Trading with Differences: Racism from Race to Culture

Margarita del Olmo Pintado

Departamento de Antropologia, CSIC
e-mail: mdelolmo@ile.csic.es

Resumen
El artículo tiene el objetivo de analizar la relación entre las diferencias culturales y las actitudes racistas, y tratará de mostrar que en España, una sociedad de inmigración reciente, el fenómeno del racismo se ha descubierto y se ha explicado en relación con la presencia de los inmigrantes. La tesis de la autora es que esta relación es falsa.
A partir del análisis del caso de estudio propuesto, el trabajo persigue una meta más ambiciosa, la de discutir el concepto de cultura desde la explicación de qué es el racismo y para qué sirve esta actitud en un contexto social. En opinión de la autora, el empleo del concepto de cultura reproduce algunos de los mecanismos que se han empleado en el pasado para concebir y legitimar clasificaciones raciales.

Palabras clave: Exilio; España; Argentina; Dictadura Militar.

Abstract
My proposal in this article is to analyse the relationship between cultural differences and racism. I will try to show how in the case of Spain, which is a new immigrant society, racism has been discovered and explained as a social reaction to immigrants. My thesis is that this is false.
In addition I have another and more ambitious goal, which is to discuss the concept of culture from the perspective of an explanation of what racism is about and what it is for in social terms. In my opinion, nowadays, the concept of culture, reflects some of the social mechanisms employed in the past to generate and give legitimacy to racial classifications.

Key words: Exile; Spain; Argentina; Military Dictatorship.

Introduction: Spain as a New Immigrant Society

Spain is traditionally considered an emigrant society which in the last years (since the end of the 70s, and specially since early 80s) has been becoming an involuntary host country of permanent residence for some immigrants, mainly from North Africa and Latin America.

Since this situation is a new phenomenon that has taken place because of the creation of the European Community (EC), a number of new unpredicted situations and crisis have followed. As in any crisis, some subtle social mechanisms have emerged, and one of them has been the discovery of racism. Racist attitudes, discourses, behaviors, and crimes have been reported by the mass media. Surveys and social scientists have analyzed them all as a consequence of the unpredicted and unwelcomed immigration process which has taken place¹.

I do not agree with the kind of analysis that links racism and immigration in a cause-effect relationship, and I have been trying to prove it false². At the same time, however I do think that immigration in Spain is a specially appropriate context within which to analyze racism, not because immigration provokes it but because it is a situation crisis where subtle and institutionalized racism emerges. It is with these ideas in mind that I will show some pieces of discourses or conversations which show how Spaniards think about immigrants.

Racist Discourses in an Immigrant Context

Let me introduce now some examples of racist discourses collected by interviewing Spaniards about immigrants³.

I have chosen the first couple of examples because they introduce the "problem" of immigration in Spain by speaking about the Spanish experience as emigrants abroad:

Look, I left Spain to make a life and I have been working abroad. I got paid because I worked, but here these people are getting paid just for loitering, for doing just nothing, for just surviving; meanwhile we are being squeezed to give that man or that woman money that I ..., yes, I' m working, and I have to work hard to get paid because nobody gives me anything for free, and these people are making money here and there, they get house and furniture out of Caritas, and the other one, and his cousin, and his brother. They get a nice house and when they get tired of the same furniture they put them in the garbage because they know they will get new stuff the following day. And I'm not being treated in the same way [stressed in the original]. (Quoted in Colectivo Ioe 1995:79).

Let me tell you something: Spanish people in Europe..., we have done more right things than wrong things there, haven't we?
[...]
How much did the Spanish workers contribute to the building European business?
[...]
What are immigrants in Spain doing? What have they done for Spain?
We're just getting the scum, the drug-dealers. They are the ones who spoil everything, the scum. (Quoted in Pumares and Barroso 1993:19).

Both examples agree in the terms: they make a positive evaluation of the Spanish experience abroad because of the contributions of Spanish workers to European societies, but they refuse the same right to the immigrant, showing prejudice toward them that blocks the interviewees from taking into account the immigrants work. They ask for a consensus in the conversation, but they hide the arguments, as if we were supposed to share their thoughts. They are claiming their right to be an emigrant country because of the work, but at the same time they are denying immigrants the same right because of the immigrants' presumed attitudes. That is to say: we have more rights because we deserve them, because we are different from immigrants', and because our differences are better than yours. Nevertheless they are laying differences only on prejudices.

Why are they different? And why do they deserve more rights? Here is an example that tries to justify this:

A: So Spaniards are more demanding. We have more and different needs. We cannot be content with just anything, I mean, we are more demanding.
B: Why don't you tell that to the grape-pickers in Catalonia! They are being exploited, not only now but even eighty or ninety years ago.
C: I'm so sorry, but they are the ones to be blamed.
B: We have to blame the people who are exploiting them.
C: No, they [the workers] are the ones to be blamed for this. I won't pick up grapes for just 10.000 pesetas, I wouldn't do that.
(Quoted in Pumares y Barroso 1993: 23-24)

This is plainly "blaming the victim" (Ryan 1971), that is to say: you deserve 10.000 pts (aprox. $67 in U.S. currency) because you have to work for that money, and since I cannot live on that I do deserve more. This is the same very same argument of the "poverty culture complex"⁴, it is a circle, it says to people: you are poor because you live as a poor.

Let me quote to other examples of the same type of argumentation:

There are even some Spanish ladies who have immigrants at home, from Portugal, Morocco, or even from Angola, yes Angola as well... Those [Spanish] ladies spend part of their time teaching those immigrants to fulfill themselves, how to realize themselves as persons, don't they? (Quoted in Colectivo Ioe 1995:40).

I can tell you, I have a Portuguese immigrant at home, for two years now. She didn't come to clean up, but to learn how to keep a home, to learn the ABCs of a house, and in a family, because she used to live in a wagon till two years ago (Quoted in Colectivo Ioe 1995:40).

Both persons hide that the immigrants are working in the houses as house-maids, and stress the fact that they have the opportunity to learn. Both speak as if the time of the Spanish ladies was worthier than that of the workers. They make up the argument again on prejudices that even deny the workers the right to be a person by him/herself, since they think the workers need the help of their bosses to fulfill themselves as proper persons.

The interviewees were speaking as if their way of life were the only one possible, as if another one was invalid. They are taking into account differences not as such, but as shortcomings. Meanwhile they can have the right to make a profit out of these differences, since they suppose they deserve the work of the immigrants just in exchange for the right to share the "sameness", or the "proper way" to behave, to organize a house or to fulfill oneself as a person. They are making a profit trading with differences.

Trading with Differences

People don't see cultures the way we anthropologists are used to. We understand cultures as different, complex, and approximately coherent systems of signification or references, which allow us to explain and understand heterogeneity. But people don't look at heterogeneity in the same way: they look at the variety they can reach, but keeping in mind only one of those systems of reference, as if there was just only one possible, correct and ultimate explanation for everything. They understand differences, not as paralleled different systems of norms, but as different variations of a single (and the only correct) system of norms.

A society is an arena where people interact and negotiate in order to share of power and benefits. Following an old explanation by Barth (1966), in a social interaction people want to get more than they actually give. Everyone who gets more than she/he gives tries to consolidate the relationship; while everyone who feels that he/she is getting less than they are giving tries to break up the exchange. This is a difficult and unsteady equilibrium that becomes somewhat more stable when it is possible to get more or less of a consensus, which is what we call legitimation.

When looking at the enormous variety spread over humanity in the form of a continuum we can observe differences as well as similarities. By making categories of people out of this human continuum, what we are doing is manipulating the observations by stressing certain differences and sameness while ignoring other ones, and by establishing boundaries.

We need to classify in order to think. We cannot deal with the tremendous variety we are exposed to, so we need to make clusters with things to reduce diversity, and to accumulate experiences that let us predict that, if something new fits in an already known cluster, we can apply what we know about the whole cluster to that new thing.

We also have to do the same with people. When we classify people in groups we can apply what we know about the whole group to every individual who is part of it, and to every individual who could be identified in the future as a member of the same group. This is part of the process of symbolization⁵, and we have to do that to think, to accumulate valuable experience, and to use it to predict in future situations.

But by classifying people we can do something else in social terms, we can overlap classifications, and use the symbolized differences to justify or to explain social differences, and that is what racism is about: to understand social inequality with physical, geographical, linguistic, religious, or cultural differences.

We should explain social inequality in social terms, but if we use human physical diversity to justify a social hierarchy, what we are doing is classifying human diversity in graded ranks, valuing some physical features, or geographical places, or languages, or religions, or origins above other ones, as if they were worthier. I've claimed this is racism, but let me now clarify my arguments.

Racism from Race to Culture

I understand racism as any discourse, attitude or "tacit" compromise that tries to explain social inequality in terms other than social, as we do when using e. g. physical features, religious background, geographical references, linguistic patterns or cultural ascription. Neither of these arguments can explain or justify a socially hierarchized distribution of power, privilege, land, or material goods⁶.

What underlies racism is the assumption that there must be social differences because people don't look the same, don't speak the same language, weren't born in the same place, don't have the same religious beliefs or cultural behavior⁷. This is to say that there are better physical appearances, better places to live or to be born in, better languages to speak, and better religions to believe in or better cultures to be part of than others, the better ones are better fitted to claim and use social power, privileges, lands or material goods, and they are to be ranked higher in the social hierarchy with the consensus.

Racism is a very powerful argument, as a circular thought, it says people: because you are different, you are worse than me, and for that reason I have more rights than you have, but you and your differences are the only ones to blame for your dispossession.

The point is not that the privileged should explain or justify their privileges, but that the dispossessed should look at their "differences" -inherent and usually inherited- as shortcomings that justify their dispossession. We have been used to do this by using races as categories for classifying people. Let me illustrate this point by quoting a 1975 U.S. Memorandum of the Office for Federal Contract compliance⁸.

Blacks should include persons of African descent as well as those identified as Jamaican, Trinidaian, and West Indian.

Spanish surnamed should include all persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Latin or Spanish descent, including all persons whose native language, cultural heritage, and/or ancestry are rooted in Spain or Latin America.

American Indians should include persons who identify themselves or are known as such.

Asians American should include persons of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Filipino descent, or whose appearance reveals oriental, Polynesian origin.

Persons of Indo-European descent, e.g., Pakistan and East Indian as well as Malayans, Thais, and others not falling within the above are regarded as White.

We can still find this kind of classification elsewhere in the United States. Nevertheless races as categories have been contested for a long time from the Academia. Let me introduce now some of the more representative examples:

The first one is as old as from 1942, when Ashley Montagu, a physical anthropologist, stated that the concept of race was a myth:

[T]he myth of "race" [consists in the] the belief that physical and mental traits are linked, that the physical differences are associated with rather pronounced differences in mental capacities, and that these differences are measurable by IQ tests and the cultural achievements of these populations. (Montagu 1974:5).

More recently Thomas Gossett wrote:

Linnaeus had found four human races; Blumenbach had five; Cuvier had three; John Hunter had seven; Burke had sixty-three; Pickering had eleven; Virey had to "species" each containing three races; Haeckel had thirty-six; Huxley had four; Topinard had nineteen under three headings; Desmoulins had sixteen "species"; Deniker had seventeen races and thirty types. Jean Finot, one of the critics of race theorizing, concluded in 1906 that the methods of classification were so different that <the facility with which human races may be created at will can easily be imagined>. We should gratified, says Finot, that the anthropologists differ so little. <Far from being astonished at the number of races already extant, we must bless Heaven for having preserved us from a thousand million races and consequent classifications!> (Gossett 1965: 82).

In the same very work he concluded:

All attempts to construct any theory of history of civilization upon racial theory, all attempts to describe accurately the differences of character, temperament, and intelligence among races, have been failures. Race theory has frequently lent itself to the crudest kind of manipulation by the people who wished to justify a scheme of exploitation or discrimination. (Gossett 1965:409).

Let me quote another argument along the same lines, but as recently as 1995 by Lopez:

There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non-Blacks; similarly, there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to non-Whites. One's race is not determined by a single gene or gene-cluster, as is, for example, sickle-cell anemia. Nor are races marked by important differences in gene frequencies, the rates of appearance of certain gene types. The data compiled by various scientists demonstrate⁹, contrary to popular opinion, that intra-group differences exceed inter-group differences. That is, greater genetic variation exists within the populations typically labeled Black and White than between these populations. This finding refutes the supposition that racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences. (Lopez 1995: 194).

The American Anthropological Association has recently published a teaching module written by Lieberman and Rice to demonstrate "...that characteristics that in the past were used to identify biological races de not support the concept of race because they do not covary". (Lieberman and Rice 1996: Preface).

It is possible to summarize the arguments developed in the paper by quoting a fictive dialogue from page 1:

Puzzler: Conceptually, races don't exist, yet humans around the world vary in physical appearance and genetic composition, and belief in the existence of races is widespread in popular thinking.
Solution: Clines or continuous gradations in physical characteristics exist; clines can be used to explain physical characteristics and the genetic composition of groups. Since clinal gradations do not covary geographically, races do not exist as distinct populations. Popular belief in races is a social concept, not a biological reality. (Lieberman and Rice 1996:1).

I would like to finish this set of examples by quoting the draft of the American Anthropological Association Official Statement on Race¹⁰

[W]e conclude that the concept of "race" has no validity as a biological category in the human species. Because it homogenizes widely varying individuals into limited categories, it impedes research and understanding of the true nature of human biological variations. (American Anthropological Association Ms (1997:1).

So it looks as if we do not have races, what we do have is an enormous variety -physical as well as cultural- spread over humanity in the form of a continuum, where we can observe differences and similarities as well, but we cannot make racial categories out of them. Still we have racism, we have it, we live with it, we can observe it, and we have to analyze it because we must deal with it.

In modern Western experience, after slavery, colonialism, and after the Holocaust, we are used to resorting to cultural differences as means to justify social inequality, in a way we were used to doing the same with racial characteristics or physical features. That is how we can have racism without races, and that is why I understand racism as a social manipulation of the use of cultural differences and this is also why, as van Dijk has pointed out that

[R]acism does not consist of only white supremacist ideologies of race, or only of aggressive overt or blatant discriminatory acts, the forms of racism as it is currently understood in informal conversations, in the media, or in much of the social sciences. Racism also involves the everyday, mundane, negative opinions, attitudes, and ideologies and seemingly subtle acts and conditions of discrimination against minorities, namely, those social cognitions and social acts, processes, structures, or institutions that directly or indirectly contribute to the dominance of the white group and the subordinate position of minorities. (van Dijk 1993:5).

Whenever we try to analyze organized racism and the political right wind as aberrant products of contemporary democracies¹¹, we are missing the focus. Racism is an iceberg and that kind of behavior is only its visible peak, we cannot understand the peak if we don't take into account the underwater part also.

Racism is part of Western democracies, not only by giving votes or voice to racist right wing speakers, but because it is part of our society as a key to understanding the social hierarchy and the legitimation of that hierarchy.

We have to look into our history to find out the foundations of racism in our societies, but today all of us are the ones to blame for our direct or indirect responsibility in the process of reproduction of racism in contemporary Western democracies. T. van Dijk expressed the same idea as:

If whites are not themselves actively involved in these modern forms of segregation, exclusion, aggression, inferiorization, or marginalization, then their involvement in the problem of racism consists in their passivity, their acquiescence, their ignorance, and their indifference regarding ethnic or racial inequality. (van Dijk 1993:6).

I agree with van Dijk's explanation of racism as a social mechanism for justifying inequality, but what I want to do is to push the argument a little bit further by analyzing what it means in terms of the concept of culture.

In my opinion what we are doing now is shifting from the concept of race to the concept of culture or ethnic group anytime we have to deal with racism. When physical anthropologists deny any significance to race classifications they are driving the challenge to explain racism into society and into culture by suggesting that we should erase the term "race" and put "ethnic group" or "culture" in its place:

We suggest that most people have become so bombarded by the media that races do exist, that they feel very uncomfortable when deprived of the "cherished" idea. If we deprive them of race, we should substitute something more attractive (and more accurate). Since people are not apt to identify with clines, we suggest that substituting the concept of ethnicity and ethnic groups will fill the bill. (Lieberman and Rice 1996:8).

This idea is broadly explained in the AAA's Draft of the Official Statement on Race, when at the end of the document they wrote:

The "racial" worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status while others were permitted access to privilege, power and wealth. The tragedy is that it succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between human groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance; rather, these inequalities are products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational and political circumstances. (American Anthropological Association, ms. 1997:3).

The only problem with this perspective is that by substituting the concept of ethnicity or ethnic group we can still have the same problem. If we use them to assign and justify some groups to perpetual low status while others were permitted access to privilege, power and wealth on behalf of their ethnicity or their culture or their historical background, we are giving again scientific grounds for justifying racism, not on physical terms now, but based on cultural explanations.

Challenging the Concept of Culture

In my opinion, we as cultural anthropologists should take the challenge of our physical anthropologist colleagues not by moving the problems which arise from racial classifications into cultural or ethnical classifications, but by accepting their arguments against the concept of race into our own concept of culture.

It is possible to use cultural differences to trade with in the same way we made it when we used with racial differences to explain and justify social discrimination and social inequality. If we keep on making clusters of people by labeling them in "cultures" or "ethnic groups" we can easily inherit all the problems that have been associated with racial classifications until now.

We have been dealing with cultures in the same way physical anthropologists have been dealing with races: as if there has been a mythical time in which a group of people has become a closed category we call "a culture" which makes sense by itself, or an "ethnic group" when we consider it needs an outsider reference to be explained.

The challenge we should accept in my opinion is to rethink cultures not as islands or closed systems, but as parts of larger worlds where cultural differences have a social meaning with deep effects on the lives of individuals, and which frame their access to social power by legitimating their right to take part in the unequal share of social power and benefits .

I do believe a culture is no longer a significant unit of analysis if we are to understand the complex processes that crisscross our complex world, a world which Fredrik Barth described as "... a characteristically shaped, disordered system containing emergent events and discrepant worlds, in a flux generated by identifiable processes, which are in part capable of modeling" (Barth 1993:354).

An in which we have to understand, using again Barth words:"... the kaleidoscope of events a [...] population produces [...] continually subject to discrepant interpretations by its various participants" (Barth 1993:354).

Let's start by identifying and understanding the processes that shape the everyday experiences of people in social interactions.

Notas

¹ Most recent survey has been published by El País on February 3, 1998. The results have been quoted as: "Spanish School Children Reject Immigrants: A Survey Shows that Racism is Widespread among Youngsters" p. 26.
² For further argumentation see del Olmo (1997).
³ The texts have been already published in Spanish (Calvo Buezas 1991; Colectivo Ioe 1995; Pumares and Barroso 1993). The translations of the texts are mine, but I am in debt with Dr. Francisco Rodriquez-Mañas for his help.
⁴ A broad discussion of this argument is also in Ryan (1971).
⁵ I have analyzed this process extensively (del Olmo 1989;1997).
⁶ I'm using here part of Kivel definition of racism, which stated that "White racism is the uneven and unfair distribution of power, privilege, land, and material goods favoring white people" (Kivel 1996: 2).
⁷ Christian Delacampagne claimed that "On puorrait dire [...] que le besoin de justifier les différences sociales par des différences naturelles revêt, dans les processus d'exclusion practiqués par l'Occident, une constante troublante" (Delachampagne 1983: 170).
⁸ I have taken this racial classification from Glazer (1987:199).
⁹ The author offers the following references: Kamin, L. et al (1984); Alqquist, A., J. Cronin (1988); Bower, B. (1991); Lewontin, R. (1972); Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (1974).
¹⁰ This text is not yet published; it is still just a draft for broarder discussion.
¹¹ As an example, this is what Ford (1991) identified as racism in Europe, just organized racism and right wing.

References
1. Alqquist, A., Cronin, J., "Fact, Fancy, and Myth on Human Evolution" in Current Anthropology, 520, 1988.
2. American Anthropological Association, Official Statement on "Race", Draft Ms, 1997.
3. Barth, Fredrik, Models of Social Organization, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Glasgow, 1966.
4. —, Balinese Worlds, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1993.
5. Bower, B. "Race Falls from Grace ", In Science News, 380, 1991.
6. Calvo Buezas, Tomás, "La imagen de los <gitanos> en los profesores y alummnos madrileños: un estudio de la sociedad mayoritaria", en: Malestar cultural y conflicto en la sociedad madrileña, Comunidad de Madrid, Madrid, 1991, pp. 305-313.
7. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., "The Genetics of Human Populations" in Scientific American, 80, 1974.
8. Colectivo Ioe, Discurso de los españoles sobre los extranjeros. Paradojas de la alteridad, Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Madrid, 1995.
9. Delachampagne, Christian, L'invention du racisme. Antiquité et Moyen Age, Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris, 1983.
10. del Olmo, Margarita, La construcción cultural de la identidad: emigrantes argentinos en España, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 1989.
11. —, "Una introducción al análisis del racismo: el contexto español como caso de estudio", en: Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, CSIC, Madrid, 1997, Vol. 52, Nº2, pp. 187-203.
12. van Dijk, Teun A., Elite Discourse and Racism, Sage Publications, Londres, 1993.
13. El País, Martes, 3 de Febrero, 1998, pp. 26-27.
14. Ford, James G., Informe Ford sobre racismo en Europa, Ministerio de Asuntos Sociales, Madrid, 1991.
15. Glazer, Nathan, Ethnic Dilemmas 1964-1982, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987.
16. Gossett, Thomas F., Race: The History of an Idea in America, Schoken Books, New York, 1965.
17. Kamin, L. et al., Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, 1984.
18. Kivel, Paul, Uprooting Racism. How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 1996.
19. Lewontin, R., "The Apportionment of Human Diversity", in Evolutionary Biology, 381, 397, 1972.
20. Lieberman, L., and P. Rice, Race or Clines? Module #2. General Anthropology Division Modules in Teaching Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, Arlington,VA, 1996.
21. Lopez, Ian F. Haney, "The Social Construction of Race", in Critical Race Theory, Delgado ed, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1995, pp. 191-203.
22. Montagu, Ashley, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Oxford University Press, New York, 1974.
23. Pumares, Pablo, y Angeles Barroso, El grupo de discusión aplicado al estudio de las actitudes hacia los inmigrantes (II) Análisis de grupos, CSIC, Madrid, 1993.
24. Ryan, William, Blaming the Victim, Random House, New York., 1971.

recibido: 19/05/04
aceptado para su publicación: 15 /12/04