How race became inscribed on our skins

Kenya: In the clear prose of her semi-fictionalised autobiographies, the late Maya Angelou powerfully communicated her experiences of racism and sexism.  She performed similarly important work in her appropriately unadorned, hopeful verse.

 By adopting the ‘life writing’ approach, a form that we know here in Kenya through Mau Mau memoirs and creative publications such as Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About this Place, Angelou was able to represent the often hidden history of African Americans’ experience of racism over her single lifetime, which encompassed both the horrors of lynching and the election of Barrack Obama. 

 The past month also saw the death of Stuart Hall (pictured above), a theorist I greatly admire.  Hall was born in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s, where in left-wing circles he became massively respected for his committed work.  He was one of the founders of ‘Cultural Studies’, which extended narrow ‘Literary Studies’ into wider cultural production.  Hall’s special interests were media manipulation, the role of culture’s ‘readers’, and the experience of being ‘Black’ in an often racist post-war Britain. 

 Two brilliant talents have recently left us, then: one that tackled American racism; the other, British racism.  Although the specifics of these two racisms differ, the early ‘intellectual’ history of ‘Race’ is shared.  It is a story of appalling arrogance, worth reciting.  It is a history that led to Kenya’s experience of racism under colonialism.  It infects our local ‘Settler Literature’ (Blixen’s Out of Africa, for instance) and features more radically as a theme in our strongest postcolonial fiction, notably Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novels.

 ‘The West’ has created ‘other people’ as fully different and lesser for millennia.  For instance, in the fifth century BCE we meet Herodotus, Greek historian and ‘Father of Lies’, who, in addition to empirical studies, concocted fantastic stories of fabulous creatures and savage peoples in Africa.  Herodotus massively influenced later Western thinking.  In fourteenth-century Europe, we still encounter fantastical ‘travelogues’, absurd writing masquerading as truth, such as the notorious Travels of ‘Sir John Mandeville’; Mandeville for example presents dog-headed Africans as real instances of subhumans. 

  Even today, some American academic or other unfailing produces a book that ‘scientifically proves’ that this or that perceived inferiority is ‘inherently characteristic’ of ‘blacks’, which it of course isn’t.  A recent example might be Nicholas Wade’s sinister A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.

 From hereon in, the history of race/racism ostensibly becomes a story of reputable ‘science’ gone silly.  However, racism results in oppressive suffering and death, and these things are never just ‘silly’; they are wrong.

 In 1787, German scientist JF Blumenbach categorised humans into ‘races’: the ‘Caucasian’, the ‘Ethiopian’ and so on, which he overlaid with differences of skin colour and cranial appearance.  While he did not rank these races, his taxonomic scheme enabled others to do so, then and later.  Infamously, the French aristocrat Gobineau (a 19th century literary man and scientific dilettante) became the ‘Father of Scientific Racism’ by arbitrarily proposing a racial hierarchy, with a ‘White Race’ at the top and a degenerate ‘Black Race’ at the bottom.  Hitler’s Nazis loved Gobineau.

 Soon afterwards, the genuinely admirable science of Darwinian biological evolution was skewed by racists such as Francis Galton into Social Darwinism and Eugenics, the belief that blacks are not only inferior but also that by selective breeding between ‘pure’ whites, a Super Race might be engineered.  Galton’s hypothesis supported all manner of later moral panics regarding miscegenation: South Africa’s ‘Morality Laws’, the USA’s ‘Jim Crow Laws’ and ‘One Drop Rule’... 

 The Nazis loved Eugenics, too, for Galton further argued that the ‘Anglo-Saxon’, being ‘superior’, had the right and obligation to dominate blacks, working them to death.  This, or ‘saving’ them with ‘civilization’.  Interestingly, in ‘Africa for the Chinese’, Galton also proposed that ‘yellow’ Chinese should immigrate to Africa, ousting degenerate ‘blacks’!  The gaps in the pseudo-scientific theories were overlooked, by omission and commission, because they served the Imperialist establishment’s purpose.

 Hall’s great contributions to the debate were to show:  a) smug Englishfolk that the racism Britain extended during colonialism was still a fact of life for Commonwealth immigrants in contemporary Britain; b) that the real problem with racism was its deskmate, ‘classism’, a consignment of ‘blacks’ to the very bottom of the British pile.

 Simply, race is a construct; a fictional creation.  As post-colonialist Kwame Appiah writes, like rigid ethnic groups it doesn’t objectively exist.  The frustration is, however, that for millions across the globe it does exist in terms of material consequences, of experienced privilege and suffering, as Angelou articulates.  Fanon was right to call it a ‘reality’, even if it is unreal!