Races, Tribes, Nations

Divide and rule

Carlos Ramalhete

Photo © Brian Snelson

Once I wrote that no self-respecting “race” could ever accept me. After all, I am Brazilian — the mongrel of mongrels. But what is a race? Moreover, what is a tribe? A nation?

These questions are quite important these days, as the American construct of race is being forced down the throats of every other country, even if it cannot be applied to the local situation. Down here in Brazil, for instance, while people do have ancestors from all over the world, the American concept of “race” makes no sense at all. Brazilians see themselves as a nation, and neither tribes nor races can exist within this national identity. The same goes for other countries; in France, for instance, it is simply forbidden to divide people into races.

But, as I asked in the beginning, what does race mean? The Wikipedia definition is that a “race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society.” It says a lot about how hard it is to make a universally-acceptable definition of some stuff, but it doesn’t do much for the definition of the term race. Well, let it rest a while so we can see the other two terms.

The concepts of tribe and nation are much older, and more or less work everywhere, so it may be better to check them first, anyway. A nation is a (quite vast) group of people who share a common culture and language. A tribe is a subdivision of a nation, with smaller cultural differences; folk will usually marry a member of their own tribe, even if only because of propinquity, but all co-nationals are in a sense brothers. That is why we can see, for instance, the Jewish people as a nation (at least until the late XIXth Century, when Jewish assimilation into European society made the commonality of customs much weaker), and within it Ashkenazi and Sephardi tribes. Perhaps we could, in modern Israel, venture that the religious and the secular citizens belong to different tribes. Palestinian militants, on the other hand, emphatically proclaim Palestinian nationhood, while Israelis see them as just one small tribe in a vast national Arab sea. Stretching the term a tad further, we can say that European nobility and peasantry were different tribes.

Now we can come back to race. It is a quite recent concept, that began as an analogy with dog breeds — in most languages, the word for a dog breed is “race”, “raça”, “raza”, “razza”, and so on. When Count Gobineau, the first theoretician of the matter, wrote his Essay on the Inequality of Races and proposed the existence of white, yellow, and black “races” (meaning “breeds”), he subdivided the whites into Slavs (whose personality would be “too weak and gentle to allow for strong animosity against invaders”. I don’t think Putin would agree) and Aryans. The latter would be the apex of the human race mankind, the proactive engine pulling the other, weaker, people. It is interesting to notice that this distinction within the white race corresponds perfectly to the division between nobility and peasantry in Northern Europe. For Gobineau — a nobleman who had lived in present-day Germany — Northern European nobility was the best people ever, and European peasants were their inferiors. Obviously, then, Gobineau’s buddies should rule over the peasantry. It’s amazing how often people come up with “scientific” explanations for the status quo.

The Nazi notion of race used the same terms but changed their content. All Germans, not only the nobility, would be gloriously Aryan; all Slavs, including the local nobility, would be their inferiors, fit only to be killed or enslaved. The funniest thing about the murderous fantasies of Nazi racism is a small detail in their presentation of Aryans — a vastly superior kind of people who unfortunately muddied their blood by mixing with inferior races; the whiter (thus Northernmost) the skin, the larger the percentage of Pure Aryan® blood. Who were those guys? Well, modern-day genetics provides us with the answer to that crucial question. There is a group of people who were stronger than everybody else around, loved cold climates, and interbred with other humans, with more of their genome in Northern European populations than in the Southern. They are usually called homo neanderthalensis, or just Neanderthal for short. Supermen indeed.

In Brazil, the supposedly scientific theories of race were widely accepted by cultivated society at the beginning of the XXth Century. As people never cared much about ethnic origins in Brazil, and what would be considered in the USA a “mixed marriage” has always been the rule, not the exception, race was seen as a tridimensional set of coordinates with axes for white, yellow (or red), and black “blood”. White blood would be better than yellow, and yellow would be better than black, but it was assumed everybody would have at least a bit of all three. I remember my grandfather (who was born in 1903) pointing to a very beautiful light-skinned lady who had a very dark-skinned husband and commenting she could easily have “improved her blood” by marrying a lighter-skinned person, but instead had married that guy. On the other hand, he would probably think the guy was “improving his blood” with the marriage.

This was the “science”, the theory, but the Brazilian practice had always been very similar to the eugenic propositions of “race science”. Once again, “science” comes to the comfort of the status quo.

Portuguese colonization was essentially a male-only affair, and most colonists ended up marrying the daughters of Indian chieftains. Later, when African slaves started arriving, they would also have the opportunity of buying, freeing, and marrying some gorgeous Yoruba beauty. Their descendants — lighter-skinned than the Indians of Africans — became the colonial elite. As such, they were highly-prized marriage material.

Since the beginning of Portuguese colonization, then, the richer a man got or the more beautiful a woman was, the whiter their spouse would predictably be. In other words, everybody wanted to “improve their blood” by having paler children, and if they could they would do it. The results are fascinating; for instance, my aunt married the guy who would have been the Baron of Guaraciaba if Brazil still were an Empire. Her sister-in-law had the whitest skin and the bluest eyes I have ever seen, although the immediate ancestry of her great-great-grandfather, the original Baron, was undoubtedly African. But the first Baron’s wife was European, and his children and grandchildren have certainly always married whiter. They could, so they did. “Improving their blood”, some of them would have said. On the other hand, the poorest men and the uglier women would always marry darker. Skin color in Brazil is in fact more of a proxy for one’s grandparents’ social situation than anything else. That is why the American “race” construct just makes no sense down here.

After all, what they call race in the USA corresponds almost perfectly to the concept of a nation. “Racial” separatism and the tabooing of “mixed marriages” created two separate (and unequal) melting-pots: the white one, composed of English, German, Scandinavian, Irish, Italians, etc., and the black one, composed of people who had been forbidden to speak their own languages, play their native music, and follow their own religions; folks who after having been deprived of all different cultural nationhoods they came with became a single people and eventually created for themselves an Africanized version of the European culture that enslaved them. Each melting-pot developed into a nation of its own, sadly getting further and further apart. Within each one can find tribes; the White ones more or less follow the “British folkways” tracked by David H. Fischer in his book Albion’s Seed, while within the Black nation the partition used to be mainly between rural and urban people. Until TV arrived, but that’s for another day.

Skin color became, in that context, a proxy for Black or White “nationality”, and a poor proxy at that. After all, there is a long tradition of “passing”, wherein light-skinned Black nationals would “pass off as White”; now, after the victory of the Civil Rights Movement, some White nationals — such as Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug — decided to go the opposite way.

Mistaking the proxy for the thing itself worked well for a while, but the arrival of a massive quantity of Latin-American immigrants threw a monkey wrench in the works. How could Latin-Americans be a “race”, as they are all somewhere within a mixed spectrum of Spanish and Native American ancestry, with a few African ancestors to make things more interesting? But they did become a “Latino race” (in which there are white and black Latinos; only this time the terms mean people with different skin color inside the same Latino nation, oops, “race”), and if there were Gypsies in the USA they would also be considered to be a “race”. After all, the American term “race” in fact means “internal nation”. American “racial” problems are exactly the same as Soviet “national” problems. They can also be easily compared to the problems France now faces due to the cultural split between the culture of (by now second- or third-generation) North-African immigrants, who live in neighborhoods the police cannot enter without armor, and the rest of the country, both the “français de souche”, or old-stock French, and the fully-assimilated children of immigrants.

It is futile to impose concepts from one culture onto other, different peoples. The Borg is just a fictional character.

Source: A Thomist Worldview