Customer Reviews

Race In North America: Origin And Evolution Of A Worldview

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Before this book, scholarship on the issue of race in the U.S. was already very high. As evidenced by W.E.B. Dubois' "Black Reconstruction in America;" Winthrop Jordan's "White Over Black;" Eugene Genovese's "Roll Jordan Roll;" and George Fredrickson's "White Supremacy," as well as his "The Black Image in the White Mind," and "The Arrogance of Race," just to name those at the top of my list, and several of which I have also reviewed on Amazon.com.

Yet, arguably, they all pale in comparison to this sweepingly complete study that finally gets to the heart of the concept of race as it is applied to Western as well as North American cultures. It is the author's ability to use as an analytic platform, her anthropological and historian's skills to get beyond the walls of America's internal cultural parameters to an "over-the-culture-horizon view," that separates this study from other equally fine studies on race. What results is not just an analytic study that is intellectually pristine, but also one that finally "gets the issue of race right." Put simply, Ms. Smedley is finally able to peel back this complex onion, one layer at a time, so that the reader can see how the whole messy affair was put together from the very beginning. The key is that she is able to untangle the complex interactive and dynamic elements that make the cultural matrix of "race" such a persistent and intractable phenomenon.

As she notes throughout the book, race has evolved as just one of several ways of perceiving, interpreting, and dealing with human differences. It was (and remains even today) a way of imposing order and understanding on the complex reality in which one group attempts to assert its dominance over others. Race thus came together in the minds of its inventors (16th and 17th century Europeans, mostly the Spaniards, and Portuguese, but eventually with the British decidedly in the lead) as a way of ordering and ranking humans in terms of their perceived differences.

A key part of that understanding is to appreciate (and then acknowledge) that "the need for such an ordering system" itself came prior to the very "physical differences" later used (after-the-fact) to justify the ordering. The physical differences later enlarged and exaggerated in order to make them appear natural and god-given, were simply ideological instrumentalities used to justify and rationalize the race-based hierarchical social ordering that resulted (and that in any case was its main intended purpose). Thus, although in the contemporary mind race is "assumed" to have a biophysical basis, in fact, it has always been a "socio-cultural" rather than a "biological" concept. Put simply, race is the "folk meaning" attached to differences by those on the North American continent who needed to enlarge such differences in order to justify their dominance over others. And here it is clear that by "others" we mean over indigenous Native American tribes and nations, and imported African slaves.

With the results of the Gnome Project in, there is now a consensus among scientists that race is little more than a socio-cultural invention with no consistent or measurable biological meaning. All of it's meaning thus is to be found wholly in the cultural and psychological realm. Underscoring this point, the author has said it yet another way: race is a "social fiction" bound up with the mystique of biological heredity and a belief that biophysical attributes such as skin color provide an ineradicable bonding to behavioral attributes used as the basis for dominance. And here we mean such behavioral attributes as moral, spiritual, and intellectual abilities. Together they signify a rigidity and the permanence of position and status within the American socio-economic ranking and order. Since the distinguishing attributes are based on what has universally been believed to be the unalterable and god-given reality of innate biological differences, the ideology of race has worked its way into being a worldview and indeed has become an almost universal cultural way of being -- at least this is so in the Western World.

However, before the 17th Century, the written record shows no evidence of,or reference to, a concept even remotely similar to that currently being used as "race." Westerners are alone in the contemporary practice of enlarging minor physical differences precisely to serve as markers to justify a color-coded hierarchical social ordering; and more importantly, to further advance the fiction that these "assumed biological differences" are inherited, and therefore are not only immutable but also have precise behavioral, moral, and intellectual consequences for society.

In one of her most cogent analyses, this author virtually proves that the ideology of racism preceded both the concept of race and slavery (at least as slavery was practiced in the New World). According to the voluminous sources she cites, there is little doubt that it was the British, through the inhumanity and brutality committed against the Irish (beginning towards the end of the Middle Ages), who invented, introduced and propagated the modern ideology of racism and it's primary instrumentality, the concept of race itself. With a great deal of assistance from Christianity, this ideology was transferred "in toto" from the "Old" to the "New World" where it has been applied with a new kind of British vengeance and brutality, first to Native Americans, and then eventually to imported African slaves.

The history written here is prodigiously researched, well documented, and written very tightly. It tells the most coherent story about race yet to be told.

For me, I guess it was too much to hope that the evolution of the psychological dimension of racism could also be dealt with here. But even without a discussion of the psychology dimension, the author has still made it crystal clear how and why the British ideology of race differs from that of Europe, South Africa and Brazil. For this and many other reasons, this book is altogether a monumental accomplishment and an award-winning contribution to social science scholarship. FIFTY STARS

Dr. Smedley is not only a wonderful teacher- but an excellent writer as well! In this book she summarizes the evolution of racism and traces it through the bonds of culture to how we percieve it today. It is very interesting, eye opening, though provoking reading! Excellent!!