The Theory of Cultural Racism

Very few academics these days consider themselves to be racists, and calling someone a racist is deeply offensive. Yet racism in the universities is just as pervasive, just as dangerous, as it was a generation ago. Nowadays we seem to have a lot of racism but very few racists. How do you explain this paradox? The place to begin is to notice the essential difference between racist theory and racist practice. Racism most fundamentally is practice: the practice of discrimination, at all levels, from personal abuse to colonial oppression. Racism is a form of practice which has been tremendously important in European society for several hundred years, important in the sense that it is an essential part of the way the European capitalist system maintains itself. Racist practice, like all practice, is cognized, rationalized, justified, by a theory, a belief-system about the nature of reality and the behavior which is appropriate to this cognized reality. (The word "theory" is better in this context than the word "ideology," because we are talking about a system of empirical beliefs, not about the cultural bindings of belief.) But theory and practice do not have a one-to-one relationship. One form of practice can be underlain by various different theories. Since racism-as-practice, that is, discrimination, is an essential part of the system, we should not be surprised to discover that it has been supported by a historical sequence of different theories, each consistent with the intellectual environment of a given era. Nor should we be surprised to find that the sequent theories are so different from one another that the racist theory of one epoch is in part a refutation of the racist theory of the preceding epoch.