Realism and racism: a review essay on ‘After the ball is over’

Abstract

This is a challenging and timely article in which Shepperson takes issue with the idealism that is so pervasive in scholarly thinking about and racism. The discourse about that emerged from the SAHRC investigation into racism in the SA media was permeated with this idealism: the idea that 'race is something between people's ears and nothing real at all'. The main impetus for this idealism is no longer psychological notions of prejudiced attitudes which deemed stereotypes as irrational and inaccurate beliefs. Today, in the climate of social constructionism, commentators move too quickly from arguments about the tenuous genetic basis for race, to an outright rejection of the reality of race. The reality of was elided in both the commission's focus on narratives of race, and in commentators' views that is a social construct--an illusion--and that belief in the existence of races amounts to little more than false consciousness. Underlying his distinction between thinking and racism, Shepperson seeks some factor outside of expressions about race--'some independent factuality in history'--that can ground the expression as racist. The independent factuality he proposes is provocatively derivative of genetics: is grounded in a cross-generational continuity (reproduction) of qualitative marks or iconic features on/of the human body (e.g. skin colour, hair quality, facial features). Although it has this material grounding, racism is fundamentally social: 'the term race can only arise under the condition that existing adult generations choose to have offspring that do not discontinue social bodily iconic mark ...' (my emphasis). This is a sophisticated multidimensional view of as a social and emergent material reality. Race--and its preservation, racism--is founded on social practices of mate selection. It depends on the emergence of a set of norms which dictate that 'fertile individuals do not ... explore their sexuality with members of excluded aggregations'. In Shepperson's theory, does have a reality independent of thought. It is grounded in the material reality of bodies, which are the product of sexual reproduction. Since ideas about are the grounds for mate selection we have, in essence, a dialectic theory of racism as the articulation of representations of race, social practices and material forms. In this light, it is possible that Shepperson has overemphasised the independence of reality from thought. I also believe that his language of cause--that an analysis of racism involves establishing its underlying causes--is misplaced. Representations of and the material conditions of their reproduction are not independent realities locked in causal relations. This is the wrong ontology. Rather, there are dialectical relations of co-constitutionality: each provides the conditions of possibility and constraint for the other (see Durrheim & Dixon 2005). Is it really the case, though, that racism is premised on norms and taboos of mate selection? There are many seemingly contradictory cases. On the one hand, racism can flourish in a context where iconic differences are not clear. For example, during the nineteenth century the Irish were considered a distinct from the English--they were subject to crude racism and represented as white chimpanzees, the missing link in a Darwinian scheme. …