Color and History: From the Invention of the White Race to the Invention of White Multiculturalism*
Yann Moulier Boutang
Translated by Lowe Laclau
We in our “civilized,” white and exceedingly developed democracies, despite twenty years of crises know surges of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism very well. It is easy to view such phenomena as a general return to a barbarism of inter-ethnic conflict such as those that shake the Wild Cities of Enki Bilal (from the Berlin of the Femme Piège, to Beirut by way of Sarajevo, or the Africa of resistance in Rwanda). As if times had become as rough and merciless as the “new look” of commercial capitalism. However, even if we leave aside the all against all ethnic wars, this supposed new state of nature that makes the market Leviathan more desirable, we are forced to draw up a doubly worrying assessment. Since the latter half of the Eighties, in the parliamentary democracies, the extreme right reconstructed themselves significantly on an institutional scale (the PEN in France, Haider in Austria, Pauline Hanson in Australia). One voter in ten no longer hesitated to cast his or her vote for a type of political program that the defeat of Fascism and Nazism had previously relegated in the sphere of the unnamable, the unpronounceable, or the unrepresentable. The second assessment is the relative inefficiency of the calls for tolerance and of democratic multiculturalism to reduce explosions of intolerance to a marginal and normal [sic] level.
Why have democracies seen themselves re-grow these venomous flowers, why is it that the “communicational act” is only made use of to keep police blunders and racist murders from turning into riots? Why so much inertia, why is there so much complacence before discourses on closing up borders and standing firm, discourses that earn the traditional right as well as the left, much desired voters, as has been shown with the issues of immigration regulation and border security? The response from the workers movement, from classical Marxism, from good natured Republicans, and even radical Americans is simple: in a society of class inequality, within an economy dominated by capitalist exploitation and domination, real democracy cannot exist, nor can pacified interethnic relations. One needs only search for who profits from the crime. The disjointedness of the multitude gives force to the multinationals etc. There's nothing completely false in summing it up in this manner, but there's also nothing completely persuasive about it either. It lacks some of the critical links within its reasoning, and this cuts down all operational and political character, relegating it to a sphere of moral testimony. Two books in English with very different styles and objectives propose exploring another track and of truly beginning the debate on the classical question of nation, race and class: a scouring essay from Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in an Multicultural Society (hereout WN) and two ambitious volumes from Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (hereout IWR1) and Vol 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (hereout IWR2).
The work from Ghassan Hage allows a diagnosis of the present situation of racism as well as the failures of multiculturalism. The two volumes from Theodore Allen make it possible to embrace another question at the other end of the historical chain of immigration: that of the colonization of catholic Ireland from the 16th to the 19th century and the concomitant enslavement of Blacks in the Virginia plantations. What relation would be demanded between multiculturalism, slavery and colonization? It is the question of social control through intermediaries because the normal intermediaries had not yet been set in place. What happens when a failed or too radical a polarization erodes the space of traditional political mediations?
