Intellectuals and Race Page 6
The wider the sweep of history that is surveyed, the more dramatic reversals of the relative positions of nations and races there are. A tenth-century Muslim scholar noted that Europeans grow more pale the farther north you go and also that the “farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.”118 However offensive this correlation between skin color and intellectual development may seem today, there is no reason in history to challenge it as an empirical generalization, as of that particular time. Mediterranean Europe was more advanced than northern Europe for centuries, beginning in ancient times, when the Greeks and Romans laid many of the foundations of Western civilization, at a time when the peoples of Britain and Scandinavia lived in illiterate and far less advanced societies.
Like the tenth-century Muslim scholar, Madison Grant saw a correlation between skin color and intelligence, but he explicitly attributed that correlation to genetics. Among other things, he explained the over-representation of mulattoes among the black elite of his day by their Caucasian genes, and Edward Byron Reuter made an empirical sociological study of the same phenomenon, reaching the same conclusion.119 In a later period, intellectuals would explain the same phenomenon by the bias of whites in favor of people who looked more like themselves.
Regardless of what either theory says, the facts show that the actual skills and behavior of blacks and mulattoes had historically been demonstrably different, especially in nineteenth and early twentieth century America. These were not mere “perceptions” or “stereotypes,” as so many inconvenient observations have been labeled. A study of nineteenth century Philadelphia, for example, found crime rates higher among the black population than among the mulatto population.120 It is not necessary to believe that crime rates are genetically determined, but it is also not necessary to believe that it was all just a matter of perceptions by whites.121
During the era of slavery, mulattoes were often treated differently from blacks, especially when the mulattoes were the offspring of the slave owner. This difference in treatment existed not only in the United States but throughout the Western Hemisphere. Mulattoes were a much higher proportion of the population of “free persons of color” than they were of the populations of slaves throughout the Western Hemisphere, and women were far more often freed than were men.122 These initial differences, based on personal favoritism, led to long-term differences based on earlier opportunities to begin acquiring human capital as free people, generations before the Emancipation Proclamation.
In short, “free persons of color” had a generations-long head start in acculturation, urbanization and general experience as free people. The rate of literacy reached by the “free persons of color” in 1850 would not be reached by the black population as a whole until 70 years later.123 It was 1920 before the black population of the United States as a whole became as urbanized as the “free persons of color” were in 1860.124 Neither within groups nor between groups can differences be discussed in the abstract, in a world where the concrete is what determines people’s fates. Among Americans of African descent, as within and between other groups, people are not random events to which statistical probability theories can be blithely applied— and correlation is not causation.
Against the background of head starts by those freed from slavery generations ahead of others, it is not so surprising that, in the middle of the twentieth century, most of the Negro professionals in Washington, D.C. were by all indications descendants of the antebellum “free persons of color”125— a group that was never more than 14 percent of the American Negro population.126 Because many of these professionals— such as doctors, lawyers and teachers— worked primarily or exclusively within the black community in mid-twentieth-century Washington, favoritism by contemporary whites had little or nothing to do with their success, even though the human capital which produced that success developed ultimately from the favoritism shown their ancestors a century or more earlier.
Neither genetics nor contemporary environment is necessary to explain differences in human capital between blacks and mulattoes— differences that were much more pronounced in earlier years than today, after the black population as a whole has had more time and opportunities as free people to acquire more human capital. Similarly, neither genetics nor contemporary environment is necessary to explain differences in skills, behavior, attitudes and values among other racial groups or sub-groups in many other countries around the world, since many of these groups differed greatly in their history, in their geographic settings and in other ways.
Madison Grant asserted that “the intelligence and ability of a colored person are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood he has, and that most of the positions of leadership, influence, and prominence in the Negro race are held not by real Negroes but by Mulattoes, many of whom have very little Negro blood. This is so true that to find a black Negro in a conspicuous position is a matter of comment.”127 But, like so much else that was said by him and by others of like mind, it verbally eternalized a contemporary pattern by attributing that pattern to genetics, just as many Progressive-era intellectuals disdained the peoples of Southern Europe, who had by all indices once been far more advanced in ancient times than the Nordics who were said to be genetically superior. The Greeks and Romans had the Parthenon and the Coliseum, not to mention literature and giants of philosophy, at a time when there was not a single building in Britain, a country inhabited at that time by illiterate tribes.
Chapter 4
Internal Responses to Disparities
Although economic and social inequalities among racial and ethnic groups have attracted much attention from intellectuals, seldom today has this attention been directed primarily toward how the less economically successful and less socially prestigious groups might improve themselves by availing themselves of the culture of others around them, so as to become more productive and compete more effectively with other groups in the economy. When David Hume urged his fellow eighteenth-century Scots to master the English language,1 as they did, both he and they were following a pattern very different from the pattern of most minority intellectuals and their respective groups in other countries around the world. The spectacular rise of the Scots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries— eventually surpassing the English in engineering and medicine,2 for example— was also an exception, rather than the rule.
A much more common pattern has been one in which the intelligentsia have demanded an equality of economic outcomes and of social recognition, irrespective of the skills, behavior or performance of the group to which they belong or on whose behalf they spoke. In some countries today, any claim that intergroup differences in outcomes are results of intergroup differences in skills, behavior or performance are dismissed by the intelligentsia as false “perceptions,” “prejudices,” or “stereotypes,” or else are condemned as “blaming the victim.” Seldom are any of these assertions backed up by empirical evidence or logical analysis that would make them anything more than arbitrary assertions that happen to be in vogue among contemporary intellectual elites.
In direct contrast with the Scots, who mastered the language of the English— and the broader range of knowledge, skills and culture to which that language gave them access— other groups in a position to rise by acquiring the knowledge and skills available in another language or culture have resented having to advance in that way.
In the days of the Russian Empire, for example, most of the merchants, artisans, and industrialists in the Baltic port city of Riga were German,3 even though Germans were less than one-fourth of that city’s population.4 Education at Dorpat University in Riga was conducted in German, as was most of the educational activity in the city.5 Not only in Riga, but in Latvia as a whole, the upper classes were mostly German and the lower classes mostly Latvian. However, those Latvians who wanted to rise could become part of the elite German culture and intermarry into the German community. But a newly emerging Latvian educated class, many educated at Dorpat
University, resented having to become culturally German in order to rise, and initiated the politics of ethnic identity instead.6 They saw Latvians as a people “consigned by long oppression to lowly stations in life.”7
A very similar process occurred in the Habsburg Empire, where the Germans in Bohemia were an educated elite and where Czechs there who wanted to rise into that elite could do so by acquiring the German language and culture. But a new Czech intelligentsia, including university students and school teachers, promoted Czech cultural nationalism.8 Czech nationalists, for example, insisted that street signs in Prague, which had been in both Czech and German, henceforth be exclusively in Czech.9 In the town of Budweis, Czech nationalists demanded that a quota of Czech music be played by the town orchestra.10 Symbolism— including intolerance toward other people’s symbols— has often marked the efforts of an ethnic intelligentsia.
The rising indigenous intelligentsia— whether in Latvia, Bohemia or elsewhere— tended to treat the cultural advantages of Germans as a social injustice, against which they mobilized other members of their ethnic group to oppose Germans and German culture. Whether in the Baltic or in Bohemia, the Germans tended to be more cosmopolitan, and initially resisted efforts by the newly arising indigenous intelligentsia to fragment society along ethnic lines. But the persistent and increasing promotion of ethnic identity by the newly rising ethnic intelligentsia eventually led the Germans to abandon their cosmopolitanism and defend themselves as Germans.11 The net result in both countries was ethnic polarization, often under the banner of some variation of “social justice,” requiring the lagging group to be put on a par through some process other than their own acquisition of the same knowledge and skills as others.
Similar polarization has been produced in other countries with the rise of a newly educated intelligentsia— usually educated in “soft” fields, rather than in the sciences or in other subjects that would produce marketable skills with which to compete with members of other ethnic groups who already had such skills and experience. One historical study referred to the “well-educated but underemployed” Czech young men who promoted ethnic identity in the nineteenth century12— a description that would apply to many ethnic identity promoters in other parts of Europe and Asia, as well as in the United States, then and now. The “educated unemployed” became a common expression in the twentieth century,13 whether in Europe, Asia or elsewhere— and such people became common sources of ethnic polarization.
An international study of ethnic conflicts pointed out: “The very elites who were thought to be leading their peoples away from ethnic affiliations were commonly found to be in the forefront of ethnic conflict.”14 Romania between the two World Wars was a typical example:
The years under review recorded a more visible presence of “the intellectual proletariat”: schoolmasters, lawyers, students and university graduates. This social category continued to grow, but it met with great difficulties in asserting itself and gaining a satisfactory social status. Its members were handicapped by their precarious social situation and financial difficulties during their years of study. Most of them were “first-generation” intellectuals or the sons of teachers, priests or petty functionaries. They were the main source of the right-wing movements’ audience and accounted for a high proportion of the antisemitic organizations’ membership. As in Poland and Hungary, the relatively large numbers of Jews in the universities and free professions exacerbated the frustration of young people in their endeavors to carve out “a position” for themselves in the urban social structures.15
Among the leading promoters of anti-Semitism in Romania over the years have been an academic described as “the most important Romanian philosopher of the late nineteenth century,”16 another academic described as “the greatest Romanian historian,”17 and another intellectual described as “One of the most important twentieth-century Romanian national poets.”18
Newly educated classes have been especially likely to specialize in softer subjects and to be prominent among those fostering hostility toward more advanced groups, while promoting ethnic “identity” movements, whether such movements have been mobilized against other ethnic groups, the existing authorities, or other targets. In various periods of history, the intelligentsia in general and newly educated people in particular have inflamed group against group, promoting discriminatory policies and/or physical violence in such disparate countries as India,19 Hungary,20 Nigeria,21 Kazakhstan,22 Romania,23 Sri Lanka,24 Canada,25 and Czechoslovakia.26
Whether at the level of minority activists in a given society or at the level of leaders of national revolts against external imperial powers, promoters of nationalism have been disproportionately intellectuals— and intellectuals from a limited range of fields. “Few nationalist militants were engineers or economists, or professional administrators,” as a study of nationalism said of the generation of African leaders during the transition from colonial status to that of independent nations in the twentieth century. For example, Kwame Nkrumah was a British-educated lawyer, Jomo Kenyatta an anthropologist, and Léopold Senghor a poet.27 Much the same pattern could be found in other parts of the world as well. Leaders of the Basque separatist movement in Spain and of the Quebec separatist movement in Canada were also soft-subject intellectuals.28
In the less developed eastern regions of Europe, the rising intellectual class during the years between the two World Wars likewise tended to concentrate in the softer subjects, rather than in science or technology, and to seek careers in politics and government bureaucracies, rather than in industry or commerce. As a scholarly history of that era put it, institutions of higher education in East Central Europe turned out a “surplus academic proletariat” which could not be absorbed into “economically or socially functional employment” because they were trained primarily in law or the humanities.29 Romanian institutions of higher education were described as “numerically swollen, academically rather lax, and politically overheated,” serving as “veritable incubators of surplus bureaucrats, politicians, and demagogues.”30
Much the same pattern would be apparent decades later in Sri Lanka, which was all too typical of Asian Third World countries in having “a backlog of unemployed graduates” who had specialized in the humanities and the social sciences.31 Ethnic leaders who would later promote the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the atrocities that followed in the last decade of the twentieth century, included professors in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as a novelist and a psychiatrist.32 The mass slaughters in Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge were likewise led principally by intellectuals, including teachers and academics.33
Historian A.J.P. Taylor has said that the first stage of nationalism “is led by university professors” and that “the second stage comes when the pupils of the professors get out into the world.”34 Whatever the actual sequence, the intelligentsia in many countries around the world have played a central role in promoting intergroup and international animosities and atrocities— and in trying to artificially preserve, revive, or fabricate past glories.
Conversely, the historic examples of dramatic self-improvement in nineteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Scotland— countries that set out to change themselves, rather than to blame others— concentrated on building tangible skills, such as in engineering and medicine in the case of Scotland, and science and technology in the case of Japan.* By contrast, in the twentieth century a whole generation of future Third World leaders who went to study in the West seldom concentrated on studying the science, technology or entrepreneurship that produced Western prosperity, but instead concentrated on the social theories and ideologies in vogue among Western intellectuals in academia and elsewhere. The countries they led after independence often paid a high price in economic stagnation or even retrogression, as well as in internal polarization that turned group against group.
Language politics has been one aspect of more general polarization that has poisoned relations between more prosperous and less
prosperous groups in India, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, among other places where the lagging majority tried to insulate themselves from competition with more successful minorities by making their own language a prerequisite for education and/or employment.35 In Asia, as in Europe, Africa and the Western Hemisphere, the intelligentsia have been prominent among those pushing ethnic identity ideology and intergroup polarization.
Under such influences, Sri Lanka went from being a country whose record for harmonious relations between majority and minority was held up to the world as a model by many observers, in the mid-twentieth century, to a country whose later ethnic polarization produced decades of mob violence and then outright civil war, in which unspeakable atrocities were committed, on into the early twenty-first century.36
The polarization between Czechs and Germans in nineteenth century Bohemia took longer to reach the level of historic tragedy but nevertheless it did. A key turning point came when the new nation of Czechoslovakia was created in the twentieth century, from the breakup of the Habsburg Empire after the First World War, with the former kingdom of Bohemia now being Czechoslovakia’s most economically and culturally advanced region— in part because of the Germans living in a section of that region called the Sudetenland. One indicator of the wide cultural differences among the various peoples of this small country was that the illiteracy rate in Bohemia was only 2 percent in 1921, while half the people in the province of Ruthenia were illiterate.37 Much of Czechoslovakia’s industry was located in Bohemia and a substantial proportion of it was in the hands of the Sudeten Germans.