Looking for the Counterpoints
At ACTA's blog, Erin O'Connor praises an exchange between ACTA's president, Anne Neal, and an email correspondent as a model of civility. In the exchange, Anne Neal defends the report's criticism of an anthropology course on racism. Among her arguments is that the assignment of George Fredrickson's book Racism is politically biased because it "focuses solely on Western racism, as if only Westerners can be racists", which echoes her general criticism of the course description as a course solely intended to "bash the West".
I'm trying to think as a historian about what the pedagogical and scholarly alternatives might be.
I've replied in some detail to this argument over at the ACTA blog. It seems to me that Neal's vision of a properly unbiased course is vastly more restrictive in both structure and content than what it seeks to replace.
There are other replies that one could make. As Michael Berube observes, this kind of rigid demand for every text to be met by its opposite would make a course on, say, the history of the Holocaust a pretty difficult one to teach. Moreover, as I've noted in the comments at the ACTA blog, Fredrickson's book, like much scholarship, delineates its argument about the roots of racial thought in the West in such a manner that he invites debate about his conclusions and supplies some of the possible grounds for arguing otherwise.
What I want to think about here, to be fair-minded, is what the alternatives would be to teaching a course about the history of modern racism which argued that systematic racist practices, institutions, and ideologies have a deep rootedness in Western intellectual, political or social history. One of the many problems I have with Neal and ACTA is that they don't seem to respect the extent to which that claim, in Fredrickson or elsewhere, is an EMPIRICAL, EVIDENTIARY argument. It's not just an arbitrary "political" pronouncement, but something that the detailed scholarly work of hundreds of historians and others supports. You can't just wave it away with a sentence or two that views such an argument as "biased".
But what are the alternatives? Here's some that I see:
1) Modern racism has not been nearly as systematic or connected an ideological or institutional system as some historians claim; it is more improvisational, contradictory and multiple in its origins and applications.
Personally, I find that argument congenial: it's pretty much what I'm claiming now about the roots of modern imperialism in Africa. In the context of racism, are there any monographs, articles or scholarly works that would nicely exemplify this argument that you could assign in a course?
2) Modern racism does not have deep roots in the Western tradition, but is instead an aberrational distortion, marginal to the central legacies of Western thought and practice.
I think that's a pretty hard argument to make in the context of the 19th and 20th Centuries, but if you wanted to assign something that reflected this point of view, what would you choose?
3) Modern racism is indeed "modern" but relatively global in its distribution and origins, both coming from and being reinforced by forms of hatred and discrimination in Western and non-Western societies.
I can see a lot of ways to make this argument, ranging from connecting institutional and ideological racism to the nation-state as a political form to arguing about "hatred" as a modern phenomenon. You could assign Niall Ferguson's new book on the history of hatred as one way to get at this argument: are there other books that people would recommend?
4) Modern racism is just a form of a transhistorical human universal tendency towards sectarian hatred or competition.
Here you could assign sociobiology or evolutionary psychology or you could assign Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes. This is one of those places where I suspect the very nature of the class would have to change, but it could be done.
5) Modern racism is indeed a part of the Western tradition, but that's a good thing and we need more of it.
Hey, Neal's asking for opening up the classroom to different points-of-view: on what grounds could you keep this argument out of the course if you did so? I can unfortunately think of a fairly substantial number of texts you could assign, though few of them scholarly.