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‘Race’, Racism and Cultural IdentityWeek 2
Lecture: Learning from Historical and Global Comparisons
Genocide in Rwanda in 1994
800,000 people murdered in 100 days
Members of the Tutsi minority killed by members of the Hutu majority
Racial and ethnic divisions
Shape life experiences and life chances
Are constructs rooted in social, political and historical conditions
Universal? Modern or anti-
modern?
Two crucial questions
How are why do people come to see others as similar or different?
When, how and why do beliefs about similarity and difference come to take on a social significance?
Social scientists focus on
The social and political processes of racialisation i.e. how groups are constituted.
The ways in which ‘race thinking’ and racism operate as part of particular social formations.
Race and Modernity
Slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism
New forms of power; new problems and technologies of population management
Managing the contradictions of the Enlightenment
The role of science
Rudyard Kipling 1899
Take up the White Man’s burden-
Send forth the best ye breed-
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.
The divisions of colonialism
Franz Fanon – the dehumanisation of the native
Edward Said – the dualism of the West and the Rest
Race and science
Establishes idea that race has a biological reality
Classification and ranking the world’s population
Linking race to differences in character and capacity
Ota Benga
A man put on exhibition in the Bronx Zoo (1906)
The Irish and the ‘Europeans’
