Book review - The long roots of racial prejudice and American colonialism

Francisco Bethencourt’s book Racisms: From the Crusades to the 20th Century 
explores the blood on the leaves left behind by centuries of racial discrimination, including the enduring spectre of Guantánamo Bay.

BY JOANNA BOURKE

It must have been some time in the 1990s when I first heard a Haitian band protesting about having been incarcerated in the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay. Translated from Haitian Creole into English, the song went something like this:

“We sold our pigs, we sold our goats
To go to Miami;
Where we landed, we were returned [to Haiti].
We sold our pigs, we sold our goats;
At Guantánamo they sent us back . . .
Guantánamo is no good, Oh.”

Haitian asylum-seekers are the forgotten victims of the racism that thrives at Guantánamo. Between 1991 and 1995, tens of thousands of Haitians fled their country in kanntès, or rickety boats, after the military overthrew the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. They were intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard and taken to Guantánamo, where they awaited “processing” to discover if they truly faced persecution in their home country. Some remained there for years and most were sent back to Haiti. Conditions in the camp were appalling; the inmates were fenced in with razor barbed wire and heavily guarded, and hysterical fears about “contaminated blood” were used to justify testing everyone for the HIV virus. At the peak of operations in those years, the Guantánamo base held over 45,000 Haitians. Aristide condemned the US policy as racist.

The last incarcerated Haitian left Guantá­namo in 1995. Seven years later, their place was taken by other highly racialised detainees – those captured in the “war on terror”. The links between Haitian refugees and these allegedly unlawful combatants are closer than one might imagine. As early as 1933, John Houston Craige (the then director of public relations for the marines, who were stationed in Haiti during the US occu­pation of the territory between 1915 and 1934) designated Haiti a “Black Bagdad” (sic). In Port-au-Prince a gunrunner tells Craige:

“This is black Bagdad. These people are still living in the days of theArabian Nights . . . You may hear tales as amazing as a Scheherezade ever told. You may see woolly-headed cannibals and silk-hatted savants side by side.”

Rampant racism against Haitians, Arabs and Muslims has created an image of Guantánamo as an imperial outpost for slaves, refugees, revolutionaries and terrorists.

To understand what fuelled such racist ideologies and practices, I can think of no better book than Francisco Bethencourt’s Racisms. It is an ambitious, bold project: Bethencourt seeks to chart the history of racial bias in the western world from the Crusades to the 20th century. He is critical of studies that extrapolate from a limited number of case studies or from individual nations; he dismisses abstract theorising; he revels in the particular, the concrete and the verifiable. The result is a complex yet confident account of one of the most important concepts in history: racism. Or, as he insists, racisms-in-the-plural – that is, in all their varied and complex forms.

Crucial to his perspective is his definition of racism. This sounds simple, but in order to encompass such a long time frame and geographical sweep he needs to define the phenomenon broadly enough to include its many permutations, yet precisely enough to ensure that his comparisons are valid. For Bethencourt, racism is any “prejudice concerning ethnic descent coupled with discriminatory action”. In other words, it is concerned with both classification systems and everyday practices. As such, it is fundamentally a political project, concerned as much with “culture” as with “blood”.

There is nothing radical about the way Bethencourt has structured his book: he starts with the Crusades and ends in the 20th century. The advantages of this approach are immediately obvious, however; it enables him to plot the subtle shifts over time and geographical space in the meaning, significance and impact of racist ideologies. In the Middle Ages, he argues, racist practices were driven primarily by war, political competition (of the Germans against the Slavs or the English against the Irish, for instance), religious hatred (Christians v Jews and Muslims, or Latin Christians v Greek Christians) and ideas about the purity of blood (prominent in Iberia).

Bethencourt then turns to oceanic and colonial explorations and invasions where hierarchies of peoples and places were drawn up and classification systems proliferated. He shows how, in the medieval and early-modern periods, Christians became worried about ethnic purity. Might Jews be contaminating water or food? What could be done to prevent such a calamity? Not only Jews; what about other heretics? The Catholic kings decreed that the children and grandchildren of those convicted during the Inquisition should be barred from holding high office. Hostility against Roma peoples, who were initially welcomed when they arrived in Europe in the Middle Ages, also developed; they were expelled for being carriers of diseases such as the plague and accused of kidnapping children.

“Blood”, skin colour and physical appearance were not the only relevant “signs” that attracted racist attention. Even seemingly minor factors such as hairstyle and clothing could be important. In 1692, a major riot in Mexico City was blamed on tensions between Native American and mixed-race residents. Priests complained that the indigenous women were wearing Spanish skirts instead of the traditional huipil dress. Native men who wore overcoats were accused of acting in a haughty way, an attitude made worse when they spoke Spanish.

Bethencourt believes that the American colonial experience had a decisive impact on the development of a different kind of racism. He notes that slavery increasingly came to be identified with blackness... read more:

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/01/long-roots-racial-prejudice-and-american-colonialism