Theorizing the Racialization of Global Politics and the Caribbean Experience

Abstract

Hilbourne Watson (*) This article on the racialization of global politics addresses questions of the making of the modern world, as reflected through economic exploitation, racial, ethnic, and gender oppression, struggles against commodification and for liberation, and the role of philosophical and theoretical debates in the historical process. Global white supremacy has played an important role in the racialization of global politics, and while it continues to be contested it remains a key ideological rallying factor around the invention of the white race, which developed along several interconnected streams. Those streams have included politics, class, ethnicity, nationalism, religion, law, private property and property rights, slavery and abolition, labor market, employment and compensation strategies, enfranchisement and disfranchisement, racial privilege, and political patronage. (1) The racialization of global politics is a dialectical process of construction and reconstruction. I argue that race is a socially constructed phenomenon. In other words, while I recognize that there are ethnic differences among human groups, I contest the claim of race as an irreducible biological category that equates with culture, understood as the nature and embodiment of humans that are to be found in a timeless history. The social construction of race means that, for a variety of ends, humans invent the category of race and assign meanings to it and to racial hierarchies. Modern forms of race and racism acquire meaning within capitalist social relations of production, ideologically, politically, culturally, and materially, through slavery, indenture, sharecropping, and wage labor, under colonialism and imperialism. State policies of segregation such as Jim Grow in the United States and apartheid in South Africa gave particular meanings to race and racism. Race works through different claims, for example, ancestry, blood, color, and a number of retrospective illusions that help to frame right, status, and privilege for some at the expense of others. The project of white supremacy has complex articulations that range from denying the humanity of certain groups to strategies that trace humanity to a common mother source out of which nonwhites preceded whites as lower orders to pave the way for whites to assume the mantle of civilization. Liberal philosophy is implicated in this perspective, which assumes that it is the civilizing mission of whites to elevate all others. All whites benefit from the historically ascribed privilege of whiteness, whether or not they endorse or practice white supremacy. I highlight the construction of a specific form of racial contract, which I take, following Mills's The Racial Contract, to be a subset within the Western social contract. I discuss the tendency of Enlightenment and romanticist representations to define class differences in biological racial terms in relation to forms of property-sanctioned inequality, where biology and race are equated with culture. This is where the strategy of normalizing and naturalizing inequality was made into a constant across the spectrum of Western philosophy and social and political thought. I draw on racial perspectives from Immanuel Kant, G. W. Hegel, Cecil Rhodes, Theodore Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann, among others, to show how attempts were made to derive white supremacy from natural-law principles. I pay attention to the role of culture in shaping international relations (IR) representations of the nature of the world and human nature by explaining, following Beate Jahn and Roger Bartra, (2) among others, how IR historicized nature and naturalized history and culture with the effect of normalizing European cultural (racialized) accounts of the world. In addition, I focus on the place and role of race in the making of the United States of America and on how the United States used race to forge its own self-concepts and export Jim Crow as white supremacy, with fundamental impacts on, and implications for, the entire Caribbean. …