Race

From Hobson's Choice

One of the groups of people; slippery in meaning, it is often used to refer to geographical origins of the member. In this case, we refer to "race" as an indicator of political and historical origins. Members of a race have a strongly defined social role that trumps individual merit and reflects an ongoing historic struggle between colonists and natives.

Typically the concept of race as an historically imposed social role is most prominent in the Americas and results from the campaign of ecological redemption assumed by the Trans-European Project. The conquest of the ecology of the Americas for the European industrial system led to a mass invasion by ethnic Europeans, who became "Whites," accompanied by transported African slaves

1 The Foundation of Modern Races
2 Five Races
3 Notes
4 See Also
5 External Links

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The Foundation of Modern Races

Anthropologists remain divided about the validity of race as a meaningful concept in biology. One group, associated with Richard Lewontin, has argued that racial classifications are not meaningful.^[1] Others, such as Steven Pinker, have insisted it is, and accused Lewontin of politicizing science.^[2] For the time being, physical anthropology (a branch of the larger field) seems to have a subtle distinction between the meaning of the term "race," and the meaning of the term "meaningful" (in the context of scientific discipline). This essay will not dwell on that particular question.

Instead, we use race here in the sense it was used in the formation of Trans-European societies, in which the invader retained a distinctive identity from the defeated natives, and did not allow full social membership to the subaltern caste and the natives. Whatever peculiar attributes one might assign to Africans or Native Americans (as opposed to Europeans), there can be little debate over the conception of "White," "Black," or "Indian." The European invaders, settled in the Americas, established republics in which citizenship was limited to themselves. In cases where the republic was largely democratic, then the racial categories were preserved through a contrived struggle at the margins of society. Populism in "White republics" tended to focus on racial solidarity as the basis for public morality, while elitism argued that existing economic outcomes were a sufficient foundation for social rank. As a result, "populist racism" tended to be more desperate, violent, and urgent, while elitist racism was more interested in an ex post facto validation of natural social categories.

In cases where the political order was an oligarchy, then society tended to refrain from stark dualisms. Rather than one-drop rules in which a person was either Black or White, such societies treated race as a metric among several of personal merit. Since there was no pretense of democracy, there was no resort to an adversarial system in which people defended their rights. Instead, the system of rights and their preservation was paternalistic. Clearly delineated racial categories faded, and intermarriage was common. Brazil and some Caribbean countries are clear examples of this.

The "Indian" population of North America suffered extreme devastation in the wake of the invasion. The Native Americans were suppressed through the discontinuous technical superiority of the Europeans, the onslaught of alien diseases such as smallpox, and the effects of European ecological redemption on their food sources.^[3] Typically death by disease and ecological displacement are intertwined, as refugee populations are usually much more vulnerable to carrying and succumbing to disease. However, the outcome was more extreme in North America, where the number of invaders was larger and the amount of capital greater; this naturally meant a much greater impact on the ecology being "redeemed" than in South America.^[4] Racial identity in Latin America came to be a graduated affair, with Blacks and Indians forming feet of a sort of tripod; poor Mestizos formed a third foot.

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Five Races

Initially, societies facing a massive demographic invasion experience two hostile camps, for which "race" has no meaning. After conquest, the defeated natives are reduced to a lower race through interaction with the conqueror; and the conqueror introduces a population of subalterns, such as Black slaves. In most cases the subalterns are not as horribly oppressed as the African Americans were; they may be indentured servants, such as Chinese and Indians in later European empires. These three races form at once after a beachhead is secured.

Two more later appear and persist. The first one is competing subalterns. Typically the ruling invader race finds the subalterns to be politically unreliable. Or, as in the case of the United States, territorial expansion led directly to a massive wave of politically unorganized non-Whites, viz., Latinos. Latinos also self-identify as "White", "Mestizo", and "Indian"; but in the context of US history, they represent another subaltern caste, particularly in border regions where racial hatreds can be especially severe. For the elites among the Whites, Latinos are valuable for reducing the bargaining power of labor; also, Latinos and Blacks often have a mutually hostile relationship arising from their segmented and crowded labor market. They can be played off against each other.

The other is "honorary Whites," whom the invaders accept for various reasons. Expatriates from the colonial metropole (viz., Europe), who have no plans to immigrate, or who remain tentative about their adopted nationality, are not really colonials. Their presence is likely helpful, since they can serve valuable bureaucratic functions without compromising the racial order, but they judge the invaders harshly. They are absolved of the racism and crassness of the colonial frontier; they are usually regarded as more attractive because of their metropole polish. They keep a moral distance from the invaders through moral snobbery and visceral dislike, but are well-received as the "originals," of which the invaders are an inferior copy. In some cases, such as the Japanese or other Asians, honorary Whites are strategically tied to the invader because they are useful and even respected managers in the industrial system, but socially they are isolated.

These two other cohorts complete the five-race system of a settled nation, and the pattern has been duplicated many times.

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Notes

↑ See Lewontin, "Confusions About Human Races", Is Race Real? (7 Jun 2006).
↑ I have not read Pinker's The Blank Slate (2004), but I note it has received rave reviews from white power sites such as VDARE; Steve Sailer interviewed Pinker and proudly alluded to Pinker's evident conversion to white supremacist ideology. Pinker's shorter articles have insisted on increasingly coded objections to "political correctness" and other straw men complaints. This site does not link to sites of this kind for any reason.
↑ Usually the enormous loss of life among Native Americans (1492-1900) is attributed to either actual violence or disease. A third, perhaps larger, cause of death among Native Americans was the abrupt transformation of the landscape into one that did not support their livelihood. Detailed information on causes of death among Native Americans during much of this period is highly conflicted, but this seems consistent with cases studies in the lives of particular Native groups. See Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492, University of Oklahoma Press (January 1990), chapter 1; this describes methods of calculating the initial population of the Americas by the means of death, i.e., calculations backwards from the nadir populations of 1900 all the way back to initial contacts with Europeans. Richard White's The Roots of Dependency, U of Nebraska Press (1988) includes case studies of the Chocktaw, Pawnee, and Navajo that describe comparatively mild cases of decline into dependency (my review).
↑ This is a broad generalization. The destruction of American Natives was almost absolute in New England, and slightly less complete in the rest of the Eastern part of North America. The Western part of North America suffered comparatively less. In the case of South America, there are patches where genocide was total (Hispaniola, Argentina) and areas where no such campaign may be said to have occurred. Also, the impact of European settlement on Native American populations varied drastically. In some areas, such as Peru, the impact of a tiny cadre of Spaniards was immense.