I think you're underrating the "race was invented by the Enlightenment" historiography. [edit: nope! I didn't read the post carefully. But I'll leave my folly here intact.]
Broadly speaking, historians agree that most societies had ways of talking about "us" and "them". Often two kinds of "them", in fact: the "them" who were nearby and routinely interacted with and the "them" who were faraway strangers, almost more an idea than a materially concrete reality. You can abstract those ways of making distinction to a human universal, but I'm not sure you learn much in the process.
When you dig into the particulars, what you find are profound variations in the following:
a) Intensity of the us/them distinction--intensity in terms of sociopolitical institutions that enforce or are founded in the distinction, intensity of generalized feeling about the distinction, intensity of cultural representation focused on the distinction
b) Distribution of the us/them distinction. In many pre-modern agrarian societies, markedly 'different' people were rarely encountered or thought about in many communities; the people who had to care were merchants, government authorities, sovereigns and their courts, intellectuals or scribes, etc. The residents of cities and large settlements were typically more aware of us/them distinctions, but they also were often more indifferent to them/more composed of multiple communities of people that spanned such distinctions.
c) Fundamental basis for an us/them distinction: is it geographical? Linguistic? Spiritual/cultural/philosophical? Embodied? (Here what we think of race in physiognomic terms isn't the only way that people in history make embodied distinctions: another major 'language' of physiognomic distinction involves body modification and clothing--"us" scarifies or modifies in a particular way, "they" in another, etc.) Is it simply kinship? ("We" are of one lineage, with one totem; "they" another).
d) Mutability of us/them. How hard is it for "they" to become "us", and vice-versa. In a lot of world history, us/them distinctions are extremely fluid. You learn a language, you become part of the "us"; you marry into a society and live with your spouse's kin, you're "us" in every sense that matters. You're exiled from your home community? You're "them" now, even if yesterday you were completely "us". Convert to our religion? You're part of a global "us" but local "they" might still apply, depending.
e) Maintenance of us/them distinctions within a bounded culture--e.g., that within a big "us", there are smaller us/them divides that are as sharply drawn (or more sharply drawn) than the 'big' divisions. Caste in South Asia in caste-organized regions arguably mattered more than the dividing lines between people speaking Hindi, Urdu, Burmese or Malay, at least in some cases.
When people talk about "the Enlightenment invented race", therefore, they're talking about the extremely particular kind of us/them it represented along these sorts of lines. An idea of us/them that was increasingly biologized and essentialized--seen as fundamental, biologically and materially real, and immutable, a comprehensive universal principle that applied to all of humanity. An idea of us/them that was intensely instrumentalized in sociopolitical systems--used to organize political power, to justify military conquest and imperial rule, to structure economic hierarchy. An idea of us/them that was ubiquitously present in Western societies--where even people in communities that were incredibly remote from "them" were exposed constantly to culture and ideology that represented the us/them of race. And this happened quickly, which is why it's attributed to the era of the Enlightenment. Early modern European ideas about us/them differences were much more heterodox and negotiable.
Just to give an example of the difference that "race" in this sense made:
Circa 1550, Portuguese expeditions to Senegambia in West Africa and Kongo in Central Africa approached negotiating with local rulers and societies for trade goods (including slaves, but not predominantly so) roughly the way they approached trading and negotiating in the Mediterranean world. If you could get away with raiding, you did, but generally building a longer-term relationship was better. Captains, sailors and representatives of the Portuguese crown and the Catholic Church wanted to learn local languages and cultures to facilitate trading. Portuguese merchants who stayed in trading posts often intermarried without any worry or concern. They didn't think in terms of "race" in the Enlightenment sense even if they saw their Senegambian and Kongolese counterparts as a "them".
Circa 1796, the Scottish traveller Mungo Park went by himself up the Gambia River to the upper Senegal R. basin and then across to the upper Niger River. His best-selling account took the humanity and complexity of the societies he engaged for granted--and during his travels, he was also briefly enslaved as well as held captive, which he used for a kind of sentimental, generalized understanding of the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade for those taken to the Americas. And yet, the intensification of that trade had also increasingly "racialized" slavery--e.g., had defined an incredibly severe and destructive form of involuntary servility as being necessarily something that could only be visited upon a particular group of people who were defined not just geographically but in more and more essentialized ways. So Park was showing that "race" wasn't fully formed in the modern sense, but the whole situation showed that it was nearly so.
Circa 1880, as the "scramble for Africa" unfolded, British, French, Belgian, German and Belgian authorities engaged in military conquest and then imperial administration in West and Central Africa generally viewed Africans as a universal kind of "them" who were at the bottom of a comprehensive universal hierarchy of "thems". They'd completely erased any memory of an era where Europeans in West and Central Africa related to different societies within those regions on a more or less equal footing, making fine-grained distinctions between those societies. Those administrators saw the African "them" as immutably inferior based on a pseudo-scientific sense of biology, they generally derogated the idea that the language, culture and history of "they" was worth knowing--or even that it meaningfully existed at all. They organized political structures premised on the maintenance of hierarchies where race was the most important premise of those hierarchies and often refused to acknowledge when one of "them" demonstrated training, competency and capability that was indistinguishable from "us". At the same time, Western audiences who would never visit or directly contact West and Central Africa were showered with popular culture that portrayed those places in line with the concept of race being applied to them; the us/them distinction in race was disseminated widely and comprehensively via mass media.
So if you want to claim that because all past societies had "us/them" distinctions, the Enlightenment didn't invent race, you're building a strawman that's trivially easy to knock down. Modern race is an incredibly particular and highly consequential configuration of us/them--imagined as immutable and essential, embodied and cultural, universal and comprehensive, disseminated across global societies (including to "them"), used as the central underpinning of sociopolitical systems that gated access to political and economic power, and so on.
Compare this to classical Greek thinking about "barbarians". For the really far-away barbarians, Greek opinions OF barbarians mattered not one bit. It had no impact on their thinking, and had no authority over them. For Greeks engaged in trade in the Mediterranean, there was no particular chauvinism about who they would deal with. Greeks in antiquity were perfectly capable of modifying who was a barbarian if the idea became an inconvenient obstacle to their own political and economic activity, or if their conception of the scope of the Greek world expanded. Hellenism demonstrated that the Greek conception of non-Greeks was fluid in ways that modern race in its most intense heyday was not. The Greeks made distinctions between "thems" that were barbarians (mostly based on geographic distance and therefore lack of concrete knowledge) and the "thems" who were familiar (most notably the Romans). etc.
Did I write anything here in disagreement with what you said? But inherent in your very argument is that there are ways of thinking about us/them that aren't racialized in quite the same way as we racialize differences now. You can't have it both ways, either they invented a new way of thinking about an old division or they didn't.
I feel like you wrote a very long post here that responds in only cursory fashion to my post, which was precisely about me learning to take the "Enlightenment invented race" argument more seriously
Fair enough. It just felt to me as if you were aligning here with your "premoderns had selves" and trying to work your way back to your initial reaction to "the Enlightenment invented race", as if you were forced to agree that race is something different on looking at the particulars but restless about that conclusion.
On race, I noticed in researching textile history that in the early years of encounter between, say, Europeans and Africans, there is a sense of difference that might justify conquest but not what I would call racism, which implies a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. Early on, Europeans describe West African dignitaries as kings as wearing draped cloths like Roman togas. These Europeans admired the Romans and respected kings, although they would have no scruples about making war on people if they wanted their territory. There is a sense of difference that doesn't imply that, except insofar as Christianity is the One True Faith, European civilization is superior, let alone that a given white person is superior to a given black one. Indeed, an African king would presumably be superior to a European servant. At some point, that changes. Although I'm entirely pro-Enlightenment, I find it plausible that in trying to square self-interested conquest with Enlightenment individualism Europeans started cooking up racial hierarchies. As for the Dutch and the English, it's interesting to think about how things might have been different if, instead of the Dutch, the Spanish or French were involved. Although the Dutch and the English did fight the occasional war, they were hardly sworn enemies. The Glorious Revolution was essentially a Dutch takeover of the monarchy.
Au contraire . . . Pardonne mon français . . . Je suis obligé d'écrire dans plusieurs langues parce que : 1. La plupart des gens aux États-Unis ont subi un lavage de cerveau leur faisant croire que les Juifs sont leur salut ; et 2., leur anglais est de la merde et ils ne peuvent pas rester silencieux assez longtemps pour entendre ou voir ce qui se passe évidemment autour d'eux . . . Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif. Ce sont les mêmes idéaux.
Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
Les banquiers juifs ont inondé l’Europe de musulmans et l’Amérique de déchets du tiers-monde . . . L'exil comme punition pour ceux qui prêchent la sédition devrait être rétabli dans le cadre juridique de l'Occident . . . Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples.
On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune : le judaïsme.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait : «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv . . . Va te faire foutre toi et ton dieu juif.
I think you're underrating the "race was invented by the Enlightenment" historiography. [edit: nope! I didn't read the post carefully. But I'll leave my folly here intact.]
Broadly speaking, historians agree that most societies had ways of talking about "us" and "them". Often two kinds of "them", in fact: the "them" who were nearby and routinely interacted with and the "them" who were faraway strangers, almost more an idea than a materially concrete reality. You can abstract those ways of making distinction to a human universal, but I'm not sure you learn much in the process.
When you dig into the particulars, what you find are profound variations in the following:
a) Intensity of the us/them distinction--intensity in terms of sociopolitical institutions that enforce or are founded in the distinction, intensity of generalized feeling about the distinction, intensity of cultural representation focused on the distinction
b) Distribution of the us/them distinction. In many pre-modern agrarian societies, markedly 'different' people were rarely encountered or thought about in many communities; the people who had to care were merchants, government authorities, sovereigns and their courts, intellectuals or scribes, etc. The residents of cities and large settlements were typically more aware of us/them distinctions, but they also were often more indifferent to them/more composed of multiple communities of people that spanned such distinctions.
c) Fundamental basis for an us/them distinction: is it geographical? Linguistic? Spiritual/cultural/philosophical? Embodied? (Here what we think of race in physiognomic terms isn't the only way that people in history make embodied distinctions: another major 'language' of physiognomic distinction involves body modification and clothing--"us" scarifies or modifies in a particular way, "they" in another, etc.) Is it simply kinship? ("We" are of one lineage, with one totem; "they" another).
d) Mutability of us/them. How hard is it for "they" to become "us", and vice-versa. In a lot of world history, us/them distinctions are extremely fluid. You learn a language, you become part of the "us"; you marry into a society and live with your spouse's kin, you're "us" in every sense that matters. You're exiled from your home community? You're "them" now, even if yesterday you were completely "us". Convert to our religion? You're part of a global "us" but local "they" might still apply, depending.
e) Maintenance of us/them distinctions within a bounded culture--e.g., that within a big "us", there are smaller us/them divides that are as sharply drawn (or more sharply drawn) than the 'big' divisions. Caste in South Asia in caste-organized regions arguably mattered more than the dividing lines between people speaking Hindi, Urdu, Burmese or Malay, at least in some cases.
When people talk about "the Enlightenment invented race", therefore, they're talking about the extremely particular kind of us/them it represented along these sorts of lines. An idea of us/them that was increasingly biologized and essentialized--seen as fundamental, biologically and materially real, and immutable, a comprehensive universal principle that applied to all of humanity. An idea of us/them that was intensely instrumentalized in sociopolitical systems--used to organize political power, to justify military conquest and imperial rule, to structure economic hierarchy. An idea of us/them that was ubiquitously present in Western societies--where even people in communities that were incredibly remote from "them" were exposed constantly to culture and ideology that represented the us/them of race. And this happened quickly, which is why it's attributed to the era of the Enlightenment. Early modern European ideas about us/them differences were much more heterodox and negotiable.
Just to give an example of the difference that "race" in this sense made:
Circa 1550, Portuguese expeditions to Senegambia in West Africa and Kongo in Central Africa approached negotiating with local rulers and societies for trade goods (including slaves, but not predominantly so) roughly the way they approached trading and negotiating in the Mediterranean world. If you could get away with raiding, you did, but generally building a longer-term relationship was better. Captains, sailors and representatives of the Portuguese crown and the Catholic Church wanted to learn local languages and cultures to facilitate trading. Portuguese merchants who stayed in trading posts often intermarried without any worry or concern. They didn't think in terms of "race" in the Enlightenment sense even if they saw their Senegambian and Kongolese counterparts as a "them".
Circa 1796, the Scottish traveller Mungo Park went by himself up the Gambia River to the upper Senegal R. basin and then across to the upper Niger River. His best-selling account took the humanity and complexity of the societies he engaged for granted--and during his travels, he was also briefly enslaved as well as held captive, which he used for a kind of sentimental, generalized understanding of the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade for those taken to the Americas. And yet, the intensification of that trade had also increasingly "racialized" slavery--e.g., had defined an incredibly severe and destructive form of involuntary servility as being necessarily something that could only be visited upon a particular group of people who were defined not just geographically but in more and more essentialized ways. So Park was showing that "race" wasn't fully formed in the modern sense, but the whole situation showed that it was nearly so.
Circa 1880, as the "scramble for Africa" unfolded, British, French, Belgian, German and Belgian authorities engaged in military conquest and then imperial administration in West and Central Africa generally viewed Africans as a universal kind of "them" who were at the bottom of a comprehensive universal hierarchy of "thems". They'd completely erased any memory of an era where Europeans in West and Central Africa related to different societies within those regions on a more or less equal footing, making fine-grained distinctions between those societies. Those administrators saw the African "them" as immutably inferior based on a pseudo-scientific sense of biology, they generally derogated the idea that the language, culture and history of "they" was worth knowing--or even that it meaningfully existed at all. They organized political structures premised on the maintenance of hierarchies where race was the most important premise of those hierarchies and often refused to acknowledge when one of "them" demonstrated training, competency and capability that was indistinguishable from "us". At the same time, Western audiences who would never visit or directly contact West and Central Africa were showered with popular culture that portrayed those places in line with the concept of race being applied to them; the us/them distinction in race was disseminated widely and comprehensively via mass media.
So if you want to claim that because all past societies had "us/them" distinctions, the Enlightenment didn't invent race, you're building a strawman that's trivially easy to knock down. Modern race is an incredibly particular and highly consequential configuration of us/them--imagined as immutable and essential, embodied and cultural, universal and comprehensive, disseminated across global societies (including to "them"), used as the central underpinning of sociopolitical systems that gated access to political and economic power, and so on.
Compare this to classical Greek thinking about "barbarians". For the really far-away barbarians, Greek opinions OF barbarians mattered not one bit. It had no impact on their thinking, and had no authority over them. For Greeks engaged in trade in the Mediterranean, there was no particular chauvinism about who they would deal with. Greeks in antiquity were perfectly capable of modifying who was a barbarian if the idea became an inconvenient obstacle to their own political and economic activity, or if their conception of the scope of the Greek world expanded. Hellenism demonstrated that the Greek conception of non-Greeks was fluid in ways that modern race in its most intense heyday was not. The Greeks made distinctions between "thems" that were barbarians (mostly based on geographic distance and therefore lack of concrete knowledge) and the "thems" who were familiar (most notably the Romans). etc.
Did I write anything here in disagreement with what you said? But inherent in your very argument is that there are ways of thinking about us/them that aren't racialized in quite the same way as we racialize differences now. You can't have it both ways, either they invented a new way of thinking about an old division or they didn't.
I feel like you wrote a very long post here that responds in only cursory fashion to my post, which was precisely about me learning to take the "Enlightenment invented race" argument more seriously
Fair enough. It just felt to me as if you were aligning here with your "premoderns had selves" and trying to work your way back to your initial reaction to "the Enlightenment invented race", as if you were forced to agree that race is something different on looking at the particulars but restless about that conclusion.
No I actually changed my mind about the self thing a bit
A la the last line of my post!
Right! I did not read closely or carefully!
On race, I noticed in researching textile history that in the early years of encounter between, say, Europeans and Africans, there is a sense of difference that might justify conquest but not what I would call racism, which implies a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. Early on, Europeans describe West African dignitaries as kings as wearing draped cloths like Roman togas. These Europeans admired the Romans and respected kings, although they would have no scruples about making war on people if they wanted their territory. There is a sense of difference that doesn't imply that, except insofar as Christianity is the One True Faith, European civilization is superior, let alone that a given white person is superior to a given black one. Indeed, an African king would presumably be superior to a European servant. At some point, that changes. Although I'm entirely pro-Enlightenment, I find it plausible that in trying to square self-interested conquest with Enlightenment individualism Europeans started cooking up racial hierarchies. As for the Dutch and the English, it's interesting to think about how things might have been different if, instead of the Dutch, the Spanish or French were involved. Although the Dutch and the English did fight the occasional war, they were hardly sworn enemies. The Glorious Revolution was essentially a Dutch takeover of the monarchy.
Au contraire . . . Pardonne mon français . . . Je suis obligé d'écrire dans plusieurs langues parce que : 1. La plupart des gens aux États-Unis ont subi un lavage de cerveau leur faisant croire que les Juifs sont leur salut ; et 2., leur anglais est de la merde et ils ne peuvent pas rester silencieux assez longtemps pour entendre ou voir ce qui se passe évidemment autour d'eux . . . Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif. Ce sont les mêmes idéaux.
Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
Les banquiers juifs ont inondé l’Europe de musulmans et l’Amérique de déchets du tiers-monde . . . L'exil comme punition pour ceux qui prêchent la sédition devrait être rétabli dans le cadre juridique de l'Occident . . . Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples.
On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune : le judaïsme.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait : «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv . . . Va te faire foutre toi et ton dieu juif.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire
Crazy and antisemitic--such a common combination.
Race is a way off saying "the other" when there was an alignment between geographic and visual terms.