Theories of ‘Race’ and Whiteness

Abstract

The history of ‘race’ is deep-rooted. All communities and cultures identify insiders, members of the group and outsiders, those who are categorized as the Other: the unknown, the alien, the strange and the exotic. It is quite possible to imagine a world where history ran differently, and people who defined themselves as greens enslaved purple people and considered this was because something about their green identity made them innately superior to purples. The greens might see this superiority as a fact of their breeding, or their culture, or their divinely written destiny. They might claim that purple people are weak, base animals, not truly human. This is just a silly fantasy story a thought experiment that tries to approach ‘race’ and racism from a place abstracted from real life. But already what I have written resonates with the actual history of our world. How we think about ‘race’, racism and power today is predicated on an understanding of the emergence of Western power in the Early Modern period, the shaping of European empires, the growth of slavery in the Atlantic, the spread of Enlightenment thinking, the Industrial Revolution, the passage of individuals around the world, the rise to dominance of the West and the United States, the abolishment of slavery, the globalization of culture and modernity, post-colonial shifts of power and the spread of global capitalism.