The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy

Abstract

Among the social science disciplines, political science has one of the more dismal records when it comes to explaining race and racism. Sociology, anthropology, psychology, and indeed history have all done better. Only economics ranks lower on both the empirical and theoretical scales where race is concerned. Why political science has been largely incapable of tackling this momentous subject likely has to do with the field’s identification with, and in many ways, its subservience to, governing and governmentality. This is an identity it shares with economics. It is notable that many political science departments designate themselves as departments of “government,” and that they devote so much emphasis to political technology, although the designation of their work as social “science” is no doubt equally problematic. To be sure, none of the social “sciences” is immune from the criticism that they unduly downgrade the importance of race. Even when a field devotes significant attention to the subject, as sociology, history, and anthropology have done, especially since the highpoint of the civil rights and anticolonialist movements in the 1960s, they still tend to treat race and racism as aberrations from what is supposedly a democratic and social scientific norm. How often have we been told that slavery is the “original sin” of US history, or that the US is “a nation of immigrants”? It is still difficult to grasp—for white people at least—that “American Negro Slavery” was naturalized and indeed blessed by the nation’s founders, almost half of whom practiced it, and that the racist Alien Acts were the first measures passed by the US Congress. It is still nearly unthinkable the US “frontier,” romanticized in countless movies and TV shows, was the setting for an “American Holocaust” (Stannard 1992) whose centuries-long carnage exceeded (and indeed inspired) the Nazis. The idea that race is fundamental to modernity, intimately connected to the rise of capitalism, the ascendancy of Europe, indeed the Enlightenment itself, still lies largely outside academic reckoning.