hamites at the very bottom and eastern and southern Europeans—Slavs, Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, etc.—somewhere in the middle.) Thus was born the infamous Hamitic theory that was used to explain any expression of the grandeur of African history that Europeans came across. Hamites were Africans, but they were Caucasian in origin—they came from outside Africa.67 Hegemony: From a generic perspective, in my classes, I mean by this term to imply the unwanted domination of one by another—e.g. as in a racist society, or in a patriarchal society, or a colonial society, and so on. However, hegemony can occur at many levels in many different ways, and in fact it is possible that victims of hegemony may not even know that they are victims of it. This is especially so in the case of ideological hegemony–of which capitalism, as an ideology, is a good example. But how is ideological hegemony imposed? Very simply, through the pro- cess of socialization. (When you march to the beat of your own drummer then you have taken the step in the right direction toward freedom from the hegemony of others.)68 Historicality (of the present): I use this term to refer to the continuity of history up to the present which we must address in order to fully comprehend whatever given part of the present we are concerned with. For example, we can talk about the historicality of the 9/11 terrorist- inspired tragedy (a topic that, incidentally, is taboo among the right-wing in the United States) which requires us to turn to historical events in order to fully understand its origins. Hollywood: I use this term in a generic sense (that is, not necessarily referring to the Hollywood film studios) to refer to that archetypical cin- ema that was invented first by such big studios as MGM, Warner Brothers, Universal, etc. in the 1930s and 40s and that has today become the dominant entertainment medium throughout the world—leaving aside television. It is cinema that is characterized by, among other things, high production values; commercialism at the expense of art in which sex and violence reign supreme (voyeurism); a readily identifiable categoriza- tion of film output into genres (e.g. thrillers, Westerns, drama, comedies, etc.); both textual and subtextual ideological messages that reinforce hegemonic Eurocentric values laced with racism, sexism, and classism; and of course mass-marketing. It is cinema that rests on big budgets, the creation and voyeuristic marketing of the celebrity “star,” the unending quest for verisimilitude through technology, and, today, its finance and distribution by what I call the TMMC (the transnational multimedia conglomerate). In other words, my use of the term “Hollywood” 66. The literature on the historical origins of the ideology of racism in the West is fairly extensive. As an entry-point into this literature the following select sources will prove to be, for present purposes, more than adequate: Bieder (1986); Davies, Nandy, and Sardar (1993); Drescher (1992); Frederickson (2002); Gould (1971); Hannaford (1996); Huemer (1998); Jackson and Weidman (2004); Jordan (1968); Kovel (1988); Libby, Spickard, and Ditto (2005); Niro (2003); Pieterse (1992); Reilly, Kaufman, and Bodino (2003); Shipman (1994); Smedley (1993); Stanton (1960); and Wolpoff and Caspari (1997). Note that although Jordan, and Libby, Spickard, and Ditto are very specific to the U.S. context, they are included here because of their treatment of an important element in the formation of Western racist ideologies not given as much attention in the literature as it deserves: the role of sexuality. 67. For more on the Christian cosmological and “scientific” roots of Western racist discourse, see also the sources mentioned in the preceding note. 68. From a theoretical perspective, this term has very specific meaning in that it is one of the key concepts that was advanced by the Italian neo-Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci (lived 1891-1937) who argued that the hegemony of the capitalist class in a capitalist society is secured at the ideological level through the mechanism of “common sense,” where the dominated (the working classes) willingly accept capitalist hegemony because, through socialization, they come to view capitalist power relations in society from the perspective of the capitalist class; that is, the worldview of the capitalist class becomes the worldview of the subordinated classes because what appears as common sense to the capitalist class now also appears as common sense to the subordinated classes. This process, however, is not permanent or irreversible. Through revolutionary struggle what had always appeared to be common sense to the subordinated classes may no longer be so as the wool is pulled from their eyes to speak (implying the acquisition of political consciousness).
- 37. Page 36 of 89 must be understood in the sense of a perversion of the edificatory and consciousness-raising potential of cinema (even as it entertains) in the relentless quest for profits—the latter achieved by pandering to the lowest common denominator in the values and tastes of the ignorantsia. (Guys, remember my formula of frustration (with the masses): masses – m = ignorantsia. You still don’t get it? What are you left with when you remove the letter “m” from the word “masses?”) Note: Even those films that appear to subvert, at least on the surface, the basic cultural ethos of the Hollywood film by challenging some of its racist, sexist, etc. values, in the end fall in line with the dictates of the TMMC mass market- ing machine—symptomatic of which is the simultaneous denial (usually subtextually) of the possibility of challenging the system through collective action. That is, from the perspective of social change, the dominant motif is one of anarchy (to be understood here in its ideological sense and as a synonym for chaos). A good example of such a film is Crash. Hubris: Generically speaking, this term simply means, going by its Greek etymology, self-destructive arrogance. However, this ordinary word, as is often the case in my classes, has very specific conceptual meaning: beginning with its antonym, humility, it is used in the sense of an antithesis to what it means to be civilized person (in all senses—see, for example, Civilization above) and as such it has a number of variants; they in- clude: technological hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that not only all problems can be resolved through science/technology but the notion that scientific/technological mastery makes a given people and their technology infallible 69; civilizational hubris: the arrogant fallacious notion that your civilization is not only superior to all others but that it owes nothing to other civilizations and that it will last forever; racial hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that not only is your ethnicity race superior to other races/ethnicities but that you are entitled to more than everyone else simply because of your physiognomy; environmental hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that the environment can be abused, exploited, polluted, etc. at no cost to human life; ahistoric hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that the present has always been a present with no historical background where things may have been (or actually were) different; teleological hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that the current domination of a society, or a nation, or the world by… whoever it may be… was always meant to be, because of their superior intellectual, creative, etc. prowess (in other words, chance or accident has no part to play in this dominance); evolutionary hubris: the arrogant fallacious belief that because human beings have evolved to have a higher order brain they are entitled to dominate and exploit other animal species; and the hubris of ignorance: a better way to put this is the arrogance of ignorance. It is not unusual for many among those who are privileged (as expressed by their relative power and wealth) to adopt an attitude of arrogance toward the matter of knowledgeability of the world around them--be it at the local, national, or international levels--by choosing to deliberately remain ignorant (e.g. refusing to keep up with the news--especially from reputable sources); preferring instead to wallow in the mundaneness of their quotidian lives. What is amazing is that even in those circumstances where there is a clear need to be knowledgeable, they remain arrogant about their igno- rance. (A good example here is the tragedy perpetrated by some terrorists in New York City that commonly came to be referred to as 9/11. This event should have spurred all who were literate in North America and elsewhere in the West to make an effort to learn about the historical antecedents that precipitated this event as well as the proposed military response to it by the governments of the United States and its Western allies to determine its appropriateness. But of course the ignorantsia did neither; the consequences of which continue to haunt us to this day.) Ideology: Throughout this course, unless indicated otherwise, this term is used to mean a “style of thought” or a system of ideas and con- cepts which may or may not be cogent and correct, but which color world views and shape behavior. The term, therefore, is used in the Parsonian neu- tral sense (that is, as an internally consistent cognitive system). Consequently, it must be distinguished from the Marxian usage of the term (the antithesis of “true” political consciousness), as well as the positivist usage (the antithesis of “true” social science). Ignorantsia (or Ignoranti): In my classes these terms are used interchangeably to signify a body of people in a society who share one com- mon characteristic: the absence of “political consciousness” among them (which renders them incapable of distinguishing between their objec- tive interests and their subjective interests and thereby making themselves available for ideological manipulation by means of the mass media, think tanks, and the like, owned and/or controlled by the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie).70 It is important to note, therefore, that the term is used in a social structurally neutral sense. That is, members of the ignorantsia transcend the conventional boundaries of class, gender, national- ity, ethnicity, race, religion, age, educational qualifications, and so on. In the West, this lack of political consciousness is attributable to the sur- render of the critical intellect on the part of the ignorantsia in exchange for crumbs scattered by corporate capital from its (capital’s) table. A problem that W. E. B. Du Bois (1996: 642), for example, sagely described thusly: If we are coming to recognize that the great modern problem is to correct maladjustment in the distribution of wealth… [then] in this crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital. Unconsciously and consciously, carelessly and deliberately, the vast power of the white labor vote in modern democracies has been cajoled and flattered into imperialistic schemes to enslave and debauch black, brown and yellow labor, until with fatal retribution they are themselves today bound and gagged and rendered impotent by the resulting mo- nopoly of the world’s raw material in the hands of a dominant, cruel and irresponsible few [bourgeoisie] 69. This term may also be used to refer to the arrogantly fallacious equation of technological superiority with moral superiority. 70 These terms are a polite version of the arithmetic result of this formula: masses minus m.
- 38. Page 37 of 89 Mesmerized by the ideology of capitalist consumerism, members of the ignorantsia are unwilling to question the domination of their lives by the dictates and demands of corporate capital. A classic example of this behavior in the economic arena is the rising popularity of bottled potable water among the ignorantsia today. There is an inability to see that it is the activities of corporate capital that are polluting water sup- plies, and, therefore, there is a concomitant inability to seek a political solution to this problem by means of legislative restraints on corporate capital. Instead, however, the ignorantsia simply goes along with the solution that corporate capital has devised: marketing to the consumers, the ignorantsia, bottled potable water (which itself has a negative impact on the environment because of the resources needed to mine, bottle, transport, and market the water)—needless to say this is a win, win situation all around, but only for corporate capital. Note that, as an antonym of the word intelligentsia (defined for our purposes as those who navigate between the mediocrity of the ignorantsia and the decadence and hu- bris of the bourgeoisie), the term is suffused by a pejorative flavor; this is not accidental: it is an outcome of frustration and exasperation (but not hopelessness) with the behavior of the ignorantsia. Consider the deeply depressing spectacle, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, of the U.S. ignorantsia being led to the slaughter house like sheep by U.S. corporate capital and its acolytes—symptomatic of which is the former’s apparent indifference to deeply profound matters, ranging from the ever-widening politically engineered quality-of-life chasm between the super-rich and the rest, to the systematic attack on human and civil rights in the name of a mythical “national interest;” from the misuse of national resources on ill-fated imperial adventures to make the world “safe” for capital, to the acceleration of the journey toward the abyss of irreversible planetary environmental destruction; from the relentless unconscionable pursuit of wanton materialism on the backs of slave and semi-slave labor domiciled in the countries of the Afro-Asian and South American ecumene, to the unjustified and ever-widening local as well as global economic inequality; and so on. At the same time, the use of this term is an effort at steering away from the romanticiza- tion of the unwashed (the working classes) by the radical left—a pastime in which it often revels. However, the term also signifies a belief that there is sufficient room in Western capitalist societies, in terms of procedural democracy, for the ignorantsia to develop alternative ways of thinking and behaving in order to break the mental chains that binds it to capital. The term ignorantsia, therefore, must be seen to incorporate two implicit messages: despair and hope. (See also Political Consciousness) IMF: International Monetary Fund Imperialism: The imposition of nonterritorial hegemony (or as in the case of colonialism territorial hegemony). Further, in my classes it refers to the imperialism that arose upon the heels of the launch of the European Voyages of Exploitation (the conventional usage of the word “exploration” is a clear Eurocentrist misnomer), and therefore must be distinguished from all other forms of imperialism that preceded it— such as those of the Ancient world. The distinction is an important one in that “modern” imperialism was a symptom of the development of the capitalist mode of production in a particular cultural milieu (specifically that of Europe) that saw religious proselytization as a duty incum- bent upon all—including the state—against the backdrop of the rise of the modern nation state. In other words, imperialism was an outcome of the dialectic in the structural/ideational binary. (Note that this is one of those concepts where there are as many definitions as those willing to define it.71) See also Neoimperialism Institutional Racism: See Race/Racism International Monetary Fund (IMF): Like the World Bank, this is also an international capitalist financial institution (that also excludes communist countries from membership) but whose purpose is different from that of the World Bank in that its main concern is to help main- tain the stability of the international financial system—one tool that it uses toward this end is to provide emergency loans to governments that are unable to pay their foreign debts but with strict and often onerous conditions attached to the loans that usually impact the poor and the vulnerable in most egregious ways. The IMF was set up following a conference in July 1944 of non-communist nations in Bretton Woods (in New Hampshire, United States), as the Second World War was about to end, called the Bretton Woods Conference or officially the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Note that the IMF was one of the two financial institutions (the other was the World Bank) that the conference inaugurated and hence the two together are also often referred to as the Bretton Woods institutions. (Note that the legacy of the Bretton Woods institutions after more than sixty years of existence is that inequality in the world between countries and within countries has grown exponentially—a clear indication of their true purpose: the promotion of unbridled corporate capitalism on a world scale.) Interpersonal Democracy: See Democracy. Intersectionality Theory: See Race/Racism. Ironical Allegory: An important ingredient of satire is irony. Irony refers to the production of double meanings via any one or more of sev- eral devices: contrast, contradiction, incongruity, etc. Irony is especially present in satire made up of indirect aggression. A well known ironic device used by literary satirists is the irony of allegory. An allegory is an entire story created and presented for the purpose of producing two 71. Those wishing a quick entry into the various theories behind this concept will do well by thumbing through these five separate collections of essays on the subject: Chilcote (2000a, 2000b), Mommsen and Osterhammel (1986), Owen and Sutcliffe (1972), and Patnaik (1986). For a critique of the current resurgence of nostalgia for European imperialism among neoliberals and right wing conservatives in the West, couched in advocacy of what we may term as “imperialism with a human face,” see Amin (1992), Bartholomew (2006), and Foster (2006), who all provide us with a look from various angles at the most enduring and core feature of European imperialism of whatever age, and most aptly described by Amin thusly: The intervention of the North [OD countries of the Euro-North American ecumene] in the affairs of the South [all PQD countries] is—in all its aspects, at every moment, in whatever form, and a fortiori when it takes the form of a military or political intervention—negative. Never have the armies of the North brought peace, prosperity, or democracy to the peoples of Asia, Africa, or Latin America. In the future, as in the past five centuries, they can only bring to these peoples further servitude, the exploitation of their labor, the expropriation of their riches, and the denial of their rights (pp. 17–18).
- 39. Page 38 of 89 different levels of meanings. One level is immediately perceivable and it is one that is not intended by the allegorist, and the other is hidden and which constitutes the real meaning that the allegorist wishes his/her audience to take away with them. ''Allegory presents its messages in terms of something else, a literal set of events, persons, conditions, or images having a corresponding level of existence involving meaning, concep- tions, values, or qualities.'' (Test, 1991:187) The important point, however, is that in satiric allegories, the two different levels of meanings are set in opposition to each other producing thereby irony. A classic allegorical tale is George Orwell's Animal Farm, as is Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The film Planet of the Apes is another example of allegory, but in cinematic form. In both these instances the story itself comprises an entirely imaginary or fictitious world, but possessing all the characteristic features of the human world, and it is presented in order to contrast with the real world for judgmental reasons. Such fictitious worlds created for this purpose have been variously labeled as utopias, dystopias, beast fables, and science fiction. Often writers will produce combinations of these different worlds rather than rely on one specific type. In allegorical satire, it may be noted, the irony is not only inherent in the creation of the parallel (but contrasting and oppositional) worlds of the real and imaginary, but the irony itself also serves to act as satire. George Orwell's Animal Farm is both ironical and satirical. (See also parody, satire) Islamism: In brief, refers to the distorted interpretation of the role and practice of the religion of Islam currently in vogue among the igno- rant and the extremists in the Islamic world. Folks, to begin with, it is important to stress, as Roberts (2003) reminds us, that Islamism should not be conflated with so-called “Islamic fundamentalism.” In fact, the latter does not really exist because all Muslims who practice their religion are in a sense “fundamentalists.” Why? Because the Qur’an is unlike the Bible (hence the fallacy of the analogy between Christian fundamen- talism and so-called Islamic fundamentalism) in that the Qur’an is primarily a constitutional document prescriptive in intent—whereas in con- trast the Bible is essentially a historical document. In other words, to be a fundamentalist in Islam is to adhere to the true tenets of Islam, it does not imply a form of “anti-scientific eccentricity appropriate to fundamentalist Christianity,” as Roberts puts it (p. 4), where the objective of the Christian fundamentalist is essentially the advocacy of the literal truth of creationism as it appears in the Book of Genesis. So, what then is Islamism? It refers to the belief among some sections of Muslims that it is possible and necessary to dissolve the division be- tween church and state (or more correctly between mosque and state) that currently exists almost throughout the Islamic world—with the exception of one or two instances (such as Iran). While in theory that may be so, in practice it has amounted to merely a call to replace the current secular authoritarianism of the praetorian oligarchies that dominate (what are virtually) police states that make up a large part of the Islamic world with an equally virulent brutal authoritarianism of a theocracy with a matching horrendous anti-Islamic human rights record (vide the experiences of Islamist rule in Afghanistan, Iran and perhaps one may also add to the list, Sudan). The problem is not just a question of good intentions gone awry, but a fundamental theoretical weakness emanating from the refusal by the ulama (also spelled ulema, referring to the body of Islamic scholars who claim expertise in Islamic theology) to grapple with what Islam has to say on such critical questions as representative government, human rights, constitutional checks and balances, social inequality, economic exploitation, the nation-state, the modern world economy, science and technology, and so on—not in terms of airy-fairy nostalgic references to the caliphates of the past (capped with the usual escapist lines like “God knows best” or “God will take care of it”), but in terms of real, practical, day to day program of action. No Islamist has yet come up with a single example of what a concretely viable Islamic constitution, one that can be implemented in the modern world of today, would look like. The problem is highlighted by Lazarus-Yafeh (1995: 175) when he accurately observes about the ulama “It is a puzzling historical fact that although Islam produced some of the greatest empires the world has ever known, the ulama es- chewed for centuries the issues of the political and constitutional structure of the state and preferred, much like the sages of the small, dis- persed Jewish people, to deal in great detail with such problems of the divine law as prayers and fasting or purity and impurity.” There are two related conjectural explanations one may hazard to offer here for this circumstance: One, is that in Islam a political tradition arose where the executive and the legislative branches of government were considered to be subordinate—at least nominally if not always in practice—to the judiciary (since the latter drew its legitimacy from the scriptures). Yet, as we all know, in the context of the complexity of the modern world of today the judiciary, by itself, lacks the wherewithal to be able to fully confront the complex daily tasks of modern governance. Two, is that in its early caliphal history, Islam was perceived to have been ruled by God-fearing and just rulers (even if autocratic) who obeyed Islamic law, the effect of which was to obviate the thorny task of grappling with the issue of devising a political system with the potential to neutralize an un- just and oppressive ruler should one emerge in the future (that is a democratic political system). At the same time, there arose a tradition of almost blind obedience to those in charge of the state. In other words, on the issue of political authority, while Islamic doctrine evolved to include injunctions for obeying authority, it had little to say in practical terms on what to do if that authority was unjust or non-Islamic because the issue of democracy simply did not enter the equa- tion, especially in a context where Islam did not recognize the separation of church and state. However, even when in later times it became absolutely necessary to confront these thorny issues, especially following the arrival of Western imperialism, the ulama were still found wanting. The reason this time was a peculiar dialectic that had emerged where the traditional refusal by the ulama to accord importance to awail (the foreign sciences) in the curricula of madrasahs as they insisted on hewing to the traditional categories of mnemonic knowledge as a response, ironically, to the increasing irrelevance of Islam in matters of a modern economy and state in a post–1492 Western-dominated global arena, in turn, continued and continues to reinforce this irrelevance. The frustration presented by this dialectic has surfaced among some—repeat, some—sections of Islamists in the form of terrorism (which is tragically ironic given that, supposedly, an important element of Islamism, by definition, is self-righteousness and piety, and Islamic piety—unlike Christian piety of the Crusader era—does not brook terrorism, however the terrorism may be defined.) The political failure of Islamism in the context of a modern world stems from the fact that it has emerged as a political enterprise of an essentially flag-waving anarchic identity politics bereft of concrete Islamic proposals to address the very problems that are at the root of the rise of Islamism (and this failure one must stress is not because Islam is wholly incapable of supplying these proposals, but for lack of intelli- gent philosophic analysis of how Islam can provide the answers to the problems of governance in a modern world). Perhaps, Moore (1994) comes closest to the mark when he defines Islamism as “a political ideology akin to nationalism and should be viewed primarily as an abstract
- 40. Page 39 of 89 assertion of collective identity. Like nationalism, it may harbor a variety of contents or purposes. Consequently it may take many forms, de- pending on the social and political contexts in which it is expressed. Like nationalism in a colonial situation, however, it becomes a vehicle for collective action when alternative channels are suppressed or lose their legitimacy” (Moore 1994: 213).72 Islamophobia: See Race/Racism. Jihad: struggle for the sake of Al’lah. (There are two related meanings of struggle here: at the community level the struggle takes the form of a defensive war; at the individual level it takes the form of a personal quest for salvation.) Jim Crow: A phrase that refers to the racial segregation that had existed de facto in the United States prior to the Civil War (primarily brought about as a result of the massive immigration of the European working class and peasantry to the United States in the early 1800s) that became de jure, mostly but not only in the South, following the abolition of slavery. This juridical-based form of segregation arose by means of a set of racist discriminatory laws that were enacted by mostly Southern states on the back of the old “slave codes” and the newer (1865-1866) racially discriminatory “black codes” with the return to power of the former confederate governments (effected through political corruption and ter- rorism—see Nieman [1991]) in the post-Reconstruction era, in spite of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. constitution that had firmly established the civil and human rights of African Americans.73 The power of an alliance of Euro-American agrarian and urban capitalist classes in the U.S. South bent on restoring as many features of the old slave order as possible, operating through such terrorist groups as the Ku Klux Klan, was such that not only did they systematically and brutally disenfranchise African Americans (and other racial/ethnic minorities), but managed to create a political and legal environment in which a racist U.S. Supreme Court unjustly reversed the legislative intent of the amendments—by means of a ruling in an infamous case called Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) in which the Court came up with the bogus doctrine of “separate but equal.” (This doctrine would not be overturned until a ruling in another Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education [1954]). However, like its counterpart, apartheid, Jim Crow evolved to be more than simply racial segregation; it was a neo-fascist political economic order, a proto-totalitarian system, at the heart of which was the massive economic exploitation of African Americans and in which the civil and human rights of those whites who opposed racial segregation (albeit a courageous but very tiny minority) were also wiped out. The term “Jim Crow” itself is said to have originated from a song sung by an enslaved and disabled African American “owned” by a Mr. Jim Crow and overheard and later popularized (beginning in 1828 in Louisville) by Daddy Rice (Thomas Dartmouth Rice) through the medi- um of black minstrel shows—comedic song and dance routines performed by whites in blackface based on highly demeaning negative stereo- types of African Americans. The song’s refrain went: Wheel about and turn about And do jis so, Ebry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow Jingoism: See Nationalism. KGB: Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security)—the notorious Russian secret police and intelligence agency of the Soviet era. Labor-aristocracy: A derogatory term originally used by Lenin which in my classes is used fairly similarly to refer to a section of the proletari- at that delusively sees its objective interests to lie more closely with that of capital than other workers because of access to privileges not enjoyed by all workers (e.g., possession of “whiteness” that permits the “purchase” of better pay and working conditions relative to those who lack this property value; or possession of a relatively well-paying job in an environment of massive underemployment and unemployment.)74 72. For more on Islamism see the following: Beinin and Stork (1997), Ciment (1997a), Entelis (1997), Naylor (2000), Sonbol (2000), and Wickham (2002). 73. The text of the Amendments (but only the relevant parts from the perspective of this course) are as follows: Thirteenth Amendment (ratified December 18, 1865): Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 23, 1868): Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Fifteenth Amendment (ratified March 30, 1870): Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. 74. In its original usage, Lenin was commenting on the politics of trade unions, that is whether they were an institutional embodiment of pro-capital proclivities and therefore not suited to revolutionary politics or whether they were authentic proletarian organizations but often hijacked by labor “aristocrats.” Here is the key paragraph: But we wage the struggle against the “labor aristocracy” in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them to our side; we wage the strug- gle against the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class to our side. To forget this most elementary and most self-evident truth would be stupid. And it is precisely this stupidity the German “Left” Communists are guilty of when, because of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary character of the trade union top leadership, they jump to the conclusion that… we must leave the trade unions!! that we must refuse to work in them!! that we
- 41. Page 40 of 89 Law of Historical Irreversibility: A natural law that postulates the impossibility, for logistical reasons alone, of restoring the rights that ensue from the Natural Law of Prior Claim on the improbable assumption that there was agreement by all concerned on restoration of these rights in the first place. (A perfect example is the circumstance of the Aboriginal Americans vis-à-vis the European settler and African slave descendants today in the Americas.) Learned Helplessness: A concept in psychology, first described by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier as behavior condi- tioned by feelings of utter helplessness in the face of a daunting challenge, even when an opportunity readily exists, involving not much effort, to escape from the challenge that precipitates such feelings. In my classes, I define it simply as: giving up before trying because of intellectual lazi- ness (itself a product, probably, of class-specific child rearing practices of the kind that would lead to failing the marshmallow test). Left Wing: See Left/Right. Left/Right: In the social sciences, as well as in common parlance, the terms left or left-wing and right or right-wing (and their supposed corollary the center) are a shorthand and consequently imprecise, but nevertheless useful, way of defining a position on a horizontal spectrum of political ideology (and by implication economic ideology) in the matter of how a society should be structured in terms of both procedural and authentic democracy. In other words, your view of who should have political and economic power—that is, the power to determine, ultimately, a person’s quality of life (economically, politically, and socially—authentic democracy) and how that should be effected in practice (procedural democracy)—in a society such as this one, which we may define as a capitalist democracy, will determine where you fall on this political spectrum. For example, if you are a right-wing person then your view of power in this society will be that only a minority should have power, specifically, the capitalist class and not the working classes (includes the so-called “middle class”). If you bring into the picture such other ancillary determinants of power, besides class, as race then as a right-wing person, your ideological position will be to support a racially- colored capitalist order (the supremacy of whiteness). Similarly, your view of power from the perspective of gender will mean that as a right- wing person you would support a patriarchal capitalist order. Ordinarily, one would assume that your ideological position as to whether you are right-wing or left-wing should be a function of what your objective position is in this society: whether you are, for example, a member of the bourgeoisie or a member of the working classes, or whether you are white or black, or whether you are male or female. However, in practice, because of subjective factors, most especially a lack of political consciousness, which itself is an outcome of a variety of other subjective factors (such as family influences, age, religion, peers, level of education, and so on), this is not always the case. So, for instance, it is quite common to see working-class whites—who, incidentally, very often, erroneously believe that because of their skin color they are members of the middle class—adhere to a right-wing ideology in this country (“soda-partyers” are a good example75), even though, such an ideological position is not in their objective interest—meaning it does not serve their true interests in terms of both procedural and authentic democracy. Historically, the identification of this fundamental divide on how you view power first arose (in the West) and the accompanying terms left/right in the early phase of the French Revolution (which, folks, if you recall entailed a violent blood-drenched overthrow of the monarchy), specifically in the legislative body, the Assemblé of 1791, where the terms initially referred to spatial positions in the matter of sitting arrangements (and thereby reflecting by proxy ideological positions of a sort, albeit still within the spectrum of radicalism): those who were more sympathetic to the monarchic dictatorship (that is the old order) sat on the right while those less sympathetic to it—hence by implication of a more radical ideological bent—sat on the left.76 In terms of democracy and human rights as we understand them today, the right believes that only some in society—hierarchically demarcated on the basis of any one or more of such social structural dimensions as class, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and so on—are entitled to them, whereas the left believes the complete opposite (that is, all human beings must have access to them) In a nutshell, the right does not believe in the equality of all human beings whatever their origins, whereas the left insists on it before all else. It is important to note, however, that from the perspective of political means there is a convergence at the furthest edges of the political extreme (ultra-right-wing and ultra-left-wing) toward totalitarianism (Nazism and Stalinism are a case in point). Yet, in pointing this out it should not detract us from recognizing that at the level of fundamental goals there is a stark contrast even between these two extremes. So, regardless of how flawed the means (the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”) to a civilizationally worthy end (“from each according to her/his ability to each must create new and artificial forms of labor organization!! This is such an unpardonable blunder that it is equal to the greatest service the Communists could render the bourgeoisie (Lenin 1965 (1920): 43–44). 75. I am using the term “soda-partyers” derisively to refer to the so-called “Tea Party,” a populist right-wing Euro-American working-class movement financed by big business (such as the Koch Brothers) whose members are more likely to drink soda than tea (given their diet) and who not only lack a proper compre- hension of the U.S. constitution—assuming they have ever looked at it—but lack a proper understanding of the significance of the historical event they have named themselves after, the so-called “Boston Tea Party”. That event (incidentally, named after the fact by historians), was primarily an outcome of an intra-class (not inter-class) struggle between domestic capital and foreign capital (and it had little to do with democracy per se as we understand it today). On the last point, see endnote no. 2 on p. 21 of my book United States Relations with South Africa: A Critical Overview from the Colonial Period to the Present (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2008). For more on the right-wing activities of the Koch brothers follow these two links: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12334757 and http://www.elegantbrain.com/edu4/classes/readings/depository/misc/koch_brothers.pdf 76. Those of you who may be familiar with terms such as liberal, progressive, conservative, fascist, reactionary, red, populist, socialist, communist, and so on, will find it easier to understand what left and right signify. Liberals, progressives, Greens, Reds, feminists, socialists, populists, revolutionaries, Marxists, and com- munists fall on the left of the spectrum, while chauvinists, conservatives, neoconservatives, Nazis, racists, jingoists, reactionaries, sexists, the so-called “alt-right,” and fascists fall on the right. Here is another way to look at this matter: at one time, the right was opposed to the War of Independence, or the abolition of slav- ery, or the civil rights movement, or the women’s movement, or the trade union movement, and so on. It is important to emphasize, however, that left/right are not absolute water-tight ideological categories; rather they signify a preponderance of ideological proclivities. So, here is a question for you: Ideologically- speaking what are you? A progressive? Why? Or a reactionary? Why? Always be very careful of taking up positions on social and political issues that are sup- ported by the corporate media. Learn to march to the beat of your own drummer—that is what critical thinking is about.
- 42. Page 41 of 89 according to her/his needs”) may be as proposed by the radical left, we should not lose sight of the essential difference between the left and the right, considered generically—that is, regardless of the factional variations within each—in what constitutes the very essence of humanity, and civilization. Hence, whereas the latter believes that the pursuit of self-aggrandizement through untrammeled systemic greed (capitalist accumulation) is not only the epitome of civilizational achievement but constitutes a response to a genetic trait fundamental to the human species—even though completely unsupported by scientific evidence, or even religion for that matter to which the rank and file of the right is often in thrall,77 the former, on the other hand, with science (e.g. “mirror neurons” research appears to be highly suggestive here78)—and, ironically, even religious scriptures—providing support, argues that because human beings are social beings from birth to death, altruism is not only an essential part of the genetic makeup of the human species that guarantees its survival but it constitutes the very essence of civilization itself and the means to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.79 (See also Agency; Bourgeois Left; Conservatism; Meritocracy; Political Consciousness.) Life of the Mind: I define this as a passion for learning, broadly understood, for its own sake (and not for its immediate utilitarian value) and which constitutes one of life’s intellectual pleasures. Macrohistory: Like the term world history, macrohistory means different things to different people. For the purposes of this course, I define macrohistory as the study of any historical event or process that has had substantially meaningful significance beyond the confines of its nor- mal locale, across both geographical space and historical time. So, for example, while the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany was a local event in that it was a European event (or at the beginning even simply a German event), in time, it acquired global significance with the 77. It is most ironic indeed that in United States (and in much of the rest of the West) where Christianity is the dominant religion, ardent Christians tend to be on the right. Yet, the life history of Christ clearly shows that he was a revolutionary who spoke truth to power. In other words, ideologically he stood on the left because he stood on the side of the oppressed, the poor, the downtrodden. He was not a conservative! Consider these two well-known quotes from the Bible: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” ( Matthew 25:35-40) Woe to you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey! (Isaiah 10:1-2) (Note: the difference between the left and the radical left in capitalist societies is that the latter, unlike the former, considers the overthrow of capitalism as a legitimate part of the authentic democratic agenda.) 78. What are mirror neurons? Follow these links to find out: http://www.elegantbrain.com/edu4/classes/readings/depository/misc/mir_neur.pdf http://www.elegantbrain.com/edu4/classes/readings/depository/misc/mirror_neurons.pdf 79. An alternative approach to comprehending the difference between the left and the right is to not only recognize that, in objective terms, capital—which represents the interests of a minority—belongs on the right and labor (which represents the rest of us) is on the left, but to analyze every major struggle to ad- vance procedural and authentic democracy in this country from the perspective of a left versus right standpoint. So, for example, these have all been part of the political agenda of the left, from the perspective of the history of this country (listed in no particular order): the enactment of the Bill of Rights; the abolition of slavery; the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment; universal suffrage; free universal access to schooling; access to publicly-funded higher education (such as this school); the right to form trade unions (to protect members from super-exploitation); protection of civil rights; the eight-hour work day; minimum wages; safe working conditions; labor laws to protect children from exploitation; social security; access to universal health care; unemployment insurance; regulations to protect consumers from unsafe medical and other consumer products; progressive taxation; free universal access to public libraries; free universal access to public parks; regulations to safeguard the environment (access to clean air and clean water); regulations to secure the safety of the food supply; regulations to secure safe air travel; and so on. How about making your own list; and then figuring out where you belong: on the left or the right of the ideological spectrum?
- 43. Page 42 of 89 precipitation of the Second World War and the consequences that ensued in the wake of this war, not least among them the remaking of the entire world order. In contrast, world history, for our purposes, may or may not include macrohistory, because it is simply history on a global level where the events studied may or may not have implications outside their locale. For example, comparing agricultural practices in different communities across the planet at a particular point in time is a legitimate exercise in world history but it is not macrohistory. On the other hand, the spread of a particular practice to other places immediately renders it the subject of macrohistory. By the way, you will also find in the literature reference sometimes to “big history.” By big history one means the history of the universe including that of our own planet; that is beginning with the “Big Bang” coming all the way to the present. Maghreb: a geographic term referring to the part of North Africa west of Egypt. It is the shortened form of the Arabic term that the con- quering Muslims applied to all of North Africa west of Egypt: Bilad-al-Maghreb (meaning “Lands of Sunset”). The Maghreb as a province of the Islamic empire was known as “Ifriqiyah.” The Maghreb today constitutes Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia and Western Sahara. (Note: the geographical opposite of Maghreb is Mashreq, which refers to Egypt and other Arab countries in the East: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc.) Marginality: Refers to pushing people to the “margins” of society by means of prejudice and discrimination (with the result that they fall to the bottom in terms of economic and political power, which is then reflected in poverty, lack of economic opportunity, etc.). Marginality, ob- viously, is the anti-thesis of democracy. Marshmallow Test: A well-known test devised by psychologist Walter Mischel, together with Frances Mischel, and first administered to chil- dren of South East Asian Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians in Trinidad in the 1950s, that aims to measure the ability of children to delay or defer gratification (a skill involving impulse control, or what I sometimes refer to as “discipline”). The test came to be called the “Marshmallow Test” because in subsequent experiments here in the United States children were given marshmallows. The basic strategy of the test involved presenting young children with a single marshmallow each and being told that if they did not eat it right away they could have two marshmal- lows after about ten minutes. The original experiment, incidentally, concluded that the presence or absence of a father in the home (a variable that itself was correlated with ethnicity) had a measurable difference on how well the children performed on the test. But why perform this test in the first place? Because there is strong evidence (and one does not need to be a rocket scientist to surmise why) that those children who have developed a strong impulse control, in other words have the ability to defer gratification, go on to do better in school and in life generally than those with a weak impulse control. Note: There are a number of videos available on the internet that show this experiment; please access them and after viewing them think how you would perform on a such a test if an adult version was available (e.g. a promise of $100 right now or $200 if you wait a year). McCarthyism: Refers to the 1952-1954 virulent political witch-hunt that was inaugurated and sponsored by Joseph R. McCarthy, a little known glory-seeking Republican senator from Wisconsin, who upon taking over the chairship of the Government Committee on Operations in the U.S. Senate began a series of bogus investigative hearings into the alleged infiltration of the U.S. government by communists. This effort soon took on an aura of a national witch-hunt in which the lives and livelihood of hundreds of U.S. Americans (most were never communists) were permanently disrupted. McCarthyism ended when McCarthy was replaced as chair of the Operations Committee after the Republicans lost the Senate to the Democrats in the mid-term November elections of 1954, and thereafter condemned by the Senate for his activities. It may be noted that McCarthy had already begun his sensationalist accusations long before he began his hearings when at a speech in February 1950 he falsely claimed that over two hundred communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, thereby placing himself, much to his delight, in the national limelight. That the country initially went along with his witch-hunt—which was a clear violation of the civil rights of those accused—is testimony to the power of the ideology of the cold war that had begun to grip the country. Meritocracy: The concept of meritocracy, which will be defined shortly, and its U.S. variant the “American Dream,” is one of the key ideological components of capitalist-democracies today. Most people, including the working classes, who live in capitalist-democracies fully accept that socio-economic inequality is not only intrinsic to capitalism (if all were bosses who will do the work?), but is a desira- ble condition in itself because inequality, as long as it is not based on one’s inherited social status, is considered a driver of enterprise, achievement, and progress. Socio-economic equality to them is anathema because it is regarded as a condition that rewards idleness and sloth at the expense of what is considered as “merit”—specifically: ambition, integrity, perseverance, and hard work. Following from this logic, taking the U.S. example, they believe that the United States is a class-less society (meaning anyone can rise to the top as long as you are willing to work for it and those who are already at the top are there because they deserve to be there—that is, they worked hard to be there). However, a serious problem arises when inequality is not an outcome of merit but is artificially engineered in favor of the wealthy and the privileged by their misuse of political and/or socio-economic power and thereby undermining meritocracy. See for example, with reference to the U.S. experience, this article by Lauren A. Rivera in The New York Times80 or the article by Bourree Lam in The 80. This is the full URL for this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/guess-who-doesnt-fit-in-at-work.html As she says in her book, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton University Press, 2015), which expands on her article in greater detail: “Behind popular narratives of economic positions as entirely earned, there is a well-developed machinery in the United States that passes on economic privilege from one generation to the next. This system first channels affluent children into bumper-sticker colleges, as prior research has shown, and then, as my results have revealed, steers them into blue-chip firms and the highest income brackets.” (p. 267)
- 44. Page 43 of 89 Atlantic.81 The truth, however, is that despite what the masses believe there is no real remedy to this “corruption” of meritocracy by the bourgeoisie and its representatives. The capitalist system, by its very nature, is not a meritocratic system (except in a very limited sense, as will be explained below) because its functioning depends on limiting upward socio-economic mobility—which is what meritocracy is really about—so as to ensure what is called class reproduction. The capitalist system cannot exist without a hierarchic class-based social structure comprising the bourgeoisie at the very top who own and/or control the means of production (and its attendant ser- vices, such as finance capital, transportation, insurance, etc.), and the rest below them who do the actual work. Meritocracy Generically speaking, meritocracy is a concept that sees the allocation of material rewards in a capitalist-democratic society as resting entirely on merit, which itself is assumed to be based on such qualities of an individual as intelligence, effort, and ambition and not on membership of preordained social groups—whatever their definitional criteria: class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, and so on. In other words, from the meritocratic point of view, one’s class status in society is based solely on social achievement, not social ascrip- tion. However, there is a fundamental flaw here; consider: one of the most widely used and accepted measurements of social achieve- ment in modern societies today is educational qualifications or academic achievement. Now, in a meritocratic society academic achievement is presumed to rest on equality of educational opportunity. However, equality of educational opportunity itself is suppos- edly governed by the principle of meritocracy: namely that academic achievement is a function of one’s individual qualities of intelli- gence, effort and ambition in school, and not on one’s social background, be it in terms of class, race, sex, ethnicity, and so on. It fol- lows from all this that if there is a slippage in academic achievement then explanation for it must be sought in flaws in the individual’s personal qualities (perhaps there is limited intelligence, perhaps there is insufficient effort, perhaps ambition is lacking, and so on). And if this slippage is consistent among some social groups then these flaws must also be universal within these groups. (A corollary of this view is that since these groups (leaving class aside) are presumed to be biological constructs—that is regardless of what science states—the flaws are biologically determined and hence society is powerless in the face of their immutability.) In other words, the meritocratic logic rests on the assumption that we do not live in a society that is social structurally riven for historically determined reasons (rather than biological reasons), and where social groups exist in unequal power relations. But is this assumption correct? Is the social structure biologically determined? More to the point, Does academic achievement rest solely on indi- vidual qualities? Is it not possible that it may also depend on where one is within the social structure because one’s location in that structure allows one access to specific educational advantages (manifest in such ways as access to resource-rich schools, qualified teach- ers, safe neighborhoods, etc.) In fact, research in support of this point is so extensive and ubiquitous in the field of education that it even renders reference citations to it redundant. Leaving education aside, the fallacy of the concept of meritocracy is further empha- sized when you consider people with mental/physical disabilities, single mothers, the elderly, orphans, and so on; that is, all who may not have the resources to achieve the American Dream—the U.S. version of meritocracy. Exploring this concept will help to highlight this point further. The American Dream The term American Dream refers to both an end-goal and the process of reaching it. It is a manifestation of what may be referred to as the “Horatio Alger syndrome.”82 Specifically, it refers at once to a particular definition of the “good life” and to the ideological notion that in United States you can achieve your wildest materialist dreams (the “good life”) so long as you agree to play by the rules and you are willing to work hard; that is because the United States is a land of freedom and opportunity for all where nothing can hold you back in your quest for upward socio-economic mobility: neither race nor ethnicity; neither class nor gender; neither religion nor nation- ality; and so on. One will notice right away that this concept also relies on ahistoricism. The continuing legacy of a history of, among other things, the brutal expropriation of the lands of Native Americans and the labor of African Americans against the backdrop, ini- tially, of the imported English social structure of commoner versus aristocracy is, of course, relegated to the dustbin of historical am- nesia; nor is there any recognition of the inherent contradiction arising from the problem of class-determined inequality in a capitalist society. The fundamental basis of the fallacious reasoning that underlies this concept is the inability by those who believe in it to sepa- rate out issues of personal agency and issues that stem from institutional structures. The fact that millions of people in United States work long hours (sometimes holding down two to three jobs) is clear evidence that laziness and lack of ambition is not the reason why they are not millionaires. At the same time, to assume that all the wealthy in this country have acquired their wealth through hard work and playing by the rules is to disengage from reality because it does not bear out this foolish assumption.83 The capitalist system is structurally designed, through property rights enshrined in law, to ensure that only a tiny minority remains at the top, otherwise the system would collapse because there would be no one to do the grunt work—without which, wealth cannot be created. In fact, it will come as a shock to most of you to learn that the relative positions (the key word here is relative) of most of those at the top and most of the rest below them has remained constant since Roman times, if not before—pointing to the Mount Everest-like insurmountableness Another book worth looking at that complements Rivera’s book well is The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann (Macmillan, 2000). 81. This is the full URL for this link: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruitment-resumes-interviews-how-the-hiring-process-favors-elites/394166 82. Horation Alger, Jr. was a nineteenth century novelist whose specialty was children’s books aimed at the teenage market in which the common theme was poverty-stricken teenage boys achieving upward socio-economic mobility by means of honesty, courage, hard work, and so on. 83. Many among the wealthy have inherited their wealth; this fact is often conveniently forgotten. Interestingly, the notion of “playing by the rules” is rarely, if ever, analyzed: Whose rules are we talking about here? The rules set up by the rich and the powerful?
- 45. Page 44 of 89 of social structures for most people in the Euro/American ecumene in their illusory quest for upward socio-economic mobility. Hence, if you were to trace your ancestry there is an almost one hundred percent chance that you would end up with ancestors who were ei- ther slaves from Africa or slaves in the Roman times in Europe. Focusing on Europe, the slaves from Greek and Roman times eventu- ally became serfs in the feudal era and who then, in turn, became the modern working classes in the era of industrial capitalism, mil- lions of whom along the way ended up in the European Diaspora scattered across the planet—an immensely brutal and painful pro- cess—from Australia to Brazil, and from Canada to South Africa. Incidentally, the first usage of this term (American Dream) and its definition is credited to the historian James Truslow Adams, who, writing in 1931 (at the height of Jim Crow, one may ironically recall), stated that the American Dream was that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recog- nized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. (p. 404, The Epic of America [Boston: Little, Brown, 1931]) Notice that unlike the way it has come to be understood today, in this definition of the American Dream, materialism is not the defining quality, but rather egalitarianism (and, therefore, in this sense the American Dream is about life, liberty and the pursuit of hap- piness for all, that is authentic democracy—in contrast to procedural democracy). It is also worth pointing out that today the “American Dream,” for most EuroAmericans also means the opportunity to live in racially segregated neighborhoods.84 To conclude, one of the most important ideological concepts in a capitalist democracy is that of meritocracy, and in United States meritocracy is expressed as the “American Dream.” The ideological role of this concept is to help underwrite political stability for the capitalist system. As long as the masses believe in the concept of meritocracy they will not challenge the system, in fact, on the contra- ry, they will become its most ardent supporters. However, given the nature of capitalism, meritocracy, whether considered in its generic sense or in the sense of the American Dream, is, by and large, a mythological concept—and this is doubly so when considered from the perspectives of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and so on. Notice the qualifier in the preceding sentence. In other words, to make you feel better, the foregoing should not imply, however, that the concept of the American Dream is completely bogus (after all, to some degree, the concept is a subjective one—what consti- tutes the American Dream is not necessarily the same for everyone). While those who attempt to pursue their American Dream are not immune from systemic or structural oppression (racism, sexism, classism, and so on) in a capitalist democracy like the United States, one must also acknowledge that this is not just a capitalist society but it is also a democracy. That is, in a post-civil rights era United States there is sufficient space for some individuals to successfully confront structural oppression by exerting their agency (instead of waiting for the revolution, which, trust me, is not coming any time soon no matter what the bourgeois-left says). If all oppression was structural then there is absolutely no hope for a better tomorrow. Yes? The fundamental truth is this: capitalist democracies may be meritocratic, but only at the level of a few (relatively speaking) “lucky” individuals but not at the level of social groups as a whole. But who are these lucky individuals? They are those who through chance and design manage to achieve their American Dream by being in the right place at the right time. There is, in fact, a vast “self-help” cottage industry in the United States that aims to teach you how to improve your chances of achieving the American Dream. A well-known guru, for example, of this industry is one Tom Corley. He claims that he spent five years studying the daily habits of 233 self-made millionaires and 128 poor people in United States and as a result he came up with 300 habits that “separate the rich from the poor.” He concludes: “The fact is, the poor are poor because they have too many Poor Habits and too few Rich Habits. Poor parents teach their children the Poor Habits and wealthy parents teach their children the Rich Habits. We don’t have a wealth gap in this country we have a parent gap. We don’t have income inequality, we have parent inequality.”85 So, what are some of these bourgeois habits he is talking about? Here is a selection from his website (which you will notice are worth pursuing even if you don’t stand a chance of becoming a member of the bourgeoisie): Gambling Habits – 6% of self-made millionaires played the lottery vs. 77% of the poor. 16% of self-made millionaires gambled at least once a week on sports vs. 52% of the poor. Health Habits -21% of self-made millionaires were overweight by 30 pounds or more vs. 66% of the poor. 76% of these million- aires exercised aerobically 30 minutes or more each day vs. 23% of the poor. 25% of these millionaires ate less than 300 junk food calories each day vs. 5% of the poor. 25% of these millionaires ate at fast food restaurants each week vs. 69% of the poor. 13% of these millionaires got drunk at least once a month vs. 60% of the poor. 84. As Daniel Denver, in his article “The 10 Most Segregated Urban Areas in America,” accurately observes: “For the besieged white subdivision dweller, the American Dream means freedom from society’s poor and black.” (Article published by www.salon.com at http://www.salon.com/news/race/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/03/29/most_segregated_cities. See also a feature story titled “Cyberdiscrimination in Dallas,” available through this link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregory-d- squires/cyberdiscrimination-in-da_b_574008.html by Professor Gregory D. Squires). Of course, race is not the only relevant matter here, class is too in the sense that the American Dream also means the opportunity for the rich (regardless of color) to live as far away from the poor (regard- less of color) as possible. 85. From his website at: http://richhabits.net/20-learned-habits-that-will-make-your-child-rich-or-poor/#more-5331 (accessed June 14, 2015).
- 46. Page 45 of 89 Time Habits – 63% of self-made millionaires spent less than 1 hour per day on recreational Internet use vs. 26% of the poor. 67% of self-made millionaires watched 1 hour or less of T.V. per day vs 23% of the parents of the poor. 67% of these millionaires main- tained a daily “to-do” list vs. 6% of the poor. 44% of these millionaires got up 3 hours or more before they actually started their work day vs. 3% of the poor. Living Below Your Means Habits – 73% of self-made millionaires were taught the 80/20 rule vs. 5% of the poor (live off 80% save 20%). Relationship Management Habits – 6% of self-made millionaires gossip vs. 79% of the poor. 75% of these millionaires were taught to send thank you cards vs. 13% of the poor. 6% of these millionaires say what’s on their mind vs. 69% of the poor. 68% of these mil- lionaires pursue relationships with success-minded people vs. 11% of the poor. Learning Habits – 88% of self-made millionaires read for learning every day vs. 2% of the poor. 86% of these millionaires love to read vs. 26% of the poor. 11% of these millionaires read for entertainment vs. 79% of the poor.86 Military Industrial Complex: When the speech writers of President Dwight D. Eisenhower came up with the term “military industrial com- plex” (for his “farewell to the nation” address that he delivered on January 17, 1961) to describe the militarization of U.S. democracy by the military machine, it would not be surprising if many among his audience nationwide considered his warning as nothing more than a hyperbolic gesture. The relevant quote from that speech that those with an interest in this topic are very familiar with is worthy of reproducing here given its ever- increasing relevance today. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense mil- itary establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritu- al—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this develop- ment. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very struc- ture of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. But what exactly is the military industrial complex? In generic terms, it refers to an informal web of mutually reinforcing constituencies whose end- goal is weapons procurement but who each have a stake in the system that has very little to do with the security interests of the state, but instead has a great deal to do with self-aggrandizement in terms of financial and other resources. In specific terms, to take the example of United States, it refers to a conglomerate of weapons manufacturers, logistics suppliers, services providers (from torture to intelligence gathering), and the foreign policy establishment (e.g. university research centers and think tanks) that sit at the heart of a tax-payer funded web of money-making deals con- joined with democratically corrosive political influence and before which everything else, in terms of budgetary and societal priorities, is in thrall. Some seven decades or so later, to suggest that the use of this descriptively most apt term was prophetic would be an understatement. What is more, with the invention of the strategy of permanent warfare, on the occasion of the horrendous 9/11 tragedy, by that most unholy of triumvi- rates in modern U.S. history, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush, Jr., has made this military machine a more than a solid fixture in the way in which foreign policy decisions are arrived at and how the federal budget is apportioned today—especially in light of the fact that a relatively new and voraciously dollar-hungry branch has been added to the military industrial complex: that which is headed by the Central Intelli- gence Agency (CIA) and called the “Intelligence Community.” (Besides the CIA, the Intelligence Community includes these agencies: Department of Energy; Department of Homeland Security; Department of State; Department of Treasury; Defense Intelligence Agency; Drug Enforcement Administration; Federal Bureau of Investigation; National Geospatial Intelligence Agency; National Reconnaissance Office; National Security Agency/Central Security Service; Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Air Force Intelligence; Army Intelligence; Coast Guard Intelli- gence; U.S. Marine Corps, Marine Corps Intelligence Activity; U.S. Navy, Naval Intelligence.) The most tragic irony of this most unhealthy development in the modern history of United States is that to the vast majority of the U.S. popu- lation any mention of the term military industrial complex would, most likely, elicit a puzzled look at best (or at worst an erroneously “knowing” suggestion that it refers to the military of the former Soviet Union) given its relative absence, perhaps understandably, as a topic of discussion in the corporate mass media. The corrupting influence of the military industrial complex on U.S. democracy was best captured by Eisenhower himself several years earlier in a speech broadcast to the nation but delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on April 16, 1953 titled “Chance for Peace.” Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. In the end, Eisenhower, despite his publicly stated misgivings was unable (or unwilling?) to stop the military industrial complex from continuing to expand by leaps and bounds against the backdrop of the absolutely unnecessary Cold War; and, of course, it has never stopped growing to the enormously unconscionable detriment of the quality of life of all within United States. 86. From his website at: http://richhabits.net/20-learned-habits-that-will-make-your-child-rich-or-poor/#more-5331 (accessed June 14, 2015).
- 47. Page 46 of 89 However, it is not just the U.S. citizenry who are negatively affected by the U.S. military industrial complex, millions of people outside the United States as well (especially people of color) are paying a heavy price too: in terms of misuse of financial resources that can go toward meaning- ful economic development in their less developed countries; in terms of the supply of weaponry to their governments who are for all intents and purposes corrupt gangs of kleptocratic thugs who have absolutely no regard for the welfare of their people; and in terms of U.S. engineered wars and invasions targeting their countries. Consider the unprecedented number of U.S. military interventions abroad since the Second World War; here is a sampling (based on a list maintained by Professor Zoltán Grossman at http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html ): Greece, 1947-1949; Philippines, 1948-1954; Puerto Rico, 1950; Korea, 1951-1953; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Lebanon, 1958; Panama, 1958; Vietnam, 1960-1975; Cuba, 1961; Laos, 1962; Iraq, 1963; Panama, 1964; Indonesia, 1965; Dominican Republic, 1965-1966; Guatemala, 1966-1967; Cambodia, 1969-1975; Oman, 1970; Laos, 1971-1973; Chile, 1973; Cambodia, 1975; Angola, 1976-1992; Iran, 1980; Libya, 1981; El Salvador, 1981-1992; Nicaragua, 1981-1990; Lebanon, 1982-1984; Iran, 1984; Libya, 1986; Bolivia, 1986; Iran, 1987-1988; Libya, 1989; Virgin Islands, 1989; Panama, 1989-?; Saudi Arabia, 1990-1991; Iraq, 1990-1991; Kuwait, 1991; Somalia, 1992-1994; Yugoslavia, 1992-1994; Haiti, 1994; Zaire (DRC) 1996-1997; Sudan, 1998; Afghanistan, 1998; Iraq, 1998; Yugoslavia, 1999; Afghanistan, 2001-?; Yemen, 2002; Philippines, 2002-?; Colombia, 2003- ?; Iraq, 2003-2011; Liberia, 2003; Haiti, 2004-2005; Pakistan, 2005-?; Somalia, 2006-?; Yemen, 2009-?; Iraq-2014-?; Syria, 2014-? Go through this list again. Do you think race and racism may also be at play here? One thing is for sure, however, war is another source of profit for the capitalist class while the children of the lower classes, as soldiers, do most of the dying in this enterprise. Not surprisingly, the military industrial complex consumes close to a half of the entire U.S. federal budget annually! The waste of resources this represents is incalculable. Yet, the tragedy is that, as usual, the masses are asleep at the wheel. They are completely oblivious at how cancerous the military industrial complex has become in the body of U.S. political economy; thereby greatly undermining both procedural and authentic de- mocracy. The best way to appreciate this development is to untangle its many different strands that corruptly weave together money and political influence and in which the beneficiaries are primarily the merchants of death: the weapons manufacturers (and the losers are not just the U.S. citi- zenry but humanity itself). The diagram that follows aims to do just that. The Military Industrial Complex: A Diagram The diagrammatic representation of the military industrial complex is now available online as a sepa- rate document here: http://bit.ly/militarycomplex Note: If this link is not clickable then copy this URL into your browser: http://bit.ly/militarycomplex Millennium Development Goals: Meeting in September 2000 at the United Nations in New York at the start of the new millennium (in the Gregorian calendar) at what was labeled as the Millenium Summit, the world's leaders pledged to work toward improving the lot of the world's majority, the poor. This pledge, signed on to by the entire membership of the United Nations and a host of international nongovernmental organizations, was embodied in a set of eight specific goals that came to be called the Millennium Development Goals, to be achieved by 2015; they ranged from elimination of extreme poverty and hunger to reducing gender inequality to fighting HIV/AIDS to promoting environmen- tal sustainability. While the agenda was indeed a worthy one, the implementation of its goals, especially by the target date, has always been in doubt and today it is accepted that it won't be met—thanks to a variety of factors ranging from the parsimony of the rich in the global North to devotion of precious resources to “making the world safe for Western corporate capitalism” to inefficiencies, corruption, and armed civil strife among the intended beneficiaries of the agenda in the global South. Question: Under the circumstances, was the Millennium Summit a waste of time? Answer: No, because to dream of a better future is the first step toward that goal (no dream, no future—just the nightmare of the present). Misogyny: A virulent ideological expression of sexism characteristic of patriarchal societies that aims to reduce women to the status of the “Other” in order to justify their denigration, exploitation, physical abuse, violation of their human rights, etc., comprising a constellation of defamatory stereotypes, beliefs, values, and so on about women. Misogyny, it must be noted, is not necessarily the preserve of only males; fe- males may also be socialized to adopt misogynistic values and behavior in a classic case of self-hatred. (See also Essentialism, Oth- er/Otherness, Patriarchy) Mode of Production: Rather than become involved in an extensive debate on what precisely constitutes a mode of production, in my classes the term is used in the sense of a heuristic device very roughly corresponding to a “socio-economic system.”87 MLK: Martin Luther King, Jr. Multiculturalism: See Diversity NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (a predominantly U.S. African American civil rights organization) 87. See Benton (1984) and Rigby (1987) for a succinct summary of the debate about the concept.
- 48. Page 47 of 89 Nationalism: Refers to a fundamentally antagonistic political ideology of recent origin in terms of human history. It arose in its current form in Europe and it conflates one’s personal identity with a political identity that is based, on one hand, in the belief that loyalty to the nation-state (a territorially-bounded political entity commonly known as “country”) transcends loyalty to everything else—including one’s family, clan, tribe, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and even such matters as truth and justice—and on the other, in the misguided belief that one’s nation-state is superior to all others. In contexts of imperialism, however, nationalism may arise among the subordinated peoples as a necessary prelude to their anti-imperialist struggles for freedom (in which case one may legitimately consider it as defensive nationalism). It should be noted that in capi- talist-democracies, the nationalist “project” is also a capitalist “project” in that it is deployed to disguise class-divisions and class struggles. Nationalism in this context becomes part of that basket of distractions (subjective interests) that the bourgeoisie has so successfully managed to get the working classes in capitalist societies all across the world to pursue in place of pursuing their real interests (objective interests), of which defense against the class warfare of the bourgeoisie is salient. Further, nationalism, when unchecked, can mutate through demagoguery into jingoism, which is an extremely chauvinistic version of nationalism often characterized by xenophobia and/or racism and belligerence to- ward other peoples. (See also Fascism) Native Americans: See U.S. First Americans NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization Natural Law of Prior Claim: A universal law in the Aristotelian sense derived from the condition of being human (in contrast to the sources of positive law) that postulates that those who have occupied a particular territory before all others are naturally entitled to that territory; conse- quently, they have prior claims over it against all interlopers. The concept of citizenship by birth, for instance, derives its legitimacy from this law. As may be surmised, the abrogation of this law is only possible under conditions of violence. The profound and sobering implications of this law can be deduced from the following thought experiment: What if, tomorrow, Native Americans were to acquire the power sufficient to propel them to the headship (in all senses of the word, political, military, etc.) of the Americas? How would citizenship of the present de- scendants of all those who have migrated into the Americas over the centuries, literally at the point of the gun, be now defined? A taste of the answer—however repugnant it may be to all those who believe in the desirability of a multicultural democracy in that country, and anywhere else for that matter—is to be found today in the ongoing events in Zimbabwe (Will South Africa be next?) where the moral claims to citizen- ship by its white residents have been proven to have rested all along on armed political power that slipped out of their hands with independ- ence in the 1980s. In other words, regardless of how one wishes to prevaricate on this matter: citizenship in lands that were colonized by Eu- ropeans, where the original inhabitants are still present today, ultimately resides in monopoly over power, and not moral claims. (See also the counter- part of this law, the Law of Historical Irreversibility.) Negative Externality: See Externality. Neocolonialism: A variant of imperialism, referring to the imperialism of a former colonial power following the granting of nominal political independence to its colony. See also Neoimperialism. Neofascism: In my classes refers to a juridically determined political system in which a dominating group enjoys many freedoms and privileg- es associated with democratic societies, but against the backdrop of a dominated group subjected to many burdens and disabilities characteris- tic of a fascist political system—that is a system based on a virulent fusion of authoritarianism, militarism, jingoism, patriarchy, and regimented capitalism. The demarcation between the dominated and the dominant usually resting on race or ethnicity or class. Since this term is used in my classes with reference to apartheid-era South Africa (as well as the U.S. South of the Jim Crow era), a word or two about that. Because, on one hand, the South African state possessed almost all the features of a fascist state—especially when viewed from the perspective of the his- torical experiences of blacks—and yet, on the other hand, because there was democracy and respect for the rule of law (to a significant extent) in respect of the Euro-South African minority, the designation of the apartheid state as a neofascist state is appropriate. Given the total de- pendence of the Euro-South African capitalists on black labor meant that a “Final Solution” in the Nazi style (in respect of the Jews) to the “black problem” (i.e., genocide) could not be on the agenda. At the same time, considering that increasingly, by the late 1980s, almost all urban black youths were by definition “political activists,” the fascist Chilean solution (adopted by the military thugs in Augusto Pinochet's Chile fol- lowing the U.S.-inspired and supported military coup in 1973)—of simply slaughtering the political activists in their thousands—was also not possible without provoking widespread international condemnation and retaliatory action.88 Under these circumstances, the political strategy that was called for in organizing opposition to this neofascist state was one that judiciously combined the use of both nonviolent resistant strategies and violent (guerrilla warfare) strategies.89 This is the strategy that the ANC for example came to adopt and with eventual success: beginning with the 1990 de Klerk “WOW” speech and the subsequent freeing of Nelson Mandela on February 11, 1990, South Africa would begin groping its way toward a nonracist democratic order. Neoimperialism: a subtler variant of imperialism characteristic of the late twentieth century and beyond in which the U.S. role looms large and where such U.S. foreign policy projects as the so-called “war on terror” are symptomatic. The roots of neoimperialism lie in both coloni- alism and the cold war. The war that was fought against fascism in Europe and elsewhere from 1939 to 1945 by Britain, the United States and other Allied countries, and in which many colonized peoples (including Afro-South Africans) participated on the side of the European colonial powers, was, despite the propaganda of the Allies, a war fought for the freedom of only the OD nations—not the colonized else- where. Hence, hopes of liberation from European colonialism that the colonized of the Afro-Asian ecumene had begun to entertain as a re- 88. The motion picture, Missing provides a hint of what a “Chilean” fascist solution looks like from the perspective of the victims. 89. See Wolpe 1988 for a further discussion of these issues.
- 49. Page 48 of 89 sult of their support of the Allied cause, or lending credibility to documents such as the Atlantic Charter, were to quickly founder on the rocks of post-World War II reality in which a new “war” was being fomented by the United States and its allies: the cold war.90 Those in London, Washington, and Paris who saw the imperialism of the Nazis as an evil that had to be destroyed took a different (hypocriti- cal) view when it came to their own imperialism vis-à-vis the peoples of the Afro-Asian ecumene; they deemed it a good thing—even for its victims! Therefore, despite the U.S. stance (at least at the level of rhetoric) during the war, of anticolonialism and support for majority rule—as evidenced in the speeches of President Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and others—the United States at the end of World War II would inaugurate an era in which the old European form of imperialism (colonialism) would eventually be supplanted by a new and modern form of imperialism: that of “neoimperialism” (for want of a better word) in which the United States would become a dominant partner, involving the subordination of the legitimate aspirations for freedom and democracy among the colonized peoples to the require- ments of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Initially, however, the commencement of the cold war, as the decade of the 1940s came to a close, would be accompanied by a renewed effort on the part of the European colonizers to cling to their colonial possessions, even as they began the long and arduous task of rebuilding their own war-torn countries and even after having saved themselves from the same fate that they were now so keen to continue foisting on other peoples. In this ignoble task, however, they would have behind them the unexpected, tacit and sometimes overt, support of the United States. From the point of view of the United States, the struggle for freedom and democracy in the colonies, it was felt, could only lead to expansionary opportunities for its cold war opponent, the Soviet Union; therefore such struggles had to be opposed. Consequently, many colonies in Africa and Asia discovered that contrary to war-time promises made, or expectations falsely engendered, freedom from coloniza- tion would entail their own “mini-world wars.” Colonies ranging from Vietnam through India to Algeria all found themselves involved in vari- ous types of bitter, anticolonial struggles in which thousands amongst the colonized would perish. While many of these colonies would eventually achieve political independence by the early 1960s, that is, once it had become clear to the European colonizers that the costs of maintaining direct political control had been rendered prohibitively high by the anticolonial insurrections (hence indirect control via economic domination was preferable), in one part of the world political independence and democratic majority rule would be a longtime coming: in Africa, especially Southern Africa. There, in the countries of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, Portuguese colonialism and racist minority rule would continue well into the 1970s and 1980s. Behind this awful fate that dog- ged the black majorities of these countries was the ubiquitous hand of U.S. administrations, sometimes hidden and sometimes overt. Thus tyrannical minority rule in Southern Africa would receive nourishment from the U.S. administrations, ironically on grounds that such rule was the guarantor of freedom! But freedom for whom? And freedom from what? The story of U.S. relations with much of the PQD world in the post-World War II period, right up to the beginning of the closing decade of the twentieth century, must therefore be seen as a story of the contradiction between, on one hand, the ideological dictates of historically- rooted notions (of support for freedom and democracy and opposition to imperialism) that abound in a country that itself had once fought a war of liberation, and, on the other hand, the reality of the demands of waging a global “cold” war with the former communist nations of Eastern Europe over the Western world’s need to continue to preserve at all costs the dominance of capitalism within the international eco- nomic system—but set against the ideology of whiteness.91 NGO: refers to organizations formed outside governmental jurisdiction by the citizenry (civil society) and it is an abbreviation for non- governmental organizations. Nonviolent Civil Disobedience: A strategy for political change, but one that should not be confused with a “pacifist strategy.” That is, it is not a “do-nothing” strategy. As Gandhi practiced it in South Africa (and later India) and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States, the non- violent civil disobedience strategy involves creative resistance to tyranny (sit-ins, boycotts, demonstrations, petitions, and so on) that stops short of using violence, even in the face of the violence of the enemy. The strategy is to appeal to the conscience of the oppressor by refusing to answer the oppressor’s violence with one owns violence, but all the time refusing to submit to the unjust laws of the oppressor. Objective Interests: All human beings, both individually and collectively (as specific groups or as societies as a whole), have objective interests and subjective interests. Now, the difference between the two is that the first (objective) set of interests are those that an independent observer can 90. The Atlantic Charter, which was a press release issued on August 14, 1941 (following a secret meeting on a ship off the coast of Newfoundland between the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill), had made reference in Article III to the right of all peoples to self-determination of government and political freedom. (“Third, they [the United States and Britain] respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Note: the document is available on the Internet.) Even though the charter was formulated with the European peoples in mind, elites in the PQD countries, in bouts of grandiose optimism, looked upon the document as the death knell for imperialism everywhere. The United States was perceived by many Asian and African leaders as the harbinger of their freedom. This was an illusion; for, as Noer (1985: 17) says, the United States did not really include the PQD colonies in its rhetoric on self-determination, freedom, and human rights. (Of course, in a very different sense, both Britain and the United States were indirectly responsi- ble for the present freedom of these former European colonies. One only has to surmise with horror what their fate would have been had the Germans and their fascist ally, Italy, won the Second World War.) 91. Among the many theoretical weaknesses of mainline international relations theory—see, for example, Chowdhry and Nair (2002); Dunn and Shaw (2001); Jones (2001); and Scott (2002)—and here the Marxists are also at fault, has been the deafening silence on the matter of “race” despite the fact that race has always been an integral element of international relations going all the way back to the Crusades, and most certainly in the post-Columbian period. Writing some three decades ago Bandhopadhyaya (1977/78) reminded us that a fuller comprehension of international relations required consideration of what he called “global racism” as a legitimate independent category of analysis. (What is more, even in the current post-9/11 era, the race problematic has not withered away but has, instead, transmuted into a race-plus-xenophobia problematic that may be termed as “Islamophobia.”
- 50. Page 49 of 89 objectively identify.92 Subjective interests, on the other hand, are interests that are unique to specific individuals or groups and which only they can point to them—that is, an objective observer would have to be told about them. To make this difference clearer some examples are in order. From a biological point of view, an objective interest that all human beings have is access to adequate nutritionally rich food. Another objective interest is access to decent affordable shelter; another objective interest is access to adequate affordable health care; and so on. On the other hand, what particular kinds of foods (e.g. bread versus rice or meat versus fish or mangoes versus apples, etc.), or what kind of housing (e.g. apartments versus houses), are subjective interests. Some more examples: in modern societies, access to affordable quality schooling is an ob- jective interest; whereas access to public versus private schooling or access to a boarding school versus a day school are subjective interests. From the perspective of who is teaching this course, your objective interests in this class are matters like: fairness (that is, not biased in terms of raced, gender, class, ethnicity, etc.); excellent mastery of subject matter; ability to communicate effectively; a passion for teaching; a well- organized syllabus; punctuality; and flexibility when circumstances call for it. Your subjective interests, on the other hand, are being concerned about things like the gender of the teacher or ethnicity or race or religion; whether the teacher is disabled or not, or whether the teacher wears a suit versus casual dress, or whether the teacher is fat or thin, or whether the teacher’s personality is one of a smiley happy-go-lucky person or not; and so on. In capitalist societies, the objective interests of the masses (that is the working classes) primarily concerns undermining the class warfare of the capitalist classes waged against them—by demanding such things as decent wages, safe working conditions, universal access to affordable health care, a pollution-free environment, a robust social safety net, fair tax policies, and so on (all of which undermine the key objec- tive interest of the capitalist class, namely surplus appropriation). On the basis of the foregoing, you should now be able to distinguish between objective interests versus subjective interests. At the same time, you should also be in a position to think of situations where you are hurting your objective interests by confusing your subjective interests with your objective interests.93 From the perspective of capitalist democracies, this concept in my view is of great importance in helping us analyze the political behavior of the masses; especially behavior that does not further their objective interests but, on the contrary, undermines them. That is, the penchant for self-oppression that one witnesses time and time again among the masses (that is the working classes—like yourselves) can only be ex- plained by a lack of political consciousness that allows them to be manipulated by the bourgeoisie into “objectifying” their subjective inter- ests and “subjectifying” their objective interests. Here are some examples of such behavior: being obsessed with banning abortion than being concerned about access to a robust social safety-net; being more concerned about owning guns (here in the U.S.) than access to decent af- fordable housing or decent well-paying permanent jobs; being more concerned about the race or ethnicity of fellow citizens than about the unconscionably spiraling income inequality brought about by the class warfare of the rich that undermines the overall quality of life of all; being more incensed with the very poor accessing the social safety net (e.g. food stamps—here in the U.S.) than being concerned with the lower-than-the cost-of-living minimum wage levels; being more concerned with the political status of one’s country in the world (jingoism) rather than being concerned about the absence of the rule of law and other similar democratic protections; and so on. OD Countries: Over-Developed/Developed. Used in my classes (together with PQD countries) to refer to the comparative socio-economic status of different countries across the planet.94 Other/Otherness: This term refers to the ideology of the Other in which human beings of a different skin color, or gender, or class, or na- tionality, or culture (understood in the broadest sense to include everything about human existence that is learned and not biologically inherit- ed, ranging from food to music to politics to religion to economics, etc.) are consistently portrayed/treated as inferior beings for the purpose of dehumanizing them—as a device for their “erasure” or exclusion from the mainstream of society (marginalization) for the purposes of ex- ploitation or dispossession or the political expediency of scapegoating, the extreme form of which can even culminate in genocide. This ideology can only emerge in the context of a hierarchic notion of “us” versus “them” (in other words, otherness requires a dyadic sense of a self: one that is incapable of standing alone but must permanently stand in opposition to someone else). Among the key instruments behind the manufac- 92. There are some who argue that the distinction between objective interests versus subjective interests is an illusory distinction; it doesn’t really exist. One person’s subjective interest can be another person’s objective interest and vice versa. In some unique circumstances, this may be so. For example, it is possible that for someone on hunger strike access to food may no longer be an objective interest; whereas for the vast majority of people it is. In short, with the excep- tion of such unique circumstances, this concept does have heuristic value; that is for our purposes in this course it has meaningful analytical usefulness. 93. Here is homework for you that may help you become a happier person: list all your major worries and then divide them into subjective interests versus ob- jective interests. After that train your mind not to worry about subjective interests; and instead concentrate on finding solutions to problems associated with your objective interests. 94. Following the thought-provoking work of Lewis and Wigen in their Myth of Continents (1997), an effort has been made in this work to dispense with two egregious terms: the “Third World” and “developing countries.” The normative hierarchy implicit in the term Third World is simply unwarranted in this day and age. Moreover, it is an erroneous term now given the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the rapid erosion of communism in China (the so-called “Second World”). As for developing countries it simply does not make sense today (if it ever did). New categories are needed to designate the different levels of econom- ic development. Leys (1971: 32), writing more than three decades ago pointed out the problem: “The very expression developing countries has come to sound embarrassing precisely because it so obviously rests on the linear conception [of development] and sometimes refers to countries which are in fact stagnating or even regressing.” While any categorization will, to some degree, be arbitrary, it must do the best it can to come as close to reality as possible without, however, becoming so unwieldy that it loses its user-friendly value; but certainly anything is probably better than the current scheme that lumps, for example, Burkina Faso and Djibouti in the same category with Brazil and India or Ireland and Hungary with Germany and United States. Toward this end, five categories appear to strike a proper balance: pre-developing (e.g., Burkina Faso, Jamaica, Zambia); quasi-developing (e.g., Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa); developing (e.g., Brazil, India, Poland, Russia, South Korea); developed (e.g., Australia, Canada, Denmark); and over-developed (e.g., Britain, Germany, United States). Sometimes, where necessary, in the text these five categories will be collapsed into two primary divisions expressed as: pre/quasi/developing (PQD) countries, and over/developed (OD) countries. Of course, no one ever dares to admit, be it academics or politicians, the inherent dissemblance that undergirds such terminol- ogy—that in order for all to achieve the much sought after status of “developed” we would need the resources of three or more planet earths combined since the present status of the over developed is being maintained on the basis of their consumption of more than two-thirds of the world’s resources (even though they constitute a mere one third of the world’s population).
- 51. Page 50 of 89 ture of this ideology is essentialism, while at the same time otherness itself is an important weapon in the arsenal of the racist, the sexist, the “classist,” and so on. Question: but what comes first: the ideology of otherness or whatever nefarious project (exclusion, dispossession, etc.) it serves? The answer is that both come first: that is, each is bound to the other dialectically but always against the backdrop of power (the power to dominate, exploit, vilify, etc.) (See also Textual erasure, Voyeurism.) Parliamentary system. A governmental system in which the leader of the political party that wins the most seats in a national election be- comes the country's leader—either as prime minister (if there is a separate office for a head of state) in which case he is simply the head of government or as president (where both leadership of the government and leadership of the country is fused into one). In other words, unlike in a presidential system, the leader of the government in a parliamentary system is not elected to his position through a national election. Note that where there are separate offices for the head of state and the head of government then the head of state usually holds a ceremonial posi- tion without much political power (as in the case, for example, of the monarch in Britain today). By the way, Canada has a parliamentary sys- tem in which the two offices are separate. Do you know who the head of state is in Canada? (How come you do not know?) Parody: From the perspective of humor, parody is the imitation of any behavior, event, speech, writing, etc. with the intention of producing amusement, or sometimes even derision. Parody may have aggression and certainly has play and laughter in it (see the section satire), but usual- ly lacks judgment. Parody appears to be most successful when the subject of the parody, says Feinberg (1967:185), has ''sufficient individuality of style or content to be distinguished.'' ''That individuality,'' he further explains, ''may consist of significant originality or mere eccentricity.'' Since parody depends on first imitation and then exaggerating certain features of the style, behavior, affectation, etc. that is being imitated, parody can be considered a form of caricature--except it operates in either the literary or theatrical (including film and television) mode. (Three common examples of media that indulge in parodies in the U.S. are the magazines National Lampoon and Mad, and the television program on NBC, Saturday Night Live.) The purpose of the parody may include criticism, or it may simply be there to elicit laughter. A common example of harmless parody is when a stand-up comic imitates a U.S. president--and the humor will be found not so much in what the comic says while pretending to be the president, but how well he carries off the parody. Another example of parody, though in reality it is not parody because it is done by animal, is when an ape imitates human visitors at a zoo, and in the process provoking much amusement among the humans. Why parody--especially the innocent harmless kind--generates humor, is another one of those mysteries of humor that remains to be explained. Needless to say, the success of a parody is dependent not only on the person doing the parody but also on the audience viewing the parody. For, unless the audience has prior knowledge of the subject of the parody then the failure of the parody is almost assured. When parody is imbued with the elements of aggression and judgment, then it of course becomes transformed into satire. Three good examples from litera- ture that illustrate this point: Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, George Orwell's Animal Farm, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. While in all three literary works parody abounds, the authors' infusion of their work with the elements of aggression and judgment render the work satiri- cal. (See also ironical allegory, satire.) Patriarchy: This term refers to a particular historically-grounded gender-based socio-economic arrangement of power relations, as well as the ideology that legitimates it. At the core of patriarchal societies is male hegemony that seeks to exploitatively control, at once, women’s bodies and time (expressed through labor power) by means of terror on the basis of an essentialist ideology. Among the many empirical expressions of patriarchy today that women face include: elimination of the right to choose or not to choose to carry a pregnancy through to its conclu- sion; a partially paid 24-hour work day imposed by a combination of household-chores and wage-earning employment; discrimination in mat- ters of promotion, pay, etc. in the workplace; slavery (trafficking); sexual harassment in the work place and other public places; sexism in the entertainment industry (including the glorification of misogyny); sexist biases in the media; and gender-based terrorism, of which domestic violence, rape, and even murder inflicted on women by males are routine expressions. NOTE: although there are some proponents of femi- nist theory (especially those of a cultural studies bent) who question the usefulness of this concept, it has value in providing a shorthand way of comprehending the political economy of gender-based social structural relations of power—especially in the context of discussions of other similar relations of power as class, race, and so on. Peasantry: refers to either subsistence farmers (but who will also produce for the market on an opportunistic basis from time to time), or small-holder farmers who rely primarily on family labor for production for the market. Peasant farmers are to be distinguished from commer- cial farmers who produce exclusively for the market and rely primarily on hired labor. In the South African context, examples of peasant farm- ers include the frontier Afrikaner farmers of the colonial era, and the aboriginal African quasi-sharecroppers of the colonial era (prior to the passage of the 1913 Land Act). Personal wages: See Wages—Public. Petite bourgeoisie (sometimes spelled as “petty bourgeoisie”). Refers to, in my classes, the group of people in a capitalist society who mainline sociologists usually refer to as the “lower middle class”: that is, people ranging from small business owners to professionals. In other words, they are the people who (while aspiring to bourgeois status) structurally sit between the capitalist class proper (the bourgeoisie) and the working classes. In a racial state, such as the apartheid state or the colonial state, the petite bourgeoisie within the subordinate group will usually be those who are the intermediary between the dominant race and the subordinate race (e.g., the clergy, lower level civil servants, small property owners, office workers, interpreters, traders, teachers, nurses, and policemen). Note, however, that this role may also be played by the traditional elites, such as chiefs—or their state-appointed equivalents—though they are not considered part of the petite bourgeoisie (since the latter term is reserved for those associated with a modern capitalist order.)
- 52. Page 51 of 89 Political consciousness: A concept that refers to a state of mind characterized by an unending desire to acquire knowledge and information about society against the background of specific ideational and methodological approaches, of which these four are central: (1) civilization; (2) objectivity; (3) truth; and (4) the status quo. (1) Civilization. A politically conscious person recognizes that civilization has two dimensions to it: the moral, and the material; and it is the former that is of paramount importance. By moral civilization I mean the attainment of civilized atti- tudes and behavior vis-à-vis other human beings, and other forms of life on this planet. Central to moral civilization is the attitude and behav- ior that is motivated by concrete efforts to respond to the question: What can I do, in terms of my personal attitudes and behavior toward all life forms (beginning with my immediate family and then extending outward to my relatives, friends, community, other communities, society, other societies and other planetary life forms, etc.) to make this planet a better place for them to live in? Underlying this question would be such positive behavioral things as altruism, love, morality, humanity, magnanimity, forgiveness, charitability, amicability, open-mindedness, and so on. (2) Objectivity. Conservatives like to talk about being “objective,” but the quest for “objectivity” as normally understood is inherently chimer- ical. The problem was raised by, among others, Gunnar Myrdal (1969) two decades ago. He framed it thus: The ethos of social science is the search for “objective” truth . The most fundamental methodological problems facing the social scientist are therefore, what is objectivity, and how can the student attain objectivity in trying to find out the facts and the causal relationships be- tween facts? How can a biased view be avoided? More specifically, how can the student of social problems liberate himself from [a] the powerful heritage of earlier writings in his field of inquiry, ordinarily containing normative and teleological notions inherited from past generations and founded upon the metaphysical moral philosophies of natural law and utilitarianism from which all our social and eco- nomic theories have branched off; [b] the influences of the entire cultural, social, economic, and political milieu of the society where he lives, works, and earns his living and his status; and [c] the influence stemming from his own personality, as molded not only by traditions and environment but also by his individual history, constitution and inclinations? (1969:3-4.) The answer to his question, as he himself, implied is that objectivity is impossible in the social sciences in the sense in which conservatives (also referred to as positivists) advocate. Consequently, any study of any phenomenon or “object” in the social sciences will invariably be colored (not necessarily consciously) by the researcher’s own subconscious proclivities, and manifest at the level of choice of questions asked, choice of data collected and examined, choice of methods used, and so on. There is, however, another problem too: all work in the social sciences, even that which purports to be for the sake of the advancement of basic knowledge alone, is ultimately (and if not directly at least indirectly) programmatic. That is, all studies in the social sciences contain within them a mission—whether articulated or not—relating to the ultimate value or purpose of the study: which is to either preserve or change the status quo; this also has a bearing on “objectivity” in the social scienc- es. (Some, such as Kuhn [1970], have gone so far as to say that even in the natural sciences there is no such thing as “objective” science.) How- ever, guys, I must also emphasize here that the position that “objective” social science does not exist is not to say that anything goes; that any- thing any one says about anything is all valid. Rather, it is to say that the quest for knowledge must adhere to the principle of critical thinking. (3) Truth. A person who is politically conscious is a person who seeks the truth in relation to society as a whole with the objective of under- standing how that society can become a better society for all its members in terms of social justice, economic progress, environmental safety, and so on. What kind of truth? It is truth relating to how the status quo has come about and how it is maintained—that is who benefits from it and who suffers from it. This task requires one to be fully conversant with all historical processes that explain the status quo, which in turn requires him or her to be multi-disciplinary in approach given the multidimensional nature of all human existence. For, in the words of that brilliant intellectual, Paul A. Baran, “ the seemingly autonomous, disparate, and disjointed morsels of social existence under capitalism— literature, art, politics, the economic order, science, the cultural and psychic condition of people—can all be understood (and influenced) only if they are clearly visualized as parts of the comprehensive totality of the historical process” (1961:12-13). Since no society is perfect in terms of social justice, human advancement, and general human happiness, the politically conscious person is of necessity continuously questioning the status quo and striving for its perfection. Consequently he/she is by definition an insurrectionist, a revolutionary (but whose weapons are pens and whose ammunition are words) because he/she does not wish to permit the beneficiaries of the status quo (the rich and the powerful) from obfuscating the truth: that the status quo, especially in capitalist societies, benefits primarily the rich and the powerful and that it has evolved to this end through human agency and not some supernatural being or even just “nature.” This point was best presented by Barring- ton Moore, Jr. in his magnum opus some thirty years ago: [A]ny simple straightforward truth about political institutions or events is bound to have polemical consequences. It will damage some group interests. In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works. Very often therefore truthful analyses are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like exposures rather than objective statements, as the term is conventionally used.… For all students of human society, sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victors’ claims pro- vide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology (1966: 523). It follows from this that even in those instances where an unjust order has been overthrown and a new just order is being constructed, the task of those who are politically conscious is not over. The new order will still have imperfections. Hence, as long as human societies remain imper- fect the job of the politically conscious is a permanent one. To put it differently: a politically conscious person is someone who is essentially, to use Baran’s words: “a social critic, a person whose concern is to identify, to analyze, and in this way to help overcome the obstacles barring the way to the attainment of a better, more humane, and more rational social order. As such he[/she] becomes the conscience of society and the spokes[person] of such progressive forces as it contains in any given period of history. And as such he[/she] is inevitably considered a “trou- blemaker” and a “nuisance” by the ruling class seeking to preserve the status quo.” (1961:17) (4) Status quo. A politically conscious person is never satisfied with the status quo. Or to put the matter differently: a politically conscious person is not a political conservative; that is he/she shuns the ideology of political conservatism.
- 53. Page 52 of 89 Guys, it follows from the foregoing that a person who lacks political consciousness is not simply one someone who lacks political knowledge about society. After all, there are many political science professors who would easily qualify for membership among the ignorantsia. Political consciousness goes beyond the matter of knowledge and information. Knowledge, of course, is very important, but it is not a sufficient factor. (See also Ignorantsia) PQD countries: Pre-Developing/Quasi-Developing/Developing countries. Used in my classes to refer to the comparative socio-economic status of different countries across the planet. (See note under OD countries for an explanation of the source of this categorization.) Procedural democracy: See Democracy Production Values: This concept is usually associated with filmmaking and refers to everything that makes a film look professional in its tech- nical execution (from acting to special effects, from costumes to lighting, from the sound track to cinematography, from film editing to film color, and so on). Usually, but not always, there is a relationship of direct proportionality between the film budget, high production values, and verisimilitude; meaning the bigger the film budget, the higher the production values, which in turn leads to greater verisimilitude. Note: high production values tells us nothing about what the subject matter of the film is and whether it is worth watching. Proletariat: refers to those who permanently derive their livelihood on the basis of wage-employment and who, as a result, have the capacity to develop “worker-consciousness,” an attribute that refers to the willingness to join forces in order to demand better pay and working condi- tions. They are to be distinguished from those who may also seek wage-employment, but only as a supplement to another source of livelihood (e.g., subsistence farming) and who are termed in my classes as quasi-proletariat. Pseudointellectual: A person who is a member of the ignorantsia, but who exhibits intellectual pretensions. Public wages: See Wages—Public. Qur’an: the holy book of Muslims equivalent in importance to the Bible (in Christianity) and the Torah (in Judaism). Race/Racism: If you were to visit the world’s largest free online database of library catalogs (www.worldcat.org), and do a search for books on race/racism in the English language you will come up with nearly 16,000 books on this one topic! Now, to be sure, the number will include several editions/reprints of the same books; nevertheless, you do get an adequate indication that the Western world is seriously obsessed with this topic. And perhaps it is not without reason. For, if we were to identify the major ideas that have helped to shape the modern world then at least two stand out above all others, one is industrial capitalism (I include here it’s antecedents the Renaissance, and the so-called scientific revolution, and its progeny, the Enlightenment) and the other is racism (includes nationalism). From the vantage point of today, the irony is that despite this obsession there appears to be an inability among many to come to analytical grips with the whys and wherefores of this deeply unhealthy feature of modern democratic societies. Even the seemingly simple task of defining what racism is appears problematic (albeit for justifiable reasons as will soon become clear). Be that as it may, to start us off here is a brief usable definition that is up to the task of encapsu- lating its key features: racism is, at once, an ideology (meaning a systematic set of beliefs, in this case fallacious, that govern and validate human behavior) and systematic behavioral practice, at both interpersonal and institutional levels, of oppression based on the essentialist “othering” of human beings that was first invented by Europeans, beginning roughly in the fifteenth century when they began their voyages of exploita- tion across the world—fueled initially by merchant capitalism and later industrial capitalism—to legitimate a racially-based imperialist system of economic exploitation and oppression underwritten by military prowess and sanctified first by an occidental version of the Christian religion and later by a racialized occidental science, at the heart of which was the denial of the humanity of those so victimized. (The key words here are essentialism, occident, ideology, system, exploitation, humanity, and capitalism—plus one more should be added, history.) That’s it. That’s what racism is. It’s simple. One definitely does not need sixteen thousand books to explain what racism is. Or so it would seem; or so it would seem. The truth, however, is that human beings are behaviorally complex animals; hence things are never that simple. What is compli- cated about racism, and one must stress here that it is complicated, is how and why racism evolved and how it has been operationalized in prac- tice, across the centuries up to the present, even in the face of resistance by those victimized by it. Before we proceed further, however, some important disclosures/disclaimers are in order that you should keep in mind: First, from a strictly scientific point of view, there is no such thing as “race” despite the physical differences one can usually observe among humankind in terms of skin color, hair texture, facial features, etc., unless one is referring to the one race we all belong to: the human race (who, by the way, first evolved in the Garden of Eden—also known as Africa). However, from a socio-political and economic perspective one can still talk about different “races” as identified by physical features (but while still recognizing that these are artificially constructed historically contingent, and therefore unstable, socio-political categorizations of human beings in a given society and not ones rooted in biology). Second, in some places at certain times the roles performed by race/racism in society have been and are performed by ethnicity/ethnicism. Therefore, race/racism can be used interchangeably with ethnic/ethnicity/ethnicism when these latter terms signify race-like oppression. (Ethnicity refers to the distinctions between social groups based on cultural differences and not physical differences, such as language or religion.) Third, as you go through this entry, it is very important that you recognize that although many examples used in this entry come from the United States it does not mean that racism today exists only in the United States; in fact, in almost every country in the world where there are racial/ethnic minorities the hor- rible tragedy is that you will find virulent forms of racism/ethnicism against the backdrop of globalized capitalism (countries that immediately come to mind include Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Burundi, Canada, China, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mali, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, and so on, and so on). Fourth, victimization by oppression does not, in of itself, automatically make you a morally superior person. There is no special or chosen
- 54. Page 53 of 89 race morally superior to others (even if you are tempted to believe that you belong to one because of all the suffering that your race has en- dured at the hands of others). If we could go back two thousand years into history and were able to ask God, or some other supernatural power of your choice, to make this one change for us but keep everything else the same: transpose Africans with Europeans in their respective places, today we would be grappling with black “Euroracism” instead of white “Euroracism” (and whites of course would be the victims). In other words, racism is not genetically-rooted within a particular group of people—who today happen to be mostly those of European ances- try, as a consequence of historical serendipity. Fifth, from the perspective of analysis be extremely vigilant against the temptation to reify socie- ties. To explain: societies do not exist as concrete objects that you can see, touch, or feel. Rather, they are intangible social constructions. There- fore, if you, as an individual, find that your personal experiences do not reflect some of the statements made in this entry, it does not imply that the statements are not applicable to a broad group of others. You, by yourself, are not society. So, take a chill pill, calm down, and carry on. Mention the words race or racism in most Western countries today, such as the United States, and immediately most people become up- tight, defensive, and even angry: the racists because they claim that it no longer exists today, or if they agree that it does exist then at least they themselves are not racists; and the targets of racism because they know all too well that racism is all around them, institutionally as well as in- terpersonally. Yet, the irony is that the racists and their victims, both, have a very poor understanding of why racism persists, what forms it takes, what role it plays in society, and how (or whether) it can be ever be eradicated. Folks, what you must know is this: while we who live in a society such as this one are ALL affected by racism in one way or another from the time we are born, that does not in itself guarantee that we will understand it fully. The fact is racism, like its other counterparts (classism, sexism, etc.), is a very complex ideology and system of oppres- sion. Its complexity stems from the dialectical interplay between structure, ideology, and behavioral practice at both institutional and interpersonal levels. There are nine critical issues associated with this interplay: (1) the mythical basis of the ideology; (2) the mode of its origins and trans- mission; (3) the variety of forms it takes, depending upon historical time period; (4) the role it performs in society; (5) its relationship to other ideologies of oppression: sexism, ethnicism, classism, etc., (6) the problem of contradiction: the futile attempt to create a racially egalitarian society in an inherently non-egalitarian one; and (7) the fallacy of the concept of “reverse racism” (or “reverse discrimination”). Then there is the matter of (8) the geographic specificity of certain forms racism. Three such forms are well-known today. So, with specific reference to most Western countries (such as Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States), racism, at the ideological level, takes the specific form of what some sociologists term as whiteness. This kind of geographic specificity is akin to two other forms, An- ti-Semitism and Islamophobia, which however are found across the world today. And as if all this is not enough, there is (9) the problem of what theoretical approach to take in the study of racism generally, as an intellectual endeavor (such as in colleges and universities). 1. Mythical basis of the Ideology In addition to the fact that racism refers to behavioral practice, it should also be understood in terms of an ideology that is based on a mythical conception of the category race. All scientific evidence to date points to only one fact: that there is only one race on this planet: the human race (and the origins of which can be traced to Africa). Whatever racial categories “societies” have come up with are categories that have been cre- ated artificially by those in power in order to create a basis for otherness as a means for justifying prejudice and discrimination for the purpose of legitimating what I call “unjustifiable entitlement” (to land, labor, and other resources). Before Columbus set sail from Europe there was no “white” race or “black” race or “red” race, or even “yellow” and “brown” race. It is the European domination of the world unleashed by the Great European West-to-East Maritime Project that created a need among the Europeans to produce these artificial categories (hence the legitimate view among sociologists today that race is a socially-constructed category). Before Columbus there were only ethnicities based on learned, not genetically determined, distinctions of language and culture, such as: in Africa: the Akan, Malinke, Ngoni, Yoruba, Zulu, etc.; in the Americas: the Aztec, Cherokee, Inuit, Maya, Sioux, etc.; in Asia: the Arab, Berber, Han, Jews, Korean, Mongol, Indo-Aryan, Dravids, etc.; and in Europe: the English, French, German, Irish, Spanish, etc. Remember also that all human beings originate out of the same place, regard- less of what you believe in: religious explanation (Garden of Eden [if you are a Christian, Jew or Muslim]) or scientific explanation (Africa). In other words: whether you believe in God or in science, both recognize only one race: the human race. However, having said that it is important to emphasize that in singing this favorite mantra of many intellectuals that “race” is nothing more than a social construction, the fact remains that for most in a racialized society phenotypical markers are embodied with what Loury (2002), for example, calls “social signification.” For victims of racism (and other similar forms of prejudice and discrimination based on superficial biologically-determined criteria), at one level, it is not difficult to determine what racism is. They really do not need to be told what it is and what it does to them, as attested by their everyday lived experience. In racist societies (as in the United States, or England, or India, or France, or Brazil, or South Africa, or Ireland, or Malaysia, or Sudan, or Mauritania, or Australia, and so on) racism for them involves encounters with a poisoned environment in which, de- pending upon the society and/or circumstance in question, their dignity and/or their lives are constantly under assault as the racists, by under- going a process of “uncivilization,” attempt to harass or dehumanize or brutalize or terrorize or murder their victims merely because they be- long to a different racial, ethnic, linguistic or other similar grouping.95 Yet, the ubiquity of racism in racist societies at the personal (or micro) level tends to blind both victims and victimizers to its origins, forms and functions in society as a whole (macro or institutional level), making it difficult to work toward the eradication of this heinous human social disease. At the outset, following Nash (1972) it would help by establishing 95. Although examples used in this section come primarily from the United States, it should be stressed that the aim of this section is not so much to show that the United States is a racist society—a fact that cannot be disputed—but rather to arrive at an understanding of what racism is and what functions it performs in racist societies. Racism, today is found in almost all societies, except that it takes a different form in those societies where all belong to the same race. This form can be “ethnicism” for example. In many countries of Africa and Asia, the role performed by racism is performed by “ethnicism.” In some societies rac- ism is substituted with discrimination based on linguistic and/or religious differences. Plus one must not forget that in almost all societies today one will find discrimination of another kind: it is a type that is even more pervasive than racism, though it operates in almost the same way as racism does and performs almost the same functions: sexism. But whether bigotry and discrimination are based on racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, gender (or any other biologically- determined immutable factors) the end-goal remains the same for those who practice this bigotry and discrimination: to dominate and exploit their victims on the basis of “unjustified entitlement.”
- 55. Page 54 of 89 the fact that racism is an ideology (that is a “style of thought” or a system of ideas and concepts that, in this instance, is neither cogent nor correct). As an ideology, racism has no scientific basis given its essential purpose: to impose a social and cultural significance on the genetic and morphological diversity found in the human race (usually undertaken for the purposes of justifying and maintaining racially-based hierarchical power relations). At its root therefore, racism does not seek to study and explain this diversity (which remains the legitimate project of science), but rather seeks to illegitimately (in terms of science) use this diversity to arrive at explanations for social and cultural differences among differ- ent population groups as identified by diverse phenotypes and genetic frequencies. As Nash (1972: 112–13) explains: The ideology of race is a system of ideas which interprets and defines the meanings of racial differences, real or imagined, in terms of some system of cultural values. The ideology of race is always normative: it ranks differences as better or worse, superior or inferior, desir- able or undesirable, and as modifiable or unmodifiable. Like all ideologies, the ideology of race implies a call to action; it embodies a politi- cal and social program; it is a demand that something be done. The ideology of race competes in a political arena, and it is embraced or rejected by a polity, not a scientific community.… [Moreover], [o]n these grounds, that is, the functional consequences of ideologies, no amount of evidence (even were it scientifically impeccable) will destroy an ideology, or even, perhaps, modify it. It is necessary to stress, therefore, that the ideology of racism was “invented,” it did not emerge naturally out of supposed innate differences in intelligence (despite assertions to the contrary by racist hate groups), in order to facilitate the domination of their victims by means of an un- ending series of “racial projects.”96 In the case of racism in the Western world, for example, racism emerged to facilitate the racial project of European domination of PQD peoples and the plunder of their resources by denying their humanity. This is not to suggest by any means that a conspiracy took place in Europe in the fifteenth century when the so-called “voyages of discovery” (in actuality a misnomer because as Burman [1989] clearly demonstrates much of the world was already known by the fifteenth century) would commence and propel Europeans to the far reaches of the earth, and in the process unleash a nightmare on PQD peoples from which many have yet to recover. Rather, it is that the combination of (a) an Occidental version of the Christian religion (which in reality was a corrupted form of an Eastern religion—Christ, it must be remembered, was not a European), developed against a backdrop of the Crusades, with (b) a revolutionary form of economic system that would first emerge in Europe on a large society-wide scale, merchant capitalism, proved to be a potently fertile mixture for the evolution of a European racist ideology. Only racism, backed by a self-conjured device of the “divine mandate,” for example, could have made possible such behavior of “God-fearing Christians” as that mentioned in the following account of a European slave raiding expedition in Africa: Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best as he could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts; others stowed their children among the sea weed, where men found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice… . And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a payment for all their labor and expenses; for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165 besides those that perished and were killed… . (From in Kaufman and Guckin 1979: 2) Therefore, armed with a racist ideology sanctified by European Christianity, and possessing technological superiority (in terms of weapons) to implement this ideology, it became relatively easy for European imperialists to venture abroad into the lands of other peoples and proceed to unleash an orgy of rapine terror and wholesale thievery of resources. And once the ideology of racism had emerged, it was not difficult to soak the entire fabric of European societies in this ideology via the ubiquitous, but powerful process of socialization for generations to come—that is long after the original economic roots of this ideology had disappeared from public consciousness.97 Although the seeds of modern racist ideology in Europe were long planted in the debate that took place between those among the Spanish who decried the brutal exploitation of Native Americans in the sixteenth century and those who argued that the exploitation was supported by Christian theology (See McNutt 1909),98 racism, as an ideology, first received widespread respectability in the Western world via a perversion of the Darwinist theory of evolution with its application to the explanation of the pigmentary, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the human community in the nineteenth century by pseudo-scientists. These pseudo-scientists would claim that biological science (Darwinism) provided “proof” of the inherent inferiority of the black peoples: that is that their evolution was on a different time scale from that of whites, placing them (blacks) closer to apes than to humans (whites). 96. I am borrowing this concept from a theory known as racial formation theory developed by Omi and Winant (1994) to explain the persistence of racism in modern societies. 97. From the perspective of transmission, racist ideologies depend on the creation of stereotypes and their transmission through agencies of socialization. Racists rely on stereotypes to create otherness because stereotypes permit them to dehumanize their victims. These stereotypes can be both “positive” (intelli- gent, industrious, ambitious), and negative (lazy, dumb, thieving, etc.) but, above all, in the arsenal of all racists three stereotypes are universal and salient: one has to do with dirt, the other with sex, and the third with trust. For example, those who hold a monopoly over power and resources in the United States, the Eng- lish, have portrayed all these groups at various times in history as unhygienically dirty, animalistically oversexed, and highly untrustworthy: Native Americans, U.S. African Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. But where do stereotypes come from? They come from those who are involved in producing the content of what we today call the media (books, cinema, television, theater, newspapers and magazines, radio, museums, etc.): writers, actors, musicians, entertainers, artists, scholars, museum curators, travelers and explorers, etc. All of these people are involved in the creation, dissemination and maintenance of stereotypes. As stereotypes become widespread in a society over time, other agencies of socialization besides the media become involved: the family, the church, schools, and so on. 98. In actuality, the historical antecedents of the origins of the European ideology of racism lie in the first encounters between Europeans and Jews on one hand (following the adoption of Christianity by the Romans under Constantine I in the fourth century), and Europeans and Muslims (following the Muslim invasion of Europe in the eighth century) on the other. Remember too that the Muslims who arrived in Europe were made up of many different races and ethnicities. Further down the road, in the eleventh century, came the Crusades, and this was one more formative influence in the genesis of European racism as an ideology.
- 56. Page 55 of 89 Science today, of course, recognizes that not only is this perverse application of the Darwinist theory false, but even the concept of race itself is false in that scientific evidence points to only one race: the human race—which (ironically for the racists) evolved in Africa! So perva- sive has been this false concept of “inferior” and “superior” race in the Western world that on four different occasions the United Nations Educational and Scientific Commission would assemble scientists to examine this issue; their conclusion: “Neither in the field of hereditary potentialities concerning the overall intelligence and the capacity of cultural development, nor in that of the physical traits, is there any justifica- tion for the concept of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ races” (from European Parliament 1985: 21). The ideology of racism derives its cogency for its proponents from three principal fallacies: “(1) The identification of racial differences with cultural and social differences; (2) The assumption that cultural achievement is directly, and chiefly, determined by the racial characteristics of a population; (3) The belief that physical characteris- tics of a population limit and define the sorts of culture and society they are able to create or participate in” (Nash 1972: 118). On the basis of these fallacies a number of ridiculous propositions are then generated; chief among them being: (a) It is not correct to legislate relations between races because God has ordained that some races are not equal to others. (b) Some races are not capable of becoming modern and “civilized” and hence they cannot be treated as equals of “civilized” races. (c) The “fact” that some races have not made any meaningful contribution to the human civilization is an indication that they are genet- ically incapable of high cultural achievement. (d) Even when some races have had an opportunity to associate with civilized races they soon sink back into barbarism once the associa- tion ends. (e) To struggle against civil and human rights for inferior races is to struggle for the interests of all races. (f) Those who struggle for human and civil rights for inferior races are enemies of the civilized races—see Nash, pp. 114–118 for more on this point. These assertions, however logical, natural and scientific they may appear to the racist mind have no basis in real fact. Even a cursory study of the history of the human race from the caveman era to the present would quickly reveal the fallacious basis of these assertions. And, of course, to date no scientific evidence has yet emerged that links race with intelligence. Yet, to this day, some five hundred years after the ideolo- gy of racism began to take shape in Europe, for example, it continues to flourish in the West in countries such as the United States, Germany, France, etc., governing the behavior of the white majority toward the black minority. How does one explain the persistence of this ideology? Nash (p. 120) provides five basic reasons; specifically, the ideology of racism “(1) Provides a moral rationale for systematic disprivilege; (2) Allows the members of the dominant group to reconcile their values with their activities; (3) Aims to discourage the subordinate group from making claims on the society; (4) Rallies the adherents to political action in a ‘just’ cause; (5) Defends the existing division of labor as eternal.” In other words, to put it simply: racism as an ideology aims to encourage and justify the discrimination of people solely on the basis of their skin pigmentation in all areas of life—in such a way as to negatively alter their life-chances and violate their basic human rights—with the aim of dominating them for economic and political purposes. The ability of racists to discriminate against victims rests on the possession of power via the monopoly of political and/or economic means. The term racism, it is important to emphasize, does not cover xenophobia, the paranoid fear of strangers. Whereas xenophobia is gen- erally “curable” via education and amicable contact with those one fears, racism cannot be “cured” in this sense. As an ideology, racism has a specific rational function: to discriminate against victims in order to obtain and/or retain monopoly over access to resources and services in society. Consequently, racism is ultimately rooted in terms of its genesis in economic factors; and, therefore, the strategy for fighting the ideol- ogy of racism depends on a number of concrete material actions—not psychiatric treatment as in the case of xenophobia. These include: (a) Instituting a dialectical relationship between legislation that prohibits discrimination (whether in education, housing, government, or any other area of public life) and the economic and political empowerment of the victims of racism via concrete measures (e.g., affirma- tive action programs) that address the injustices of the past. (b) Breaking the chain of socialization that permits the ideology from being passed from one generation to the next by outlawing all manifestations of racist thinking in public life—including, and most especially, in the corporate media.99 99. While such a measure, in the United States for example, will rankle with those who are (or claim to be) opposed to all forms of censorship, they have to be reminded that freedom from racist discrimination that violates fundamental human rights of victims takes precedence over freedom from censorship. Inability to comprehend this simple point is indicative of the fact that such people have simply misunderstood the purpose of First Amendment rights, or they are in actuality “closet racists”—especially considering that, not surprisingly, those who oppose muzzling racists from advancing their gutter ideology in the media (on grounds that the U.S. constitution protects the dissemination of such ideology under the First Amendment rights) invariably, tend not to belong to the group that is being victimized. Surely, if all speech was beyond prohibition, then why are there laws concerning libel (defamation through print, writing, pictures or signs aimed at injuring a person’s reputation) and slander (defamation through oral speech)? Clearly, freedom of speech is not absolute—except, one has to assume, when it comes to inflicting racist injury on victims. Racism was determined to be a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg trials, yet those who advo- cate and champion the practice of such a crime are deemed to be protected by First Amendment rights! Such rank hypocrisy is only possible under conditions of pervasive racism where even normally intelligent people momentarily abandon their intellect in favor of meaningless slogans that racists have seized upon to smuggle in their gutter ideology. To be sure, there must be vigilance against censorship, but in the West, especially in the United States, the struggle against cen- sorship has been marked by much hypocrisy and ignorance. For example: there is no campaign visible anywhere against the monopolization of the mass media by a handful of giant transnational corporations—which has resulted in a pernicious and pervasive censorship of alternative political viewpoints via the “nor- mal” operation of the market and the “normal” politics of media ownership (he who pays the piper calls the tune). There is no campaign anywhere to force the media to hire, employ, consult writers and commentators with ideological viewpoints different from those of the owners and controllers of the media (e.g., commentators who are not enamored of capitalism and neoimperialistic relations with the PQD ecumene). The struggle against censorship requires a balanced perspective on what is truly worth fighting for (e.g., against censorship of information that expose the true corrupt nature of the capitalist class and its allies, or information that expose the governmental misuse of taxpayers’ money and/or the mandate of the citizenry to govern for purposes of undertaking nondemocratic and corrupt clandestine projects—like obtaining assistance from drug lords to overthrow legitimate
- 57. Page 56 of 89 (c) Consistent, persistent and spirited leadership from the highest levels of government and other public and social institutions in con- demning racism and racial discrimination. (In the United States and in Britain, it is not a coincidence that the resurgence of virulent rac- ism in the 1980s came with the election of government leaders with racist proclivities.) It is important to point out that the institution of such measures is aimed at undermining the mechanism by which the racist ideology per- forms its “economic” function: the cultivation of a mythology of racial superiority that is imbibed by both victimizer and victim. The victimiz- er proclaims his/her racial superiority to justify all racially-inspired injustices inflicted on victims, while victims are rendered impotent against racist tyranny—until exceptional consciousness raising circumstances surface—because of a racist-inspired (‘blame the victim’) inferiority complex. It is a complex that rests on a dialectic in which the inferior material conditions of the victim are explained by the racist victimizer on the basis of the victim’s supposed inherent inferiority, rather than the racist discrimination that is responsible for the inferior material condi- tions in the first place. Given this critical function that the mythology plays in racist ideologies it should be noted that its cultivation is not a consequence of irrationality and ignorance. Hence, not surprisingly, antiracist strategies that depend on debunking the mythology stand little chance of success. Only “political” measures such as those just mentioned can undermine racism. In fact, the enormous amounts of time and energy spent on debunking the racist mythology are simply a waste of time and may even play into the hands of the racists. 2. Origins and Transmission In terms of origins and transmission, racist ideologies depend on the creation of stereotypes and their transmission through agencies of so- cialization. Racists rely on stereotypes to create otherness (you are not one of us), because stereotypes permit them to dehumanize their victims. These stereotypes can be, both, positive (intelligent, industrious, ambitious), and negative (lazy, dumb, thieving, etc.), but above all, in the arsenal of all racists three stereotypes are universal and salient: one has to do with dirt, the other with sex and the third with trust. For exam- ple, those who have monopoly of power and resources in this country, the English, have portrayed all these groups at various times in history as unhygienically dirty, animalistically oversexed, and highly untrustworthy: Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. But where do stereotypes come from? They come from those who are involved in producing the content of what we today call the media (comprising electronic social and mass media, and traditional media: books, cinema, television, music, theater, newspapers and magazines, radio, museums, etc.): writers, actors, musicians, entertainers, artists, scholars, museum curators, travelers and ex- plorers, etc. All of these people are involved in the creation, dissemination and maintenance of stereotypes. As stereotypes become widespread in a society over time, other agencies of socialization besides the media become involved: the family, the church, schools, and so on. 3. Varieties Racism can take the following fairly distinct, but NOT unrelated, structural forms: genocidal racism, dominative racism, aversive racism, institu- tional racism, juridical racism, and internalized racism. Genocidal racism, as the term implies, is the attempt to totally annihilate a group of people for whatever reason. Some classic examples of this most brutal form of racism would include: The settlement of the Americas by Europeans at the expense of Native Americans; the Shoah (the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe); and the Rwandan Genocide. Dominative racism is racism aimed at dominating victims in order to directly exploit their labor, as in the case of the racist exploitation of African Americans in the South. Note that at the level of interpersonal relations, under conditions of dominative racism, intimate relationships between the racist and the victim are common. Not surprisingly, in the racist South of the past enslaved African American women often ran the household of the white master: from house cleaning and cooking to child-rearing--and sometimes even child-bearing! (By the way, a similar situation obtains to day in the West [California, Texas, etc.] but involving primarily Hispanic American women.) Aversive racism, as the term implies, denotes the type of racism where the racist wants to put the greatest physical and social distance possi- ble between himself/ herself and the target. For example: aversive white racists would never dream of permitting African Americans to enter their homes, let alone cook their food or baby-sit their children. The logical conclusion of this kind of discrimination from the perspective of the victim is genocide. The European Jews were victims of aversive racism. In this country, wherever dominative racism disappeared it was replaced by aversive racism; consequently, today it is aversive racism that is the most common form of racism. At the structural level, aversive racism is manifest in such ways as de facto residential segregation. At the interpersonal level, the desire by aversive racists for as much physical and social distance as possible between themselves and other races stems from the incorporation into their psyche, through early childhood socialization, at the minimum the triple racist stereotypes of dirt, sex and trust (mentioned above). As you can guess, laws cannot really over- come this form of racism. Why? Because it is too pervasive and yet very subtle to the point where, sometimes, both the racist and the victim may not even be aware of its existence at a given moment. A classic example of the latter phenomenon, in this society, is the subconscious belief by almost all whites (including, ironically, non-racist whites) that their whiteness entitles them to a place above everyone else, regardless of what aspect of society is under consideration: employment, housing, health, religion, culture, language, etc., etc. The only whites who do not foreign governments) and what should not be fought for (e.g., against censorship of racist propaganda aimed at hurting and psychologically destroying other human beings, as well as fomenting race hatred among the vulnerable—such as working-class youth.) To defend racists who use words to attack and wound people simply because their skin color is different from theirs by arguing that racist speeches and writings are constitutionally protected is a gross perversion of the intent of the First Amendment. What about the rights of the victims? Don’t victims have a right to be protected from the verbal abuse of bigots (who derive their strength, like the typical cowards they are, from the fact that they have the power of numbers, being in the majority); abuse that produce in victims all kinds of mental anguish ranging from shame through anger and from defensiveness to withdrawal; abuse that undermines their self-worth and esteem? Champions of anti-censorship on any grounds may be surprised to learn that the United States is, perhaps, the only country in the Western world that offers governmental protection to bigots and hatemongers. (See Matsuda [1989] for more on this issue; see also Wiener [1990] who discusses this matter in relation to bigots and racists on university campuses.)
- 58. Page 57 of 89 suffer from this “white is best; white is right” psychological disease are those whites who are actively engaged in struggling with themselves to overcome this disease in order to become normal and mentally healthy human beings. Aversive racism is not a monopoly held only by whites in this society. Other groups can and do exhibit this form of racism too. For example: Jews against blacks; blacks against Jews; blacks against Hispanics and Asians; Asians against blacks, etc.; etc. While you are reading this entry, I want you to stop for a moment and ask yourself this question: If I am alone in an elevator would I be uncomfortable if a person from group X enters it, even though I have never come across that person before and the person appears to pose no threat? (Substitute group X with whatever racial/ ethnic groups you encounter in your daily lives that you can think of.) If your answer is yes with respect to ANY group, you are a racist. Not only that, but think about this: it means that you are a potential candidate for recruitment by a racist organization like the Neo-Nazis (under appropriate circumstances). How do you think a minority, the Nazis, in Nazi Germany were able to convince the majority of Germans to murder millions upon millions of people within a short period of 5 to 6 years? They exploited the existing aversive racism that went back hundreds of years toward Jews that most Germans and many other Europeans harbored. So, if you are one of those who becomes “uncomfortable” when you encounter in your daily life a person of another color then you need to seriously consider psychiatric treatment because you are mentally sick! Institutional racism, inthiscountry,iscloselytiedupwithaversiveracism.Institutionalracism,alsoknownasstructuralracism,incontrasttointerpersonal racism(theday-to-dayracismfoundininterpersonalencountersbetweenindividuals)referstohistorically-determinedovertand/orcovertracistdiscriminatory practicesthatmaybedeliberateorsimplybemotivatedbyignorance,prejudice,stereotypes,andthelikeintheoperationofsocio-economicandpolitical institutionsofsociety(rangingfromschoolstohospitals,fromprisonstothemilitary,fromthepolicetonewspapers,fromstatelegislaturestochurches, frombankstocitygovernments)wherethediscriminatorytargetisentiregroupsofpeopleratherthanspecificindividuals.Institutionalracismoriginates fromapastwherejuridicalracismwastheorderoftheday.So,forexample,wheninnercities—wherethemajorityofminoritiesinurbanareaslivebecause ofhistoricallydetermined,racistresidentialsegregation—continuetolackequitableaccesstoresources(rangingfromdecentschoolingthroughadequate socialamenitiestojobsandemployment),thenthatconstitutesamanifestationofarangeofformsofinstitutionalracism.InUnitedStates,inrecentyears, becauseofanultra-rightconservativeSupremeCourt(thatevenincludesanultra-conservativeAfricanAmericanjusticebythenameofClarenceThomas whoseappointmenttothebenchwas,mostironically,coloredbyhisinvocationofracismonthepartofCongressduringhisconfirmationhearingswhere crediblechargesofsexualharassmentwereleveledagainsthimbyanAfricanAmericanwomanofintegrity,AnitaHill),institutionalracismhasbeengivena juridicalmandate.IntheviewofthisCourt(withtheexceptionofaminorityofjustices),institutionalracisminUnitedStatesissupposedlyathingofthe past,and,therefore,thereisnolongeranyneedforanygovernmentpolicyinanyareaoflifethatseekstoeliminateinstitutionalracism.Anditisencapsulat- edinawell-knownquoteauthoredbyChiefJusticeJohnG.RobertsJr.,inamajoritydecisionoutlawingvoluntary(repeat:voluntary)desegregationeffortsin schoolinginthecombinedU.S.SupremeCourtcases,ParentsInvolvedinCommunitySchoolsv.SeattleSchoolDistrictNo.1,andMeredithv.JeffersonCountyBoardof Education,551U.S.701(2007):“Thewaytostopdiscriminationonthebasisofraceistostopdiscriminatingonthebasisofrace.”Whileoneisleftwonder- ingonwhichplanettheChiefJusticeresides,thislineofthinkingmaysoundlogicalandseeminglyanti-racistinintent,itis,inreality,averyracistviewbe- causeitdeliberatelyignoresthehistorically-determinedracismthatcontinuestobepervasiveinUnitedStatestoday—attestedtobymassiveevidence,both research-basedandthedailyexperiencesofordinaryindividuals.Onalmosteverymeasureonecarestolookat—rangingfromhousingtohealth-care;from employmenttopolicing;fromeducationtoratesofincarceration;fromenvironmentalsafetytopossessionofwealth;fromequalaccesstosocialspaceto equitablepositiverepresentationinthemedia—racial/ethnicminoritiesintheUnitedStatesareenormouslydisadvantaged,fornootherreasonthantheir race/ethnicity.AnenlightenedCourt,ontheotherhand,wouldaccepttheviewarticulatedbyJusticeSonyaSotomayor(withwhomJusticeRuthBader Ginsburgconcurred)inadissentingopinioninanotherSupremeCourtcase,Schuettev.CoalitiontoDefendAffirmativeAction,572U.S.___(2014),thatfurther advancedtheracistagendaoftheconservativesontheCourttoturnbackthegainsoftheCivilRightsmovementofthe1950sand1960sby,inthisin- stance,outlawingaffirmativeactionpolicies:“Thewaytostopdiscriminationonthebasisofraceistospeakopenlyandcandidlyonthesubjectofrace,and toapplytheConstitutionwitheyesopentotheunfortunateeffectsofcenturiesofracialdiscrimination.”Shecontinues:“Asmembersofthejudiciary taskedwithinterveningtocarryouttheguaranteeofequalprotection,weoughtnotsitbackandwishaway,ratherthanconfront,theracialinequalitythat existsinoursociety.Itisthisviewthatworksharm,byperpetuatingthefacilenotionthatwhatmakesracematterisacknowledgingthesimpletruththat racedoesmatter.”Note:institutionalracismmayalsobereferredtoas“color-blindracism”wheretheideaistoclaimthatbynot“seeing”raceyouunder- mineracism(theviewheldbypeoplelikeChiefJusticeRoberts,Jr.).Butasexplainedabove,thisviewassumesthatwenolongerliveinaracistsocietyand thereforenoremediesareneededtodealwiththisdeeplyinsidiousformofsocialinjustice.Inotherwords,“color-blindness,”is,inactuality,aformofrac- ism.However,itshouldalsobenotedthattheconceptofcolorblindnessfromtheperspectiveofracealsohasadifferentand,infact,apositivemeaning whenusedasoriginallyintendedwhenitwasfirstinvokedintheformofa“color-blindconstitution”byJusticeJohnMarshallHarlaninhisdissentingopin- ioninthatinfamous1896casePlessyv.FergusonthatlegitimatedJimCrowracismbyestablishingthepatentlybogusdoctrineof“separatebutequal”indirect violationoftheintentoftheThirteenthandFourteenthAmendments.Inthatcase,JusticeHarlanattemptedtoremindhiscolleaguesthattheU.S.Consti- tutionwascolorblindinthesensethatitcouldnotbeusedtojustifyracistpractices,suchasJimCrowsegregation.Whenconservativesharkbacktothe Harlandissenttheyaredeliberately,cunningly,andperfidiouslymisreadingtheintentofthatdissent. HereispartofJusticeHarlan’sdissent: Butinviewoftheconstitution,intheeyeofthelaw,thereisinthiscountrynosuperior,dominant,rulingclassofcitizens.Thereisnocastehere. Ourconstitutioniscolor-blind,andneitherknowsnortoleratesclassesamongcitizens.Inrespectofcivilrights,allcitizensareequalbeforethe law... Thepresent decision,itmaywell be apprehended,will notonlystimulate aggressions,more orless brutaland irritating,upontheadmitted rightsof colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the constitution, by one of which the blacks of this country were madecitizensoftheUnited Statesand ofthestatesin whichtheyrespectivelyreside,and whoseprivilegesand immunities,ascitizens,thestatesare forbiddentoabridge.
- 59. Page 58 of 89 Juridical racism, in this country, is closely linked to dominative racism because it was racism that was instituted through law in order to exploit African Americans and other minorities directly. The slave codes and the Jim Crow laws are classic examples of laws that established a juridi- cal racist society in the South. Internalized racism, refers to the hatred of and discrimination against people of one’s own race/ethnicity. In other words, it is a form of self- hatred that emerges as a consequence of a lack of political consciousness in the context of a pervasively racist/ethnicist society. A very com- mon example of internalized racism in United States is the deliberate refusal to learn one’s own mother tongue or practice one’s culture by second generation immigrant children. Another common example is discrimination against people of one’s own race/ethnicity who are recent immigrants (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “fresh off the boat”). Internalized racism allows people who suffer from this form of racism to delude themselves into believing that they themselves will be spared racist discrimination by the wider (white) society. It’s a delusion because white racists do not make a distinction between recent immigrants and those who have been in the country for generations when they discrim- inate against a particular group—it is skin color that matters, not language and culture. 4. Societal Role The role of racist ideologies in societies such as this one is that it assists the capitalist classes in doing three things: (a) Achieve political and economic stability by using racial/ethnic minorities as scapegoats for the severe problems that the activities of the capitalist classes as a whole produce: unemployment, falling standards of living, environmental destruction, scarcity of resources, etc. Racism helps to deflect resistance and rebellion away from the capitalist class and the capitalist system. (Note: in the absence of race, other ideologies of oppression become salient: sexism, classism, etc.)100 (b) Permit the direct exploitation of victims through measures such as low wages, dispossession of their lands, etc. (c) Allow them to sow division among the working classes so that they can keep each other in check in their struggles with the capitalist classes. A classic example is the use of African Americans and other minorities to break up labor strikes of Euro-American workers. Histori- cally, and up to the present, racism has been one of the most important tools used in this country to buy the allegiance of white workers by capitalists. By allowing white workers to exchange their whiteness for a few privileges, the capitalist classes have kept all working classes from demanding a fundamental change to the entire political and economic system for the benefit of all. Racism creates an us and them mentality, whereas genuine progress in a society is only possible under conditions of cooperation and mutual respect. To be sure, the white working class (to take the U.S. example) may maintain a short-term advantage relative to the black working class in terms of better employment opportuni- ties relative to the black working class, but in the long-run the fact that it is not united with the black working class prevents it from demanding a greater share of the total profits generated from its labor but kept by the capitalist class. At the same time, working-class disunity prevents it from mounting successful struggles in increasing the “public wage” (which takes such forms as unemployment insurance, life-long medical insurance, public schooling, environmental protection measures, and so on).101 Racism therefore serves as an additional factor, besides the workings of impersonal “market forces,” in hiding the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class—an exploitation that many workers in capitalist societies deny because of their ignorance of the workings of the capitalist system. (See also the Southern Strategy.) One legitimate question that may be asked is that considering that some of the most virulent, moronic, and highly objectionable racist behavior is to be found among the white blue- and white-collar working classes even though it is immoral, uncivilized and not in their econom- ic self-interest, what explanation can one offer for this behavior. The explanation is two-fold: One, propaganda by capitalists and their allies via the media often elevates blacks to the level of scapegoats for the inequality, alienation and powerlessness that the white working class experi- ences and thereby assure stability for the capitalist system as a whole. Instead of targeting the real sources of their woes (the capitalist class) the white working class ends up targeting blacks instead. The following example by Reich (1977) will drive home this point: “[M]any whites believe that welfare payments to blacks are a far more important factor in their taxes than is military spending. Through racism, poor whites come to believe that their poverty is caused by blacks who are willing to take away their jobs, and at lower wages, thus concealing the fact that a substan- tial amount of income inequality is inevitable in a capitalist society. Racism thus transfers the locus of whites’ resentment towards blacks and away from capitalism.” It should be pointed out here, that historically, the black working class has been used by employers to help break white trade unions by using black workers as “scabs” when white unions are on strike. In fact Cherry (1991: 61) convincingly demonstrates that “[t]he post-World War II profit boom [in the United States] resulted from the ability of capitalists to exploit a racially divided southern work- force and a growing low-wage female workforce. The profitable employment of these workers enabled capitalists to undermine the benefits obtained by unionized workers.… Thus, race and gender discrimination made the postwar profit boom possible, and provided industrialists with the opportunity to weaken the power of the unions.” Such strategies are clearly not conducive to healthy race relations among black and white workers. Two, racism provides for the white working class an avenue of psychic satisfaction: As Reich observes, for example, “the op- portunity to participate in another’s oppression compensates for one’s misery” (1978: 387). Karp (1981: 91) calls it the displacement of mis- treatment in which one’s own hurts are taken out on others. Then there is the solace one obtains by seeing oneself as “above” another group to psychologically compensate for life’s tribulations in capitalist societies. Note, however, that while there may be group-level psychic benefits to racists in coping with the capitalist system, it is also true that at the individual level racist behavior is a manifestation of a psychosis. It is mani- fest in the irrational expenditure of mental (and often physical energy) in hating people of color. When a white person undergoes mental dis- tress every time he or she sees or comes into contact with a person of color (or vice versa) because of their hate and prejudice, there is no question that the person is not mentally healthy. There are, of course, other personal costs too that go with micro-level racism: the self-denial of potentially powerful and meaningful friendships with other human beings, the failure to explore the full range of life’s experiences by avoid- ing experiencing other cultures, the constantly distorted mental world in which the person lives where everything is “lily white,” and so on. (See Karp 1981) 100. An adage I have coined that is worth remembering: prejudice is a powerful antidote to truth. 101. It should be remembered that capitalists need workers to survive, but workers do not need capitalists to survive; all that the workers would have to do is to start their own enterprises and redirect all their labor away from capitalists toward their own enterprises in order to survive and thrive. (Where would the workers get their start-up capital? They would have no need for it; they can use their labor initially and use a barter system to exchange commodities with other workers.)
- 60. Page 59 of 89 In explaining the genesis and functions of racism, we have seen that the best approach to understanding racism is to see it as an ideology, and as an ideology it has evolved to play a very specific function in society: the structural domination and exploitation of one group of people by another. (A question for you guys: So, which came first: the ideology or the structure? The answer is that both came first in a process of dialectical evolution. Hence, Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, for example was, at once, a racist project and a capitalist venture.) And that this function has not evolved in contradiction to the evolution of the dominant socio-economic system: capitalism. On the contrary, the rela- tionship between capitalism and racism has been one of symbiosis. After all, capitalism is like racism in the sense that whereas racism involves exploitation on the basis of pigmentation, capitalism involves exploitation on the basis of class. But the analogy does not end here. Compare the role of ideology: the exploitation within the capitalist system is legitimated among both the exploiters and the exploited via an ideology (the capitalist ideology) that includes among its tenets the elevation of this exploitation to the level of “natural law”—expressed through the con- cept of meritocracy, namely the proposition that it is “natural” that some in society (capitalists) deserve to be richer than others (the working class) since not all are equally endowed with intelligence, discipline, self-sacrifice, capacity for hard work, etc. and other similar attributes that capitalists mythically assign exclusively to their class via a perversion of the history of societal evolution. Within racist societies the exploitation is similarly legitimated via a perversion of the scientific explanation for biologically determined phenotypic differences in which the inferiority of the target victims is mythically deemed to be naturally ordained. And in the case of both capitalism and racism this legitimation of exploita- tion serves to perform two complementary roles: to “dehumanize” the victims and to “uncivilize” the victimizer.102 In light of the foregoing, the principal conclusion that we may draw is this: racism is unacceptable in civilized and democratic societies; yet its eradication is bound up with the very structuring of their dominant economic system: capitalism. Unless the capitalist system is changed in a radical way, the ideology of racism is here to stay.103 The problem was best described by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French social philosopher, writing in 1830 about racism in the United States—albeit his identification of the root cause of the problem, democracy, was well off the mark: I do not believe that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere. An isolated individual may surmount the prejudices of the religion of his country or his race but a whole people cannot rise, as it were, above itself. A despot who should subject the American and his former slaves to the same yoke might perhaps succeed in co-mingling the races but as long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will under- take so difficult a task and it may be foreseen that the freer, that is the more democratic the white population of the United States be- comes, the more isolated it will remain. (From Bell 1991: 44). It is not democracy that has underwritten the racist ideology in the United States, it is capitalism. In fact, without democracy it is unlikely that progress would have been made in the area of civil rights for blacks (and, of course, women too).104 While racism is functional for capital as a whole, it is not necessarily so for individual capitalists—at least the theory of capitalism would suggest that. Individual capitalists seeking to lower their production costs relative to their competitors may find the artificially high wages of white workers (as in South Africa for example prior to 1992, made possible by apartheid laws enacted at the behest of racist white unions), dysfunctional. For the individual capitalist the only criterion that should be of significance in a worker is his/her ability to do the work at the lowest wage rates that a free labor market can bear, not his/her color, gender, religion, etc. This argument is ably summarized by Edwards, Reich and Weisskopf (1978: 362): [T]he capitalist drive to rationalize production, lower costs, and expand profits is itself a strong force for the elimination of racial discrim- ination. Employers are trying to maximize their profits, and in organizing their workforce they will be interested in a worker’s productivity and potential contribution to profits and not in his or her skin color. The pressures from other firms competing for workers will over- come the resistance of racist employers who persist in discriminating. … Thus, market forces, by allocating labor to its most efficient use, are themselves a strong stimulus for ending discrimination. Consequently, racism in capitalist societies can, in principle, play both a functional and dysfunctional role. Yet, as Edwards, Reich and Weisskopf (1978) point out, in practice, to take the U.S. example, this has not always worked out. Just as in South Africa today, the economic advantage enjoyed by whites as a whole because of their skin color has remained, for the most part, unassailable despite the supposed rationality of the capitalist system and despite the struggles of the civil rights movement; the lukewarm implementation of the much touted “affirmative action” programs of the 1970s; and despite even the election of an African American (Barack Obama) to the U.S. presidency in 2008. Neither the “magic” of market forces, nor obtaining the right to vote has translated into concrete economic progress for the majority of blacks suffi- 102. The irony, ultimately, is that ideologies of exploitation are necessitated by the very fact that human beings have evolved to a level higher than animals and thereby acquiring the capacity to be “civilized”; otherwise such ideologies would be unnecessary (e.g.: lower order animals such as sharks do not need ideologies of exploitation to consume other marine animals). 103. Those who may jump to the conclusion, therefore, that the answer is communism of the type this planet has known so far, may do well by looking at the revelations of unimaginable horrors (not unlike those, in modern times, of Nazi Germany) that emerged out of the secret archives of that Soviet monster called the KGB. However racist the United States may be today, it is very doubtful that any black person would choose to live in what was once the Soviet Un- ion (or Communist China for that matter). Though, of course, in saying this one must agree with Cornel West (1991: 61–62) that it is a choice in relative op- tions: “who wouldn’t choose capitalist democracy? That doesn’t mean we can’t be critical. It means we have lives to lead, kids to feed and dreams of being able to exercise certain freedoms of speech and worship. We will choose a place where we at least have a chance, even if the odds are against us.” 104. Notice too, however, that democracy has not by itself alone induced this progress. Other forces had to come into play too: in the case of the abolition of slavery, for example, capitalism had to undergo a radical change in mode: from one based on agriculture to one based on manufacturing and industry (at least in the North). Similarly, to take another example, the civil rights movement was helped considerably by the onset of the cold war with the Soviet Union where the United States, in its effort to win over onto its side the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia, was compelled to make progress in the area of civil rights in order to demonstrate to the PQD nations, what it felt, was the moral superiority of capitalist democracy over Soviet style communism.
- 61. Page 60 of 89 cient to bring them on par with the majority of whites—except for the tiny emerging black middle class (the “token blacks” [see below]). What explanation can one offer for the constancy of racial inequality (which most whites, deliberately or because of ignorance, refuse to acknowledge) in terms of income and employment in the U.S.—especially considering that the U.S. does not have an apartheid system (akin to the one that South Africa had)? The answer is that, sure, there is no de jure apartheid, but in reality there is a de facto apartheid system of sorts at work. While logically the theory just outlined above ought to have worked by now to eliminate (or nearly eliminate) racial inequality in the U.S.—especially in the post-Civil Rights era. The problem, however, is that as was noted earlier racism (or any other fissionary avenues: gender, religion, ethnicity, linguistic heritage, etc. that fragments the working class) is in the interest of capital as a whole. This is not to say that capital- ists produced racism in the U.S. (or South Africa for that matter), but they used and maintained it to their own advantage: specifically to keep the working class divided and as a result pliable—thereby keeping the capitalist system stable. In other words, capitalists will adapt whatever forms of social structural divisions that may exist in society for their own ends. If there is no racial division, then they may use divisions based on ethnicity, or religion, or gender, or old age, and so on. The mechanisms by which racism against racial minorities have continued to operate in the U.S., for example, despite the fact that racial discrimination in education, employment, housing, etc. is illegal, are subtle and many and involve the operation of both micro (individual-level) and macro (institutional-level) racism; they include: (a) psychological assaults on one’s dignity in the media, work-place, and schools—by means of “micro-aggression”—aimed at creating self-doubts, an inferiority complex, etc.; (b) physical assaults by the police, and white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan and their allies; (c) Inadequate funding for de facto black schools leading to inferior education and high drop-out rates; (d) discrimination by personnel agencies and personnel officers (that is people who ordinarily are not concerned with the health of the economic unit they work for because they do not own it, and therefore noneconomic factors like race are allowed to intervene in their hir- ing practices); (e) “last hired and first fired” tendencies among employers in recessionary periods, which invariably works against black workers; (f) discrimination in the judicial system; (g) segregation of residential areas in apartheid fashion, thus facilitating discrimination at the level of city services, loans for housing, police protection, access to transportation, etc.; (h) passage of rules and regulations aimed at gutting the intent of civil rights legislation by the federal government—especially under Re- publican administrations; and so on. Clearly those who see in market forces as social engineering panaceas are either deluding themselves as a result of ignorance or are simply en- gaged in fomenting a lie for the consumption of the unwary in order to justify the status quo. To put the matter differently: racism in western societies (both as an ideology as well as behavioral practice) serves to objectify the subjective (race) and subjectify the objective (class) which then permits, among other things, the super-exploitation of racial minorities, the scapegoating of racial minorities for the socially disruptive consequences of the activities of capital, and the fragmentation of the working class as a whole in the context of a permanent class-struggle intrinsic to all capitalist societies. 5. Relationship to other ideologies. Racism does not operate in isolation from other ideologies of oppression, but rather a society or an individual often experiences it as part of a nonhierarchical multidimensional system of oppression. The best illustration of this fact is the case of African American women: they are victimized, at the same time, by classism (because of capitalism), racism (from white women), racist-sexism (from white men), and sexism (from black men). To take another example: victims of racism (e.g. Jewish Americans or Asian Americans) will also perpetrate their own rac- ism on other minorities (e.g. African Americans). One more example: the emerging African American middle-class, who themselves are vic- tims of Euro-American racism, will perpetrate classism on fellow African Americans. A good example of this are African American Republi- cans who support racist legislation aimed at barring the means to overcome or mitigate institutional racism: such as, affirmative action and welfare programs. Today in the U.S., racial categories to some extent do coincide with class categories, not perfectly, but generally. In such circum- stances, the issue of race rather than class assumes salience in political behavior. However, as structures of juridical institutional racism begin to be dismantled the situation starts to become more complex because the class factor gains ascendancy in explaining political behavior. (Racism, therefore, is ultimately an epiphenomenon in capitalist democracies.)105 In the case, for example, of blacks in the U.S. the principal division that has emerged among them that is of political significance is between the new U.S. African American petite bourgeoisie and the U.S. African American working and unemployed class.106 Here, it should be pointed out that in suggesting that the blacks have undergone class fragmenta- tion in the U.S. there is the implicit suggestion that institutionalized racism is assailable to a significant degree via political struggle. The civil rights movement of the 1960s did make a sufficient dent in it to permit some 5% of blacks to achieve middle class or bourgeois status by the end of the 1970s. The sad fact, however, is that the result of this class fragmentation has been the divergence of political and economic inter- ests of blacks along class lines. Thus, for instance, the slowly expanding ranks of black Republicans—of whom people like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas are among the more well-known—is indicative of the fact that the interests of all blacks no longer coin- 105. That is, class as demarcated by ownership or lack of ownership of the principal means of production; not class as determined by such criteria of stratifica- tion as levels of income (the latter criteria may be relevant, but only tangentially). From this perspective, only two principal classes are of significance here: those that emerge out of capitalism, namely, capital (or its equivalent the modern bourgeoisie) which has a complete monopoly over the means of production (be it land, factories, etc.) and the working class which has no access to the means of production, and therefore must sell their labor-power to capital in order to sur- vive. 106. It is new in the sense that it owes its origins to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
- 62. Page 61 of 89 cide. The class interests of the well-off blacks (the direct beneficiaries of the small political and economic space opened up by the Civil Rights struggle) are closer to those of the white bourgeoisie than to those of the vast mass of urban and rural black poor, who, if and when they vote, tend to vote for the Democratic Party. In other words: with the weakening of institutionalized racism in the U.S., racial discrimination is not as close to watertight as it was before; it has allowed a number of “token” blacks to achieve upward mobility. However, as their numbers have become politically sizable, their behav- ior has also changed accordingly in the direction of supporting the status quo. Their interests have now diverged from the rest of the members of their community to such an extent that they will now, with a perfectly straight face, even deny the existence of white racism. What is more, others (such as one Shelby Steele [a professor of English] and one Thomas Sowell [a conservative economist]) have begun adopting the same “blame the victim” racist doctrines held by whites to explain why fellow blacks are not achieving upward mobility.107 Cashman (1991: 240-41) best describes the political character of these token blacks, this new U.S. African American bourgeoisie (or “elite” as he calls them), as: “staunch advocates of American capitalism, whose beneficiaries they had become since American capitalism had made significant concessions to them on such issues as affirmative action.” He notes further on: “They did not want a restructuring of American economics and politics lest this should endanger their new, hard won advantages. The undoubted prosperity of certain privileged sectors among the fortunate U.S. African American elite seemed to hide the apparently irreversible drift of numerous U.S. African Americans toward the nation’s poor.” A good exam- ple of this privileged type of U.S. African American is the current Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. As the Congres- sional confirmation hearings over his appointment in 1991 revealed, this confused and ignorant arch conservative who had been a beneficiary of the movement for civil rights was, now that he had done well, no longer interested in supporting policies and programs that had helped to weaken institutionalized racism in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, notice that the majority of the black masses failed to realize that even though Thomas was an African American he was not necessarily their friend or ally (in fact, as a Republican in the U.S. politics of the 1990s and beyond, how could he be).108 Sure, Thomas did use the “race” card when it appeared that his confirmation was in jeopardy after a black woman accused him of sexual harassment (though earlier in the hear- ings he had denied that race had anything to do with his appointment), but that has been a common ploy of this new U.S. African American elite. The black masses have so far, it appears, failed to realize (like its white counterpart) that in the politics of this first decade of the twenty- first century, the critical issue, increasingly, has not been and will not be race, but class when it comes to deciding which candidates to vote into office. If the black working class continues to vote for black candidates, merely and solely because the candidates are black, then they will find themselves in the same position that the white working class is in (who also—most especially in the South—tends to vote for candidates mere- ly and solely because the candidates are of a certain color, white). This position is one of increasing economic and political marginalization. In other words, it is time that the vast majority of U.S. African Americans, the poor and unemployed, realized that even though the struggle for civil rights was mounted on their backs, the true beneficiaries of the struggle have been this new U.S. African American petite bourgeoisie who are not interested in the welfare of the rest of their fellow U.S. African Americans. As befits all capitalist systems, they are interested only in furthering their own interests (which means that from time to time they may still be inclined to play the “race” card, but only when it suits their interests). Thanks to the struggle for civil rights the political situation in the U.S. has become more complex: race and class are both now signif- icant factors. Both black and white politicians each appeal to the black and white masses to vote for them because they share their color respec- tively, and the masses get taken in, without realizing that these politicians often do not necessarily represent their interests, but the interests of the bourgeoisie.109 Interestingly, a similar situation is now developing in former apartheid South Africa too, of course. There, the abandonment of the apartheid system in the absence of radical changes in the economic system has created a potential to unleash upon the majority a re- newed economic tyranny by a reconstituted capitalist class that will now incorporate a fragment of the black population: the emerging com- pradorial petite bourgeoisie. The struggle against white racist tyranny first begun by blacks from almost the day the European settler first set foot in South Africa—vainly pitting spears against bullets, and following military defeat, relaunching the struggle via nonviolent strategies which in turn eventually become transformed into violent struggles in the face of an intransigent neofascist state—culminating in the final defeat of the apartheid state is but only the first step in a long struggle that has only just begun: the struggle for economic dignity, one that will take blacks far into this century. And if the experiences of South America are anything to go by, where freedom from colonialism was achieved over a hundred years ago, the future does not look bright at all. The race struggle is being transformed into a class struggle—testifying to the inherent epiphenomenal character of racism in capitalist societies.110 107. Notice, however, that these same “token blacks,” whenever they need support from other blacks for their own private projects, will emerge to seek black support on grounds that all blacks should stick together and support each other. It is in the face of such appeals that the black working class must be wary; for, in the past such an argument may have been valid, but in the present it is no longer so. For instance, today in the U.S., supporting a white rival over a black rival (for a given political office) may often be the right course of political action, depending upon their political agendas. This is what is meant by suggesting that racism (compared to class) in capitalist democratic societies can be an epiphenomenon; it is not to deny the existence of racism. 108. Since his appointment to the Supreme Court, on almost all cases he has sat, this man has not only sided with capital rather than labor, but, acting in consort with his fellow conservatives, he has sought to weaken respect and protection of civil rights and human rights (in direct contrast to that great Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who, most ironically, he was appointed to replace) for all in this country. 109. See Kilson, (1989) and Wacquant (1989) for more on the issue of class formation and its implications for black politics in the U.S. For a sampling of the right wing ultra-conservative political views of black Republicans see their journal: The Lincoln Review. 110. This should not be taken to imply that racism will not be an issue any more with the elimination of the apartheid system. For, as the experiences of coun- tries such as the United States, Canada, and Britain so well demonstrate institutional racism—even in the absence of legislative mandate—can thrive via many devious mechanisms. In these countries, as blacks so well know, elaborate but extremely subtle ways have been found to discriminate against blacks in employ- ment, housing, education and so on. The point, however, to take the U.S. example, is that given that racism is illegal now racial discrimination cannot be as close to watertight as it was before; it does allow a number of “token” blacks to achieve upward mobility. However, as their numbers become politically sizable their behavior also changes accordingly in the direction of supporting the status quo. Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the members of their commu- nity to such an extent that they may, with a perfectly straight face, deny the existence of racism and begin adopting the same “blame the victim” racist doctrines held by whites to explain why fellow blacks are not achieving upward mobility. Such people, however, often lead double-faced political lives: whenever they need support from blacks for their own private projects they will emerge to seek black support on grounds that all blacks should stick together and support each
- 63. Page 62 of 89 6. Contradiction. We live in an inherently inegalitarian society. Why? Because this is a capitalist society. In any capitalist society equality is a concept that is severely circumscribed by a pyramidal social structure that capitalism demands. Not everyone can be a capitalist, otherwise who would do the work? You have to have a working class too, who necessarily are below the capitalist class. Within this context what kind of racial equality is possible? The answer is: one that simply reproduces identical pyramidal social structures across all races, where race is substituted by class distinctions. Yet to struggle for this form of racial equality is to demand that the historically racially privileged white middle class (to take the example of this society) shed some of its privileges and join the ranks of the black working class on an equal footing. Which member of the white middle class is going to agree to this? (We can also apply this same reasoning to the white working class. Which one of them would be willing to join the black underclass?) The political difficulties involved are best illustrated when we see the frequent inability of, say Jewish Americans and Asian Americans (many of whom are middle class) to come together with, say, African and Hispanic Americans (many of whom are working class), and yet they all face racism/ ethnicism to varying degrees.111 (See also Capitalism; Class; Democracy) 7. Reverse Discrimination/Reverse Racism In their opposition to programs of affirmative action aimed at correcting inequalities brought about by racist/ethnicist discriminatory practices, racists/ethnicists (for example, in Canada, India, South Africa, and United States) have concocted the mythical concept of “reverse discrimina- tion” or “reverse racism.” In the United States, the concept of “reverse discrimination” it will be recalled, first entered the U.S. legal lexicon with the court case of a EuroAmerican, by the name of Allan Bakke, who argued that his rights to further education had been violated as a result of preferential admission of blacks in public education (that is, affirmative action), and where the Supreme Court in 1978 concurred with him on the basis of an interpretation of the same Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution that the Court had used in 1954 in striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine in education in the famous case of Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka. Yet, as Cruse (1987: 31) points out, the court and those who brought the case neglected to consider that “Allan Bakke had not, prior to his filing of suit for “due pro- cess,” experienced a lifetime under the onus of ethnic, racial caste, or class oppression, nor had his ancestors. He was as near to the racial ideal of “Nordic” perfection as any white racist could dream.”112 That decision in favor of Bakke, Cruse further observes, once again raised the rhetorical question of whether or not the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 was intended to protect the citizenship rights of blacks. (Notice also the profound irony in all this: EuroAmericans themselves have always been beneficiaries of affirmative action, for centu- ries!) The racism embedded in the concept of “reverse discrimination” is also pointed up by the outrageous suggestion that a minority of the population (in the United States), historically discriminated against to the point where today they continue to remain at the bottom of the eco- nomic and political ladder, are unjustly threatening the interests of a majority that historically enjoyed and continue to enjoy a monopoly of political and economic power. Such thinking is, to say the least, one of the most ludicrous arguments ever advanced to continue to justify white political and economic supremacy (See Grabiner 1980; for more on the concept of “reverse discrimination” see also Gordon, et al. 1978). Moreover, this false concept hides behind it the stark fact that the wealth the Europeans enjoy today has come about as a consequence of the economic activities of generations before them. (Even in the most ideal conditions of steady uninterrupted economic growth—not yet rec- orded anywhere in human history—it takes nearly an entire human life-span for the Gross National Product to simply quadruple.) Therefore, the wealth that the whites in the U.S. enjoy today came about as a result of unpaid labor of enslaved Africans and underpayment of free U.S. other. It is in the face of such appeals that the black working class must be wary; for, in the past such an argument may have been valid but in the present it is no longer so. For instance, supporting a white rival over a black rival (for a given political office) may often be the right course of political action. This is what is meant by suggesting that racism (compared to class) in capitalist societies is an epiphenomenon; it is not to deny its existence. 111. It is important that I strongly emphasize that in any discussion of racism in this country in this course the objective is not to try and prove that whites are an evil and nasty people or that this society as a whole is an evil and nasty society that is beyond redemption. Rather, the objective has been to try and understand what racism/ethnicism is, how it originates and what role it plays in this society, in order to see how we can work toward a society where such forms of preju- dice and discrimination no longer exist. In advocating a society that is free of such prejudices and discrimination I am not only concerned with issues of morali- ty and social justice, but my position is that, in the long run, such a democratic and civilized society is good even for the racists, sexists, etc. themselves. Remem- ber: that a society that tolerates and even encourages discrimination (in whatever form: racist, sexist, ethnicist, etc.) in the end only hurts itself. Since no single group has monopoly over intelligence and creativity, imagine how far advanced this country would be to day if it had from the very beginning given all minori- ties, including women, and the white working classes, every opportunity to realize their fullest potential. To further underline this point: a racist society is in one sense like a racist individual. Such an individual has a very narrow and shallow life experience because he/she denies himself/herself access to the rich tapestry of cultures, love, and friendship that non-racist/ non-ethnicist contacts with other racial/ ethnic groups permit. For example: a Euro-American who wants to be truly a racist should refuse to be a Christian, because Christianity is not a European religion, it is a Semitic religion. Take another example: a Euro-American who wants to be truly racist should refuse to listen to rock (because rock has its origins in African American music), or eat tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, and so on because they are not of European origin. In other words, racists do not realize how rich their lives are because of the contributions of the very people they reject; but how much richer their lives would be if they gave up their racism. To immerse one’s life in hate (as opposed to love) surely is not only unnatural, but mentally unhealthy--perhaps requiring psychiatric treatment. To engage in prejudice and discrimination is to engage in self-hurt, but let me go one step further and state that it is also to engage in self-destruction. The best example I can give here is that of the Nazis in Germany: in the end their racism/ethnicism brought on to themselves nothing but death and destruction. Think about this: Hitler and many of his henchmen eventually committed suicide. If you are a racist (whatever color you may be), or a sexist (whatever sex you may be), etc., I hope that you will work toward eradicating this prejudice in you and in society; it is not good for you and it is not good for society. 112. In truth, throughout history and up to the present day, Euro-Americans in the U.S. have always had the benefit of “affirmative action” arising out of their skin color. Today, when two equally qualified individuals, but one white and one black, present themselves for employment at the factory gate, the chances are that the white will be hired first—if that is not affirmative action the what is? In fact, the problem is more insidious than that: resumes with black-sounding names are less likely to be read than ones with white-sounding names by employers (see Bertrand and Mullainathan [2004]).
- 64. Page 63 of 89 African Americans—not to mention the dispossession of Native Americans.113 If the Africans brought over to the U.S. had been given the same privileges as their white counterparts to terrorize, brutalize and murder Native Americans by the hundreds of thousands in order to steal and despoil their land, then one can talk about “reverse discrimination” today. But, then, what about the rights of Native Americans? 114 It follows, on the basis of the foregoing, that measures (such as affirmative action programs in the U.S.) aimed at correcting the present-day consequences of past racially-determined inequities cannot be labeled “reverse racism.” Yet, despite the fallacy of reverse racism (or “reverse discrimination”), it has now become a much bandied about concept among conservatives in the U.S. to attack whatever progress that has been made in weakening institutionalized racism in the 1960s and 1970s following the struggles of the civil rights movement. Clearly, in a racist country, such as the U.S., the concept of “reverse discrimination” is a false concept; it is another racist gimmick dressed up in legal language to deny victims of centuries of racist discrimination access to what is rightfully theirs.115 8. Geographically-specific Sub-varieties of Racism In this exegesis of the concept of race/racism so far, the effort has been to look at it mainly from a generic perspective—albeit with a focus on the U.S. example. However, one would be grossly remiss if we did not also include a description of at least three geographically-specific sub-varieties of racism as an ideology and practice of oppression: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Whiteness. While all these three forms have their origin in Europe historically (especially Western Europe), today antisemitism and Islamophobia have become universal, while whiteness re- mains, for obvious reasons, a feature of Europe and other places where people of European ancestry are dominant (demographically, and/or socio-economically, and politically). Antisemitism (or anti-Semitism) is unlike any other kind of racism because it is a unique and exceptionally virulent form of racism in that genocide is already baked into this racist ideology of oppression (something that Nazi Germany, for example, tried to achieve in practice through its death squads, gas chambers, concentration camps, and the like, killing millions and millions of Europeans of Jewish ancestry116). In other words, an anti-Semite is always contemplating and working toward a world where there are no Jews alive at all. It is not simply a matter of religion, and in fact religion may not necessarily be an issue at all, but rather it is about an ethnic group as a whole—no matter what their religious beliefs, if any. Here is a thought experiment: what if all the Jews had converted to some other religion (Buddhism, or Christianity, or Islam, etc.), or had become atheists, in Nazi-occupied Europe? To the European anti-Semite it would not have mattered. But why? Because Jews had become, for historical reasons—beginning from the time of the Roman occupation of Judaea around 63 BCE, the subsequent revolt of the Jews against Roman rule, and their forcible dispersal from Judea as refugees, about 2000 years ago—a convenient scapegoat for the ills of a society, perpetrated by the ruling elites of the day. This scapegoating, initially through religious justification (Christianity being the main culprit here), and later secular justification (with industrial capitalism being the villain of the piece), was made possible because of their ethno- religious difference from the rest in their host societies. So, for example, for centuries, Christianity taught its adherents that Jews were “Christ- killers,” which of course was a complete myth. (Christ was killed by the Romans for political reasons.) Notice, however, that given that Jews were always a minority group, following their dispersal from Roman-occupied Judea, in any given host society (until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948), the Jewish identity that was the basis of antisemitism was itself a function of antisemitism—one depended on the other dialectically. In other words, over the millennia, had Jews not faced antisemitism, they would have disappeared through the natural processes of demographic and cultural absorption, as a distinctly identifiable ethnicity, because of their circumstance as a minority population. Today, while it has steadily receded in Europe and North America through the process of “whitening” (meaning Jews being considered a “white” people rather than an alien minority, as in the past117), antisemitism has become much more prevalent in the Islamic Middle East since the creation of the State of Israel (and its subsequent and ongoing persecution—aided and abetted by the United States—of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Palestine, as well as its occupation of the third holiest city of Islam, Jerusalem). Yes. It is true, that antisemitism has always been present in the Islamic world too, but it had never been as widespread and horrendously virulent as in Christian Europe. On the contrary, more often than not, Jewish communities in Islamic lands often thrived, such was the case, for instance, over most of the seven-hundred year Muslim rule of Spain, which of course was then followed by the infamous Christian-led Spanish Inquisition, as Muslim rule came to an end, that led to anoth- er massive diasporic dispersal of the Jews. (One reason being that Islam recognizes Judaism, as it does Christianity too, as a legitimate reli- 113. Mention should also be made of the fact that if Africans had not been forcibly brought over to the Americas and instead left alone in Africa to follow their own historical destiny, without any interference from colonialists and imperialists, today they would probably be as advanced (at the minimum) as Japan—the only country in the PQD to have escaped imperialist depredation. 114. Perhaps it is time to consider ways of compensating both Native Americans and U.S. African Americans for what the Europeans stole from them. (See Browne [1972] for a compelling argument on this matter.) 115. One more point worth noting: since racism is a function ultimately of power (and not the mythical superiority of the racist) it follows that: (i) at the societal level, the racial antagonism of victims against racists provoked by racism cannot be classified as racist behavior given the inability of the victims to negatively affect the life-chances of the racists with this “rebound” antagonism; and (ii) all human beings are potential victims of racism—including racists themselves— when racism is allowed to flourish against any group; all it takes is for the balance of power to shift. To take an example: in South Africa it will not be long be- fore the European racists who had subjected blacks to centuries of brutal racist oppression will begin complaining about “black racism”—though it will quite likely be more imagined than real (unless South Africa follows the retrogressive path taken by its neighbor, Zimbabwe) given the continuing EuroSouth African monopoly over economic power. Incidentally, the consequence of reversal of power relations for victimizers is well explored in the motion picture Planet of the Apes (1968). 116. The estimate used to be that around six million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators (usually ordinary Europeans) in a time period of roughly no more than ten years (1933-1945)! (And this is not counting probably an equal number of others—Poles, Russians, the Roma people, peo- ple with disabilities, homosexuals, Germans who opposed the Nazis, and so on, altogether.) New research, however, suggests that the numbers were probably much, much higher—possibly, ten million or more! See the report in the New York Times by Eric Lichtblau: “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking,” March 1, 2013. 117. See, for example, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America by Karen Brodkin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), and The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity by Eric L. Goldstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
- 65. Page 64 of 89 gion—after all, knowledgeable Muslims recognize the fact that their religious roots lie in both these religions, constituting together with the other two, the three dominant Abrahamic faiths.) So, what then is antisemitism, in a nutshell? It refers, at the ideological level, to the genocidal hatred (repeat—genocidal) of all peoples of Jewish ancestry on mythical grounds that Jews are a cunning and money-hungry people always plotting to take over the world (as mythologically outlined in that antisemitic fraudulent tract known as the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and at the socio-economic and political level it refers to such practices targeted at individuals and entire groups as employment discrimination, residential segregation, enslavement, murder, and mass-killings, often at the behest of ruling elites (as in the case of pogroms, of which the Holocaust is a prime example). Islamophobia. As one can surmise by parsing this word, this form of ethnicism has to do with the religion of Islam. One can begin by not- ing that relations between Islam and the West date back almost to the beginning of the founding of Islam in the 7th century; how- ever, the West’s view of Islam has almost always been through the lens of what may be called Islamophobia. And this continues to be true today. (See, for example, the Islamophobic article authored by Wood (2015) popularized by ultra-right zealots, as well as critiques of it by Dagli (2015); Haqiqatjou and Qadhi (2015); and Jenkins (2015). For a historical perspective, see also Hillenbrand (2000), and Meserve (2008).) So, what then is Islamophobia? It refers to a variant of racism (much like anti-Semitism) that rests on essentialist stereotypes that foster an irrational distrust, fear or rejection of Islam and those who are Muslims (or thought to be Mus- lims).118 While Islamophobia dates back almost to the period of the founding of Islam, as just noted, in recent times it has received considerable currency and legitimacy (especially in the West with the complicity of much of the Western corporate media, as well as academics and government officials—often hiding behind “freedom of speech” slogans) following the 9/11 tragedy in United States. Read, for example, Sandra Silberstein’s well-received book, War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11 that not only documents how language can be commandeered in the service of objectives that go well beyond simple communication, but also provides an illuminating window into the mechanics of the construction of ideologies of war (such as the current replacement of the Cold War, with the “War on Terror”). Of particular relevance is her last chapter (titled “Schooling America: Lessons on Islam and Geogra- phy”), in which she demonstrates how an opportunity, in the aftermath of 9/11, to mount a genuine effort to provide the U.S. citi- zenry (and the rest of the planet that subscribe to such U.S. television news channels as CNN) with an objective introduction to Islam—in terms of its history, basic tenets, and its far from insignificant role in the genesis of modern Western civilization—was, instead, often subverted to produce a caricatured image of Islam and Muslims well-suited to the task at hand of manufacturing a new global enemy to replace the one of yesteryear, communism. As she explains: “The geography [of Islam] Americans learned post 9/11 was of a particular sort. This was not a benign travelogue of cultural and historical highpoints. Rather, instruction focused on the military, political, and economic self-interest of the United States as it became involved in a region in which several of the coun- tries were presented as dangerous and incompetent. And the metaphors used to describe this area were often military” (p. 149).119 It should be pointed out that from the perspective of the Muslims living in Western countries, Islamophobia has also involved government sponsored projects to reconstruct the Muslim identity by suggesting implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, that Islam is a primitive and backward religion practiced by a backward peoples (the darkies) that is intrinsically violent and terrorism prone. Such an essentialist view, of course, is not only false but completely neglects to consider the historical truth, as those intimately familiar (in a scholarly sense) with both the history and practice of Islam know quite well, that its appearance on the stage of human history marked an important turning point toward the better for much of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene (and indirectly the rest of the world). It is not simply that Islam was marked by such deeply progressive ideas as education and social welfare as constituting the responsi- bility of the state (baitul mal), or that a highly inegalitarian class-fractured society was unjust (zakaat), or that an economic system that rested on unbridled capitalism was anti-democratic (laws of equity governing commerce), or that the conduct of war be based on principles akin to those agreed to at the Geneva Convention of 1864 and its later incarnations, or that reciprocal obligations between the state and the citizenry be constitutionally codified (dhimma), or that seeking knowledge (ilm) was an exceptionally wor- thy attribute, and so on, long, long before such ideas came into vogue elsewhere, but that without the Islamic civilization it is quite conceivable that there would be no Western civilization as we know it today. The question that emerges here, however, is this: Is the problem of Islamophobia simply one of ignorance and misunderstanding? Or is there something more going on in that Islamophobia is a symptom of a wider problem: the use of ideologies of prejudice in Western societies to underwrite domination and exploitation, internally and externally? The answer is that it’s the latter. That is, Islamophobia, whether in its past (Crusader era) or current (“war on terror”) guises, is not an aberration, but tied up with the construction of the Euro-Americo-Australasian identity. It is one of several ideologies of the “Other” that aims to render non-European peoples as merely “resident aliens” of this planet and which has been so instrumental in justifying and explain- ing both the past and the current global domination by the West. Whiteness. To start with, this is a sociological term—no, folks I did not invent it—and it refers to a racial ideology that is unique to those socie- ties today where Europeans (whites), or their colonial descendants, dominate other peoples in political and/or economic terms, against the backdrop of capitalism, and which is characterized by a number of fallacious beliefs—held consciously or subconsciously—that are all rooted in the notion of the supremacy of the “white race” (captured by the common phrase: white is right! white is might!). In other words, this is a sub-variety of racism (much like Antisemitism, and Islamophobia). In order to explain further what “whiteness” really means let me ask you 118. It ought to be mentioned here that sometimes one gets the sense as one travels around Europe and North America that the issue is not Islamophobia but what may be called “Arabophobia,” where the age-old racial hatred of Arabs is trundled out under the pretext of a “freedom of speech” criticism of Muslims. Of course, ignorance is also tied in because there is a lack of conscious awareness that not all Arabs are Muslims and vice versa. (On Muslims and the “freedom of speech” issue that the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in France highlighted see the excellent address (Trudeau, 2015) by the celebrated U.S. cartoonist Garry Tru- deau—of the Doonsbury comic strip fame—at an award ceremony.) 119. For additional sources on Islamophobia, past and present, see: Ahmed (2013); Allen (2010); Helbling (2014); Kundnani (2014); Lyons (2012); Meer (2014); Omidvar and Richards (2014); Rane, Ewart, and Martinkus (2014); Shyrock (2010); Trudeau (2015); and Van Driel (2004).
- 66. Page 65 of 89 to consider the following two quotes: The first is by Etherington (1989: 286-87) and it is part of his account of relations between the Europe- an settlers and missionaries in the colony of Natal (that would later become part of South Africa and which today is called KwaZulu-Natal) in the nineteenth-century. [A] settler complaint was that… missionaries attempted to convert people who were not capable of becoming true Christians. According to a Methodist district superintendent, the major reason why settlers would not contribute to missions was “skepticism as to the convert- ing power of the gospel upon the native population.” A candidate for the Legislative Council once told an election rally that a “corps of police officers could do more to civilize the Kaffirs, than all the missionaries in the Colony.” Lieutenant-Governor Pine reinforced local prejudice by telling the Methodists that experience had taught him “the extreme difficulty of really converting savage nations to a knowledge of our religion.…” It was as though the settlers unconsciously feared that Christian Africans would have a more powerful claim to equal rights than an uneducated population devoted to their ancient beliefs. This second quote is from Ostler (2004: 17-18) who seeks to explain the ideological premises of the dispossession of the U.S. Native Ameri- cans in the U.S. West following the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803 (as if it was theirs to sell in the first place). Though many men and women who “settled” western frontiers became virulent Indian haters and advocated extermination, most theo- rists offered assimilation as an alternative. Assimilation resolved the contradiction between a commitment to dispossession with its impli- cations of genocide on the one hand, and Enlightenment and Christian principles of the common humanity of all people on the other.… Yet the basic premise of assimilation, that Indian ways of life were inferior, was linked to increasingly systematized theories of racial classi- fication and hierarchy that tended to reinforce ontological thinking about race.… American elites eventually tried to resolve the contradic- tion between imperialism and humanitarianism through the idea that whereas rare individuals might become “civilized,” Indians were an inferior race that was inevitably destined to vanish. Although Americans knew at a practical level that Indians controlled a significant pro- portion of North America, on an ideological level they conceived of the entire continent as empty. O.K. So, what is my point? It is impossible for the psyche of a people to remain completely unaffected by their unprincipled and violent abro- gation of the rights (that is those subsumed by the Natural Law of Prior Claim) of other peoples over a period spanning centuries and on a scale that is simply unfathomable by the human mind—most especially when those so victimized continue to live among the interlopers. It is not surprising then that the denouement of such shameful markers in the history of the colonization of the United States and South Africa as the enslavement of Africans and Asians (in South Africa—1650s–1830s) and First Americans and Africans (in the United States—1500s– 1863/1865); the Hundred Year War (1799–1879); the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase (1803); the Trail of Tears (1838); and Wounded Knee (1890), on the ideological plane has been the development among the descendants of the European settlers of what may be described as the hegemony of the ideology of “whiteness.” United in their common history—that transcends class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and any oth- er social structural division one may care to identify—of gross criminality (in terms of crimes against humanity), a perverse racist sense devel- oped among them of entitlement to human and natural resources, before all other peoples, on the basis of nothing more than their skin pig- mentation. Fortified by the power to continue across centuries, all the way to the present, to impose hegemony upon others (and contrary to the logical expectation of feelings of remorse, the quest to seek forgiveness, the magnanimity to consider restitution, and so on, befitting a people that have never ceased to trumpet to this day their membership of a supposedly superior civilization) the descendants of the European colonial settlers elevated the notion of whiteness as signifying entitlement to privilege to one of Darwinian naturalness (or in the case of those of a religious mind a God-given right). While the literature on the subject of the hegemony of whiteness is burgeoning, a brief foray into its principal characteristics is all we can afford, folks, given limitations of time. There are seven central elements around which the ideology of whiteness is organized: a pervasive and stupefying ahistoricism; the deep illusion that whiteness is an immutable biologically determined concept, rather than one of contingency (exemplified by the profound inability to clearly and consistently define who a “white” person is across time and space); the fallacy that whiteness equals civilizational superiority (a Eurocentrist hubris); the preposterous belief that whiteness is a synonym for humanness; the notion of whiteness as “property”; the belief that possession of this property entitles one to privileges that others without this property are not entitled to; and the idea that what constitutes knowledge is a prerogative that belongs only to those who possess this property (and therefore, even describing and questioning whiteness, its practice, its historical antecedents, and so on is akin to dabbling in superstition). Using this framework as a starting point it is possible to do an analysis of the role of whiteness in society from the perspective of a wide range of topics, such as: 'White' as an unstable, time and place dependent ethnic category; Whiteness and 'normality' in the popular consciousness of Western citizenry; Whiteness as a determinant of social spaces; Whiteness as a determinant of power relations; Whiteness and urban planning; Whiteness and its intersection with class relations; Whitness and its interaction with race relations; Whiteness, and settler colonialism;
- 67. Page 66 of 89 Whiteness and imperialism; Whiteness and Marxism; The politics of whiteness in the academy; How whiteness determines personal identity; Whiteness, law and legal discourse; Whiteness and the justice system; The role of the media in the 'normalization' of whiteness (nationally and transnationally); Whiteness and cinema; White feminism and the interrogation of whiteness; Women of color and their interrogation of whiteness in white feminism; Whiteness and the politics of white supremacy (in the present and in the past); Whiteness and concepts of human beauty; Whiteness and Christianity; Columbus and the origins of whiteness; The history of the manufacture of the 'white race'; Whiteness and presidential politics in the U.S.; Whiteness and the politics of immigration; The politics of whites struggling against whiteness; People of color and their perception of whiteness; Whiteness and international relations; Whiteness and psychiatry; Whiteness and war; Whiteness and the globalization of Western culture Comparative white studies (Australia, Canada, Europe, South Africa, U.S., etc.). But of what relevance is the concept of whiteness to the subject matter of our course? Simple: as I have explained quite a few times, we can- not comprehend the functions of racism in this society without understanding this concept. The reason is that “whiteness” has become the ideational element in the ideational/structural dialectical binary that not only underwrites the material basis of the prosperity of the peas- ant/proletarian European interlopers and their descendants to this day, but also helps to shape the character of the relations that currently exist between whites and blacks in the U.S. There is however, one fly in the ointment in the analysis so presented: A question arises that is not so easily dispensed with: Exactly how does whiteness interact with the overall process of accumulation that in the last instance is the driving force of all capitalist orders? Very briefly: whiteness within the working-classes of European ancestry serves as an ideological vehicle for the subjecti- fication of the objective and the objectification of the subjective in the domain of class-relations, which in the end benefits capital. This ex- plains, for instance, why in the United States cross-racial working class alliances have been notoriously difficult to organize or sustain, permit- ting capital almost unfettered access to political power. It also explains, to turn to a wholly different time-period, why most of the poor whites in the slave-holding South (who could not afford to own slaves) supported the plantation aristocracy in maintaining the slave order—so much so that when that order came under severe threat they en masse took up arms in its defense (reference here is of course to the U.S. Civil War). A close reading of the foregoing, to sum up, should lead to this conclusion: whiteness performs a contradictory role. It is, at once, a source of privilege, and a source of oppression for the working classes of European ancestry; similarly, for capital whiteness serves to undermine accu- mulation as well as enhance it. In other words, like all ideologies whiteness is an inherently contingent cultural artifact in its practice; it all de- pends on the level and specificity of the analysis one undertakes, and the place and time-period in question, to comprehend the contradictory role of whiteness, today—as well as in the past. In one sense the policy of affirmative action has always existed in this country from the very beginning of European colonial settlement, in the shape of legalized racist and sexist discriminatory practices that gave preference to whites in general, and white males in particular, in all areas of the economy, politics and society (from employment to voting rights). In other words, white racism and sexism has always been another name for illegitimate “affirmative action”—in support of whiteness and patriarchy. Yet, when legitimate affirmative action policies were instituted beginning in the 1960s in order to help rectify the historically rooted injustices of racism and sexism, considerable opposition among whites (even among liberals—including, ironically, white females) to this policy emerged. (See also Essentialism, Jim Crow, Marginality, Other/Otherness, Race/Racism, Social Darwinism, White Southern Strategy, Ste- reotype, Textual Erasure.) 9. The Academic Study of Racism Given the complexity of the societal role of racism in the past and today—here in the United States and elsewhere in the world—it is not sur- prising that a number of different theories have been advanced by academics to grapple with it. For our purposes, these four (and only in brief) will have to do: (a) Racism from a Marxist perspective; (b) Racism and Feminist Theory; (c) Race and Law: The Critical Race Theory perspective; and (d) the Racial Formation Theory perspective. An immediate question that arises is which of these theories has the best explanatory/analytical power? The answer is that none of them and all of them. That is, each provides us with valuable insights into a given dimension of the sub- ject; therefore, one would do well to consider all of them together, as each has some value in advancing our understanding of the role of race/racism in a society like this one—that is, a capitalist democracy in the twenty-first century. What is important to note is that all of them consider, at least sub-textually, the end goal to be a victory for social justice for all, where no one is subjected to marginality and oppression of any kind (be it classism, sexism, racism, disablism, etc., etc.) Marxism, at least in its traditional approach, does not recognize racism as a subject worthy of study in its own right; in fact, the view is that it is a distraction from what should be the focus of all concerned with social justice in capitalist societies: namely, class and class struggle. After all, Karl Marx himself was, like many intellectual contemporaries of his day, a racist, but not, it is very important to emphasize, in the sense of
- 68. Page 67 of 89 rejecting the humanity of people of color (as represented, for example, by the Nazi perspective), but in the sense commonly prevalent today among many white liberals: that people of color remain intellectually backward, not necessarily for biological reasons but for historical reasons, and therefore continue to need the guiding hand of whites—a view characteristic of the “Great White Father” syndrome—if they are to achieve progress in their struggles for social justice. Not surprisingly, Marx saw European imperialism (including settler-colonialism) as a great boon for people of color in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and elsewhere. Eschewing the horrendous atrocities in which millions died, the massive exploitation, and the widespread injustice that was visited upon peoples of color across the planet by European imperialists, he saw imperial- ism as progressive force dragging them out of the mire of socio-economic backwardness and the “despotic” tyranny of their rulers onto the path of socio-economic progress and eventually liberation from all tyranny, including imperialism itself, as well as that of their traditional rulers. In terms of his overall vision, he saw all workers across the planet eventually uniting, irrespective of color or ethnicity, against that foremost tyr- anny that subjugates and exploits all workers: capitalism. In recent decades, especially in United States, Marxist revisionists (labeled Neo- Marxists), have come up with an alternative view on the matter of race/racism: that it should be considered as one of the three interrelated avenues of oppression, with class and gender being the other two. Moreover, some Neo-Marxists have also come to conclude that racism can be quite compatible with the interests of some segments of the working class—specifically, that represented by (though this is not the concept they apply), the labor aristocracy. The idea of a “labor aristocracy” in a capitalist society may appear to be an oxymoron par excellence, but upon brief reflection this is not necessarily so. It speaks to the fact that some sections of the working class enjoy socio-economic privileges far above the rest because of their structural location within the U.S. economy and simultaneously, for historical reasons, their white skin color (the labor market segmentation theory). Compare, for instance, the fortunes of the working class in the so-called hospitality industry with that of the working class in the aerospace or auto industries. Feminist Theory takes a similar approach to the Neo-Marxian approach to study of race/racism, in that it applies the concept of what it calls “intersectionality,” to the study of race/racism where its concern for gender (not class, as in the case of the Neo-Marxists) as its key organizing principle of its intellectual endeavors is tempered by the view that women of color in a capitalist and racist society are also simultaneously sub- jected to racism, classism, and other forms of oppression. The actual lived experiences of women of color for centuries, and up to the present, in this country has always been (and often continues to be) subject to a multiplicity of oppressions—and often simultaneously (imagine for a moment a woman of color who is poor, who is gay, who has a physical disability, and who faces gender discrimination at work). However, it took a woman of color professor of law, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, in the late 1980s, to give a name to this multidimensional experiences of oppression. Her theory of intersectionality, it is important to point out, was an effort at addressing the racism of many white feminists who had tended to wantonly neglect in their work the experiences of women of color. White women very often refused to see that not all oppres- sion facing women could be put down only to patriarchy, but rather that a substantial population of women also faced, at one and the same time, other equally powerful forms of oppression—such as that represented by classism and racism. After all, in so far as racism was and is concerned, white women also stand implicated (this was true in the past, and it is true today). Critical Race Theory, as the name suggests, is the application of critical theory (the idea that the fundamental basis of all critiques of social injus- tice must be rooted, above all else, in the critique of ideologies of oppression) to study of race. This approach first gained currency in legal studies beginning in the 1980s when a sizeable number of legal scholars who were people of color had achieved a sufficient mass in numbers in law schools to come together and challenge existing thinking by white scholars on the relationship between law and race. They were driven by the need to determine why the struggle for civil rights that the civil rights movement had produced had made little headway in eradicating institutional racism in United States. Their conclusion was that law was also to blame in the persistence of institutional racism; moreover, criti- cal race theorists called upon traditional scholars in the area of critical legal studies who studied race and civil rights to abandon their “color- blind” racism (in other words, they were accused of being institutional racists) and look afresh at how law could advance the continuing strug- gle for social justice—especially from the perspectives of race, class, and gender. Racial Formation is a term first coined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their book Racial Formation in the United States (first published in 1986, but now in its third edition) and it’s a play on the Marxian concept of social formation, and therefore, as can be deduced, suggests the his- torically-determined permeation of the factor of unequal “race relations” at all levels of society, and intersects with, but does not displace, such other dimensions of the social structure as class and gender. For Omi and Winant, in a country such as the United States, race as an avenue of oppression can take a life of its own separate from such other dimensions of oppression as class and gender. That is, given that race is a social- ly constructed category (and not, as we have seen, a biological category), its social construction has been in the service of specific “racial pro- jects,” depending upon a given historical time period, up to the present. Under these circumstances, “race” is an unstable ever changing catego- ry, depending upon the needs of the bourgeoisie in a given time period. For example, in recent U.S. history, at one time ethnicities such as Ital- ian Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, Greek Americans, Russian Americans, and so on, were not considered “white” and there- fore were not considered “full” U.S. Americans. Today, this is no longer so. To give another example: racial formation theory would suggest that the intensifying class warfare perpetrated by the bourgeoisie on the U.S. working classes through the processes of globalization (symp- tomatic of which, above all else, is the massive income and wealth inequality, perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history, effected through the sub- version of procedural democracy by the bourgeoisie), has called for another racial project in order to distract sections of the white working class from this warfare, and it is represented by racist right-wing populism in which the immediate target, that is first-level target, are not Afri- can Americans, as used to be the case traditionally, but other people of color, all swept together into the category “illegal immigrants” (which, from the perspective of this populism, not surprisingly, does not include white immigrants, legal or illegal, from Canada, Europe, and else- where)—and this is regardless of whether they are U.S.-born citizens or not. Of course, other factors may also come into play in this diver- sionary effort, such as gender or homophobia, but in this instance it is ancillary. Note also that just because African Americans are not the first- level target of this racist populism, they are not completely off its radar; they remain a second-level target.
- 69. Page 68 of 89 Racial Formation: See Race/Racism Rationality Fallacy: By this concept I am challenging the foundational belief of economists and other social science disciplines that human beings always act in their own self-interest because they are rational beings. Human beings may pride themselves as masters of the planet (an expression of what I call evolutionary hubris) because they have the most complex brain but that does not imply that they always think/behave logically or rationally, even when their own self-interest is at stake. In fact, I want to suggest that to act irrationally or illogically, at times, may be part of our genetic makeup as human beings (to ensure the survival of the species) because the evolution of all life is also a function of nothing more than serendipity. Reverse Discrimination/Reverse Racism: See Race/Racism. Right Wing: See Left/Right. Right/Left: See Left/Right. Royal Proclamation of 1763: A decree issued by the British Crown on October 7, that was aimed at eliminating the ever-escalating and costly armed conflicts between the colonists and U.S. First Americans by, in theory if not in practice, forbidding land-grabs by colonial land specula- tors of the former’s lands which the Act now specifically designated as lying west of the Appalachian Mountains, the crest of which constitut- ed the border. It was this decree together with such other legislation as the Quartering Act of 1765; the Stamp Act of 1765; and the Townshend Acts of 1767 that helped to precipitate the U.S. War of Independence.120 In other words, the fundamental source of the grievances of the domestic colonial elites against the British lay in such matters as settlement expansion, taxation, and the like that threatened to undermine their inexorable accumulation-driven greed. Their anti-British ire sprang essentially from the perception that the various measures that the British Parliament had enacted in the aftermath of the costly Seven Years’ War ([1756–63]—also variously known as The French War, The French and Indian War, and The Great War for Empire and which had benefited the colonists greatly by securing the defeat of French colonial designs in North America—for the purpose, quite reasonably and legitimately, of getting the hitherto lightly taxed U.S. colonists to assist with paying off the huge debts incurred by the British citizenry as a direct consequence of the war (as well as assist with tightening the grip of British suzerain- ty in the face of an increasingly sullen U.S. colonial elite), were the thin end of a wedge that would lead to unacceptable economic burdens down the road.121 Rule of Law: This jurisprudential concept is one of the foundational pillars of democracy; that is, no rule of law, no democracy. At the sim- plest level the concept of the “rule of law” simply means that not only do laws govern relations between the government and the citizenry, but no one, not even the government, is above the law; everyone must obey the law. (To what extent this concept is implemented in practice in a given society that professes to be a democracy is, of course, a different matter.) However, like the concept of democracy itself, when one probes deeper into the meaning of this concept (rule of law), then one finds important variations depending upon which society one is con- sidering and what time period. For example, in those societies where there are multiple sources of law (e.g. in many countries in Africa and the Middle East where traditional pre-colonial law exists side by side with Western colonially derived law—a situation that may be referred to as jurisprudential pluralism) this concept will have different meanings. However, given that our focus is North America, specifically the United States, for our purposes the concept of the rule of law, at the theoretical level, should be understood to carry with it, at the minimum, these subset of contingent conditions (listed in no particular order)—which, needless to say, may not all be necessarily practiced: Theremustbeabodyofrelevantlawsthatthecitizenrymustobey,andtheymustbewrittenclearlywithoutambiguity;andtheymustbepublicly accessibletoeveryone—thatis,lawsmustbepublishedinsomeformsothatanyonewhowishestodosocanfindoutwhatthelawisregarding agivenmatter.Notethataccessibilityalsoimpliesthatlawsmusthavesufficientlongevitytopermitthepublictogettoknowwhatthelawisbe- foreitischangedforwhateverreason.(Forexample,adoptingalawinoneweekandthenchangingitinthenext,andthenchangingitagain— andsoon—createsuncertaintyastowhatthelawsaysonagivenmatter.) Lawsareapplicableonlyaftertheyhavebeenadopted(so,forexample,apersoncannotbechargedwithbreakingthelawifatthetimetheper- sonsupposedlybrokethelaw,thelawwasnotyetonthebooks—thatis,hadnotbeenpassed).Notethattherecanbecircumstanceswherea lawisapplicableretroactivelybutnotusuallyinthecaseofcriminallaw. Lawsmustbepassedbyademocraticallyrepresentativelegislativebodywherethesetwoelementsofthepoliticalsystemareinforce:theruleof themajoritywhileatthesametimeprotectingtherightsoftheminority. Lawsmustnotexistonlyforthepurposeofcreatingorderandrespectforauthority;therefore,lawsthatviolatethehuman/civilrightsoftheciti- zenrycannotbeconsideredasinviolable(thatis,lawsmustnotbetyrannical). 120. Although some of these measures were repealed the following year because of impudent intransigence on the part of the colonial elites, the damage to the legitimacy of continuing British colonial presence was now irreversible. 121. The “American Revolution,” as the War of Independence is also known, was a revolution from above; consequently it had little to do with democracy per se. The Revolution at its core was nothing more than a conflagratory overthrow of the hegemony of one section of the elite (colonial) in preference for that of another (domestic), in which the masses, even though participants in the conflagration, did not act to secure their own interests—the existence of the safety valve of abundant lands to pillage having dulled their senses in this regard, coupled with the elite-inspired emergent ideology of nationalism. The socio- economic and political consequences of this history continue to hound us to the present day; the clearest symptom of which is the constant glorification of the hollow shell of procedural democracy (in lieu of building corporeal democracy) by U.S. capital and its allies, even as the masses look on. As Gregg (1997: 273) states pithily: “the endurance of pluralism and the potential for liberal change in the United States appears less likely to be a rule of history than a luxury enjoyed by the lucky few.”
- 70. Page 69 of 89 Lawsmustbeenforcedinapoliticalcontextwherethepoliticalsystemadherestotheconceptofseparationofpowersinwhichtheindependenceof thejudiciaryissacrosanct. Lawsmustbeenforcedinalegalcontextwherethejusticesystem(police,courts,andprisons)istransparent,efficient,andfair. Becauseweliveinacapitalistsociety,lawsmustbeenforcedinasocio-politicalcontextwherethepowerful(thebourgeoisie)donotusetheirun- fairadvantageinaccessingfinancialandpoliticalresourcestocynicallymanipulatethejudicialsystemfortheirbenefit.Inotherwords,contradic- torythoughthismayappearatfirstglance,lawsalonecannotcreateajustsociety;therefore,theymustbesupplementedwithasocio-political frameworkofrules,regulations,institutions,moraltraditions,etc.thatpromotesocialjustice.122 Satire: Defining satire is about as difficult as defining humor itself. For not only does it occur in many different forms of humor (literary hu- mor, stand-up comedy, political cartoons, comics, and so on) but it also has many roles to play, depending upon what culture and society one is looking at. Going by George A. Test (1991:12), who to date provides the most complete treatment of the subject yet available, defines satire in this way: Satire may more easily be explained and understood as a bent possessed by many human beings but more highly developed in some indi- viduals and expressing itself in an almost endless variety of ways. The aptitude may reveal itself in a mock nursery rhyme or a mock office memo, in a takeoff on a film genre, in graffiti, poetry or fiction, in mock opera, in newspaper cartoons, in a seemingly endless number of ways. The faculty, if that is the best word for it, will in its essence manifest itself in an expression or act that in various ways combines ag- gression, play, laughter, and judgment. Each of these acts or expressions is a complicated form of behavior particular to an individual but also influenced by a person's social environment and ultimately by that persons culture. Satire, then, is the permutation to varying degrees, depending upon the nature of the satiric work or satiric expression, of four basic ele- ments: (a) aggression, (b) play, (c) laughter and (d) judgment. Satire involves verbal aggression. To elaborate: (a) The satirist employs satire in order to give vent to his/her anger, dislike, frustration, intolerance, hatred, indignation and the like at or about someone or something via verbal aggression. As Test (1991:260) aptly puts it: Whenever and wherever there have been differences among persons and groups--personal, social, religious, philosophical, political--there have been strong emotions aroused that have expended themselves in verbal aggression. Kings, dictators, and presidents, wars and revolu- tions, racial antagonism, social movements--Socrates, Lewis Phillipe, Richard Nixon, the Revolution of 1688, various phases of the wom- en's movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Reformation --whenever the social structure has been threatened or frag- mented, various expressions of satire have erupted. The verbal aggression can be of the direct kind (as in name-calling) or as is more often the case in public, indirect (as in a play or a mythical story involving anthropomorphic animals), but the overall objective remains the same: at the immediate level to make the targeted person(s) or group(s) appear foolish or stupid or less important or lowly or satanic, etc. The level of directness of aggression is inversely pro- portional to the degree of fictionality involved in the satiric story or expression. That is the greater the degree of use of fictional elements, in a satiric story for example, the less direct will the verbal aggression be perceived. At the same time, the level of directness is inversely proportion- al to the status and power held by the target of the satire--that is, the more powerful the person(s) being targeted by the satirist, the more likely that the satiric story or expression will be clothed by the satirist (unless he/she is suicidally inclined) with fictional elements in order to make the verbal aggression embodied by the satiric attack indirect. Obviously, satire is not without risks to its practitioners. Angered targets may retaliate, and in fact throughout history there are examples of satirists who have been persecuted (Voltaire, Daumier, Defoe, the editors of the magazine private Eye, etc.). The more recent example, as Test (1991:11-12) reminds us, is that of the Palestinian political cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who suf- fered not only deportation from Lebanon and Kuwait, but was also a target of an assassination attempt while in exile in London; he died a month after he was shot on July 29, 1987. (b) Linked together with verbal aggression in satire is the paradoxical element of play. Hence even as the satirist attacks his/her victim he/she often does it in the context of playfulness. The playfulness is usually there to temper the verbal aggression. Two examples will illustrate this point: the court jester in the royal households of Europe of yesteryear and the celebrity 'roaster' of today in the U.S.; they both engage in satire, but it is acted out in the context of playful merrymaking. Play does not only take this concrete form in satire; it can also take the form of an imaginary kind--as when fables, fantasies and allegories are constructed. Whatever form play takes in satire, its central role remains the same: to permit satiric expression without offending its target to the point of inviting retaliation. Play, in other words, helps (like fictionality) to render the verbal aggression of the satire indirect. (c) Laughter, of course, is an essential element of satire since satire is a form of humor. In fact, there is no such thing as humorless satire. However, it should be noted that laughter is to be understood here in its broadest sense--referring to any degree of amusement; ranging from a sly grin to a roar of thunderous laughter. Satirists will incorporate whatever technique of inducing laughter they may be comfortable with in their satire: farce, parody, burlesque, exaggeration, etc. From the perspective of the satirist, laughter is absolutely crucial to his/her en- terprise; for it serves as the hook to pull in the audience--the greater the potential for laughter present in the satire, the greater its popularity, and consequently the larger the potential audience (leaving aside those who are the targets of the satire) for the work of the satirist. Besides providing obvious pleasure of entertainment to those who choose to sample the satire, laughter has another function too: it acts to serve the role of adding insult to injury from the perspective of the person(s) or group(s) targeted. That is, in linking laughter with verbal aggression the satirist renders his/her satire even more potent and devastating--with sometimes negative consequences for the satirist if the target happens to be powerful and intolerant. Yet, on the other hand, laughter can also serve the role in satire of weakening the sting of the verbal aggression. 122. There is a very well-known saying by Sir Edward Coke (a famous lawyer in sixteenth century England) that captures this point well: “a good judge decides according to justice and right and prefers equity to strict law.” (Coke on Littleton, 24)
- 71. Page 70 of 89 This would be especially the case if the target of the satire joins in with the laughter--as in the case of court jesting or celebrity roasting for example. In such a situation laughter serves to sugarcoat the aggression of the satirist. (d) The fourth major element on which satire rests, according to Test (1991), is judgment. That is until the satirist makes a judgment on who or what should be the target of his/her satire (whether it is a person or a group of people, whether it is an institution or an organization, whether it is a society or a culture, whether it is a style of life or a fashion of dress, whether it is religion or politics, whether it is a work of art or music, whether it is a book or an article, whether it is a profession or a vocation, or whatever else it may be) it remains a neutral artistic ex- pression. As he puts it: ''It is aggression waiting for a target; it is laughter waiting for a stimulant; it is play waiting for a game.'' (p. 27) In other words, once the satirist has taken hold of satire it ceases to be neutral, it is transformed into a weapon; and the purpose to which it is put is varied indeed: it has been used for the best of intentions and the worst of intentions, and in support of the best of causes and the worst of causes. ''It has been used by malicious, envious, and spiteful persons and it has been used by idealistic and moral persons. It has been used by person in all walks of life, all kinds of cultures and systems of government in countries all over the world. It has been used to attack govern- ments and to bolster governments, it has been used to attack and to defend religion.'' (p. 28) Having looked at the key elements that make up satire, it remains to look at a special problem that afflicts almost all satire: that of communication. In order for satire to succeed it must be perceived by the audience as satire and nothing else. Satire is both highly localized humor (bound to a specific time and place) and highly demanding. The audience must not only be conversant with the context out of which a particular piece of satire has emerged (be it political, religious, social, economic, etc.), but must also be in sympathy with the motivations of the satirist (unless the audience itself is the target of the satire) to the point where it can appreciate the unique elements that make up the satire: verbal aggression, play, laughter and judgment. Under the circumstances, the potential for communication failure is considerable--for satire makes a great deal of demand on the knowledge, intellect and tolerance of the audience. In fact, as Test (1991:253) puts it, ''[t]he demands of satire and its irony for special knowledge and choosing among values gives satire a unique capacity for alienating an audience, quite apart from any individual irony blindness--inability to pay attention, lack of practice, incapacity for attaining the appropriate emotional state... " (See also ironical allegory, parody.) Scapegoat: A person or group of people who become the target of anger, prejudice, resentment, oppression, etc. because of a belief that he/she/they is/are responsible for one’s problems, failures, immoral behavior, and so on—even though that is entirely untrue, not borne out by facts. Blaming others not responsible for difficulties one is experiencing appears to be a common human attribute and a favorite political strategy of demagogues—who, obviously, thrive on bullying the powerless—in their effort to whip up support. When a group of people are scapegoated, a potent reinforcement for this strategy will usually be found in the deployment of malignant stereotypes of this group (who more often than not tend to be weak in terms of political and economic power, relative to those targeting them). Not surprisingly, ideologies of oppression (ethnicism, racism, sexism, classism, etc.) rely heavily on the strategy of scapegoating. Incidentally, ancient Greeks ritually practiced scapegoating by blaming some calamity and the like on a powerless person or outcast (a pharmakós) and most unfairly and tragically driving the person out of the community by force. However, the term as we know it today comes from the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Bible), specifically, the third book known as the Book of Leviticus where the directive is for an actual goat to be sent into the desert, symbolically carrying with it the sins of the community (the Israelites). Here is the relevant passage: 16:7 Then he is to take the two goats and present them before the LORD at the entrance to the tent of meeting. 16: 8 He is to cast lots for the two goats—one lot for the LORD and the other for the scapegoat. 16:9 Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the LORD and sacrifice it for a sin offering. 16:10 But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the wilderness as a scapegoat. Settler-colonialism: A variant of colonialism, referring to colonization that entailed settlement by colonial populations. Such settlement was usually, but not always, permanent—compare the colonization experiences of Kenya and South Africa. Shi’a: those who belong to the other (much smaller) part of the major division that arose in Islam over the question of the rightful heir to the Islamic caliphate. The Shi’a pressed the claims of Ali (the son in law of Prophet Muhammed) and his descendants, in opposition to the Sun’ni (who supported claims to the caliphate based not on blood lines but consensually determined elections—hence their recognition of the Um- mayads). It should be noted that neither parts of this major schismatic division recognizes the legitimacy of the other as members of the Um’mah, that is, as authentic Muslims. Social Change/Social Transformations: Those who study history, especially comparative history, are burdened by the constant and sober- ing reminder that no matter how intelligently purposeful human beings may consider themselves, at the end of the day—that is, in the last instance—social transformations (meaning macro-level social change) are as much a product of chance and circumstance as directed human endeavors (in the shape of “social movements”—broadly understood). To put the matter differently: any teleological order that may appear to exist in the history of social transformations is in reality a figment of the historian's imagination. History, in the sense of historiography, is, ultimately, a selective chronicle of a series of conjunctures of fortuitously 'propitious' factors where the role of human agency, while not entire- ly absent (hence the qualifier: ultimately), is, more often than not, far from pivotal to the social transformation in question. Stephen K. Sander- son, in his book Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development (Blackwell, 1995), makes this point with even greater clarity: [I]ndividuals acting in their own interests create social structures and systems that are the sum total and product of these socially oriented individual actions. These social structures and systems are frequently constituted in ways that individuals never intended, and thus individ- ually purposive human action leads to many unintended consequences. Social evolution is driven by purposive or intended human actions, but it is to a large extent not itself a purposive or intended phenomenon. (p. 13)
- 72. Page 71 of 89 (See also Conjuncture of Fortuitously Propitious Historical Factors.) Social Darwinism: A thoroughly misguided and scientifically discredited ideology, that drew succor from the ideology of the Other, popular in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—propounded by people like Francis Galton,123 Herbert Spencer, Walter Bage- hot, and William Graham Sumner—that viewed human societies through the lens of the concept of “natural selection” that Charles Darwin had proposed as part of his theory of evolution and pithily summarized by Spencer with the oft quoted line: “survival of the fittest.” In sum, the social Darwinists believed that life was akin to a crapshoot and only those (individuals, societies, nations, races, etc.) who possessed, sup- posedly, “superior” genes were deservedly best suited to survive it; thereby ensuring a continuous evolutionary “purification” process which in turn would lead to societal “self-improvement.” To varying degrees (depending upon how fervent they were about their ideology), such desira- ble human qualities as charitableness, kindness, love, generosity, altruism, benevolence, righteousness, justness, fairness, and so on were viewed, either explicitly or subtextually, as weaknesses that interfered with the “natural law” of the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism, as one can guess, proved to be of great help in providing the ideological justification for such evil projects and movements as colonialism, imperialism, eugenics, fascism, racism, and so on. In the twentieth century, social Darwinism’s vilest achievement was, of course, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. It is important to note that social Darwinism in its slightly milder form continues to hold sway today, especially on the right (e.g. among political conservatives and advocates of laissez-faire capitalism). (See also Essentialism, Other/Otherness, Stereotype.) Social Formation: A sociological concept that, in simple terms, refers to the historically determined totality of institutional structures and practices at all levels of society: economic, political, and ideological (to name just three). Social Safety Net: This is a kind of “insurance policy” for the capitalist system against the possibility of ordinary class-struggles (e.g. trade- union activity) spiraling out of control into revolutionary upheavals that would cripple the system or destroy it altogether. In other words, the social safety net is one of the key hallmarks of a democratic-capitalist society (respect for the rule of law, human rights, civil rights, etc. being among others). There is a profound irony here in that even though the capitalist system as a whole benefits from the existence of a social safety net, it is instituted at the behest of the working classes (by means of class struggle) and not the capitalist class itself. So, what exactly is a social safety net? It is wages, both monetary and in kind, paid out to the public by society—hence it’s a form of public wages—that come out of taxes paid by the citizenry in order to ensure that the weak and the vulnerable (the young, the old, the disabled, the sick, the unemployed, the poor, and so on) are protected to some extent from the negative (predatory) consequences of capitalism that under- mine the overall quality of life of the citizenry—including protection from utter destitution. As you can guess, the term comes from the fact that it is analogous to the safety net that hangs below a high-wire act in, say, a circus. However, there is another irony here: many of the benefi- ciaries of the social safety net, today, do not appear to comprehend this fact. The social safety net, therefore, is not a charity, as conservatives would like you to believe; rather it is a mechanism for ameliorating (albeit in the mildest way) the socially deleterious consequences of that axiom of capitalism: “profits before people.” Consider this: it is not a coinci- dence that in every country in the world today—repeat, every country—where political chaos and mayhem reigns, there is an absence of either any kind of a social safety net or a social safety net that only exists, for the most part, on paper; that is, it does not work in practice for a num- ber of reasons, chief among them being corruption and the absence of the rule of law. Taking the example of the United States, the key components of the social safety net (which for the most part has been, for obvious rea- sons, the handiwork of Democrats, not Republicans)—depending upon which state you reside in (some states have weaker social safety-nets than others, especially those in the South)—include: the minimum wage; social security; food stamps; tax-payer-funded education (schools, colleges, etc.); tax-payer subsidized transportation services (rail, subway, buses, etc.) unemployment insurance; disability insurance; Medicare; Medicaid; personal bankruptcy; welfare; tuition assistance; Head Start Program; Veterans Affairs Healthcare System; 123. Incidentally, Galton was the first to coin the term eugenics when he proposed the despicable fallacy of “improving” societies by selective breeding of hu- man beings. As he wrote: “We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viviculture, which I once ventured to use.” (Galton, Francis. Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development. Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT: 2004 [1907] p. 17, footnote 1.)
- 73. Page 72 of 89 public libraries; and so on. It should not be surprising that the social safety net is always—repeat, always—among the key permanent elements of class struggles in any capitalist democracy. (No folks; prisons are not part of the social safety net.) Incidentally, a social safety net also exists for the bourgeoisie (even though they don’t need one); though, of course, it’s never portrayed as such. What are some of the elements of the social safety net for the bourgeoisie? They include: financial bail-outs; tax-breaks; bonuses; stock options; so-called “right-to-work” (anti-collective bargaining) legisla- tion; and so on. See also Bourgeoisie; Class-struggle; Democracy; Public Wages Social Structure: As is often the case in the social sciences, this term has different meanings depending upon who is using the term. From a general perspective, it can be used to refer—in a non-reified sense, it must be emphasized—to the major groupings of people connected to each other, both consensually and coercively, at the macro level by means of a relatively stable historically-determined socio-political and economic matrix of web-like connections. It is this constellation of groupings that we popularly call “society.” In my classes, however, I use the term primarily to refer to the arbitrary (usually) division of society in a hierarchic order by those in power (the ruling class) along one or more crite- ria, such as economic power, race, ethnicity, gender, age, income, and so on. This division is not always necessarily de jure, it can simply be de facto given the nature of existing power-relationships. So, for example, the hierarchic “racial structure” in this society today is far less a function of law than of historically-determined institutional, cultural, and ideological practices (though, one can legitimately argue that law is involved through the backdoor, so to speak, in so far as these practices are mediated by the state). Socialization: Refers to the process of passing values, norms, mores, etc. from one group of people to another—e.g. from the older genera- tion (parents) to the younger generation (children), or from a peer-group to a new member of the group. This process involves agencies of socialization (which range from the family to the church; from the state to the school; from peers to the media; and so on.) Socialization, there- fore, involves processes of formal and informal education in which the learner is not always conscious of what he/she is being taught. Be- cause the process of socialization begins at a very early age and takes place via many diverse agents (through usually informal means) it is a process that is powerful enough to withstand most pressures that may work toward reversing it. Given the power and ubiquity of mass media, socialization can also occur cross-generationally. Consider that even children of recent migrants to racist societies will pick up racist tendencies. Socially Responsible Capitalism: See Democracy Society: Societies do not exist as concrete objects that you can see, touch, or feel. Rather, they are intangible social constructions comprising a bundle of historically-determined highly, highly complex and generally persistent set of hierarchic socio-economic and political relationships among a group of geographically-bounded (usually) human beings, which they may or may not enter into willingly as they live out their lives, first and foremost, as biological entities (meaning their existence is primarily governed, as in the case of all mammals, by the genetically- determined remorselessly inescapable quest for food, shelter, and reproduction, and secondarily by almost everything else—religion, politics, and so on.) Now, it is important that you understand this fact: when sociologists make statements about societies as a whole, they do so on the basis of identifying, through peer-reviewed studies and research, broad thematic patterns among these relationships. Consequently, there will always be some individuals within these societies who do not fit some of these patterns. Therefore, if you, as an individual, find that your per- sonal experiences do not reflect some of the statements made in this course, it does not imply that the statements are not applicable to a broad group of others. You, by yourself, are not society. So, take a chill pill and calm down. Southern Strategy: See White Southern Strategy Spaghetti Westerns: Low budget western films—the fictional film genre that glorified the settlement of the frontier in the western part of the U.S., with the cowboy as the quintessential protagonist—made by Italians and Spanish and filmed on location in the geographic locales of Spain and Italy that resembled the U.S. Southwest. These films often featured U.S. Hollywood film stars, who were either in the twilight or in the dawn of their filmic careers, in key roles. State: Denotes a socio-political spatially bounded entity at the center of which is to be found a formally and coercively organized hegemonic central political authority. While the state simultaneously exists as both an abstract as well as a concrete entity, it should not be confused with what is commonly referred to as the government.124 In its concrete manifestation, however, the state is readily visible via its various coercive “ap- paratuses” (e.g., the legislature, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the army, etc.) that together constitute what is popularly known as the “govern- ment.” 125 Behind this seemingly benign definition of the state, it is necessary to stress that there is considerable controversy among political scientists over its nature and function stemming from this key question: In a modern capitalist democracy, whose interests does the state really represent? While seemingly easy to answer, this question has caused much acrimonious disagreement—and viewed historically, contention 124. One way to comprehend the difference between the state and the government is to look at the example of political systems—such as constitutional mon- archies and parliamentary political systems—where the head of state and the head of government reside in two separate offices. In other words, governments (or administrations as they are referred to in this country) can come and go, but states are generally permanent and are symbolically represented by things like the flag, the national anthem, the currency, and so on. 125. Folks, this term should not be confused with the term “state” as used to denote a fragment of a federal political system (e.g., as in “New York state, Michi- gan state,” and so on).
- 74. Page 73 of 89 over this issue in some other parts of the world (as in the former Communist countries) has been the basis of revolutionary upheavals.126 The conventional wisdom of course (especially in the West) is that the democratic capitalist state serves everyone’s interest, not a particular group’s interests. It is a neutral arbiter among competing interest groups in a context where its principal function is to supply public goods (services) and to regulate and facilitate the operation of the capitalist market for commodities (understood in the broadest sense to mean anything that can be bought and sold). People who hold this position (such as Baumol 1965, and Verba and Nie 1972) may be termed pluralists. Others hold that the state is an epiphenomenon of the economic base where its principal function is to serve as an instrument of the capitalist class (the wealthy and powerful who own the major means of production)—via the state’s monopoly of the power of coercion—in order to dominate the working class economically and politically. Those who hold this position (such as Becker 1977 and Miliband 1969) may be called instrumen- talists. Still others, such as Althusser 1971 and Poulantzas 1978 (who may be called the structuralists) hold that the state, while serving the interests of the capitalist class, does so in such a way that members of this class do not even have to be directly involved with the state (e.g., occupying a particular bureaucratic position). This becomes possible because of the way modern capitalist societies are structured where the function of the state is to (a) maintain societal cohesion via ideological transformation of bourgeois interests into general societal interests in the face of disintegrative tendencies arising from class antagonisms; (b) engender class cohesion within the bourgeoisie in the face of disintegrative tendencies arising out of competition between individual capitalists; and (c) engender disunity within the subordinate classes so as to prevent a concerted opposition against the bourgeoisie. The coincidence of bourgeois interests with the interests of the state is a product of the objec- tive relationship between the state and the capitalist socio-economic system and not a subjective relationship between the state and the bour- geoisie; therefore, the bourgeoisie do not have to occupy positions of power within the state apparatuses. Then there are those such as Habermas (1976), O’Connor (1973), and Offe (1984)—who may be called systems theorists—they theorize that the state should be seen as a political input-output mechanism that exists to guarantee capitalist accumulation—necessary in part to allow for the state’s own reproduction. In this role it requires an input of mass political loyalty in order to generate an output of autocratic administrative decisions aimed at correcting the inherently crisis ridden characteristic of capitalism. This role of the state, however, is contradictory because intervention within the economy on the side of the capitalist class leads to an erosion of its legitimacy within the rest of society—as its appar- ent neutrality is stripped away—producing for it a crisis of “legitimation.” Consequently, the capitalist state is immeshed in a crisis laden politi- cal system and the solution to which can only emerge via the replacement of capitalism with socialism. People such as Altvater (1973) and Hirsch (1977) represent those who may be termed derivationists; their position is that the specific form of the capitalist state cannot be divorced from the inherently exploitative nature of the capitalist relations of production, on the contrary it is derived from these relations. However, in order to obfuscate and thereby render palatable this exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class, the state creates a dichotomy be- tween the “economic” sphere and the “political” sphere. The domination of the state in the political sphere then allows it to create the illusion of a democratic political and economic system via its stance of apparent class neutrality—thereby ensuring mass loyalty to the state and through it the capitalist system, even as the state (as an “ideal collective capitalist”) engages in actions aimed at countering the inherent tendency for the rate of profit to fall in capitalist systems.127 These actions include: securing those external conditions necessary for maintenance of the capitalist relations of production that cannot be entrusted entirely to market forces (e.g., infrastructure); redistribute revenues and/or intervene in the circulation process so as to favor economically strategic capitalists and/or secure the reproduction of wage labor; promote long-term development of productive forces through such various measures as funding “research and development” programs; and providing support 126. The reason for this disagreement is not far to seek: depending upon what “theory” one has as to whose interests the state really represents, one will be motivated to adopt certain political positions regarding the legitimacy of the state. Depending upon the theory in question, it can range all the way from apathet- ic acceptance of the legitimacy of the state to co-operative acceptance on to apathetic non-acceptance and even further: active opposition to the state in the form of revolutionary war. The contentious basis of the question (i.e., whose interests the state represents) is, therefore, clearly evident. Any theory of the state is of necessity a composite of two dialectically related halves: the heuristic and the normative; hence this implies that a theory of the state is ultimately a program of social action. Alford and Friedland (1985) make this very point in a dramatic way when they say that state theories have “power.” This power is manifest in several ways: (a) How one interprets state behavior at the political, legislative, or administrative levels depends on the theory one subscribes to. (b) Theories of the state help to form the consciousness of social groups in terms of what is permissible and what is not with respect to the state, thereby pointing to the “power” of theory to dominate behavior. They give an example by saying that “a hypothesis about whether the police are likely to arrest some- one for sitting-in at the mayor’s office is a theory of probable state action” (p. 388) (c) State theories have hegemonic power over categories of language. This is evidenced via latent assumptions about what behaviors belong to the public do- main and what behaviors belong to the private domain—thus pointing to an implicit theory about state-society boundaries. Therefore, as they explain, “[c]larity on the theoretical issues may contribute to a more precise understanding of the potential for new leaders, policies, and social movements to significantly chal- lenge the drift into economic crises, political and cultural repression, and war. … Theories motivate people to act and rationalize those actions afterward. … If the theory is correct and the conditions under which the action takes place are compatible with the theory, the intended outcomes are more likely than not. In this respect, theory has powers” (Alford and Friedland 1985: 3–4). Consequently, accepting an existing theory of the state, or constructing a new state theory, boils down to making a choice between accepting, for example, the present political, social and economic practices of modern industrial societies, or working toward their change for the better. For, to construct new theories of the state is to call for a change in the status quo. It is ultimately for this reason that common agreement on the acceptance of a single theory of the state be- comes impossible; hence, it is not uncommon to see fur fly when the issue of the state is brought up among political scientists. 127. The concept of the “falling rate of profit” is used to explain the tendency of capitalist economic systems to undergo, over time, cyclic phases of “boom” and “bust.” It is defined as the phenomenon where businesses, in the face of competition from other businesses, combat both labor costs and the rising unit cost of production by resorting to increasing mechanization and automation. This increase in the ratio of machinery to labor, however, produces its own con- tradiction: a declining rate of profit as costs at the macro-economic level, brought about by the increased investment in machinery, accelerates. Therefore, even though unit costs may decrease, the decrease is achieved on the basis of rising overall production costs that lead to falling profits, especially as the substitution of labor with machinery reaches the point of saturation imposed by the existing limits of knowledge and technology. The long-term consequence of declining rates of profit at the macro-economic level is that, eventually, a system wide economic crisis (commonly known as a “recession”) is set in motion as disincentives to further investment emerge, inventories begin to build up due to lack of sales, labor is fired, and so on. For more on the concept of “falling rates of profit” see Shaikh (1982).
- 75. Page 74 of 89 assistance for the entire capitalist class in their competition with other capitalist classes on the world market (e.g., erecting tariff barriers, inter- vening diplomatically and/or militarily where possible when situations call for it in the world, and so on). As if these are not enough, there are still more theories of the state: there is the managerial theory of the state. Here people such as Birn- baum (1981), Block (1980), Dahrendorf (1959) and Evans, Rueschemeyer, Skocpol (1985) argue that the state is controlled by bureaucrats called “state managers” and not capitalists. However, the coincidence of interests of capitalists and those of the state managers is a function of the need for the state to maintain its revenue base, as well as guarantee its legitimation vis-à-vis the public. The need to maintain “business con- fidence” therefore underwrites state activities in the area of reproduction of capitalist relations and accumulation. The state functions as an autonomous actor, placed intermediately, between the working class and the capitalist class. Then there is the corporatist theory of the state; its proponents include: Cawson (1986), Grant (1985), Panitch (1980), and Schmitter (1974). Their position is that the state is the embodiment of the common good and this serves as the basis for its legitimacy. Therefore, the state does not have to reflect the democratic will of the people. In a corporatist society the state as an independent political authority mediates between, as well as directs, select state licensed organizational- ly-based economic interests (e.g., employer organizations, trade unions, and so on). In such a society, political participation occurs only through these officially sanctioned organizations. Corporatism is the logical (and desirable) outcome of the decay of pluralism. Yet another theory is the racial theory of the state that posits the state, such as the one in United States, as comprising a panoply of institutions—but considered together with, in the words of its chief proponents, Omi and Winant, “the policies they carry out, the conditions and rules which support and justify them, and the social relations in which they are imbedded,” —in which race (depending upon the institutions and historical moment in question) occu- pies “varying degrees of centrality” (Omi and Winant, 1994: 83, emphasis in the original). Here, one can also add some of the work of the critical race theorists as constituting contributions to a formulation of the racial theory of the state.128 This summary of the major theories of the state will end with one more: it may be called, for want of a better term, the articulated theory of the state. Chief proponents of this theory are Alford and Friedland (1985). Their argument is that all theories of the modern capitalist state can be categorized into three principal sets: pluralist, managerial (statist) and class (Marxist). Each set of theories has a home domain in which the cogency of their analysis is unrivaled: for the pluralists it is at the micro-level analysis of the state (e.g., the individual, such as the chief executive officer of a corporation), for the managerialists it is at the meso-level (e.g., the organization, such as a business corporation) and for the Marx- ists it is at the macro-level (e.g., society, such as the capitalist social formation). Each of these three theoretical sets, despite their claims to an all-encompassing analytical validity, has little theoretical value outside their home domains. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of the state must rest on an articulation of these three principal sets of theories, each providing a unique and cogent insight into a specific level of analysis (to which it is best suited) of the advanced capitalist state. Which among these different theories, then, is the correct theory about the nature and function of the state in modern capitalist democra- cies? The answer is that all of them but only when considered together. This position in actuality is the one adopted by Alford and Friedland (1985) in their articulated theory of the state (though this is not what they call it; in fact, they deny that they have constructed a new “theory of the state”). Each of the theories indicated above address a particular dimension of the role of the state; though they all think that they alone have the full grasp and understanding of this role; which in truth is impossible to achieve given its enormous complexity, in terms of both its composition and functioning.129 Stereotype: Refers to the generalization of a quality in an individual to an entire group of people that the individual belongs to. (Note, there- fore, that stereotypes by definition dehumanize those who are stereotyped.) Stereotypes are created by artists (writers, actors, filmmakers, paint- ers, musicians, comedians, journalists, etc.) in order to justify discrimination and prejudice. The newest stereotype popularized in the West in recent years—especially following 9/11—is that Arab and Asian Muslims are all terrorists. Some stereotypes can go out of fashion because of changed circumstances (e.g. the stereotype that all Russians are communists is no longer in vogue today.) A stereotype, then, is an oversimpli- fied mental image of groups of people, or categories of institutions (the church, etc.), or even whole countries, continents and regions. This mental-image is shared by a large number of people and it is usually derived from the extrapolation of the behavior of a single individual (or entity) to the rest of the community (or entities) from which the individual (or entity) comes. Stereotypes can be of both “positive” types and negative types. In both instances, however, the fact that this image does not conform to reality, implies that there is an inherent underlying neg- ative element to it—even in the case of positive stereotypes. This negativity resides in the fact that it conditions behavior toward the target of the stereotype in a manner that is not warranted by the actual objective reality surrounding the target. When the target of the stereotype happens to be a group of people or a country then the injustice that underlies this phenomenon is readily obvious. In such circumstances the behavioral attitude toward the target is preconceived; it is not a product of actual interaction with the target. For example: it is not uncommon to see immigrants come into the U.S. with preconceived views of African-Americans, even though they may have never ever actually interacted with a single African-American. 130 Of all the agencies in society that are responsible for 128. An excellent introduction to critical race theory is the comprehensive seminal anthology by Delgado and Stefancic (2000). 129. Here one has to concur with the observation by Jessop (1982) that the quest for a general or grand theory of the state is doomed from the start however desirable it may be. “For, while any attempt to analyze the world must assume that it is determinate and determined, it does not follow that a single theory can comprehend the totality of its determinations without resorting to reductionism of one kind or another.” He continues: “(t)he various abortive efforts to devel- op a general theory of the state get their impetus from conflating the determinacy of the real world with determinacy as a property of a given theoretical sys- tem, thereby aiming to explain the former in terms of the latter” (p. 211–12). Jessop then goes on to elaborate his point by suggesting that attempts at general theory construction invariably fall into one or more of the following three traps: (i) Reductionism: using one aspect of theoretical formulation to account for everything about the state and its politics; (ii) Empiricism: substituting an adequate explanation for a given event with a partial explanation based on either a synchronic and/or historiographical description of the event; and (iii) subsumptionism, where a particular description of a given event is considered to be “sub- sumed under a general principle of explanation as one of its many instantiations” (p. 212). 130. While it is humanly impossible to eliminate all stereotypes from one's mind because of the enormous complexity of the world one lives in; there are some stereotypes [especially those concerning groups of peoples or a country] that demand elimination. Examples of such stereotypes abound; here are a few: whites are racists; blacks are lazy; Jews own everything; Orientals work too hard; women are weak; women cannot be understood by men; Arabs are wealthy; Ameri- cans are rich; Americans are uncouth; etc.; etc.
- 76. Page 75 of 89 generating, disseminating, and sustaining stereotypes the media—especially film and television—is undoubtedly the most powerful. So, for example, one of the dominant stereotypes that films in the U.S. have perpetuated concerns the racist image of people of color, especially Na- tive-Americans and African-Americans. In the case of Native-Americans one only has to see the old “Westerns” (the cowboy and “injun”) films to quickly determine the stereotype. In these films U.S. First Americans are invariably portrayed as vermin and scoundrels who deserve to be annihilated (and many of whom were annihilated in real life), rather than as victims (which in real life they were) of a voracious and rapine land-hungry alien settler population that established its legitimacy to rob the land that belonged to the Native-Americans solely on the basis of their guns and their numbers. As for African-Americans, the stereotypes in cinema have been at a subtler level. In his excellent book, Bogle (1989) identifies the fol- lowing types of stereotypes, among others, that African-Americans have been historically burdened with in Hollywood films: the uncle tom (the polite, patient, uncomplaining 'good negro' who did everything his/her white master desired even in the face severe oppression); the coon (the comic negro who via his/her buffoonery [either as a child, a pick ninny, or as an adult the uncle Remus] served as an object of amusement and entertainment); the tragic mulatto (the product of miscegenation who is forever the victim of her mixed parentage); the mammy (a big, fat and bossy woman, often the female version of the coon); the aunt Jemima (the female version of the uncle tom); the buck (either as brutal and savage out to destroy the white man's world or as an over-sexed animal lusting after white women); the jester (the comic negro, ''[h]igh- stepping, and high-falutin' and crazy as all get-out"); the servants (respectable, uncomplaining, and entertaining domestics); the entertainers (the respectable, well dressed jester); the problem people (the victims of racism of bad whites eliciting sympathy from good whites, or angry vic- tims of racism turned militant); and the black superstar (the race problem is over, even blacks can be superstars now). As is evident from this long list of stereotypes, the net effect has been to dehumanize African-Americans by portraying them in a manner that did not correspond with reality, not so much at the level of the individual (e.g. in reality there are some individuals who do act as uncle toms), but at the level of the group (e.g. not all African-Americans are uncle-toms). Needless to say, via this dehumanization the ideology of racism has continued to be propagated through the socialization aspect of film-viewing. (Other examples of racist stereotypes of African Americans are available in this short but well-illustrated article available here.) It is important to caution that human behavior, where stereotypes are involved, is not conditioned entirely by the stereotypes—other fac- tors will also come into play. For example, in the case of racist stereotypes and racism, it would be a mistake to suggest that racist stereotypes leads to racism; for, in reality, the reverse is probably true. Therefore, in the context of racism, the function of racist stereotypes is that they are simply one more item in the arsenal of dehumanization. That is, they help to reinforce, not create, racism. Moreover, in the creation and dis- semination of insidious stereotypes of negativity by the mass media (includes the entertainment industry), nothing compares to the power of images, regardless of whether they are still images or moving images, in socializing the masses to the acceptance of prejudice and hate of the “Other” to the point of naturalness—meaning it becomes "natural" to assume, for example here in the United States, that black people are intellectually inferior or that Jews are a cunning money-grubbing people or that the Irish love their drink (meaning they are brawling drunkards) or that Italians are lazy, pasta-loving members of the Mafia. However, a common ploy among racists, sexists, etc. in popularizing stereotype images is to claim that such images constitute "art" and therefore should not be opposed or erased from the media, and what is more, it is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Three points emerge here: First what is “art”? Who decides when an "object" is art? Is the First Amendment about protecting the right to popularize material that contributes to oppression, terrorism, and so on? Or was the First Amendment originally conceived to protect the citizenry from the tyranny of the State (but today has been hijacked for ulterior purpos- es)? One would be remiss not to mention here a very thorough and for the most part (though not entirely) convincing demonstration by Bark- er (1989) that, in his words, “the concept of a ‘stereotype’ is useless as a tool for investigation of media texts.” Moreover, he continues, “it is dangerous on both epistemological and political grounds.” (p. 210) While this characterization of the concept may be valid from the perspec- tive of the uses made of it in different contexts, the position adopted here is that the concept, when properly defined, is not entirely valueless in some circumstances. What does one mean by 'properly defined?' That the concept should not be freighted with unnecessary baggage (value assumptions, political agendas, etc.) such as those that he identifies. Therefore, it is possible to use the term (as it is used here) in a neutral sense to simply signify the process of extrapolation of, for example, the personal characteristics of an individual to all members of the group that the individual belongs to. Structural Adjustment: Very simply put this seemingly benign term refers to a policy/program for eliminating the role of government in every human endeavor that has the potential to be “privatized,” meaning capable of being converted into capitalist profit making ventures by big business. So, for example, structural adjustment advocates are against the idea of governments providing even such basic services to their citizenry as water supply, or operating prisons, or providing education because they can all be provided by private entities, that is businesses. The rationale behind this approach is that, supposedly, capitalist enterprises are not only more efficient than the government in providing these services, but that they would also help to reduce the tax burden. The foolishness of this kind of thinking is highlighted by the fact that not all human needs can be adequately provided for on the basis of the profit motive—that is why we have governments in the first place—and that “efficiency” among corporate capitalist monopolies when it comes to captive markets is simply measured by, to all intents and purposes, how much they can “steal” through both legal and extra-legal means without getting caught. Notice also that the current economic policies being pursued by Western countries (such as the United States, one of the foremost champions of structural adjustment) has been, most ironically (or perhaps most hypocritically) an almost complete repudiation, in effect, of this policy as they have moved to dramatically and directly inter- vene in the economy by means of various “economic stimulus/bail-out-the-crooks” strategies aimed at trying to rescue their economies from going into complete free fall! Structural Racism: See Race/Racism
- 77. Page 76 of 89 Structure: In my classes I usually use this term to refer to those social artifacts that comprise the historically-rooted institutionalized and seem- ingly “natural” relationships that systemically bind a whole together, but whose construction, while the prerogative of those with a monopoly over power and to which the powerless are in thrall, is often transparent to neither with the passage of time once it is completed. At the social level, generally speaking, structure and agency has a dialectical relationship: meaning one assists in shaping the other. At the individual level, structures of society interfere with individual agency. By the way, structures are not always human-made. The climatic environment is an ex- ample of a structure too.131 At the simplest level, structure can be considered as a metaphor for those relatively enduring aspects of society that allows it to retain some degree of functional coherence akin to the structure of, say, a building (the walls, roof, and foundation). From the per- spective of daily life, this concept also has considerable significance for the individual because structures will have an impact on how we go about negotiating the vicissitudes of daily life. If you are still confused by the concept of structure, then consider it, for example, in the context of oppression (be it racial, class, gender, and so on) where structure is captured by such terms of street lingo as “the Man,” or “the System,” or “the Establishment,” or even just plain “society.”132 See also Social Structure. Subjective Interests: See Objective Interests Substantive Democracy: Another term for “authentic democracy.” See Democracy Sun’ni: See Shi’a Surplus Appropriation: In a capitalist system, like the one that exists in the United States, there is only one and only purpose of almost all entrepreneurial activity: to make profits for the owner(s). Surplus appropriation, therefore, refers to the profit that a business owner makes and keeps on the labor power of his/her workers in a capitalist system (like the one that exists in United States). And since capitalism is a highly competitive system in which businesses compete with each other to make as much profit as they can one of the iron laws of capitalism is profit maximization. But what is profit? It is the price of the product in the market place minus the cost of its production: which covers all these things: the worker’s wages (which includes any fringe benefits that may be provided—such as health insurance); the boss’s salary; the cost of raw materials; the cost of machinery; the rent for the building; interest payments on loans used to set up the business; the cost of utilities; the cost of advertising; any taxes that are paid; and so on. The more profit the business owner makes, the greater the surplus appropriation. Need- less to say, through the process of surplus appropriation the business owner gets ever more richer, while the worker is always at a standstill in terms of accumulation of wealth. Exploitation, in other words, is the name of the game. In the final analysis, not surprisingly, all class struggles between the capitalist class and the lower classes is over the quantity of surplus appropriation because there is an inverse relationship between wages and surplus appropriation—the lower the surplus appropriation the higher the wages; and vice versa. This scenario, by the way, applies both to personal wages paid to individual workers as well as public wages paid to society as a whole (via taxes) to finance such needs as health care, schools, roads, bridges, parks, environmental protection, etc., etc.). One should also note that in today’s world of globalized capitalism profit maximization has also included taking advantage of workers overseas through the mechanism of the supply chain. An employer can increase profits by subcontracting parts or all of the production/services to others overseas in places where the rule of law is weak that allow the subcontractors there to pay workers sub-minimum wages and making them work long hours in unsafe conditions, etc., thereby considerably lowering production costs. Another method for maximizing profits in- volves reducing production costs by lowering the cost of raw materials illegally—by, for example, purchasing them in places where slave labor or semi-slave labor is being employed (yes, slavery still exists today, mainly in parts of Africa and Asia), or where it is illegal to produce these raw materials because of threats to the environment, or because government regulations are being bypassed, etc. At the end of the day, regard- less of the form(s) the profits take, it is the labor power of the workers that produces profits which are not shared with them but are instead appropriated by the owner(s) exclusively. (One can also argue that, in addition, the many undeserved tax-breaks the capitalist class often re- ceives under various guises and pretexts or the refusal to pay for negative externalities are also forms of surplus appropriation.) See also Capitalism; Class; Class-struggle; Globalization; Public Wages. Techno-financial monopoly capitalism: A term coined in my classes, for want of a better word, to refer to the ongoing phase in the evolu- tion of global monopoly corporate capital that is characterized by a level of globalization unprecedented in human history—in terms of geo- graphic magnitude and operational intensity—driven by corporate capital’s ability to harness two primary factors of production: computerized information technology, and the ability to move across national boundaries at the speed of light (literally) gargantuan self-generated financial resources that dwarf the annual national budgets of the majority of the world’s nations. 131. This definition draws on the structuralism of Louis Althusser and the concept of structuration first articulated by Anthony Giddens. See, for instance, Althuss- er (1972), and Giddens (1986). 132. Another way of comprehending the concept of structure (and agency), at the individual level, is to do an exercise that may be worth your while: Ask yourself this question: What factors are helping or preventing me from doing well in this school? Make a two-column list of factors where in the first column you will list factors that are completely within your control, and in the other column list the factors that are not within your control because of your circumstances. Factors that are within your control are factors of agency while those that are not are factors of structure. Here is an example: if your family income is such that you have to work to earn money while in school then it means that you will have less time to devote to your classes. Your family income is, of course, not within your control; it is a matter of your class/race/gender background—in other words, it is a structural factor. However, you can also create structures through your own agency or volition which can then have an impact, further on, on your agency regarding your school performance. So, here is example to illustrate this latter point: if you decide to hang out with peers who do not care about doing well in their classes then you have created a friendship structure that will have a nega- tive influence on your approach to your classes in terms of time, discipline, and ambition. From the perspective of society as a whole, you can use this same method of analysis (figuring out factors of structure versus agency) to determine why certain groups in this society are doing better than others.
- 78. Page 77 of 89 Terrorism: note that this term is defined here in the context of the pre-9/11 era (that is, before the onset of the current ongoing so-called “war on terror” which has clearly added a relatively new gloss to the definition of terrorism). In the pre-9/11 context, then: the term even in that period was clearly fraught with much disagreement; for, one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom-fighter. Wilkinson (1973) suggests a compromise: to label the terrorist activities of the state as “repressive terrorism” and the terrorism of those attempting to overthrow the state as “revolutionary terrorism.” In making this distinction the purpose is to get beyond the issue of who has legitimacy in using the weapon of terror and instead concentrate on what terrorism is and the role it plays in politics. Terrorism to start with is a political activity, not a criminal activity, in the sense that the object is a political goal (either to overthrow the state or to repress those trying to overthrow the state). As a means to a goal and not an end in itself it is clearly a tactic or a strategy. This strategy is to create among opponents (or supporters of the op- ponent) a pervasive climate of fear with the hope that the opponent will give in. Among the elements that go toward creating this climate of fear three are of central significance: (a) the victims are always civilians (if the victims are soldiers or guerrillas then clearly it is not terrorism but war). (b) Violence is an integral part of terrorism where its use (regardless of the form it takes: rape, murder, torture, bombings, and so on) will be indiscriminate, arbitrary and unpredictable. (c) It follows from (a) and (b) that terrorism does not subscribe to any “rules of war” nor is it circumscribed by moral restraints of any kind. Whether used by the state or by revolutionaries the fact that terrorism involves victimization of those not equipped to defend themselves, i.e., civilians, terrorism as a strategy for achieving political goals must be condemned. Neither the state (which usually employs terrorism via the agency of hired thugs (right wing death squads in El Salvador and in South Africa are prime examples) nor the guerrillas have a right to subject civilians to violence and death, however just their cause may be. This is one situation where means clearly do not justify ends.133 In fact a very legitimate argument can be advanced along the lines that those whose consciences have be- come immune to the death and suffering of their victims caused by their terrorist activities are very likely to use terror as a weapon of choice once they have achieved power whenever they run into opposition—regardless of whether the opposition stems from within or without their own ranks and regardless of whether it occurs via lawful channels. Two examples to support this point: the reign of terror unleashed by Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and the reign of terror inflicted on the Cambodian people during the period 1975–78 by the Pol Pot regime (these blood-thirsty thugs would later be named, characteristically, as “freedom fighters” by the Reagan Administration following their ousting from power with assistance from the Vietnamese in 1978.)134 In both cases, the terror eventually spread to their own ranks consuming their own. (Though it is possible that the widespread use of children by the Pol Pot regime to do its dirty work probably further aggravated the situation given that children are less likely to comprehend the value of human life than adults.) Bristol (1972: 2–3) in a brilliant essay on the Gandhian strategy of nonviolence makes the same point with a slightly different nuance: One of the most insidious results of participation in the use of violence is that, no matter how noble their motives, how great their courage, and how deep the sacrifices they make, violence does produce a change in those who employ it.… So often when hatred, distortion, torture, murder, destruction are used to bring down a ruthless and inhuman tyranny that avowedly needs bringing down, it is discovered that the terror and ruthlessness of the old tyranny reappear in a new guise. All too frequently, in human experience, wars of liberation have been fought with lofty courage and high idealism only to result tragically and ironically in the rebirth of tyranny with new tyrants in charge. Does terrorism work, however? It depends upon the situation and the nature of the enemy. Hence “repressive terrorism” of the Chilean fas- cist junta seems to have worked in eliminating the opposition to all intents and purposes, whereas in El Salvador it has not entirely succeeded. In South Africa repressive terrorism succeeded in the short run but the 1990 de Klerk “WOW” speech showed that it ultimately failed. In the Middle East and Northern Ireland “revolutionary terrorism” seems to have achieved little for the Palestine Liberation Organization and the same was true for the Irish Republican Army respectively. In the first case (as happened in the second case) peace is most likely to come as a result of largely political factors involving outside pressures from key benefactors to reach a negotiated settlement where the cost of not reach- ing such a settlement is rendered much higher than doing otherwise for all parties.135 One other point: terrorism should not be confused with guerrilla warfare which also uses violence, except that it is targeted exclusively against the military, it obeys the “rules of war” and it is not above moral constraints in how far it can go with violence. Examples of such guerrilla war include that fought by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Cuba against the corrupt U.S.-supported regime of Fulgencio Batista in late 1950s and the liberation wars in the former Portuguese territories in Africa (see below). One cautionary note about the issue of revolutionary violence: there is today a general distaste in the West for revolutionary violence eve- rywhere.136 Yet while on the surface this may appear laudatory on closer examination it reveals plain hypocrisy. To begin with a general amnesia 133. There is, however, one exception: when the target of terrorists is not people but property. Since terrorism is usually the weapon of the weak, great mileage may be achieved by revolutionaries if their terrorist activity is restricted to destroying capitalist property—which in capitalist systems is less expendable than people’s lives. The ANC had claimed that its terrorist activities were so targeted, yet awful “mistakes” were made where innocent civilians were killed (see TRC 1999). 134. The motion picture Killing Fields provides a glimpse of the widespread terror that the Pol Pot regime unleashed on its own people in the name of “social- ism.” Millions upon millions would perish in this self-created Cambodian holocaust that in its barbarity and magnitude would come close to the Jewish Holo- caust in Nazi Germany. And the world would simply stand and watch, as in the case of the Jewish Holocaust—not even the self-proclaimed champions of civilization, freedom, democracy, etc. would see fit to lift a single finger to assist the Cambodian civilians. Only an invasion by Vietnam in 1978, for other reasons, would put an end to the carnage. Although Pol Pot himself was never brought to account for his crimes (having died in April 1998—possibly as a result of suicide), some of his lieutenants were arrested and brought before the long-delayed U.N. organized genocide tribunal that commenced proceedings in Phnom Penh on November 20, 2007. 135. Hence, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict peace will only come when the Israeli state is subjected to credible international sanctions and the simultaneous suspension all U.S. aid, regardless of the form it takes, to that country. 136. Though it appears that in the 1980s this distaste withered away in the case of the Reagan Administration when it began funding counterrevolutionary movements (e.g., in Nicaragua and Angola).
- 79. Page 78 of 89 clouds the issue: Westerners tend to forget that the historical foundations of Western democracy itself rests solidly on violent revolutionary upheavals: the Puritan Revolution (the English Civil War), the French Revolution and the War of Independence and the Civil War in the Unit- ed States. (Even the whites in South Africa have their history of revolutionary violence: the Boer War.) More importantly, opposition to revolu- tionary violence conceals a pernicious hidden agenda arising out of a deliberate tendency for the beneficiaries of the status quo—the rich and the powerful—to equate, in the words of Barrington Moore (1967: 505) “the violence of those who resist oppression with the violence of the oppressors,” and thereby promulgate the falsehood that “gradual and piecemeal reform has demonstrated its superiority over violent revolu- tion as a way to advance human freedom.” Even a cursory examination of history indicates that while violent resistance against oppression by the oppressed has generally been met with universal condemnation, the violence of the status quo has gone unchallenged, even when it has been demonstrably greater in magnitude than the revolutionary violence that rose to challenge it. Take for instance the case of the French Revolution: the number who actually perished at the hands of the revolutionaries (estimated to be about 40,000) were far fewer than those who died as a result of the injustices of the ancien regime. Consequently, as Moore (1967: 104) so rightly reminds us with reference to this fact: “to dwell on the horrors of revolutionary violence while forgetting that of ‘normal’ times is merely partisan hypocrisy.” There is one other point that must be noted on this issue: violence need not necessarily always imply blood-shed. Violence can also take the form of unjust juridi- cal constraints: a case in point is the entire panoply of laws that made up the apartheid system. Hence the denial of human rights is surely vio- lence. Clearly then there is more to it than meets the eye when politicians in the West decry revolutionary violence: their agenda has little to do with morality; rather it has more to do with the preservation of the status quo upon which rests their hegemonic power. Having said this, how- ever, it should also be pointed out that revolutionary violence, if one can go by the histories of some of the communist nations, e.g., the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, is also heavily tainted with the blood of the innocent: the people at the bottom, the peasantry, who were victims of the old order yet again found themselves re-victimized by the new order. In fact, the rivers of blood of the innocent have, at times, run very deep in these societies. Textual erasure: I have come up with this term to refer to the non-inclusion of a group of people, for discriminatory reasons, in the audio- visual “texts” of the mass-media in any racist society (films, tv shows, radio programs, and so on). This is most clearly visible, in this country, at the time of, for example, film casting where ordinary roles, which in real life could be performed by anyone (including blacks, women, etc.), are assigned exclusively to whites or males. In this instance, textual erasure results from stereotypes or outright racism/sexism on the part of filmmakers. For example, the stereotype that blacks occupy only lower class positions in society [which of course is not entirely true]— therefore film roles featuring middle or upper class positions should not be assigned to black actors. A group who are almost always targets of textual erasure in Hollywood films (for racist reasons) are Asians—even though many of them in this country are middle class and profession- als. This concept, however, does not apply only to audio-visual texts; it also applies to the erasure of the presence of peoples of color (or women in general) in regular texts, such as history books by, for example, either completely neglecting their roles in history or subjecting them to only a cursory nod. The concept of East-to-West Diffusion (see term above) is my response, for instance, to this form of erasure. Theory: A systematic ideational construction—made of properly defined concepts and logically interconnected propositions—that is at once verifiable (in the immediate sense of being consistent with known facts and available evidence) and provisional (capable of revision), and that is built via the dialectic of a humanist (speculative, creative, etc.) and scientific (measurement, predictive power, etc.) method. Think Tank: The name commonly given to such types of organizational bodies as research centers and research institutes that are set up for the explicit purpose of gathering together experts (or so-called “experts”) to do research and disseminate their findings on, more often than not, issues of society-wide implications in order to influence, usually, governmental policy decisions.137 Because think tanks are for the most part (but not always) set up by non-governmental interests—such as professional organizations, businesses, charita- ble foundations, like-minded citizens, etc.—the presence of these bodies in any society is considered a foundational element of what is known as civil society, which in turn is foundational to democracy. Focusing on United States, think tanks are usually tax-exempt (in other words, they are subsidized, usually unknowingly, by taxpayers) and derive their legitimacy primarily from the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution. For our purposes, the importance of think tanks stems from the fact that they are a powerful weapon of class warfare against the working classes employed by the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) and its allies. To explain: because the power of these bodies to influ- ence public policy is usually highly correlated, for obvious reasons, to how much money they have at their disposal, which in turn tends to be a function of who their benefactors are (usually the wealthy and powerful, such as big business), their ability to conduct class warfare against the working classes on behalf of their benefactors, the bourgeoisie, is considerable. By issuing research reports and policy documents, by organizing conferences, by sponsoring research in universities, by supplying “experts” to the media (much of which itself is owned by corporate capital), by lobbying legislatures at both state and federal levels, and so on, these think tanks advance the agenda of big business (corporate capital) and their conservative allies by means of class warfare.138 137.Sometimes think tanks are also referred to as think factories. (Also note: the terms bourgeoisie, big business, and corporate capital are used interchangeably in this entry and elsewhere in this glossary.) 138.Examples of conservative (right-wing) think tanks with considerable influence include these (listed alphabetically): American Action Forum; American En- terprise Institute; American Foreign Policy Council; Brookings Institution; Center for International Private Enterprise; Cato Institute; Center for Immigration Studies; Center for the National Interest; Center for Strategic and International Studies; Freedom House; The Heritage Foundation; Hoover Institution; Hudson Institute; Ludwig von Mises Institute; Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; Middle East Forum; Pacific Institute; Petersen Institute for International Eco- nomics; and Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (It should be noted that allied to conservative think tanks are also a number of right-wing organizations that are not considered think tanks but nevertheless have a powerful influence, especially on the U.S. Congress and the media, such as: Americans for Tax reform; Citizens United; Christian Coalition of America; Family Research Council; FOX News Channel; FreedomWorks; John Birch Society; Koch Industries, Inc.; News Cor- poration; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.) Are there any progressive think tanks? That is, think tanks that attempt to challenge through their work the power
- 80. Page 79 of 89 In capitalist democracies, such as the United States, one of the major ideological tasks of the bourgeoisie is to get the masses to sub- stitute their class consciousness with pseudo-consciousness (meaning a lack of awareness of one’s objective class interests) by getting them to objectify their subjective interests, and this task it has turned out has not been that difficult because of several factors structurally intrinsic to capitalist democracies. Among these is the existence of powerful conservative think tanks funded by big business and the wealthy.139 In recent decades, these think tanks have been successful enough in convincing large sections of the working classes in es- pousing extremely self-oppressive propaganda advanced by the bourgeoisie. Examples of this propaganda include (not listed here in any particular order): tax-cuts for the rich also benefit the working classes (because of the so-called “trickle-down” economics—or more correctly “crumbs-from-the table” economics); the unconscionably massive economic inequality that plagues the United States is “natural” in any healthy capitalist democracy (even though this level of inequality is more a function of politics rather than economics); government regulations (specifically those enacted to protect the public from the negative consequences of relent-less profit max- imization by big business—e.g. curbing air and water pollution) are not in the interest of the working classes and must be eliminat- ed because they interfere with profit-maximization (euphemistically dubbed by conservatives as “job-creation”); climate change is not happening, or if it is, it is not man-made—therefore, the quest for alternative energy sources is not neces- sary; access to universal health-care is not a human right (except of course for members of the U.S. Congress and the rich); gargantuan expenditures on sustaining the military industrial complex are of greater importance than expenditures on such necessities as assisting the disabled, improving education, assisting parents in finding quality affordable day-care for their children, building and repairing roads and bridges, cleaning-up the environment, maintaining parks and wildlife sanctuaries, etc.; the American Dream is attainable by anyone who is willing to work hard and play by the rules (even though in a capitalist society inequality is built in because the capitalist system cannot function without these two classes, at the very minimum: a working class and a capitalist class); trade-unions hurt the interests of workers and therefore membership in them should be discouraged; raising the minimum wage will lead to large-scale unemployment; businesses are always more efficient then governments (not necessarily true); so everything that can be privatized must be privat- ized (from fresh water supply to schools; from hospitals to bridges; from intelligence gathering to torture; and so on); tuition-free college education is unaffordable (in the economically wealthiest country on the planet); externally-directed terrorism is a greater threat to society than mindlessly-easy access to guns by even the mentally disabled (despite what statistics show); of corporate capital and its allies in support of the working classes. Yes, of course. But compared to big business-supported think tanks they have little influence. Examples include: Center for American Progress; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Center for Climate and Energy Solutions; Center for Effective Gov- ernment; Center for Peace and Conflict Studies; Economic Policy Institute; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting; Human Rights Watch; Institute for Women’s Policy Research; International Food Policy Research Institute; New America Foundation; Open Society Institute; People for the American Way; Public Citizen; and United for a Fair Economy. What policies do they stand for? Their work, for the most part, would be in opposition to the conservative agenda outlined above. 139. Three other factors quickly come to mind in this often-successful effort by the bourgeoisie, in the United States, to persuade the working classes to aban- don their objective interests (in favor of subjective interests). The bourgeoisie, through its monopolistic control of the corporate mass media—which includes, television, film, radio, etc.—has been able to prostitute it in the service of materialist consumerism where the message is that the sole purpose of one’s entire life is the mindless and relent acquisition of consumer goods (churned out by the capitalist system without regard to true human needs or the importance of protect- ing the biosphere). Another factor has been the availability of the masses as willing targets for bourgeois propaganda (to the point where they even regularly vote into power a staunchly pro-bourgeois political party). This is exemplified by the gargantuan and seemingly bottomless appetite of the lower classes for right- wing anti-working class newspapers, radio programs, television shows, films, and so on. This circumstance is an outcome of the deep ignorance (which is a precondition for development of a pseudo-consciousness) of important issues critical to the achievement of authentic democracy that is the bane of all lower classes everywhere arising from its structural location within the capitalist relations of production. That is, notwithstanding the romanticization of the supposed “revolutionary” potential of the lower classes by the Bourgeois Left, the tragically sad truth is that the very conditions that create this potential are also responsible for produc- ing its susceptibility to pseudo-consciousness. These include, on one hand, the lack of wherewithal for self-education (time, and money), and on the other, bor- ing, repetitive, and mindless job-related work—coupled with energy-draining overwork—that leads to lethargy and thereby a propensity toward non-intellectual soporific leisure activities. (What is even worse is that the end-result of all this is the espousal by the lower classes of an ideology of anti-intellectualism.) In sum, serious contemplation, which class-consciousness demands, is both energy and time consuming! (Instead, it’s much easier to fall into the trap of, say, “race con- sciousness” to explain away problems.) A third factor, is the despicable perversion of First Amendment rights (lobbying legislators and mass political advertising campaigns, by big business, is considered “freedom of speech”) after having secured from the U.S. Supreme Court—an institution that is rarely a friend of the lower classes—one of the most shamefully egregious dispensations ever known in U.S. history: the designation of corporations as “persons” and therefore, ipso facto, all the constitutional protections, including the Bill of Rights, are applicable to them too. It should also be noted here that from the perspective of the capitalist class, its ability to employ think tanks, together with its monopolistic owner- ship and control of the mass media, as machinery for its ideological propaganda gives it an enormous power in its class warfare against the working classes. Consider the “three-for-the-price-of-one” benefits of this machinery: (a) it appears to the masses to be non-partisan (since their supposed purpose is to report “truth” by means of research and/or journalistic reporting), thereby allowing their propaganda to appear as “commonsense;” (b) it serves as a source of surplus (profits) in its own right as capitalist enterprises, in the case of the mass media; and (c) by using the think-tanks as conduits for tax write-offs (in addition to the tax-exempt status of the think tanks) the corporate capital ingeniously gets the public to subsidize its propaganda activities.
- 81. Page 80 of 89 institutional racism no longer exists (untrue) and therefore the poverty and unemployment that disproportionately plagues the working classes who comprise people of color is self-induced; the widespread consumption of illicit drugs must be best dealt with through interdiction of supply (rather than dealing with the fundamental cause: social alienation that in turn fuels demand); immigrants are responsible for unemployment among the native-born (rather than factors such as automation, computerization, migration of manufacturing to countries where labor is much easier to exploit and regulations against environmental pollution are either non-existent or never enforced, etc.); federal lands (which are public lands) should be sold off to private interests; the social safety net is not the responsibility of government, rather it is the responsibility of civil society (e.g. charities, churches, etc.)—even though the social safety net is funded through taxes and therefore a facility that the taxpayers rightly and legitimately deserve; any government that professes to be an ally of U.S. corporate capital should be considered a friend worthy of unquestioning sup- port by the United States, regardless of its human rights record or the level of corruption that it tolerates or engenders (and if there is blowback, the unstated assumption is, we will deal with it as “terrorism”). TMMC: see Transnational Multimedia Monopoly Conglomerate (TMMC). Totalitarianism: An antithesis of democracy where it refers to an ideology that champions a system of government in which citizens are completely at the mercy of an autarchy; that is a system of government that not only eschews democracy in favor of an all-encompassing political dictatorship but considers the use of terror and violence as legitimate instruments to achieve its ends. Consequently, by definition, a totalitarian state is a tyrannical state because totalitarianism requires it to constitute itself as a police state—a good example of which would be a fascist state or even a communist state (but only in its Maoist or Stalinist incarnation). In fact, one can trace the etymology of this word to the Italian word “totalitario” first coined by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile in 1925 and later promulgated by the Italian fascist, Beni- to Mussolini. It is important to emphasize here that from an economic perspective, a totalitarian state is equally compatible with communism or capitalism—the latter well exemplified by Germany during the Nazi era. (Other words that can substitute for totalitarianism include despot- ism, authoritarianism, and absolutism.) Transnational Monopoly Conglomerate (TMC): A corporate capitalist enterprise that is similar to the Transnational Multimedia Mo- nopoly Conglomerate (TMMC), except its business covers everything other than mass media and entertainment. (See also Techno- financial monopoly capitalism.) Transnational Multimedia Monopoly Conglomerate (TMMC): The TMMC is a large corporation with worldwide operations composed of subsidiaries engaged in a range of business activities (besides those incorporating the entire gamut of mass media/entertainment) often unrelated to each other and possessing monopolistic dominance across the planet. The origins of these corporate behemoths, for the most part, it would not be an exaggeration to say, lay with the election of Ronald Regan as president of United States. The ascendance of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980 was not only of a symbolic significance to Hollywood in that here was a one-time B-grade movie actor who had made it to the top, but it was also of substantive significance in that he would help usher in a new form of oligopolistic film company in Hollywood, the subsidiary of the transnational multimedia monopoly conglomerate (TMMC). The Reaganites came with a philosophy that believed in the illusory idea of “minimum government” as the bedrock of a capitalist democratic society, whereas what they really meant by this con- cept was minimum or no interference with corporate capital (the only exception would be in those circumstances where the interests of private business were considered to be in grave danger from activities of either consumers or labor) in its relentless quest for profit at the expense of everything else. To them government regulations that interfered with the strict business of making profits, even at the expense of general soci- etal welfare, was anathema. It did not matter that many of these regulations had evolved in order to protect the interests of consumers and the working class (in areas ranging from clean air and water through to worker safety on to the financial stability of banks) from the more extreme of the depredatory tendencies of big business. Consequently, they launched a frenzy of deregulation, giving big business a free hand in a varie- ty of areas including the area of oligopolistic control—the Reaganites were not only loathe to prosecute any antitrust violations, but through deregulation actually encouraged the development of numerous mergers and acquisitions, and thereby giving rise (on a scale not known be- fore) to the huge transnational multimedia monopoly conglomerates (TMMCs) of the type represented by Time-Warner and Sony. Among the central features of these TMMCs was their incorporation of unrelated business activities within a single corporate entity. One of the conse- quences of the arrival of the TMMC in Hollywood on a major scale in the 1980s, was the production of what is sometimes referred to as “event movies.” Three examples of event movies from the past are Batman (1989), Jurassic Park (1993), and The Titanic (1998). They are called event movies because the release of the films become media and business events in themselves; they even become part of the daily evening news broadcasts on radio and television. 140 140. From the perspective of this course, the importance of the TMMC stems from its connections with popular culture. Among the central questions I am raising in this course is where do ideologies of discrimination (racism, sexism, ethnicism, etc.) come from? We know that ideologies of discrimination endure and acquire a life of their own because they perform a specific function in society. But who creates these ideologies and how do these ideologies attain the status of universality in a society—a universality that even extends to the victims of these ideologies. The short answer is: those who create and disseminate popular culture. Now, in an ideal world, skin color would not be among the demarcating criterion of popular culture--for, from a biological perspective, there is only one race of people in this world: the human race. Sadly, however, the truth is that we do not live in an ideal world. Whether one likes it or not, popular culture, like all other aspects of society (economics, politics, etc.), is not immune from the factor of skin color as a significant determinant. But acknowledging this fact does not preclude one from advocating and striving toward the ideal: a popular culture untainted by such morally and abhorrently corrupt norms and values as those that undergird racial prejudice (as well as, of course, such other forms of prejudice as those based on gender, religion, nationality, age, disability, etc.). The term
- 82. Page 81 of 89 Ulama: the body of religious scholars who have mastered the Islamic religious sciences. (Note: may also be spelled ulema; and the singular of ulama is alim.) UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization 'popular culture' has traditionally carried with it an implicit acknowledgment of a hierarchical polarity in society: the masses versus the elite or the ruling classes-- with the latter considered as custodians of 'elite' or 'high' culture. Consequently, an often unstated assumption among those concerned with popular culture is that it is inferior to elite culture. Whether judged from the perspective of cognitive demands or decent and civilized human values this is probably true--much of popular culture is soporific, banal, mediocre and quite often abhorrent to say the least: witness, for example, commercial prime time television, or consider the film menu on the marquee at your local multiscreen movie theater. However, are the masses to blame entirely for this situation? Of course not. They must bear some blame as non-discriminating consumers of popular culture, to be sure, but a larger share of the blame must be laid at the doors of the very people who consider themselves as persons of high culture: the wealthy who own/control the transnational multimedia conglomerates that today have monopoly owner- ship and control of all the principal outlets for popular culture (movies, books, magazines, radio, television, etc.) To put the matter differently: the people who help fund the so called 'public' television (PBS)--which in relative terms may be considered 'high culture' television--are also the same people who produce and market trashy films for the masses that glorify the basest of human instincts, ranging from greed to dishonesty and from violence to sexual perversion. The constituent elements of popular culture are like other mass consumer commodities, they are only popular in the sense of consumption, not in the sense of production. In other words: the capitalist marketplace offers merely an illusion of democracy by suggesting that it is the consumer who decides the 'menu' of popular culture; for in reality it is determined by those who own and control, via the transnational multimedia conglomerates (TMMCs), the means of produc- tion and distribution (film studios, publishing houses, cinema theaters, etc.), namely the corporate capitalist class. Therefore, so long as what appears on the 'menu' is not within the control of the masses, the notion of consumer 'choice' that is celebrated with such religious zeal by advocates and defenders of the capitalist marketplace is nothing more than a big lie. The link between popular culture and the TMMCs does not rest merely on the matter of production, there is another form of linkage too: the domi- nant ideology, which in North America is the capitalist democratic ideology (and the function of which is to either prevent the development of, or erase, politi- cal consciousness (this term is defined in the next chapter). But to what end? In order to assist with the maintenance of the status quo by facilitating the repres- sion, or rechanneling or even refusal to acknowledge the disintegrating tendencies inherent in capitalist systems arising from such iniquitous power-dependent polarities as the rich versus the poor, males versus females, the able-bodied versus the disabled, the young versus the old, whites versus blacks, etc., etc.). Popular culture serves as a vehicle for the socialization of the dominant ideology, with the aim of rendering it so pervasive within the psyche of the masses that it achieves the inviolable status of so called “common sense.” Therefore, the ultimate task of the TMMCs is to harness the artistic creativity of the human mind in the service of this ideology; even if on the surface it may appear that the goal of such creativity is simply art and/or entertainment. This process remains usually transparent to all artists involved with mass or elite cultures because of their participation in the capitalist marketplace as either direct, or indirect, em- ployees of the TMMCs. Note two further points: One, the foregoing should not imply that there is a conspiracy at work among the TMMCs; conspiracy there is, but it is one that is systemic in which the chief conspirator is 'profit.' Two, it is necessary to stress emphatically that in ascribing the function of ideological socialization to popular culture the suggestion is not that the masses imbibe the ideology by passively exposing themselves to the different dimensions of popu- lar culture. Rather, the suggestion here is that the masses are actively available for socialization by virtue of prior mental 'conditioning' that renders them willing to expose themselves to popular culture and which in turn creates receptivity to the ideological messages being transmitted by popular culture. The 'condition- ing' itself is a product of the experience of living and working in a particular type of society—in this case a capitalist democratic society—and the often unsuc- cessful attempts to deal with its many contradictions. Examples of these contradictions include: poverty amidst plenty, massive unemployment in the context of rising corporate profits, the right to vote in the context of deepening powerlessness in the face of the ever expanding pervasive corporate domination of society at all levels, the primacy of corporate needs over the needs of people, the abuse and destruction of environmental systems critical to all life forms in the name of economic progress, large budgetary deficits (with their attendant negative consequences for the quality of life) in a context of continuous massive funding for the military machine, etc., etc. In other words, to give a specific example of this dialectical relationship between popular culture and the nature of the material relations of production of capitalist democratic societies, the willingness of the working class to purchase newspapers (such as the many TMMC owned and controlled mass tabloids found in large cities of Europe and North America) that are so anti-working class in ideological orientation as to blatantly slant and even distort news in the service of this ideology, is a function of the failure by the working class to come to grips with the contradictions of its daily existence-- thereby rendering it vulnerable to ideological manipulation. And this ideological manipulation, in turn, blinds it to the true source of the contradictions of its existence. One observation that can be made in parenthesis here is that what the foregoing also suggests is that those who seek a better society, free of the type of contradictions just mentioned, cannot place all their hopes in the transformation of popular culture. Things are simply much more complex than that. There is, therefore, no denying this fact: that given the dialectical relations between the material relations of production (as manifest in the workplace) on one hand, and popular culture on the other, alluded to above, the struggle for a better society rests on the necessity of taking the struggle into both realms; anything else is to engage in wishful thinking. Those artists who do not wish to be recruited in the service of the dominant ideology must pay a price for their independence: the marginalization of their work—coupled usually with personal poverty. Therefore, even in a democracy, the artist is never really free to remain true to his/her art as long as he/she must have his/her art placed for evaluation before a capitalist marketplace—especially one that is controlled by the representatives of the wealthy, the TMMCs. Any artist who dares to produce serious art, one that questions the status quo in the name of a better society, must grapple with the real problems of putting bread on the table and overcoming physical barriers that prevent his/her work from reaching his/her potential audience among the masses placed by those who have monopoly ownership and/or control of the film studios, radio stations, galleries, publishing houses and so on. Based on the foregoing it may appear that the suggestion here is that those who wish to influence popular culture through their artistic creativity in the direction of entertainment (via books, films, music, radio, etc.) that does not create, sustain and glorify ways of thinking and behaving that are banal, idiotic, soporific, and even morally and intellectually corrupt are doomed to permanent failure. This, however, is not true. Not all within the populace are unwitting puppets of the TMMCs. Moreover, the very concepts of freedom that the owners of the TMMCs are want to laud at every opportunity to legitimate their monopoly of wealth and power, are also available to the populace to legitimate development of their own independent forms of popular culture untainted by the dominant ideology. Plus, under certain conditions, it is possible for such forms to achieve a sufficient level of popularity as to permanently alter the status quo in a positive direction: toward the creation of a truly civilized society. However, what the foregoing does suggest is that given the political and economic power of the owners of the TMMCs, the necessary political and economic space that can permit development of such alternate forms of popular culture is extremely narrow.
- 83. Page 82 of 89 U.S. African Americans: An ethnic category in the United States that refers to all peoples who can trace part or whole of their ancestry to the peoples of Africa (excluding Afro-Arabs and Afro-Asians) prior to the European intrusion in that continent. In different time periods they have been variously referred to as blacks, Negroes, and Coloreds. (See also Africans.) 141 U.S. Euro-Americans. See Blacks. U.S. First Americans: In this course an ethnic category that refers to the Americans who peopled the Americas prior to the arrival of the European settlers, and their descendants. (Others may refer to them as “Indians” [a gross misnomer if ever there was one] and/or “Native Americans” and/or “Aboriginal Americans.”) USSR: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Verisimilitude: Verisimilitude in cinema refers to the appearance or illusion of reality achieved through mimesis which permits what is happen- ing on the screen “believable”and which in turn allows the filmmaker to commandeer and manipulate the emotions of the audience.142 In other words, the relationship between verisimilitude and the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of audiences—the fundamental tool of imagination that permits one to enjoy/appreciate a film—is directly proportional. A documentary film has the greatest amount of verisimil- itude followed by films made in the cinéma vérité tradition. However, all Hollywood-type films seek maximum verisimilitude, especially through manipulation of production values, without of course making the film look like a documentary. Notice that there is a fundamental contradiction here: verisimilitude is highly desirable but it should not have the quality of a documentary. Another major contradiction of course is that in so far as verisimilitude depends on the manipulation of production values it runs counter to what happens in real life (for instance, our lives are not accompanied by sound tracks). Verisimilitude in cinema is of particular concern to me because of its dependence on high production values which in turn demand a high level of technology and financial resources in the production of the film and which in turn requires corporate mass-marketing. The outcome of this circumstance is that the quest for verisimilitude in cinema becomes the unwitting tool of the socialization of marginality in racist (or sexist or capitalist) societies. Here is how, beginning with why cinema was invented in the first place: 1. The human desire for pleasure in the form of performance entertainment (genetically determined? Perhaps). 2. Leads to an eternal and insatiable quest for verisimilitude. 3. Leads to the invention of cinema/television (and mass visual entertainment). 4. Requires expensive technology (production, and distribution). 5. Requires large financial outlays—especially because films are a gamble. 6. Requires marketing to as large an audience as possible to recoup the financial investment. 7. Requires themes and depictions that are in consonance with the outlook of the majority of the audience—Euro- Americans, males, etc. 8. In the areas of race/ gender/ class relations these themes and depictions will play to pre-existing racist/ sexist/ class ste- reotypes, as well as act to reinforce them. In other words: There is a dialectical relationship between, say, racism and sexism in film, and racism and sexism in society at large. 9. Also leads to textual erasure of blacks, women, etc. from scenes and story lines altogether—as if they don’t exist in soci- ety at all. 141. See the excellent article by Hanchard (1990) that discusses the contested terrain of nomenclature vis-à-vis U.S. African Americans, as well as the ideological- ly loaded conventional practice of the designation of United States as “America.” 142. Mimesis refers to the art of faithfully copying (to the extent possible), in literature, theater, film, etc., the reality of the human world.
- 84. Page 83 of 89 10. Final outcome: leads to socialization of marginality of blacks, women, the working class, etc. (because films have be- come a powerful medium of socialization in general). Voyeurism: This term has several different meanings (e.g. paraphilia), but in my courses the term signifies what I would refer to as “visual exoticism.” For example, the National Geographic magazine, which is more than a hundred years old now, has been the bastion of what I call “voyeuristic exoticism” in this country, and in the West generally. In another sense the invention of the moving visual image (as represented by cinema, television, etc.), it can be legitimately argued, represents the technological expression of voyeurism—from this perspective, cinema, by definition is an expression of voyeurism. However, in the case of Hollywood cinema a particularly significant characteristic of cinematic vo- yeurism is what is usually referred to in the literature as “the stare.” The stare here does not refer to the neutral viewing or seeing but rather the culturally-determined looking where, depending upon who is doing the looking, the “look” becomes a psychological act of projection. In the case of Hollywood films it is often the projection of male fantasies of sexual desire where the female cast (especially the lead female actor) becomes the male viewers' subject of phalocentric “objectification.” Consider: how often do you see male frontal nudity versus female frontal nudity in Hollywood films? Wages—Public: In contrast to personal wages which is remuneration one receives from paid employment, public wages refers to “wages” one receives in kind that benefit the majority of the citizenry aimed at enhancing authentic democracy and paid for through their taxes (and which also include benefits of the social safety net). Such wages range from measures to ensure access to clean air and water to publicly funded education and healthcare, to development of transportation infrastructure to old-age insurance (social security); and so on. In other words, in capitalist democracies the true value of wages a person receives must be calculated on the basis of the following formula: (a) personal wages, plus (b) employer-provided benefits (e.g. paid lunch-breaks, health insurance, retirement benefits, etc.), plus (c) tax-payer provided employee benefits (e.g. unemployment benefits, disability compensation, etc.), plus (d) public wages. To the extent that measures offering protection from the predatory activities of the capitalist class (by means of legislation that prohibits child labor, establishes minimum wage baselines in em- ployment, mandates over-time pay, protects the public from the manufacture and sale of bogus and/or harmful medicines, etc.), impose an economic cost on corporate capital, then such measures could also be considered as part of the public wage. Important: the term public wages should not be confused with public sector wages (wages received by employees in government sector jobs) in contrast to private sector wages (wag- es received by employees of privately owned enterprises, businesses, factories, and the like). Washington Consensus: Refers to a basket of such neo-liberal economic policies as a wholesale move toward privatization of as many gov- ernment functions as possible; devaluation of national currencies; elimination of barriers to currency convertibility; implementation of pack- ages of deep austerity measures in an effort to balance national budgets; removal of state subsidies and price controls; renewed emphasis on agricultural production for export (in consonance with the theory of comparative advantage); removal of controls on trade and payments; and a reduction and rationalization of bureaucracies (see Biersteker 1990), all aimed at, ostensibly, to rescue PQD countries from the deadly grip of endemic widespread economic woes confronting many of them in recent years.143 In reality their net effect was to benefit the continued dom- ination—as well as its further deepening—of the PQD countries by transnational monopolies (most of whom are domiciled in the West). While it is true that advocacy of some of these measures was certainly a step in the right direction, when the package is taken as whole it has been a prescription for disaster. Why? A central component of the basis of the economic ills plaguing these countries is not addressed (and can not be addressed given the ideological underpinnings of the consensus): the web of Western-dominated international economic relations in which the PQD countries have been enmeshed for centuries ever since it was forged in the wake of 1492 (Columbian Project)—ranging from unnecessary heavy debt burdens to inequitable terms of trade; from unfair trade policies to resource squandering and environment de- grading investment projects; from economically crippling extraction of investable surpluses to import-dependent investment enterprises. WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (a usually pejorative term referring to a white person in the United States of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, or simply European ancestry, with racist/ethnicist inclinations—consequently the acronym may also stand for White Anglo-Saxon Pig). West (Western World): In general, for purposes of this course, this term refers to white publics living in the Euro-North American (and Australasian) ecumene collectively. When it comes to economic matters Japan may also be included as part of the West, even though the Japa- nese, obviously, are not Westerners. (See also Global North, OD) Whistleblower: Someone who reveals an activity that its perpetrators don’t want the public to know about—usually because it is an illegal or embarrassing activity. In a democratic society, the whistleblower has a very important role to play in helping to bring to light the nefarious activ- ities of the powerful in society as a whole (government, business, and so on). White Man’s Burden: This phrase comes from an 1899 poem of the same title by that ideologue of British imperialism Rudyard Kipling,144 which was the arrogant notion that Europeans had a divinely mandated duty to free Africans (and other colonial peoples) from the prison of 143. The self-confessed father of the phrase “Washington Consensus” is one John Williamson, a senior fellow at the conservative (neoliberal) Washington- based think-tank, the Institute for International Economics. See his summary and discussion of the term as he defined it, together with a critique by others in the work edited by Auty and Toye (1996). See also Stiglitz (2002), and Kuczynski and Williamson (2003). 144. The first verse of this seven verse poem—to get a sense of what Kipling composed—reads: Take up the White man's burden -- Send forth the best ye breed --
- 85. Page 84 of 89 heathen darkness and savagery by bringing them into the light of Christian civilization and modernity. Perhaps the most boldly articulated embodiment of the “white man’s burden” was the mission civilisatrice of the French, which one French colonial governor, Raphael Sallers, de- scribed it thusly as late as 1944, at the Brazzaville Conference in Brazzaville, Congo: Evidently, the purpose of our civilization is to bring civilization to others. So we civilize, that is to say, we are not content to provide merely a surplus of material wellbeing, but we also impose moral rules and intellectual development. And by what methods and according to whose example should we do this, if not by our own methods and according to the example of our own civilization, in the name of which alone we may speak? For what authority would we have to speak in the name of the civilization whose people we are trying to im- prove? (from Shipway 1999: 142). White Southern Strategy: A political strategy ideologically rooted in whiteness strategically devised by Republicans to secure the electoral victory of President Richard M. Nixon that rested on convincing the white ignorantsia in the South145 —by appealing to their racism in the context of the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1960s—that their objective interests lay with the Republican Party.146 This strategy, in various forms, continues to be wielded to this day (consider that the majority of white males in this country have consistently voted for the Republican Party since the days of Nixon). The White Southern Strategy was originally devised by one of Nixon’s election strategist Kevin Phillips (which is most ironic indeed considering that over the years Phillips has become one of the most trenchant critics of the Republican Party) that sought to electorally realign the Southern white working class voter toward the Republican Party and away from his/her traditional and unquestioning support of the Democratic Party—a tradition that was an outcome of the gratitude felt for the Democrats for helping to alleviate, under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the misery of the Great Depression through Roosevelt’s “New Deal” set of anti-laissez-faire and pro-working-class economic and social programs. (Note, however, that until the arrival of the Kennedy/Johnson presi- dencies the Democratic Party, especially in the South, had also been a strongly racist Jim Crow-supporting party.) Phillips—who claimed that he originally got the idea for the strategy from his observations in the New York city borough of Bronx where he grew up of the rising white- ness-inspired resentment against racial minorities among working class whites with the passage of civil rights legislation and the launch of President Lyndon Johnson’s exemplary antipoverty “Great Society” programs (to which the racist white working class ignorantsia felt racial minorities had no right)—explained the strategy to James Boyd (1970) in an article for the New York Times Magazine, which tellingly had labeled him as a “self-taught [perverse] ethnologist,” thus: All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even “Jake the Snake” [Senator Jacob K. Javits] only gets 20 percent. From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the lo- cal Democrats. (p. 106—bracketed interpolation in the original) The strategy was not a short-term device targeted only at securing Nixon’s victory but a long-term device, aimed at permanently effecting the realignment and it depended on exploiting the ideology of whiteness—by playing on the racist fears of the white working class, both in the South and in the North, in the wake of racial desegregation brought about by the civil rights movement—as well as jingoism, machismo- inspiring militarism, and anticommunist hysteria of the cold war. And even though, the objective interests of the white working class dictated that they remain aligned to the Democratic Party given that the Republican Party had slowly evolved toward an unrepentant and cult-like champion of the interests of capital (relative to the Democratic Party) the Nixonites were shrewd enough to realize that race (in combination with a melange of other ultrareactionary proclivities that have, through the agency over the decades of subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle relentless corporate media campaigns masterminded by right wing think tanks funded by U.S. capital, become ingrained in the psyche of the Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild -- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child. (Source: Kipling, R., & Washington, P. (2007). Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 96) Notice the reference to colonized peoples as “half devil and half child” by a man whose ancestors less than a thousand years before could not have held up a candle, in terms of civilizational achievements, to the ancestors of those he is now labeling thusly. 145. Those familiar with the literature on this subject will quickly note that the prefix “white” is usually absent—reminding us that most EuroAmericans view the term “Southerner” to refer to white Southerners, ignoring the fact, with typical hubris, that millions of other people have also been part of the South from the very beginning of the founding of United States as a European settler nation. (So, for example, southern African Americans in the South are as much Southerners as southern whites!) 146. In its various guises, the literature on the White Southern strategy is considerable, however, in addition to Boyd (1970) and Cowden (2001) this basket of sources should more than suffice for an introduction to this one of the most cynical and nefarious of Machiavellian political strategies ever devised to under- mine democracy in the United States in modern times—to the detriment, in the long run, of all: Carter (1995 and 1996), Cowden (2001), Edsall and Edsall (1992), Knuckey (2006), Mendelberg (2001), Murphy and Gulliver (1971), Perlstein (2008), and Phillips (1969).
- 86. Page 85 of 89 white ignorantsia in the United States, such as jingoism, militarism, “states’ rights,” right wing Biblicalism, anti-gun-control sentiments, patriar- chal beliefs, homophobia, and the like) could be parlayed to subjectify the objective interests of the white working class. Not surprisingly, since the election of Nixon, to date the majority of the white working class males have never voted for the Democratic Party in presidential elec- tions. At the same time, despite voting consistently for the Republicans the poverty rate among working class white Southerners has remained the highest in United States. However, even at the national level, the fact that a party that has so unashamedly groomed itself over the years to be the loyal tribune of U.S. capital continues to win the presidency time after time by exploiting the racist and other phobias of the white igno- rantsia has meant a concerted attack on democracy—both procedural and authentic—to the detriment of the objective interests of all the citizenry (which range from poverty-rate wages and the absence of universal health care to a broken and underfunded public educational sys- tem and overflowing prisons; from a highly-skewed tax structure that steals from the poor to give to the rich to a bloated and immensely wasteful military-industrial complex; from a pampered pharmaceutical industry that has little regard for the welfare of consumers to a health- compromising-additives-polluted agro-food industry; from a Congress that has been virtually bought by the lobbyists of U.S. capital to a presi- dency that has no compunction in expending seemingly limitless quantities of life and treasure in pursuit of protecting the interests of U.S. capital abroad; from the egregious violations in favor of the interests of capital of the intent of the U.S. constitution to a relentless assault on the civil rights of both the white working class and the racially marginalized; from tax-payer funded bailouts of U.S. capital to turning a blind- eye to the relentless assault on the environment wrought by the activities of capital; and so on). Four additional points need emphasis: first, that although credit has been usually given to the Nixonites for developing the Southern strate- gy, it already had a progenitor in the shape of the politics of the Alabama governor George C. Wallace who had established his fame as a stal- wart racist with the line in his 1962 inaugural speech “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In fact, one can argue that the germ of the strategy is to be found in the slave era where the slave-owning plantocracy, by means of the manipulation of the ideology of whiteness, convinced the majority of white Southerners, the poor, that supporting the slave order was in their objective interest—whereas in reality the reverse was true. Following the abolition of slavery, this strategy was again used to bind the South and the North once more; re- quiring in the process, the obscenely hasty termination of Reconstruction (symbolically typified by, among other things, the adoption by Northern whites of no less a scoundrel than the Confederate General Robert E. Lee as a native son147). Second, the concept of “states’ rights,” while of long pedigree dating back to the Civil War era (where the issue was the abolition of slavery) is essentially a white Southern strategy concept where under the ruse of protecting the states from undue federal interference the effort is to permit the Southern states to circumvent civil rights legislation—credit for this innovation perhaps goes to Wallace. Third, although at the core of the Southern strategy is the subjectification of the objective interests of the white working class by objectifying their subjective interests, one must not overlook the fact that it is also a strategy aimed at erasing from the national agenda the very notion of racial justice despite the centuries-long history of racial injustice targeted at blacks. In other words, the Southern strategy is not simply a matter of rallying agency, it is also a question of exploiting and reinforcing dialectically a particular historically-rooted structural attribute of United States: institutionalized racism. Fourth, the Southern strategy approach has not been restricted only to the South, it has found relevance, not surprisingly given the history of racism in United States, in the North as well (the target being of course Northern working class whites)—as Cowden (2001: 279) puts it: “the United States has become Southern.”148 Whiteness: See Race/Racism Whites: See Blacks. Willing Suspension of Disbelief: I generally use this phrase in a loose sense to mean the willingness by audiences to allow their emotions to be manipulated by a beam of light in the form of projected images—which I should remind you can be turned off with a simple switch in the film projector. A stricter, that is common, definition refers to the willingness of audiences to believe what is happening on the screen in particu- lar genres of films or specific actions/scenes in a given film as “real,” but only for the duration of the film of course (unless one is a child). One genre, for example, that requires a very high dose of the willing suspension of disbelief is the science fiction film. Consider: people can only enjoy a Superman film if they are willing to believe (while watching the film) that Superman can really fly. (Once the film is over they can throw that silly notion out of the window.) Another good example of films that rely wholly on the willing suspension of disbelief by audiences are Disney cartoons where animal characters are not only completely anthropomorphic but are capable of fantastical antics. (Compare here too 147. For an illuminating article on the historical significance of Robert E. Lee to EuroAmericans (North and South), to this day, see the one by James C. Cobb in Humanities (magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities) in the July/August 2011 issue (vol. 32, no. 4) also available on the internet, as of this writing, here: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2011-07/RobertELee.html 148. Most recently, the strategy even reared its ugly head in the nomination process of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate when Hillary Clinton, sup- ported by her spouse former president Bill Clinton—both supposedly dyed-in-the-wool liberals—used it against her opponent African American Barack Obama, thus clearly testifying to the veracity of the adage that scratch a white liberal deep enough and more often than not you will uncover a racist. For an account of the significance of race and class (and gender) in the Democratic primary elections, see, for example the Newsweek cover stories titled “Only in America” [May 5, 2008, pp. 28–39] and “A Memo to Senator Obama” [June 2, 2008, pp. 22–30]. Interestingly, the June 2 issue of the newsmagazine also carries an article titled “A Secret Side to the Secret Service” (pp. 32–33) in which the presence of a racist culture—against the backdrop of the Barack candidacy no less—in the U.S. secret service (whose job includes protecting the U.S. president) evidenced, for example by the interchange of racist e-mails and an incident where a noose was hung at one of the training sites. The kicker in the story is this paragraph: “[t]he officer responsible, who hasn’t been named by the agency, insisted he didn’t mean any offense, and his superiors seem to believe him. ‘At this time, there is no clear indication that he had intended a racial message.’” Giv- en the potent and inflammatory symbolism in U.S. political culture that a hanging rope with a noose has historically come to acquire as a consequence of the horrendous terrorist practice of lynching in which more often than not blacks were the target of the depraved vigilante white mob violence this is a typical lie- in-your-face denial so characteristic of the ideology of whiteness.
- 87. Page 86 of 89 the Flintstones cartoon series.) Magical realism in literature and film, to give yet one more example, depend wholly on a willing suspension of disbelief. World Bank: This is a global capitalist financial institution, whose members today comprise almost the entire membership of the United Na- tions (with the exception of communist countries such as Cuba), that was founded in 1944 at Bretton Woods (in New Hampshire, United States) with the purpose of eliminating poverty around the world by providing low-cost long-term loans to governments and it comprises two institutional wings: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association. (The World Bank itself is part of a larger entity called the World Bank Group.) Because the United States is the biggest shareholder in the bank it has tradi- tionally reserved the right to appoint the president of the Bank, a prerogative exercised by whoever has been the president of United States when the occasion has arisen. It is important to stress that while it may appear that the Bank has a laudatory mission, in reality its activities have been far from benign given its emphasis on an economic development agenda that protects the interests of the rich over those of the poor— achieved through the enforcement of capitalist economic principles (neo-liberal economics) that favor, though in not so many words, the he- gemony of transnational corporations. So, for example, it has been a strong advocate of the policy of structural adjustment (though in recent years it has toned down this emphasis in the face of strident criticism from those countries so affected by this policy). World Trade Organization: This capitalist organization was founded in 1995 with the purpose of promoting world trade on the basis of what is usually referred to as free trade (meaning no trade barriers like customs and excise duties). In one sense it is the institutional embodi- ment of globalization; consequently, as with the Bretton Woods institutions, the WTO has really been more concerned with making the world as safe as possible for Western corporate capitalism more than promoting equitable world exchange of goods and services. WTO: See World Trade Organization
- 88. Page 87 of 89 Appendix I Procedural versus Authentic Democracy in the U.S. (Legislative Examples) Lacey Act of 1900 (named after its principal champion, Representative John Lacey of Iowa). (William McKinley [R]); established: civil and criminal penalties for violation of laws protecting flora and fauna. Today, with successive amendments over the years, the Act serves as the principal legislative mechanism for the protection of plants, fish, and wildlife from illegal procurement, or possession, or trans- portation, or sale. The Act also covers plants, fish, and wildlife obtained from abroad. Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (also known as the Wiley Act after its principal champion, Harvey Washington Wiley, the chief gov- ernment chemist) (Theodore Roosevelt [Progressive Party]); established: The Food and Drug Administration to protect the public from the production and marketing of unsafe and dangerous foods, medicines, medical equipment, and so on. Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 (Woodrow Wilson [D]); established: Federal Trade Commission to protect the public from anticompetitive and deceptive acts and practices of businesses that the same Act outlawed. National Park Service Act of 1916 (Woodrow Wilson): established a formal and more coherent national park system out of existing parks for recreational, educational, etc. use by the public Social Security Act of 1935 (Franklin D. Roosevelt [D]); established: Unemployment insurance Social security (retirement insurance for the retired; financial support for the disabled; etc.) Medicare: health insurance for the retired Medicaid: health insurance for the very poor *National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Franklin D. Roosevelt); established: Workers’ right to organize unions Workers’ right to strike to improve their working conditions, including pay Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (Franklin D. Roosevelt); established: Child labor: prohibition of employment of children under 18 in most non-agricultural occupations National minimum wage Overtime pay Public Health Service Act of 1944 (Franklin D. Roosevelt); established: Office of the Surgeon General National Institute of Health The Reorganization Act of 1939 (Franklin D. Roosevelt) which established the Federal Security Agency that would later, in 1942, establish the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities which after going through various incarnations in subsequent years would even- tually become today’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—though still popularly known by the abbreviation of its predecessor, Cen- ters for Disease Control, as the CDC. Clean Air Act of 1963 (Lyndon B. Johnson [D]); established: funding for research into air pollution enjoined states to establish agencies for controlling air pollution a legislative avenue for federal involvement in matters of inter-state air pollution Equal Pay Act of 1963 (John F. Kennedy [D]); established: Equal pay for men and women *Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson): Prohibition of discrimination based on gender
- 89. Page 88 of 89 Prohibition of discrimination based on race, religion or nationality Established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission *Criminal Justice Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson): mandated the establishment of a public defender system to allow legal representation in federal courts for those charged with a crime but who could not afford to pay for legal counsel. Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: Jobs Corps, a national program that provides post-secondary school vocational training and education to low income youth to enable them to find and keep a good job Head Start, a national program that promotes school readiness for children from economically disadvantaged families by giving the chil- dren from birth to age three access to health, educational, nutritional, social, and other services in order to enhance their cognitive, social, and emotional development Volunteers in Service to America (now known as AmeriCorps VISTA) Upward Bound to assist low-income students prepare for college Food Stamp Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: a permanent food stamp program (originally initiated in 1939 as a temporary executive mandate during the presidency of Franklin D. Roo- sevelt) to allow indigent families access to food. Library Services and Construction Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson): increased federal funding for the construction of libraries as well as the services they provided in communities that had poor access to library facilities in both rural and urban areas Wilderness [Protection] Act of 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: the National Wilderness Preservation System and criteria for including lands in this system. This system not only has recreational value but, among other things, is essential for preservation of biodiversity and the protection of watersheds (sources of drinking water for humans) and forests (helps with alleviating global warming). Department of Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: the U.S. Housing and Urban Agency as a Cabinet-level agency for the purposes of promoting access to affordable housing for all. Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson): provided federal assistance to K-12 education for low-income schools, communities, and children. Executive Order 11246 on Affirmative Action of 1965 (amended 1967) (Lyndon B. Johnson): a presidential order that mandated government contractors to be proactive (“take affirmative action”) in hiring practices with regard to race, and from 1967, gender. The underlying rationale for this order was described by President Johnson in a powerful commencement address that he delivered at Howard University on June 4, 1965 wherein he stated: “But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Higher Education Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: student financial aid for higher education—Pell Grants; Stafford Loans; Federal Perkins Loans; Work Study the TRIO programs (Upward Bound [originally established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964], Talent Search, and Student Sup- port Services, all aimed at assisting economically disadvantaged students enroll and succeed in higher education institutions) Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: a funding mechanism for acquisition, preservation, and maintenance of land and water resources for “recreation and to strengthen the health and vitality of the citizens of the United States.” Medical Library Assistance Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson): established programs to provide assistance to medical libraries including the development of a network of regional medical libraries that would connect with the government’s National Library of Medicine National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established
- 90. Page 89 of 89 National Endowment for the Humanities National Endowment for the Arts (Note: the rationale for this act was, characteristic of much of the Great Society legislation championed by President Johnson, most eloquently stated. Hence, it read in part: “(1) The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States. (2) The encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts, while primarily a matter for private and local initiative, are also appropriate matters of concern to the Federal Government. (3) An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future. (4) Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”) Water Quality Act of 1965 (Lyndon B. Johnson): required that states develop water quality standards and for interstate waters establish water quality goals. Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: Corporation for Public Broadcasting (but not as a government agency, but as a private corporation so as to, in the words of the Act, “af- ford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.” The rationale for this legislation included this language: “it is in the pub- lic interest to encourage the growth and development of public radio and television broadcasting, including the use of such media for instruc- tional, educational, and cultural purposes;…. expansion and development of public telecommunications and of diversity of its programming depend on freedom, imagination, and initiative on both local and national levels; the encouragement and support of public telecommunica- tions, while matters of importance for private and local development, are also of appropriate and important concern to the Federal Govern- ment; it furthers the general welfare to encourage public telecommunications services which will be responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States, which will constitute an expression of diversity and excellence, and which will consti- tute a source of alternative telecommunications services for all the citizens of the Nation; it is in the public interest to encourage the develop- ment of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities;….” ) Fair Housing Act of 1968 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: Prohibition of discrimination in purchasing or renting housing Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 (Lyndon B. Johnson); established: a national system of outstanding rivers of scenic, recreational, fish and wildlife, cultural, geologic, historical, etc. significance Clean Water Act of 1972 (vetoed by the Republican president Richard Nixon Republican but overridden by a Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress): Established a legislative mechanism (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System—NPDES) for reducing water pollution, a problem that could not be effectively tackled by the establishment of water quality standards alone, as mandated by the Water Quality Act 1965. Affordable [Health] Care Act of 2010 (Barack H. Obama [D]): popularly known as “Obamacare,” established mechanisms for expanding health care coverage to a wider section of the U.S. public and for reducing health care costs. (Among its many provisions are prohibition of discrimination against those with pre-existing health condi- tions by insurance companies; prohibiting insurance companies from withdrawing coverage; providing free preventive care; allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance plans until they turn 26; expanding coverage for early retirees; strengthening communi- ty health care centers; and understanding and combating health disparities based on race, ethnicity, language, etc.) Copyright © 2014-2017 by wordbrain.com. All rights reserved. This document, either in whole or in part, may NOT be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way, except that you may download one copy of it on any single computer for your personal, non-commercial home use only, provided you keep intact this copyright notice. _____________ End of Document _____________ An HTML web-friendly version (with images) of this document is available here.