University of Virginia Library

Racism — Pattern Of Behavior

Institutions Seen By Public As Unreal, Mindless Not Determinant

By Kenneth Ross

—ed.

One of the more remarkable features of American
"national character" has been our consistent tendency to
discount the significance of institutional arrangements as
determinants of social events. With the notable exception
of the South, where the European emphasis on
institutionalized traditions, collective experiences and
class formations was preserved to an extent, the American
orientation toward institutions has identified them as
something to be overcome, as obstacles to be surmounted,
as mindless and foolish brakes on progress, but not as
determining forces. The Protestant Ethic and its kin, the
Spirit of Capitalism, are both clearly and profoundly
anti-institutional in this sense; both tend to perceive
collectivities, collective authority, collective experiences
and collective institutional arrangements as somehow
unnatural, illegitimate, and not quite real.

Whatever the moral or political virtues of such an
orientation, it clearly suffers some limitations when
applied to an analysis of a problem like racism in
America, the problem of an institutionalized pattern of
thought and behavior. A condemnation of racism, as
simply another of those nasty institutions, is morally
valuable. But in trying to understand and explain white
racism, it is precisely its force as an institution and its
relationship with the needs of other institutional patterns
that must be given attention. It will not do, for example,
to simply condemn the institution of racism and then
look for explanations on the level of individual
psychology in studies of "prejudice" on the assumption
that institutions are wicked but at the same time
irrelevant as factors in explanation . . . What follows here
is an attempt to briefly delineate some aspects of racism
on the level of institutions, to demonstrate the
connection between institutionalized racism and other
institutionalized patterns. The attempt is formulated in
terms of the "functions" of racism in a social system, the
ways in which racism is found in mutually reinforcing
relationships with other institutional dimensions of a
social system.

Historically, it is clear that racism is very much
involved with the provision of an inexpensive labor force,
a force that will not only be maintained at minimal cost,
but will also be utilized for labor that is essentially
undesirable. That undesirable labor should at the same
time be underpaid or not paid at all is a very curious
moral principle, but it becomes culturally valid on the
assumption that such a labor force is "naturally inferior."
That a group's natural inferiority requires it to be socially
and economically inferior is an even more curious moral
principle, but cultural or ideological validity has never
depended much on logical validity. For the purpose of
providing such a labor force, all sorts of differences,
cultural and physical, in the African population are
submerged; that very diverse population is, with
extra-ordinary devotion to purpose, defined by their
exploiters as a single "race" and as uniformly inferior. The
exploiters themselves, in an even more bizarre fashioning
of Procrustean beds, define themselves accordingly as
"white" and superior similarly overriding glaring differences
in physical type for the sake of the
economic-ideological benefits of the classification.

While coercion might be used to maintain the inferior
group in its subordinate position, it is clearly more
efficient, both politically and economically (coercion is
expensive and labor-consuming) to have the subordinate
group accept the fact of its inferiority, to believe that it is
indeed naturally inferior. Thus, limited forms of
subordination and enslavement (as in Latin America),
which left Africans with some of their culture, and even
more important, with their souls and the right to
protection for their souls, turned out to operate much less
smoothly than the American slave system, in which a
totalitarian system closed off any alternative to the
African believing that he was inferior and that slavery was
his only "rightful" position. The American system was
plagued with far fewer revolts for this reason, as it would
later be troubled by far fewer acts of protest than one
would expect from an extremely oppressed group.

The functioning of racism in connection with
economic arrangements of this kind is fairly explicit and
obvious. (It should be noted that such a functional
relationship had much to do with the perception of
economic growth as simply quantitative additions of more
land and more slaves, i.e. with the low level of qualitative
technological changes, factors which proved to be
ultimately dysfunctional for economic survival.) A more
indirect function of racism, though still involved in
maintaining an economically depressed labor force,
emerges when blacks are used by white employers as
means of counteracting the demands of white laborers
and thus as a means of keeping the costs and the
availability of labor at a point favorable to the employer.
Thus, the relative "stability" in relations between
management and labor in the South, even in the midst of
severe economic adversity, has had much to do with the
use of racism as a device to split "labor" into two
antagonistic, non-collaborating parts.

art by gary kreger

In a more general sense. American society has
indicated the broad stabilizing functions served by the
concept of race. It has often been noted that Americans
are relatively unconscious of class, do not define
themselves in the socio-economic terms familiar to
Europeans or Latin Americans, are relatively "egalitarian,"
non-deferential toward superiors, etc. Americans
do not, as do the British, define themselves in terms of a
socio-economic "We" in opposition to a socio-economic
"Them." The orderly and efficient quality of American
economic and political processes has often been related to
the absence of such broad class divisions and divisive class
consciousness.

Now while affluence and upward mobility are in part
responsible for such limited class consciousness and
conflict, considerable objective differentials in power and
wealth in America, would, it seems, naturally result in far
more consciousness and division than we have in fact
witnessed, what we find, on examination, is that a major
reason for the low level of class consciousness in America
is precisely the high level of American race consciousness,
our definition of social reality in racial, instead of class,
terms. Class conflict has been largely limited, and often
precluded, in short, due to the influence of institutionalized
racism. The political fate of the Populist
movement in America, like the German Communist
Party's unsuccessful efforts at competing with nationalist,
racist ideology, or the identification of the South African
white working class with the "Herrenvolk democracy" of
white supremacy — all are illustrative of the inverse
relation between race consciousness and class consciousness.

Two points are worthy of note here. First, one can
expect, on this analysis, that a reduction in the strength
of institutionalized racism would result in a significant
increase in the amount of class consciousness to be found
in America. Dominance and subordination no longer
being perceived in racial terms would mean the
heightened awareness of socio-economic bases of such
dominance-subordination. Whether this be achieved by
means of integration or black power, the racial definition
of dominance-subordination would no longer be available
to abort class consciousness.

Second, there is an important difference between a
class definition of reality and a racial definition of reality
in terms of their implications for social conflict. Class
conflict is essentially socio-economic conflict; though it
varies in scope, it is rarely total. There are points of
reconciliation, and the processes of conflict may be
institutionalized and socially regulated. The implications
are different in the area of race. Since a racist definition
of groups defines their total relationship, is diffuse rather
than functionally specific, racial conflict, when it occurs,
is far more likely to be total, far more difficult to contain,
with far fewer points of possible reconciliation. Thus a
racial definition of reality, while providing benefits in
terms of reduced class conflict (benefits which accrue
largely to the wealthy and powerful), results in form of
conflict which is potentially far more destructive to the
social system as a whole. Thus a pattern which is at one
time functional for the preservation of a given
arrangement evolves into a major source of the system's
malfunctioning.

To continue with the functional aspects of racism, we
observe that racism often performs important functions in
the area of socialization and acculturation. In particular,
the subordinated racial group becomes the model of
deviant behavior, a repository of all those traits which
the social system wishes to avoid or repress. If sexual
repression is to be taught as a cultural ideal (perhaps in
connection with economic development), the presence of
a subordinated group which is identified as uninhibited
and savage in its appetites will make that socialization
experience considerably more effective. If one is striving
to build a "New Soviet Man," the identification of a
particular group as lazy, superstitious and of questionable
loyalty (in the Soviet case, the Jew) will likewise serve to
crystallize those attitudes and behavioral traits which are
the very antithesis of the New Soviet Man. This
identification of the subordinate group with forbidden
behavior bears an interesting resemblance to the
identification of witches in certain African societies (cf.
Professor Winter's studies on the subject), where the
witch comes to symbolize the performance of such
forbidden behaviors. To extend the association further, it
appears that in both cases, those forbidden behaviors are
behaviors which members of the system are especially
tempted to engage in. It is in this content that one can
better understand the curious dialectic of
attraction-repulsion which so often characterizes the
relations between dominant and subordinate groups.

It might be fruitful to speculate here on the effects of
a reduced need for sexual repression in advanced
industrial societies, a greater permissiveness in sexual
expression, and thus a declining need to define relatively
free sexual behavior deviant. In this event, the definition
of the subordinate group as "savage" would simply
become an anachronism, irrelevant to the socialization
needs of the present system. On the other hand, if
political docility were to become a major value, one might
then well find the subordinate group being defined in
terms of its very undesirable "aggressiveness")

It is not possible here to provide a complete
examination of the manifold functions of racism.
Hopefully, this brief discussion will have suggested, or
reinforced, the idea that the way to an understanding of
such a pattern is not through a study of "the minds and
hearts of men," but through the institutional arrangements,
and the relationships between those arrangements,
that have a great deal to do with what happens in the
minds and hearts of men, through such an institutional
approach we can better estimate the implications of
change in racist patterns for those patterns to which it is
related, and, more important, understand the broader and
deeper changes that may be required in order to do
something of consequence about changing the pattern of
racism itself.