Recently, I reflected on the connection between race, racism and the nation state and the ways in which it has deepened my understanding of anarchism and anti-racism for an essay in Religious Anarchisms: New Perspectives. There I argue that critiquing and challenging state power demands that we confront and dismantle racism and the false racial categories that are at its foundation. But to do this effectively, we must understand the history of race and its role in creating the nation-state.
The concept of race was first articulated in 1684 by Frances Brenier who categorized human beings into four racial groups. With the stroke of a pen, Brenier crafted a classification system that shaped anthropology, biology and pseudo-sciences like eugenics well into the nineteenth century. During what scholars now call the Romantic period, philosophers who embraced racialized thinking were also constructing the theoretical framework for the modern nation-state. These thinkers were immersed in a worldview that predicted increased decline among Europeans due to prolonged exposure to so-called inferior races. In response to these perceived internal and external racial threats, they called for society to be tightly organized around and motivated by common purpose, shared ancestry and a single destiny.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the architects of the nation-state embraced race as the category for determining who should rule and who should be ruled. As a result, European governments developed social welfare programs for the working class to graft them into a common national identity. As the state sought to create a common people with a shared destiny, immigration laws were developed to track and regulate people as they moved between borders that were once permeable. On an international level, racist theories about the inferiority of darker, “uncivilized” peoples provided Europeans with the necessary excuses to dominate people of color across the globe. This process of international colonization, expansion and competition coupled with increasing race-based fear among the masses had the added benefit of strengthening people’s commitment to and participation in the nation-state at home.
The role of race in historical class conflict also demonstrates its power to create a shared identity, even among people with opposing interests. In the early American colonies poor whites and enslaved blacks who identified the elite as their common enemy often saw one another as partners in struggle. However, after indentured servants and black slaves rebelled in the late 1600s, “the propertied class decided to ‘free’ [indentured servants] by giving them a special status as ‘whites’ and thus a stake in the system of oppression.” (Zinn, 31). Elite whites also reinforced white identity among former indentured servants and other non-elites by giving them land, providing them with jobs as overseers, and pitting slave labor against newly emancipated white labor. These and other social pressures coupled with the success of a manufactured white racial consciousness quickly thwarted associations across racial lines and weakened the possibility of shared resistance.
This history of race, racism and the nation-state makes it clear that anarchists must be fully committed to the work of anti-racism. This involves becoming more knowledgeable about how race and racism animate the state, identifying white privilege, understanding internalized oppression (people of color especially), becoming sensitized to the injustices perpetuated against people of color (an essential task for white people) and grasping more fully how race hinders us from seeking greater justice, peace freedom and equity for all people.
In addition to the task of sharpening our analysis, anti-racist work also involves, but is not limited to, standing together with oppressed racilized groups, confronting white privilege wherever we see it, setting up structures and processes in our organizations to avoid perpetuating white racial privilege and people of color taking the lead in challenging their oppression. The engineers of the nation-state have depended on divisive racial constructs to create and sustain ‘castes’ since its inception. When anarchists ignore the work of racial unity and anti-racist activists ignore the role of the state in perpetuating racism, we betray our efforts to transform society.
Sources
- Alana Lentin, Racism: A Beginner’s Guide (OneWorld Publications, 2008).
- Thomas F. Gossett, Race: the History of an Idea in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
- Richard Dyer, “The Matter of Whitness” in White Privilege: essential readings on the other side of racism ed. Paula S. Rothenberg (New York: Worth Publishers, 2002).
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995).
