Race, Comparative Perspectives

Historical Comparisons

A classic illustration of the historical analysis of race can be found in the mid-19th-century debates between Alexis de Tocqueville and Arthur de Gobineau concerning the latter's contention about the central role of racial struggles in human history. At the time of the publication of Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853), a work that earned its author the title of “The Father of European Racism,” his friend and senior colleague Tocqueville made a powerful attack on the idea that there were permanent and immutable differences between human groups based on biological inheritance.

Tocqueville, the famous author of Democracy in America and the Ancien Regime and the Revolution, applied a simple set of observations concerning the rise and fall of different peoples to undermine the plausibility that such changes were the result of genetic forces. It was understandable, he observed, that societies that possessed far greater political and economic power might feel that they consisted of individuals who were completely different from members of less powerful and subordinated groups. Thus, to use Tocqueville's illustration, “Julius Caesar, had he had the time, would have willingly written a book to prove that the savages he had met in Britain did not belong to the same race as the Romans, and that the latter were destined thus by nature to rule the world while the former were destined to vegetate in one of its corners!” The irony of this case was precisely the global power and influence of the British Empire in the middle of the 19th century, almost 2,000 years after Caesar's time, and the beliefs of many of the descendants of these former savages that the “British race” was superior to almost every other group on the planet.

Thus, a comparative historical perspective on racial thinking suggests that it is little more than a system to legitimize group power and domination. Such a conclusion was subsequently echoed by the Italian social scientist, Vilfredo Pareto, after a wide survey of world history in the second decade of the 20th century. Pareto noted, “The right claimed by people who bestow on themselves the title of ‘civilized’ to conquer other peoples whom it pleases them to call ‘uncivilized’ is altogether ridiculous, or rather, this right is nothing other than force.”

The Social Construction of Racial Categories

Another use of the comparative perspective to demonstrate the social construction of racial categories can be seen in the highly variable way in which different societies draw boundaries between groups consisting of individuals possessing some superficially similar characteristic. The “one-drop rule” in the United States, whereby any trace of African ancestry relegates an individual to the subordinate racial category, contrasts markedly with much of the world influenced by a Dutch colonial legacy, or, indeed, with Latin American societies such as Brazil. In the Dutch East Indies, a “one-drop rule” existed, but it worked in the opposite manner from the North American system of racial stratification. As van Amersfoort has pointed out, the Dutch believed that their “racial” influence was so strong that any admixture would raise an individual into the dominant racial category.

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