The Undivided Past (33 page)

As the South African
economy became the most
industrialized on the continent, it proved more difficult to maintain these simplified, artificial boundaries. By the early 1960s, Sir
John Maud was convinced that apartheid must collapse because it was “inconceivable that in this multi-racial state the criterion of advancement will forever remain the colour of your skin.” The attempt to keep whites and blacks separate, insisting on the superiority of the former and the inferiority of the latter, must give way, “for the simple reason that it is not only evil, but cannot be made to fit the facts.” The South African economy, Maud believed, could not in the long run work on the basis of apartheid, any more than the American economy could have survived on the basis of
slavery. He was also convinced that the perverted
religious teachings of the
Dutch Reformed Church, lending bogus legitimation to racist doctrines by spuriously claiming divine sanction, would not prevail against the traditional
biblical injunctions stressing the equality and brotherhood of man, which had underpinned the campaigns to abolish the slave trade and slavery more than a century before. “
Christianity,” Maud concluded, in his valedictory dispatch to the British government, “is a much more serious threat than
Communism to white supremacy.” In the end, he was sure, common
humanity would prevail over racial divisions.
¹⁰³

The attempts to establish empires and nations on the basis of unambiguous racial identities, distinctions, rankings, inclusions, and exclusions were undertaken on the assumption that there was no such thing as a humanity common to all people: indeed, according to those proponents of racialist schemes in the European empires, or the American South, or Nazi Germany, or South Africa, the objects of oppression belonged to races so alien, inferior,
and reprehensible as to be barely human. Yet even the most fiercely enforced of these views, policies, and polities, whether based on
religious,
biological, or historical evidence, have ultimately proved unstable and unsustainable, resting as they did on intellectual foundations that were at best uncertain and contradictory, and at worst plain wrong. Even as these regimes were being created, their policies and presumptions were subjected to ever more critical analysis and scrutiny, and from a variety of perspectives. Some of the earliest and most persuasive defiance of racialist thought came from
Christians who believed that racial hierarchies and identities could not be reconciled with the religious teaching that all people were equal in the sight of
God. Among them was Sir
John Maud, who believed that racist policies violated the teachings of the
Bible. Evangelical
whites in the American South,
Hitler’s stooges among the German clergy, and fellow travelers in the
Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa might piously claim otherwise, but they were in a minority; and the hostility of the Christian churches to the treatment of the
Jews by the
Nazis, and to that of nonwhites in South Africa, would prove decisive in mobilizing opinion against those regimes. As the fourth assembly of the
World Council of Churches would put it in 1968, racism “denies our common humanity in creation and our belief that all men are made in God’s image.”
¹⁰⁴

But it was not the Christian churches alone that deplored attempts to divide the world into superior and inferior races; their resistance was reinforced by academics on both sides of the Atlantic. Some French scholars, unimpressed by a century of taxonomical confusions and inconsistencies, contended that there were no “pure” races, and in the United States the anthropologist
Franz Boas urged that the whole notion of an anatomically unchanging racial hierarchy, established on the allegedly “scientific” measurement of different skulls, was inaccurate and misleading.
¹⁰⁵
In the aftermath of Germany’s aggression and defeat during the
First World War, many writers sought to disprove the earlier claims concerning
“volkish” preeminence and Teutonic superiority. In 1922, the Belgian
Théophile Simar argued that the concept of race had been devised for political purposes and lacked all scientific validity, and that the claims of German superiority over other
European races was utterly wrong. Four years later, the American sociologist
Frank H. Hankins mounted another attack on the theory of Nordic supremacy and the doctrines of “race purity and superiority” that supported it. And in a book published posthumously as
Racism
in 1938, the German-Jewish sexologist
Magnus Hirschfeld set out to provide a history and a refutation of the racial doctrines of the Nazis. “If it were practicable,” he wrote, “we should certainly do well to eradicate the term ‘race’ as far as subdivisions of the human species are concerned.”
¹⁰⁶

The rise of Hitler and the application of Nazi racial policies created widespread consternation in academic circles, and work denouncing “
scientific racism” gained increasing scholarly traction.
¹⁰⁷
In 1936, at a joint meeting of the Anthropology and Zoology sections of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, the distinguished geneticist
H. J. Fleurie declared that pure races did not exist; in the same year,
E. A. Ross, who had deplored the arrival of immigrants to America from central and eastern Europe before the
First World War, now admitted that “
difference of race
means far less to me now than it once did.”
¹⁰⁸
Franz Boas remained an influential figure among an older generation of American anthropologists, and in 1937 the young cultural critic
Jacques Barzun published a book entitled
Race: A Study in Modern Superstition
, in which he insisted that “a satisfactory definition of race is not to be had,” that it lumped people together “on the most superficial, unverified grounds of similarity,” that it was “a superstition on a par with the belief in witchcraft and horoscopes,” and that “a prudent man” would suspend judgment on the whole subject “until
genetics can offer a more complete body of knowledge.”
¹⁰⁹
(It was a prescient prediction.) Four years later, at the annual gathering of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists, similar views were expressed by the anthropologist
Ashley Montagu, who declared that the accepted view of race was artificial and did not agree with the facts.
¹¹⁰

There were also
political activists who defied racialist regimes.
Booker T. Washington, although devoted to the advancement of blacks in the postbellum American South, did not believe they should mobilize against
white supremacists, but rather that they should talk, cooperate, and come to terms with them, on the
grounds of political prudence as well as in the name of common humanity. In fact, he urged that his fellow blacks eschew politics; cultivate the habits of thrift, honesty, and sobriety; and concentrate on the acquisition of a Christian character and a good education, in the hope that they might make a modest living and achieve some degree of economic security. Washington opposed inciting conflict between the two races, seeking instead to “cement the races and bring about a hearty co-operation between them,” and he offered whites “the patient, sympathetic help of my race.”
¹¹¹
This doctrine of accommodationism proposed one version of how blacks and whites might get along with each other; Mahatma
Gandhi offered another. Unlike Washington, Gandhi
did
believe in protest and mobilization (albeit of a nonviolent kind), but although he is best remembered as the figure who decried the racism he had encountered in
South Africa, and as the nationalist leader who harassed the
British and humbled their empire, Gandhi saw these specific South African and South Asian issues in terms of humanity as a whole.
¹¹²
In 1906, he took a vow of celibacy to free himself to care for
all
humanity as his own family; his teachings and politics drew on
Christianity as well as
Hinduism; and while seeing them as opponents, Gandhi was eager to engage in conversations with representatives of the British Raj across the boundaries of race. He believed in forgiving his enemies, in the underlying interconnectedness of life, and in a single, shared “authentic humanity.”
¹¹³

But rather than denying the importance of race, attacks on the racialist status quo in other countries reaffirmed it. In 1893,
Charles Pearson, a Liberal Australian politician, published a book entitled
National Life and Character: A Forecast
, predicting the overthrow of
Anglo-Saxon racial hegemony, because white men would be “elbowed and hustled and perhaps even thrust aside” by their supposed inferiors in Africa and Asia. This was also the view of the American intellectual
W. E. B. DuBois, who asserted at the
Pan-African Congress in London in 1900 that the great issue of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the colour line,” by which he meant “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea”—a relation that he too believed was soon bound to
change.
¹¹⁴
Pearson and DuBois shared the Anglo-Saxonist view that the world was divided between the monolithic identities of white and colored races, inevitably fated to struggle; but where they differed from it was in their conviction that the colored people, not the whites, would emerge victorious, thereby inverting the traditional racial hierarchy. Even before 1914, then, it was clear that the appeal to racial identities could be used as much against Europe’s hegemony as on its behalf.
¹¹⁵

DuBois was a university-educated northerner, who believed his fellow college graduates should organize and agitate blacks, to radicalize their politics, and to secure manhood suffrage, the eradication of distinctions based on color, equal employment opportunities, and equal rights. He regarded racial pride and the assertion of a distinct racial consciousness as essential prerequisites for black advancement, and he thought Africans and African Americans shared a common culture and racial identity, becoming one of the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism. In 1915, he published
The Negro
, a sweeping account of the alleged racial unity of the African peoples and of the glories of the continent’s ancient kingdoms.
¹¹⁶
DuBois believed in a black identity that transcended the boundaries of Africa and the American South, and these internationalist views were further developed during the 1920s by the Jamaican immigrant
Marcus Garvey, who celebrated “race distinction” and urged the creation of an independent state in Africa to which American negroes should be free to return. His aims were “to make the negro race conscious” and “to champion negro nationhood by redemption in Africa,” and he too repeatedly called for international black solidarity. Indeed, on one occasion, Garvey compared the aims of the (spectacularly resurgent)
Ku Klux Klan in America with his own aims in Africa: the Klan wanted to make America exclusively a white man’s country; he wanted to make Africa exclusively a black man’s country.
¹¹⁷

There was another part of the world where the conventional racial hierarchies were attacked by those who nevertheless believed in the concept of race, namely
Japan, a nation that had industrialized rapidly during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, defeated and shamed the Chinese, concluded an alliance with
Britain, vanquished and humiliated
Russia, and established
its own Asiatic empire. Here was a country undergoing “astonishing development,” and that seemed increasingly Western in its attitudes, attainments, and ambitions; yet the people of Japan had “yellow” skins and did not fit on either side of the alleged white-black racial divide. In 1902, the French government wrote to the British Foreign Office to inquire whether the Japanese should be categorized as white or nonwhite. The British could not decide, but the Japanese were convinced they were so superior to such lesser races as “Kanakas, Negroes, Pacific Islanders, Indians or other Eastern peoples” that “to refer to them in the same terms cannot but be regarded in the light of a reproach, which is hardly warranted by the fact of the shade of the national complexion.” During the 1890s and 1900s, Japan regularly protested that the restrictions on Asiatic
immigration recently established in the United States,
Canada, and
Australia insulted their nation by placing it on the same level in the racial hierarchy as inferior peoples such as the Chinese and Koreans.
¹¹⁸

One Japanese response to such humiliation, exemplified by the newspaper proprietor
Tokutomi Soho, was to give up trying to obtain acceptance by the white nations and to urge all “coloured people” to “combine and crush Albinocracy. We must make the whites realize that there are others as strong as they.”
¹¹⁹
But after the
First World War, having joined the entente against Germany and its allies, the Japanese strategy at the Paris Peace Conference was again to try for such acceptance, by lobbying for a clause in the Covenant of the
League of Nations proclaiming the equality of all the races of the world; but that effort was defeated by an alliance of the “white” dominions of the
British Empire, the United States, and
Britain itself. This “
Anglo-Saxon dominance in defiance of racial equality,” along with the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which specifically excluded the Japanese, was a further rebuff that long rankled popular and official opinion in Japan, and it stiffened the resolve of those who advocated more aggressive nationalist policies. It also helps explain why, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese would present their imperialist conquest of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands and Asia as something very different, namely as a war for liberation—indeed,
as the first serious attempt to overthrow the
white empires of America and Europe.
¹²⁰

Such were the varied arguments about racial identities and rankings advanced between the 1900s and the 1930s: some contended there were no races, some that there were two, and some that there were more. These inconsistencies had emerged early at the
Universal Race Congress, held in London in 1911.
¹²¹
Its aim was to “discuss, in the light of science and the modern conscience,” the relations between the “so-called white and so-called coloured peoples,” with a view “to encouraging between them a fuller understanding, the most friendly feelings, and a heartier co-operation.” This was scarcely a coherent manifesto, by turns proclaiming the existence of race, expressing doubts about the “so-called” binary categories of white and colored, but also hoping the races might get along better with each other. There was much resort to the rhetoric of
Christian universalism, and insistence that the peoples of the world were “to all intents and purposes essentially equals in intellect, enterprise, morality and physique,” but some delegates took different views. As a
social Darwinist,
Felix von Luschan, professor of anthropology at Berlin, conceded that “the brotherhood of man” might be “a good thing,” but thought “the struggle for life is a far better one.” Races were different and antagonistic, and conflict between them was an essential precondition for human progress. From another perspective,
Baron d’Estournelles de Constant regretted that “the white man” in
Africa or Asia felt himself “to be more or less master, with power to act as he will” over all lesser peoples, while
W. E. B. DuBois insisted that the key issue in America was “whether at last the Negro will gain full recognition as a man, or be utterly crushed by superior numbers.”