The Undivided Past (34 page)

Thereafter, as attacks on the twentieth-century race regimes gathered force, their contradictions became more apparent. As an advocate of aggressive
black mobilization against whites, W. E. B. DuBois deplored the
accommodationism of Booker T. Washington, which he regarded as a narrow and pessimistic policy of betrayal and submission; yet DuBois’s belief in a unified, coherent,
monolithic black consciousness ignored the increasing variety of the black experience in the United States, and made even less
sense when extended to the Caribbean and Africa.
¹²²
Moreover, the idea that there was a single color line, with a “white” race on one side and a “black” race on the other, might have been shared by white supremacists who wanted to keep things as they were, and by black activists who wanted to change things radically, but both were at fault in claiming the existence of these two homogeneous, inevitably antagonistic identities, and in ignoring the many conversations, encounters, and interactions that took place across these allegedly impermeable racial boundaries. And what of those other races that did not fit this polarized, dichotomized, black-and-white world? What, for instance, of the
Jews: were they absolutely and loathsomely non-
Aryan, as
Hitler insisted, or were they part of the white South African
“volk,” as some champions of
apartheid claimed? And where did the “yellow races” of
China and
Japan, or those who belonged to the “brown races” of North Africa and the
Middle East, fit into this oversimplified, Manichean picture?

These inconsistencies were largely rendered moot during the
Second World War, by a widespread repudiation of racialist thought and identities that was partly a matter of conviction and partly one of strategic necessity. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that his “four freedoms” should be enjoyed by people of “every creed and every race, wherever they live”; the Allies claimed to be fighting for a liberty that was opposed to Aryan superiority and Japanese racial intolerance; and where politics and public opinion led, the academy followed. Horrified by the uses to which the Nazis and the Japanese had put the idea of inborn racial difference, physical and social
scientists now retreated headlong from the claims that racial categories, identities, and hierarchies were the best way to understand the peoples of the world. The writings of
Franz Boas, his student
Ruth Benedict, and anthropologists critical of the link between race, culture, and ability now began to reach a mass audience.
¹²³
Benedict’s
Races and Racism
, published in 1942, dismissed race thought as “a travesty of scientific knowledge”; in the same year,
Ashley
Montagu’s
Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
became a best seller; and in 1944 the Swedish sociologist
Gunnar Myrdal published
An American Dilemma
, which concluded that Jim Crow segregation in the
South was unjustified and un-American. By the end of the Second World War, the notion that race was the most significant form of collective human identity, consciousness, and ranking had been stripped of any serious claim to intellectual respectability. It was no longer the “everything” that earlier authorities from
Knox to
Hitler had claimed.
¹²⁴

Yet even as the idea of race, and the binary divisions built around it, were being intellectually undermined, evidentially discredited, and
politically invalidated, the politics of racial identities and antagonisms were being given fresh impetus from a variety of developments. There was the
Atlantic Charter, agreed by
Winston Churchill and Franklin
Roosevelt in 1941, which recognized “the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” a provision with serious implications for the European empires, where millions of dark-skinned people lived under authorities they had not chosen.
¹²⁵
There was also the
Japanese success in conquering vast swaths of the British, French, and Dutch empires, thus destroying the notion of the white man’s innate superiority and ushering in a new world where Asiatic peoples had to be taken seriously and treated as equals rather than inferiors. And there was the critical reaction to the high-minded claims made in the United States that it had gone to war in 1941 to fight racial prejudice, discrimination, and genocide, all of which sounded distinctly implausible given the persistence of Jim Crow and the crude American racial stereotyping of the Japanese as rats, dogs, gorillas, and snakes. How could the Roosevelt administration condemn other regimes constructed on the basis of racial identities, inequality, and discrimination, given white America’s own prejudices against blacks?
¹²⁶
Was the Second
World War a conflict of racial liberation—or merely of one racist dominion against another?

It was in this atmosphere of contradictions that the
United
Nations established its
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), one of whose aims was to counter the “ignorance and prejudice” that had underpinned the belief in the “doctrine of [the] inequality of men and of races.” It convened a panel of scientists, chaired by
Ashley Montagu, to produce a definitive verdict on race.
¹²⁷
Their first statement was issued in
1950. “Scientists,” it began, “have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species,
Homo Sapiens.
” Genes responsible for the “hereditary differences between men” were “always few when compared to the whole genetic constitution of man and the vast number of genes common to all human beings regardless of the population to which they belong.” It followed that “the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences,” and that “
national,
religious,
geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups.” The panel urged it would be best “to drop the term ‘race’ altogether,” since “for all practical purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.” It concluded with a ringing endorsement of the reality of common humanity: “Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives towards co-operation.… In this sense, every man is his brother’s keeper.” A year later, a second UNESCO group reaffirmed these findings, insisting that there were “no scientific grounds whatsoever for the belief that there were pure races or a hierarchy of superior and inferior human groups.”
¹²⁸

Underlying these words was the widespread revulsion at the
Jewish
Holocaust, but the defeat of Germany had vanquished that most terrifying of racist polities, and during the next half century the remaining regimes that had been constructed on the basis of racialist thought, identities, superiority, subordination, segregation, and exclusion also disappeared. The end of the
British Raj in
India, of Dutch rule in the East Indies, and of French dominion in
Indochina portended the termination of all the European empires in Asia, Africa, and the West Indies, and decolonization was virtually complete by the 1980s. During the same period, the “white” dominions of
Canada,
Australia, and
New Zealand abandoned their policies of racial discrimination, ended their restrictions on
immigration, sought to atone for earlier acts of genocide and dispossession, and embraced multiculturalism. At the same time, the Jim Crow
laws and customs of the American South were toppled:
civil rights legislation ended discrimination and gave blacks the vote, while the
Supreme Court nullified state laws banning marriage or sexual relations across the boundaries of race, and the
1924 immigration law was effectively repealed.
¹²⁹
Nor could the
apartheid regime in
South Africa endure indefinitely against what was becoming a global repudiation of racialist thinking. In 1990, President
F. W. de Klerk announced that the discriminatory laws and state apparatus enforcing apartheid would be abandoned and that
Nelson Mandela would be freed. Four years later Mandela was elected president, leading a government that was a “rainbow coalition” including blacks, Coloureds, Asians, and whites.
¹³⁰

This breathtaking survey of events might seem to vindicate the view that the house of cards constructed on racialist thought and racial identities had finally collapsed after the
Second World War. But the underlying thinking did not melt away so easily. As the historian
David Reynolds has noted, the extra-European assault on white racism after 1945 was “mounted in the name of another invented category, ‘blackness,’ ” with “the ironic effect of entrenching racial conceptions still further.”
¹³¹
Many African
nationalist leaders of the postwar period, fighting for freedom against
imperial dominion, were concerned to proclaim racial identities, to raise black
consciousness, and to urge white Europeans to get out of their countries. It was the same in the United States, where
Malcolm X propounded the doctrine of “black nationalism” while castigating the “devil race” of white men and “angrily” demanding black power and black separation, and where many American universities established departments of African American studies that sought to explore (and help create?) a shared sense of transatlantic African American identity and black consciousness.
Even Martin Luther King Jr. sometimes spoke of the “marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the negro community,” while Nelson Mandela for a time embraced violence as the only way to bring apartheid to an end.
¹³²
In Africa and the United States, the
color line remained strongly in evidence, and demands for
independence and civil rights looked like the declaration of a race war the blacks in America and Africa were determined to win.

Yet the claim that there was a single, united, all-encompassing black consciousness being mobilized against European colonial oppression in Africa and white supremacists in America was belied and contradicted by much of the evidence. It bears repeating that
many of the “
black” agitations against imperial rule in Africa were fissured by divisions between different tribes, between those who lived in the countryside and the town, and between the traditional forces of collaborating authority and the new forces of middle-class nationalism: in the case of Southern Rhodesia, for example, there were deep divisions between those Africans led by
Robert Mugabe and those who followed
Joshua Nkomo. The result was that independence often ushered in more divisive battles as rival tribes, parties, and factions struggled over who would obtain the spoils of the postcolonial state: as in the former Belgian Congo, where the province of Katanga soon broke away, and where civil war continues to this day; as in Rwanda, where in the 1994 genocide between half a million and one million Tutsi were exterminated by the Hutu; and as in the Sudan, where the south broke away from the north, but where another long-running civil war nevertheless continued.
¹³³
Moreover, the struggles for independence against the “white” European empires were not only carried on by “black” Africans but also by
Arabs in North Africa and the
Middle East, as well as by the inhabitants of South Asia and
Indochina, none of whom could possibly be described as black.

In the deimperializing twentieth century, as in the imperializing nineteenth, there was no one single global color line dividing all the peoples of the world into blacks and whites. The same was true in the United States, where by the 1950s the range of black circumstances was more varied than ever, divided between North and South, country and town, working class and middle class. Some blacks, trapped in the ghettoes of big cities, rioted and rampaged; others joined the nonviolent protests against segregation in the South. Some of them, such as the parents of
Condoleezza Rice, did not buy into arguments about collective mobilization, but preferred to
embrace the individual ethic of self-help and
accommodationism; and whether black
civil rights leaders were confrontationalist or conciliatory, they were invariably male, and they gave very little recognition to the role of women.
¹³⁴
And after a generation in which university departments had been devoted to tracing and studying (and often proclaiming) the unity, coherence, and victimhood of the African American experience and identity, that experience and identity, fissured by
geography and
gender,
class and culture, had turned out to be very difficult to discern. The result, in the words of
Cornel West, was that “there is no such thing as having one identity or of there being one essential identity that fundamentally defines who we actually are.”
Reginald McKnight agreed: “we are not a race,” he wrote, “not even simply an agglomeration of individuals.” Depending on the circumstances or purposes, he argued, “we are at times a ‘We’ and a ‘Them,’ an ‘Us’ and ‘The Other.’ ”
¹³⁵

But while such claims to an all-encompassing black identity and consciousness were in some ways too inflated, they were also too limited, for like the white supremacists against whom they were mobilizing, they denied the common humanity that was more than ever being scientifically verified.
¹³⁶
Two figures, inspired by
Gandhi, embraced this broader picture—not always, and not always successfully, but in ways that were nevertheless inspirational and transformative. The first was
Martin Luther King Jr., who drew on the
Christian teachings of the unity of humankind and sought to stress human connections and affinities in a “network of mutuality.” “Many of our white brothers,” he declared in Washington, D.C., in August 1963, “have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.” So he dreamed of a time when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood,” when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” and when there would be a redeemed America encompassing “all of
God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics.”
¹³⁷
The second figure was
Nelson Mandela, whose views were close to King’s, though he was not a practicing Christian. He espoused “harmony” between “all persons,” in conversation and operation across the boundaries of racial identity, and in the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation in the post
apartheid
South Africa, which should be a country “of which all humanity will be proud.” He recognized the greater and more compelling identity of “the entire human race,” and he personified it with such charisma and moral force that he became someone who “transcended colour” and was “above race.”
¹³⁸