The Psychology of Racism
Introduction
Throughout history the superiority of the winners has been connected to a denial of feelings - what, in the British empire, was called the stiff upper lip. The conquerers of nature and "natives" claimed their right to the world as their possession because they had first conquered themselves.
Powerful people get others to do their bidding. It is the people that they subordinate who are forced to make adapt their lives to their masters bidding. The people with power can look aloof, calm and collected because they find it is easier to appear to be like this. They have the easier life, they are not being treated like beasts of burden, they are not being robbed and murdered. The ideology and culture of power often turns things upside down. Distress is the result of subordination and in human relationships the emotional display of distress then becomes the proof of inferiority. It proves that you need "protection". It becomes part of the power way of thinking, embedded in the culture, that the unemotional life style is evidence of superiority. The "Stiff upper lip" is the way you hold your face so as not to smile, snarl or cry. It is colonialism in facial expression when times, occaisionally, don't go so well. In contrast the emotional excitability of "the natives" proves their inferiority, it proves they have to be 'civilised'.
The civilisers, convinced of their superiority (which is really their arrogance and the way they have been emotionally amputated from any empathic response to common suffering) then see themselves in the role of benefactors, their supposedly higher civilisation is a gift to 'the natives'.
The effect of this is to put a pervasive burden onto supposedly subordinate cultures and social systems. People in subordinated cultures are forced to live a lie. Instead of the anger, resentment, fear, that they should feel there is a pressure from the colonial masters, to conform to a certain type of appearance, docile, unthreatening, submissive, obedient, 'Christian'. While a counter culture of resistance might develop away from the masters's gaze (like the development of Patois as a form of speech the masters could not comprehend) this pressure for conformity creates a mismatch between how one is supposed to appear, and think, and how one really feels.
Black people, in cultures subordinated by imperialism assist to create a sort of social stability in a double sense. As a minority and therefore vulnerable they can be at the bottom of the line to soak up anger and aggression generated in other situations where white people dare not challenge the real sources of their frustrations. (Racist attacks and harrassment). On a day to day level white people can survive with a sense that, whatever else they may be, at least they are white and English (British, Dutch, French etc). In the power relations of society, in order to survive, people need the reassurance that they are 'superior' to others.
In our own day this creates, for post colonial minorities, a relationship to the host culture which is one of hostility and exclusion.
The 'inferior/superior' relationship
In the heads of those who aspire to, and attain, dominance is their sense of personal and social 'superiority'. The consequence is that others must be seen as inferiors and made to recognise this status. (In children this gives rise to the inferiority complex - its psychological defence is to strive for dominance over others).
But to make others recognise their inferior status is more than a set of psychological manipulations. The superior decide for the inferior, they govern them and take decisions about their economic and social life. These are decisions in which they derive powerful advantages at the expense of the subordinated society. When a whole society becomes involved in the domination of another racial group the culture of the dominant society becomes thoroughly pervaded by a sense of its superiority. If we look at all Imperial Cultures from the point of view of their colonised victims we see justifications for oppression and exploitation imposed by the threat or reality of legalised murder.
The Spanish Empire and the British
"Cannibalism, human sacrifice, incest, drug abuse, drunkness, sodomy, adultery, robbery, murder...The only sin with which the Spaniards did not instantly saddle the Incas and Aztecs was heresy, and that was because they could not, by definition, be pagans and heretics at the same time.....If the American Indians were, as the sins of which they were accused seemed to imply, no better than brute beasts - 'irrational' (or 'non-rational') creatures was the preferred euphemism - then it was morally permissable, even desirable, for the Spaniards to appropriate their land, their property, and their persons. 'Irrational creatures cannot have dominion...because dominion signifies rights...(Since) irrational creatures cannot have rights, it follows that they cannot have dominion...' " (Raey Tannahill Sex in History, Abacus, 1981 p.272).
The argument was as ancient as social power and authority - the Spaniards were rational, moral and, in short, they knew best so had to take control. ("When the most reliable information was correlated, it transpired that sodomy, incest, adultery, rape, murder, and theft were just as illegal in the dominions of the Aztecs and Incas as they were at home in Spain; that drunkeness, admissable in Spain, was a crime among the Aztecs; that the Incas, just like the Spaniards, thought of prostitution as a necessary evil; and that human sacrifice was rare among the Incas and cannibalism almost unknown" (Ibid. p 274.) A counter current in the Catholic Church fought for this alternative view but lost.
But these were the Spaniards. Wasn't the British Empire altogether more civilised? In 1762 the French author Jean-Jacques Rousseau inflamed progressive thinkers in European society with a work called The Social Contract which he started with the stirring words ' Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains' . Rousseau appealed to the emotions and explained how human reason, when not accompanied by considerations of the heart, could only act in a way that was unproductive because insensitive. Part of his argument was the harmonious existence of the uncorrupted 'Noble Savage' who everywhere were being put in the chains of slavery by white peoples. (For a modern day vindication of Rousseau's ideas, enriched in modern psychotherapy ideas, we have only to look at Jean Liedloff's study of the Yeaquena Indians The Continuum Concept Penguin 1982). Rousseau stirred the imagination of people like William Wilberforce who devoted a lifetime to bringing about the abolition of slavery in the British colonies.
But people like Wilberforce could not overturn the whole economic and social dynamic of their time, nor its culture. If, for example, we examine the relations between Britain and the Indian Subcontinent at this time the story was robbery with genocide.
The East India Company's servants "forcibly seize the belongings and goods of the peasantry, traders and others at a quarter of their value and by means of violence and oppression they make them pay 5 rupees for goods that are worth no more than one" (Henry Verelest A view of the Rise of the English Government in Bengal, 1772). "In a year when 35% of the cultivators perished not 5% of the land revenue was remitted and 10% was added for the ensuing year" (W.W. Hunter The Annals of Rural Bengal). The land revenue was the tax imposed to pay for the government and to make up the profits of the East India Company. "Such has been the restless energy of our misgovernment that within the short space of 20 years many parts of this government have been reduced to a desert" (William Fullerton M.P. 1787). (This and other details of the different kinds of later British imperial economic domination of South Asia are to be found in my book The Economic Development of India, Spokesman Books, 1975.)
Wealth flowing back to the metropolitan power enabled not only capital accumulation but also forms of luxury consumption and life styles for everyone that then came to make up part of English and British culture, a culture of ostentation and dominance.
Once England, the dominant part of Britain, was powerful it could then be apparently 'laid back' and unthreatening. Just as the playground bully, whose power is established, whose orders accepted without question, can afford to lay off beating up his rivals.
"We don't want to fight,
But by jingo if we do,
We've got the ships,
We've got the men
We've got the money too"
Because we've got the money, the ships, the men, we don't need to fight now and don't want to...but just you watch out. If you play fair with us we 'll play fair with you. We British are decent sorts really, motivated by fair play, don't you know. If you know your place and don't rouse our bulldog spirit we'll see you all right.
British History and British Culture
The notion that colonised peoples (Black people) are inferior is to be found not only in the heads of individuals as 'attitudes', that they can be argued away from, to 'to see the light', with the truth of anti-racist attitudes. It is much more insidious and pervasive. It lies in the way we understand our history and culture.
For example, the idea that "We gave India and the other colonies their independence" is a colonial attitude which enables us to feel that the inhabitants of those countries, and migrants, are still inferior. Rather than understand this situation as defeat, the condescension continues - independence is an act of generosity, a gift, the civilising period is over, the junior culture has grown up enough to look after itself. In fact, people in the Indian subcontinent fought for their independence for decades against what was often murderous oppression and won when Britain was no longer a dominant world power. (Lord Ismay, Mountbatten's Chief of Staff in India, wrote in his biography 'There was in fact no option before us but do do what we did.')
Semiology can help us see these things more clearly. The mechanisms are illustrated for French Racism by the French semiologist Roland Barthes (Mythologies, Paladin, 1972). He uses the example of a photograph in Paris-Match of a black soldier saluting the French flag. This has a first and second order connotation: (1) a gesture of loyalty (2) 'France is a great empire, and all her sons, without colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag'.
In everyday life a host of things go to make up the culture in which we live. "...all the characteristic activities and interests of a people. Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into segments, beetroot in vinegar, 19th Century Gothic churches, the music of Elgar..."(T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture quoted in Dick Hebdidge Subculture. The Meaning of Style 1979 p. 7). If we think that our Englishness is superior then all these familiar things become proof of our superiority. When Norman Tebbit, a member of a former British conservative government, wanted to put black migrants and their children to a cultural loyalty test it is a cricket test, which team do they support.
Black cultures then come to seen, in their lack of familiarity for colonising white people, as somehow exotic. We look at the interesting different pictures of gods and goddesses or religious symbolism, different clothes styles, different foods, initially we might gawp in the way a tourist would before he reaches for his camera, but after a while this culture somehow seems strangely improper, not quite right, it isn't British, it isn't quite our cup of tea.
There are deep psychological reasons for this which are not as simple as we might at first believe. As babies we are no more familiar with the meanings and cultural codes of 'our own' society than of any other. We have to learn them and this learning is often a painful process. The place of knives and forks on the table, and how to use them, is something we learn. It symbolises our smallness. When we are obliged to use chopsticks, or our fingers, we feel the same foolishness that our parents might have made us feel when they patronised our inadequacy to use a knife and fork. We had to learn the meanings of our culture: that a suit is the way that a gentlemen dresses, that the plumes in the imperial governor's hat do not have the same significance as those of the Red Indian chief. We learn that clean shaven men in bowler hats are normal on the commuter train to London and that the bowler means a city gent. We learn that the vicar dresses up in funny clothing but this is quite normal and that we should not comment aloud about it in church during the sermon, for if we do we suddenly become extremely uncomfortable.
This world of meanings we acquire, sometimes very uncomfortably, and we want to flee from the memory of the time when we were vulnerable because we did not have these points of reference. But to observe a foreign culture, in particular a non-European one, other than as exotic, is to observe just such a world where we have no points of reference to help us find our way without embarrassment and humiliation. Unless, like black children in this society, we are brought up in this culture, we distance ourselves from what we see with a nausea which is actually the transferred feeling of how we were made to feel as children as we were socialised into white culture, feelings we are not willing to experience again, preferring to take snaps shots and distancing ourselves in our feelings of superiority.
At this stage it is not difficult to find, in our selective viewing of things, the 'evidence' for cultural superiority. All European society shouts it at us all the time, even in its most sublime and spiritual places we can find evidence for our beliefs.
Christianity and racism
It was the Spanish Pope Alexander VI Borgia who assumed he had the right to give Spain sole dominion over most of the New World. While there were splits in the Church, and it was eventually recognised that the Indians were 'truly men', the Catholic Church worked hand in hand with the new European barbarism, providing its justifications with the symbolism of the cross and the noose. Thus in 1583 the Third Provincial Council of Lima Peru approved a sermon for Indian converts which included the following about the alleged sodomy that the Spanish claimed to find everywhere. "Let it be known that it carries the death penalty under the just laws of our Spanish kings. Let it be known that the reason why God has allowed that you, the Indians, should be so afflicted and vexed by other nations is because of this vice that your ancestors had." (Reay Tannahill op. cit. p 283). History does not record what the Indians made of this, history records the views of conquerors. But it helps to be reminded of the Hopi Indian who told Jung that white people were mad. Racists are always unable to see themselves properly.
In England too the Church played a similar role. It helps us see how intrinsic to our culture is imperialism to look at the semiology of racial superiority in churches. One has only to go into somewhere like Canterbury Cathedral to have it shout at you from every wall. What is memorialised there in this vast cultural monument to the English branch of 'Christendom'? Besides the moth eaten shabby flags of different regiments there are the memorial plaques on the wall to imperial adventurers who spent their life for the glory of god subduing different inferior races: To Major Generals who died fighting colonial campaigns; to Rear Admirals killed opening up the Chinese market for British Opium; to Captains shipwrecked during the pursuit of Holy Free trade.
It is not that this grotesque and grizzly place has been turned 'from a Temple into a den of thieves', it has never been anything else. The commemorative plaques and tombs from before the period prior to mercantile plunder celebrate the earlier imperial adventures of English and European feudalism. 'Crusader' is still a noble word in our culture. But the crusaders for Christendom in the Holy Land put countless defenceless women and children to the sword, brutalising the more civilised Muslim cultures of the time.
Yet this place is the centre of British spirituality. The blindness to the meaning of these grizzly imperialist monuments, in the same buildings as Christian Aid posters, appealing for justice for the Worlds Poor, is the blindess of Imperial culture, or racism.
Monumental culture
Is all this merely to be found in Churches? Of course not. If I want to relax and I go to walk in the Arboretum in Nottingham I can find it there too. A public park and green space set aside by the municipal socialism of the last century its high point has the usual decorations: cannon taken from the Russians at Sebastopol and a Bell Tower, which used to have a bell in it, stolen from Canton. The town in which Robin Hood robbed from the rich to give to the poor, celebrates robbing the world's poor to give to the rich.
But surely these things are forgotten now, surely we can see through these things? I would agree that we have moved on to some degree but that this shabby ideology of imperial grandiosity which has generated racism lives on increasingly divorced from its historical roots. This dog eared point ideology still lives on and when fascists march they do so still wrapped up in Union Jacks, little Alf Garnetts to a man.
On a half crown coin before 1948 you would find the monarch's head surrounded by the words FID.DEF (fidei defensor - defender of the faith)and IND.IMP (Indiae imperator - emperor of India). The two went together. If things have changed it is nevertheless true that the pageantry and historical relics of that time is still part of myth of cultural superiority to a multitude of Alf Garnetts and to all who scan the new years honours list for Medals whose names reek of Empire.
Savages, natives and nakedness
The sort of psychological processes on which racism is often generated is illustrated by examining the connotations of words and pictures as Barthes does. For my generation, and older ones, there are some tricky and embarrassing issues around race and sexuality that we have to explore in regard to white attitudes to people of African, Polynesian, North and South American 'Indian', and Aboriginal descent. Unlike peoples from the Indian Subcontinent, or China, where the one was dealing with established 'civilisations' here one was dealing with tribal people or 'savages' who were, in the racist rendition of Darwin, only just down out of the trees.
Until I was quite old I thought that the native meant a person that was primitive and, usually, naked or next to naked. These people were also always 'coloured' (i.e. white was the expected norm). You could see these naked people in copies of the National Geographic or other books about the British Empire with photographs. You could also see them sometimes on TV. You can still see them today in a book like Desmond Morris's Manwatching .(Triad Grafton 1982). Just as in my childhood experience of the description of tribal peoples Morris applies different critieria to his description of them. Thus he discusses the cultural function and meaning of clothes, when they are there to hide or emphasise body language, as the social norm and refers to tribal peoples in different terms (as 'primitive peoples').
We are all born free but are everywhere in chains according to Rousseau. We are also all born naked. Tribal peoples who do not wear clothes partly live in climates where they are not needed, but partly their nakedness displays the openess which more equal, and therefore more open and honest human relations make possible. There is no need for badges of rank nor for the disguises that arise from the suspicion and defensiveness intrinsic to cultures of power and violence. (Cultures in which rape is common as an expression of male power). Suits of armour are also clothes.
The nakedness, or scantier dress, of black 'savages' that I saw as child was startling and it confirmed that they must be 'primitives' for if you wanted to look at photos of naked white people you might surreptitiously read daddy's Men Only, but you definitely didn't take it out of the house. (I wasn't yet sophisticated enough to go and stand in front of paintings of naked women in art galleries). And never in a million years - this was the late 1950s - did you expect to see naked white people on a screen.
It was a long time before I realised that 'native' really meant the original inhabitants of a region - and even later to realise that the notion of 'native' is the distinctive point of view of colonists to indigenous populations which follows from the fact that they are intruders set on dominance. It is not until I think about it now that I can see the paradox in Rousseau's notion of ' Noble Savages'. For in our culture nobility has the connotations of the codes and life styles of a landed aristocracy and is therefore to be aspired to. 'Noble' is what philosophers call a 'Hurrah' word and evokes all those meanings and associations which seem intrinsically 'right', because they correspond to the logic of the social structure. By contrast, 'Savage' is a 'Boo' word. Savages are uncivilised and civilisation is superiority, where superiority lies in the deployment of superior money and technological power ('the ships, the men, the money too').
Who are the barbarians?
My childhood archetype of the unclothed natives were often South Sea Islanders who supposedly did ghastly things like eating people. But many times one would also watch such programmes of African tribes which must have radically affected how people of Afro-Caribbean descent were seen when they migrated to Britain in the 1950s. They may have dressed like English people but it was people 'like them' that were seen naked on the TV and magazines. Asian people, by contrast, are often 'more dressed', and differently dressed, than people in white culture. On the other hand Mr Gandhi did create a sensation in the 1930s by coming to negotiate with the stuffed shirts of the British Imperial State wearing a dhoti.
We see here the way in which racism powerfully intertwines with other social inhibitions and taboos. We cannot fully understand the emotional impact of these things unless we study the obvious other connotations. Of course, colonialism originated in countries where clothing made sense to keep you warm and dry and 'the natives' lived in hotter climes. Of course, also, dress gives instant signals of status and power. In the 15th century no English knight was allowed to wear a tunic that failed to cover his buttocks or to wear shoes with points longer than two inches. And here were people who were not only not dressed like His Majesties subjects, but who were barely dressed at all. But there was more going on than that, otherwise the colonialists would have 'gone native' in (no) clothes styles. They did not 'go native', the colonialists developed a colonial uniform all of their own. Representives of the Imperial Power tended to adopt the way of the American Indian chiefs, to impress they put lots of feathers in the Governor's hats....
But there were deeper psychological processes than the need of important people to stand out like Peacocks. Clothes and their styles carry important messages of sexual inhibition in patriachalised cultures. Long before I had watched these 'natives' on TV white anthropologists like Malinowski and Margaret Mead saw that these were peoples that did not live by these cultural codes based on property, power and monogamous marriage. That said, the absence of clothes is somehow more shocking to white culture for more reasons than just the absence of sexual inhibition. In a clothed culture, we nevertheless come into the world naked and have to be bathed, changed and fed, if our mothers have not been seduced by Nestles, at bare breasts, until we are old enough to feed, wash and clothe ourselves. We thus carry in ourselves a record, if perhaps not consciously remembered, of when we were unclothed, and when our mothers, were sometimes partially unclothed. These records/'memories' have a very high emotional energy charge attached to them. In our culture our nakedness usually has connotations of our vulnerability, the loathsome smallness that we wanted to grow out of as quickly as possible, because we were made to feel small when we were small, by parents who may have been squeamish at their and our bodies. The nakedness of the 'native' jogs these uncomfortable feelings and it seems inconceivable that we could ever identify with them.
Perhaps when parents dealt with our nakedness they remembered their own shame and that conveyed itself to us. (Part of the attraction of porn for men is that they can survey women unclothed. This reverses the position they had with their mothers and thereby releases powerful feelings buried since infancy. My guess is that for women porn carries an opposite emotional charge because they too had the feeling of shame at nakedness that little boys had with their mothers. But they are the same sex as their mothers and the porn models. As it is mostly naked women who are 'on display' in porn it conveys to women the idea of a repetition of their original feelings of embarrassment that they felt when they were younger). The assumption that naked means primitive, a reading of nakedness under much white racism, is actually a distorted reflection of the emotional sickness of our society. For underlying it is the idea that our bodies, our sexuality, are sources of shame. All of this should be further situated in a culture of power which prizes 'knowing best', intellectual and 'reason' over the body and its feelings. As white people we are the losers of this. If we are uncomfortable, because we have been made to be so when younger, in our nakedness, then all our times of tenderness and intimacy will be times of uncomfortableness. Sexual feelings become virtually indistinguishable from shame.
There is indeed a bit of us that recognises this, for in our fantasies of paradise, our white culture imagines a South Seas island and the life style of a Gaugin. But we have corrupted this. As a child my stereotype of growing up was the movie South Pacific where you could stay in paradise, meet your future wife and only true love, but only if you were prepared to climb into a cockpit and shoot Zeros out of the sky, only if you could run fast enough for cover during a bombing run. That this was experienced as heart stirring entertainment said a lot about a society that had lost its marbles, a society whose victors proceeded to turn the Pacific into a set for a series of movies starring Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando and Robert Mitchum and then, into a nuclear dustbin and rocket range. The closest you can get to paradise now is watching adverts for Bounty bars.
Of course our view of these places as paradise lies not only in palm trees, blue seas and white coral beaches, it lies in our wish for a return to the pleasures of the body. (We corrupt this too turning places like the Phillipines and Thailand into brothel cultures, institutionalising child sex abuse, and spreading AIDS as a new holocaust on the world's poor.)
Underlying much racism is a sense that it is somehow superior to feel shame at our bodies. But we are divided because a part of us can also see other possibilities in life, when we distance ourselves from these aspects of supposedly inferior cultures it is this tender part of ourselves that we are attacking.
Jean Liedloff describes how the Yeaquena Indians in an apparently irrational fashion got water twenty minutes walk away down what we would regard as a dangerous mountain path. "Once a day each woman put her gourds and clothing (a small, apronlike cache-sexe, and ankle, knee, wrist, upper arm, neck and ear beads) on the bank and bathed herself and her baby. However, many women and children participated, the bath had a Roman quality of luxuriousness. Every move bespoke sensual enjoyment and the babies were handled like objects so marvellous that their owners felt constrained to put a mock modest face on their pleasure and pride. Walking down the moutain was done in the same accustomed to the best, almost smug style, and their last perilous steps into the stream would have done credit to a Miss World coming forward to claim her crown. This was true of all the Yeaquana woemn and girls I saw....Upon reflection I was hard put to think of a 'better' way to use the water fetching time, at least from the point of view of well being. If, on the other hand, progress - or its handmaidens, speed, efficiency, and novelty - were the criterion, the water walks were positively moronic" (Jean Liedloff The Continuum Concept Penguin 1982, p. 29)
But our society would see this as moronic. This divorce from ourselves is intrinsic to a number of patriachal cultures and their Biblical messages which were forced down the throats of supposedly 'primitive peoples' by psychologically hung up Christian missionaries who prepared the ground for the troops, the railways, and then the plantations. All this, I feel, tells us a lot about where madness comes from in our own culture, expelled from Eden to till the fields by a God whose creation of the universe was the first six day working week.
Conclusion
When Rousseau created the idea that inflamed his generation by making reference to a different society of 'noble savages', he highlighted a 'breach of social contract' by the rulers of society by reference to black cultures. There is much that is still valid in Rousseau's view and in the next Chapter I will look at how power effects our psychology and interpersonal relations. In so doing the work by Liedloff on the Yeaquana provides a comparative point of departure to reveal how, while we have progressed in our technological destructiveness we have regressed in our emotional relations.
There is also in the environmental movement an increased recognition that the defence of remaining tribal peoples is an integral part of environmentalism. At the time of writing I have just been reading of how Survival for Tribal Peoples are campaigning in defence of the Innu, one of the last hunter gather cultures in North America who have lived peacefully in the tundra of Northern Canada for thousands of years. Now NATO jets scream low over their homeland which the military claim is uninhabited. The caribou and game are dying, poisoned like the rivers. Likewise the defence of Tropical Rainforests is tied to the defence of peoples whose way of life depends upon its maintenance, whose cultures are being destroyed by the logging companies and the beef barons, and who are murdered, if, like Chico Mendez, they resist this.
In this growing identification we are at last getting a recognition of the value and wisdom of subordinated cultures which imperialism has been mostly concerned to slander and denigrate as inferior. Not only do such socieites have things to teach us about healthy emotional relationships but they also often have a much keener sense of their own environment and how to live in it harmoniously. If this is not encapsulated in written language it is often none the less highly sophisticated - existing in forms which, in the ecological age, we shall need to relearn. As an example Bill Mollison, in his Permaculture Design Manual, recognises tribal societies different ways of conceptualising their place in their environment through patterning. "We call such people illiterate only if we ignore their patterns, songs and dances as a valid literature and as an accurate recording system. Having evolved number and alphabetical symbols we have abandoned pattern learning and recording in our education. I believe this to be a great mistake because simple patterns links so many different phenomena that the learning of even one significant pattern....is very like learning an underlying principle" (p. 97).
© BRIAN DAVEY