The White Race: Degeneration and Eugenics

Abstract

One of the paradoxes of European racism is that its language seems to be centred on, or engrossed with, the negative characteristics of the Other, blacks (libidinous, dirty, lazy…) or Jews (grasping, parasitical, cunning…), whereas the reverse side of the coin, the construction of European ‘whiteness’, is strangely absent. The overwhelming concern with the moral and physical features of the Other means that the European is occluded; within most texts white identity and its essential characteristics are implicit, taken for granted, and thus become the unspoken norm, the measuring stick, from which all other racial groups deviate. The invisibility of whiteness, its unstated nature, derives from the fact that in Western culture, through language and representation, whites have an almost universal and central role as the standard of biological and aesthetic excellence. Few Christians take conscious note, let alone realize the significance, of the fact that the predominant Western image of Jesus Christ, a Jewish Palestinian, is of a blue-eyed Aryan, with long, fair tresses. It is only in recent years that scholars have begun to explore more systematically the historical and psychological processes through which ‘white’ identity has been constructed. This ‘self-reflection’ by white Europeans is central to an understanding of how racism has historically functioned: as Richard Dyer comments: ‘As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.’¹