Racism is the generalized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser’s benefit and at his victim’s expense, in order to justify the former’s own privileges or aggression.
This analysis reveals four essential elements:
The term racism is obviously not adequate to cover a mechanism so widespread. It is too narrow, just as anti-Semitism is, on the contrary, too broad. Strictly speaking, it would apply to a theory of biological differences. The Nazis, adding to the ideas of the apologists for the slave trade and for colonization, included a system for establishing a political, moral, and cultural hierarchy of human groups according to their biological differences.
The racist actually bases his accusation on a biological or a cultural difference, from which he generalizes to cover the whole of the defendant’s personality, his life, and the group to which he belongs. [ . . . ]
The first form of racism consists of stressing a difference between the accuser and his victim. But revealing a characteristic differentiating two individuals or two groups does not in itself constitute a racist attitude. [ . . . ] By emphasizing the difference, the racist aims to intensify or cause the exclusion, the separation by which the victim is placed outside the community or even outside humanity. [ . . . ]
It is not the difference that always entails racism: it is racism that makes use of the difference.
If the difference is missing, the racist invents one; if the difference exists, he interprets it to his own advantage. [ . . . ] The difference is real or imaginary, important or slight in itself. [ . . . ]
I do not think that the difference singled out by the racist is always the work of imagination, sheer madness, or a malevolent lie. The racist can base his argument on a real trait, whether biological, psychological, cultural, or social—such as the color of the Black man’s skin or the solid tradition of the Jew. [ . . . ]
It always adds an interpretation of such differences, a prejudiced attempt to place a value on them. [ . . . ]
The assigning of values is intended to prove two things: the inferiority of the victim and the superiority of the racist. [ . . . ] It proves the one by the other [ . . . ] Thus, the assigning of values is negative and positive at the same time: negative value of the victim, therefore positive value of the accuser. It follows that:
That is why a simple biological or cultural difference [ . . . ] brings a whole crowd of meanings in its wake [ . . . ] We go from biology to ethics, from ethics to politics, from politics to metaphysics. [ . . . ]
One thing leads to another until all of the victim’s personality is characterized by the difference, and all of the members of his social group are targets for the accusation. [ . . . ]
Racism [ . . . ] always includes this collective element [ . . . ] There must be no loophole by which any Jew, any colonized, or any Black man could escape this social determinism. [ . . . ]
The same movement also extends through time, back into the past and forward into the future. The Jew has always been greedy, the Black man has always been inferior. [ . . . ] Conclusion: the Jew will always be greedy, the Black man will always be inferior. [ . . . ] Globalization, totalization, social generalization, and temporal generalization [ . . . ] Thus, there is said to be a sort of absolute Black man, a kind of absolute Jew. [ . . . ] Racism merges into myth.
At this point the whole structure takes leave of reality, from which it had derived its strength for a time [ . . . ] Broadly speaking, the process is one of gradual dehumanization. The racist ascribes to his victim a series of surprising traits, calling him incomprehensible, impenetrable, mysterious, strange, disturbing, and so on. [ . . . ]
It is in the racist himself that the motives for racism lie. A superficial analysis is enough to reveal them, whether in individual or collective aggression. I will not repeat the now-classic analyses of two phenomena: the scapegoat and the foreigner corrupting the national soul. [ . . . ] A group of human beings, in order to rid itself of certain guilt feelings, projects them onto an object, an animal, a man, or another group, which it accuses and punishes in its own stead. Nor will I linger over the alibi type of racism, an excuse for individual aggression. Competition on the economic front, rivalry between intellectuals or artists—these can give rise to racism, as a way of justifying a priori every difficulty the accuser runs into and his behavior toward his adversary. [ . . . ] A certain embarrassment when faced with what is different, the anxiety that results, spontaneous recourse to aggression in order to push back that anxiety—all of these are to be found in children, and probably in a good many adults as well. Whatever is different or foreign can be felt as a disturbing factor, hence a source of scandal. [ . . . ]
The victim of racism is already living under the weight of disgrace and oppression. [ . . . ] The Jew is already ostracized, the colonized is already colonized. In order to justify such punishment and misfortune, a process of rationalization is set in motion by which to explain away the ghetto and the colonial exploitation. [ . . . ]
Racism accompanies almost every kind of oppression: racism is one of the best justifications of and symbols for oppression. [ . . . ] It is also found in the condition of the proletarian worker, the servant, and so on. [ . . . ]
It varies subtly, emerging differently from one social and historical context to another, from one form of oppression to another. [ . . . ]
Racism is not a scientific theory, but [ . . . ] a collection of opinions [ . . . ] These opinions serve instead to justify attitudes and actions that are in turn motivated by fear of others and a desire to attack them. [ . . . ] Racism constitutes a particular case of a more general practice in which psychological or cultural differences, whether real or imaginary, work just as well. [ . . . ] Racism is a generalizing definition and valuation of biological differences, whether real or imaginary, to the advantage of the one defining and deploying them, and to the detriment of the one subjected to that act of definition, to the end of justifying (social or physical) hostility and assault. [ . . . ]
Race is of relatively recent use [ . . . ] Race is [ . . . ] a collection of biological and psychological characteristics that link the ancestors of a group with the contemporary group in a single line of descent. Originally a term used in animal breeding, the term race was not applied to humans until the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Racism as a doctrine is still more recent. [ . . . ] For the Spanish of the sixteenth century, it consisted of a “civilizing mission” on the American continents defined through the so-called natural inferiority and even “depravity” of the Native Americans. [ . . . ] The systematic attempt to justify the invasion and domination of a people proclaimed to be biologically inferior by another group that thereby judges itself superior, dates from the birth of colonialism. [ . . . ]
The African slave trade [ . . . ] in the seventeenth century, arises in correspondence with the first expositions of biological racism [ . . . ] Of course, one finds racist notions among some ancient authors, and even some first elements of a theoretical treatment. Aristotle, for instance, advocated a social order based on slavery and justified it by arguing that the “natural inferiority” of the Barbarians (non-Greeks) destined them to serve as slaves for Greeks. [ . . . ]
Anti-Semitism is certainly ancient, but that too was essentially based on religious, ethnic, or national ideas. Anti-Semitism as a racial doctrine only appears much later, with the partial social liberation of the Jews and their entry into forms of economic competition.
Only in the modern era do the systematic and pseudoscientific discourses of contemporary racism appear. [ . . . ] The work of Linnaeus (1707–1778) and Buffon (1707–1788), who themselves were not beyond prejudice, paved the way for racism’s pretense to being scientific—and, of course, Darwin has been used as another authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, the cultured mind of Europe was convinced that the human species is divided into superior and inferior races [ . . . ]
In the name of biological superiority, one human group seeks to advance and affirm itself against and through others, and believes itself justified in deploying any and all means possible to do this, including violence and murder.
To assert racial superiority, one must first assume the existence of human races. The racist stance must firmly underwrite the idea that there exist pure races, that these are superior to others, and that this superiority authorizes political and historical hegemony. These three points have been submitted to widespread criticism.
First, the vast majority of real human groups are the products of prior human admixture [métissage], to the point where it is practically impossible to delineate a “pure race.” [ . . . ]
In short, the very concept of biological purity for human groups is unfounded. [ . . . ] In any case, suppose that a purity exists—how would one connect biological purity and superiority? [ . . . ] If [ . . . ] a biological superiority does exist in some connection with ethnic characteristics, it still does not explain how that conditions the psychological or cultural superiority on which racism so emphatically insists. [ . . . ]
It is clear that this is not a question of established scientific fact but rather of political choice, a program and a desire to establish political hegemony while falsely supporting it on biological or cultural grounds. [ . . . ]
Racism is not a scientific theory but a pseudotheory, a body of opinion devoid of logical connections with biological notions, which are themselves conceptually vague.
It is now clear why a definition of racism is so difficult. The first principle of racism—the concept of race applied to humans—is an ambiguous notion; or rather, it is a notion to which one cannot assign a clearly defined object or referent. [ . . . ]
The foundation of racism is not in reasoning but in affect and self-interest. [ . . . ] Racism relies on mental constructs and rationalizations to justify itself, which are themselves fueled and driven by the psychological needs of its own practices and projects. Racist thinking focuses on biological differences, whether real or presumed, from which it derives practices that it then seeks to legitimate, and which produce, in turn, a politics and a social philosophy, sometimes even a metaphysics. [ . . . ]
It is not just a question of describing biological difference but of attacking a people or a group under the cover of that biological description. [ . . . ] Thus, it would be more appropriate to call it ethnophobia [ . . . ] Racism would be only a single, and perhaps temporary, variety. [ . . . ]
Racism unfolds on both an individual and an institutional level, implying that both its psychological and its social functions must be understood.
Aggressiveness against others, in acts or in words, always has a need to justify itself. The two main ways through which it does this are fear and self-interest. [ . . . ]
One must defend oneself against this Other who is strange and foreign and, more to the point, preempt his attacks by attacking first. [ . . . ] It is done in bad faith [. . . through] the utilization of a biological or other difference (whether real or imaginary) in a quasi-mythic manner to justify that hostility. [ . . . ]
Biology has long been a convenient explanation for the anguish of humanity. But with the global unification of the planet, and the self-affirmation of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, perhaps the idea of considering others inferior because of skin color, the form of the nose, or certain character traits will finally become untenable. [ . . . ] Biological exclusion only took the place of a prior religious exclusion; it is not impossible that it will only be replaced in turn by political exclusion, for example. Its fundamental machinery and structure will not necessarily disappear with it. [ . . . ]
How is one to struggle effectively against racism? Moral indignation and attempts at persuasion have shown themselves to be clearly insufficient. One must take full account of racism’s roots in fear, in financial insecurity, in economic avarice, which are in humans the sources of aggressivity and a tendency toward domination. One must struggle against such aggressions and dominations, and prevent them. It is racism that is natural and antiracism that is not; antiracism can only be something that is acquired, as all that is cultural is acquired, at the end of long and arduous struggles, which are never free from the possibility of being reversed.
Racism only becomes racism within a social context. [ . . . ] I truly believe that one’s lived experience is the touchstone that both filters and safeguards one’s thinking as it circulates between its points of departure and its ultimate results [ . . . ] Yet in spite of having lived with racism daily, in the grocery store, on the way to school, in high school, it took a profoundly disruptive historical crisis to shake me out of the realm of personal experience and push me toward an attempt to explicate its general mechanisms. [ . . . ]
To return to Tunisia at the beginning of the events that would ultimately bring independence to that country was to be thrown into a profoundly traumatic situation. I had connections and friendships in both camps. Colonizers and colonized are not simply theoretical or abstract figures; they are real men and women, parents, colleagues—and myself! [ . . . ] The result was the book The Colonizer and the Colonized. It set in relief [ . . . ] the points at which we were tied one to the other, in the sense that the attributes and behavior of each were reflected in the other. [ . . . ] Racism was one of the inevitable dimensions of this relation. [ . . . ]
The colonizer as such is almost always racist. [ . . . ] Racism illustrates, summarizes, and symbolizes the colonial relation. [ . . . ]
In The Colonizer and the Colonized, I proposed an analysis of three major points: (1) racism, first of all, puts in relief certain differences; (2) it bestows a value on those differences; and (3) it utilizes the valuation of those differences to the benefit of one noticing them and giving them a value. [ . . . ] No one of these conditions, by itself, is sufficient to constitute racism. [ . . . ]
To insist on a difference, biological or otherwise, is not racism [ . . . ] The description of a difference does not constitute racism; it constitutes a description. [ . . . ] To put a value on a difference to one’s advantage is also insufficient to denote a racist mentality. [ . . . ] One becomes racist only with the inclusion of the third point: the deployment of a difference to denigrate the other [ . . . ]
These three major points of the racist argument, then, form a whole. Moreover, as an argument, they must be interpreted as a whole whose function is revealed by where it leads and by what then signifies its inherent orientation. In the repertoire of colonialist activity, one thing is blindingly clear: the entire machinery of racism, which is nourished on corruption, whether shameless and blatant or whispered and allusive, and which produces a vast lexicon of official words, gestures, administrative texts, and political conduct, has but one undeniable goal: the legitimization and consolidation of power and privilege for the colonizers. [ . . . ]
The condition of the Jews, seen through my experience with colonialism, convinced me that racism required the intimate daily participation of individuals who had a need for some kind of victim. [ . . . ] Anti-Semitism is a particularly clear example because it represents the exclusion of a group that is in closest possible proximity. The claim has been made that anti-Semitism is totally different from racism. I would disagree. [ . . . ] It is a racism specific to its object. [ . . . ] Anti-Semitism is racism directed against Jews. [ . . . ] The Jew–anti-Semite binary encompasses a figure of victimization that is unlike any other: the Jews, as a very ancient minority, are both familiar and alien; their culture is both strange and recognizable [ . . . ] Anti-Semitism avails itself of an effective and wellworn mythology in which the long history of disparagement and oppression, the place the Jews have been given in the economic system, their role in cultural tradition, and their assurance of election, all come together. The relationship of the Jews to their persecutors, whether Christian or Moslem, is more reminiscent of warring brothers than of perfect strangers. Despite the animosity, which at times is murderous, the Christians recognize their kinship with the Jews. “Spiritually, we are Semites,” Pope Paul VI once recalled. The Moslems as well insist on community with the Jews as “peoples of the book.” [ . . . ] While anti-Semitism may have its own peculiarity, it nevertheless belongs in the category of racist relations. Like them, it is an act of stigmatizing the other for one’s own consolation, through the deployment of respective differences. [ . . . ]
Racism as a systematic and rationalized hostility based on biological differences is relatively recent. On the other hand, there has always existed a suspicion of strangers and of those who are different. [ . . . ] The stranger is the origin of very ambiguous feelings [ . . . ] The outsider provokes a malaise that involves both distrust and respect. [ . . . ] The stranger could be the incarnation of the devil or a deity in disguise [ . . . ] The problem is that the passage from suspicion to self-defense, and from self-defense to aggression, is easily done.
Anti-Semitism is again a good example of this ambivalence toward difference. [ . . . ] In the ancient world, it most often took the form of a phobia, an irrational aversion, usually of a cultural rather than a religious nature. Judean beliefs and customs, because relatively unknown, were generally fantasized, and thus became a source of anxiety. [ . . . ] Judeophobia can be understood as a particular form of xenophobia, which was itself common throughout the Hellenic world and Egypt against any people who came from elsewhere. In effect, while one can possibly date the appearance of racism in the strict sense, one cannot do so for xenophobia. [ . . . ] [Jules] Isaac argues that a hostility specifically against the Jews emerges only around the first century, with the appearance of Christianity. [ . . . ] It was a question of religious competition. [ . . . ] Biological differences do not become an issue until later, in Spain. At that moment a racist tradition in its modern sense really begins. After that, a “theoretic” elaboration is constructed by various German and French “thinkers,” along with its murderous translation into the many pogroms of Europe and Russia, and its pinnacle in the total genocide almost realized by the Nazis and their henchmen. [ . . . ]
Christian anti-Semitism [ . . . ] systematically demonized the Jews. But why such a system? Why put in place an actual machinery of denigration? [ . . . ] To answer this question, we have but to turn to authors of the time, such as John Chrysostome [sic] (347–407 AD) or Saint Augustine (354–430 AD). The denigration of the Jews was, for them, necessary for the exaltation of the Christians. The new but still fragile Christianity, in order to thrive, had to separate itself cleanly from its initial roots. [ . . . ] The goal of Christian anti-Semitism was, for newly born Christianity, not a question of biology or economics, but of collective self-affirmation. [ . . . ]
Arab anti-Semitism [ . . . ] differs little from this pattern. At first, the prophet Mohammed showed no real hostility to the Jews of Medina, hoping to win them to his cause. [ . . . ] To have won them over would have proved the preeminence of his message. But the seduction did not work [ . . . ] Unable to affirm himself through the Jews, he affirmed himself against them. Chosen to bear witness to his grandeur, they were to become the proof of it through their own debasement. The war he made on them, in the name of Islam, was first a war of arms, followed later by a war of words. Luther would follow more or less the same pattern—as would the later inheritors of the Arab prophet, for whom it became quite prosaic. Because they were vanquished, the Jews were to be progressively downtrodden by ever-conquering Arabs during the long unfolding of Islamic expansionism. They were forced to pay an economic tribute; for what did one fight a war if not to profit from it? As for a cause to justify this racket, doctrine came to the rescue: this is how one must treat enemies of the true faith, even if they are not total strangers but cousins by blood and by culture. From then on, economic profit is simply added to spiritual profit. And the spiritual benefit will never disappear; the latter-day texts will forever attest to it. The Jew is contemptible because he is defeated, weak, and disarmed, but also because he is living testimony to bad faith and blindness—he knows the Truth better than anyone but does not want to recognize it. [ . . . ] In short, the Arabs do not oppress the Jews because they are anti-Jewish; they are anti-Jewish because they oppress the Jews.
Later, when the Spanish spoke of a purity of blood (their own, naturally), they were implicitly suggesting that that of others, Jews and Moors, was impure. [. . . Nazis] used the labor of Jews when they needed laborers and the mythic image of the Jew when they needed material for their propaganda. Utility was always in command; it was just not always the same utility. [ . . . ] All the negative stereotypes were already in place [ . . . ] Without territorial refuge, the Jews could offer no resistance, nor did they have recourse to any real protection. Aggression could be heaped on them with impunity, to the point of mass murder—which is what happened. But the Nazis did the same thing to the Gypsies, the homosexuals, to whomever they considered subhuman. [ . . . ]
Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises. To function, it needs a focal point, a central factor, but it doesn’t care what that might be—the color of one’s skin, facial features, the form of the fingers, one’s character, or one’s cultural tradition. . . . If none of this works, it will propose a mythical trait, perhaps concerning a particular quality of the blood or an ancestral curse. [ . . . ] I remember, as a child, hearing of the origins of Black servitude in the story of Noah’s three sons, retold in utmost seriousness. [ . . . ] The persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim. [ . . . ]
Why is racism so common? Because it is a very convenient tool of aggression. [ . . . ] Let us allow ourselves to propose some conclusions.
Racism not only produces aggression [but also . . .] is one of the manifestations of aggression, and aggression seems to be a very common mode of conduct for our species. [ . . . ] Humans are animals. And like most animals, when they are afraid, they attack or flee. When people feel fear, it is in the face of a perceived danger, whether real or imaginary, that is, in the face of the real or imaginary hostility of the other.
I will not address other fears here, such as fear of other animals, fear of physical catastrophe, or the metaphysical fear of the unknown. And yet, the fear of other animals does unleash similar reactions, which might explain “Man’s” tendency to exterminate certain animals beyond the call of pragmatic necessity. And it is always possible for imaginary fears to blossom into myth, which then reflects back on human relations as a whole—suggesting the importance of myth in the human universe. [ . . . ] Humans are intraconflictual, and that fact sums up the human tragedy. [ . . . ] He covets and takes the things he needs, even from those close to him. Aggressive toward others, he continually kindles their fear and aggressiveness toward him in turn [ . . . ]
We continue to confine and to decimate entire animal species for our food, clothing, and warmth, or because we think they are obnoxious (that is to say, out of fear); even worse, we do it for our mere entertainment. The processes of training, and the vast business of killing, for the purposes of profit or pleasure, all form part of a war on animals. Yet beyond that, the human is the only species who has invented, for its own kind, the prison, prison camps, torture, genocide . . . and racism. In the words of Freud, a broken old man on the eve of the Second World War, presaging its horrors: “Man is a filthy beast.” [ . . . ] “Man” is the only animal who, in order to justify himself, despises, humiliates, and systematically annihilates other people, in body and in mind. [ . . . ]
Thus, racism is always both a discourse and an action; it is a discourse that prepares an action, and an action that legitimates itself through a discourse. [ . . . ] If the enemy were so weak and corrupt, how dangerous could he be? [ . . . ] Racism is also theater, a querulous polemic that makes everything about the other something it is not, whether physique, customs, history, culture, religion. [ . . . ] Racism is an emotional and rhetorical incantation whose purpose is to proclaim one’s own power and to exorcise one’s fear of adversity. [ . . . ]
Can this infernal machine be derailed? We had better admit that it will not be easy. [ . . . ] Racism is a form of war. [ . . . ] Up to now, we have disregarded the innateness of aggressivity. [ . . . ] Like violence itself, its roots lie in the individual and collective human personality. In each person, with respect to others, there is both attraction and repulsion, dependence and supremacy. Though Christian anti-Semitism certainly exists, many Jews were saved by Christians during the war, some of whom paid for their generosity with their lives. Moslems did the same thing, even in the midst of occupied Paris; many refugees lived hidden in the basement of the mosque. The bourgeois Jews of New York were among the prime defenders of Black Americans, who actually didn’t like them very much. [ . . . ]
Each person is both a danger to other people and a salvation. [ . . . ] If each man is often a wolf toward other men, he is also a father, a son, a brother, a brother-in-law, and a cousin of men, whom he insists on saving, sometimes at the risk of his own life. Racism is natural and anti-racism is acquired. [ . . . ] They both have their roots in us. [ . . . ]
The struggle against racism coincides, at least in part, with the struggle against all oppression. There will always be the necessity for struggle. [ . . . ] In order for racism to disappear, it will be necessary that the oppressed cease to be the oppressed [ . . . ] The racist denigration of others must not be allowed to extend itself to permission to assault or oppress those others, nor must it be allowed to transform itself into a mythology about them. One’s anxiety must not become permission to bully a person [ . . . ] On the contrary, differences must be lucidly recognized, embraced and respected as such. [ . . . ] The recognition of the other, with his or her differences [ . . . ] calls for dialogue [ . . . ] To refuse racism is to choose a certain conception of humanity; it means a reconciliation among different constituent groups, thus a relative unification, not of all in each other but of each in relation to others. Conversely, humanity cannot unify itself in this relative way except through intergroup equality, and equality between the individuals who compose each group. Ordinarily, this is what would be called universalism. [ . . . ] The Jewish universalism of its prophets, the Christian universalism of its churches, the Islamic universalism of its indulgent community of believers, of people of the Book, the Marxist universalism of proletarian unity through which the eventual well-being of all by means of the Revolution is projected—none of them have succeeded in putting an end to violence, to injustice, or to massacre. At best, up to now, universalism has remained a utopia. Or worse, it has served as an alibi for distracting attention from existent and always recurring privilege. [ . . . ] Is a universalism possible that would not be either a trap or a utopia? Paradoxically, instead of renouncing it, what is needed is more universalism, that is, the passage from an abstract to a concrete universalism. It is not sufficient simply to condemn racism; it is necessary to act on the collective social conditions of its existence. In effect, universalism must pass from being just a philosophy to becoming an activity. A double activity, actually, both negative and positive [ . . . ] To push back racism, one must combat all forms of domination. [ . . . ] The struggle against racism will be long and probably never totally successful. [ . . . ] The struggle against racism is the condition of our collective social health. It encompasses the fundamental moral discussions of love or hate of the other, of justice or injustice, equality or oppression, or, in a word, one’s very humanity. The essence of morality is respect for the other. [ . . . ] Racism accepts the norm of primitive violence and pretends to justify it, which leads to a certain philosophy of Man and of human relations. Antiracism refuses this rift between people, with its definitive classifications into inferior and superior. It prioritizes dialogue and agrees to put in question all situations of acquisition, dominance, and privilege. It is a definitive question of two visions of humanity and two philosophies. One last word: we cannot hide from the difficulty of the struggle against racism. [ . . . ] The teaching in the schools has to overcome the teachings of the street—and of the family milieu. [ . . . ] One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. [ . . . ] To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. [ . . . ] Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The antiracist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. [ . . . ] The refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality.