Edward Olmos (who, as most “Alas” readers know, plays Admiral Adama on “Battlestar Galactica”) discusses race
I just heard one of the proliferative statements done by one of the great humanitarians: He’s really trying to organize and bring us together, and he used the word ‘race’ as if there is a Latino race, an Asian race, an indigenous race, a Caucasian race or a Latino race. There’s no such thing as a Latino race. There never has been. There never will be. There’s only one race, and that’s what the show brought out. That is the human race, period!
Olmos blames our current conception of race on the legacy of slavery, specifically the exceptionally cruel (even for slavery!) form of slavery perpetuated by Caucasians against Africans. ((It’s true that Africans enslaved other Africans, and sold enslaved Africans to Caucasians; however, many people believe that the slavery practices in the US was unusually totalizing and cruel, compared to many other historic practices of slavery.)) The argument (if I’m understanding Olmos correctly) is that, in order for Caucasians to justify treating Africans not as a subjugated people, but as property, as animals, we had to make up a construct in which Africans and white people were no longer of the same race at all.
(I think that’s all probably true, because it’s what many people I respect and who I’ve found to be generally accurate believe, but I admit I’ve never looked into the history myself.)
There’s an article about the event Olmos was speaking at at The Live Feed. Seems like an interesting discussion; I hope more video surfaces.
Via Sociological Images.
UPDATE: From Navidson in the comments at Soc Im:
I didn’t realize he always sounded like the great Adrmiral, I would love to hear the guy order some food at McDonald’s or something. It’d be so epic.
(“Super-size that! So say we all!“)
It’s a bit of a double bind. On one hand, of course there is no race but human. On the other hand, there is no way to say “There is no race” that doesn’t erase the material experience of race that we experience every day – that includes the repercussions of historic oppression of POC, the continued institutionalized oppression, and the real effects of white privilege.
So, no cookie this time for the admiral.
I think the “cookie” thing is usually a sarcastic response to white (or male, etc etc) people trying to get cred for taking anti-racist positions — Olmos is Latino. (Although the Admiral may be white.) (And maybe you didn’t mean “cookie” to carry that implication at all.)
I think we can recognize the social recognition of race and the effects of racism, while still objecting to the basic concept of race. It’s my impression that Olmos takes that perspective.
I was going to more or less agree with Tanglethis, that “there is no race” (the whole system was created for the sake of institutionalized racism), while a good point, is usually a precursor to dumb “we should all be ‘color-blind'” arguments. But that doesn’t seem like what Olmos is arguing here, and maybe he does pull that balance off.
Also, were they really called to speak before the UN on account of playing characters on a popular television show? That strikes me as pretty odd.
And his speaking voice is awesome.
Part of the ambivalence I feel about Olmos’s speech is that it rather suggests there wasn’t race before the fifteenth century and that if we were sufficiently determined we (or at least the younger generation) could get past it. He’s partly making a much subtler point: the Atlantic slave trade constituted race as a category that supposed areas of origin, bodily characteristics, cultural forms, and basic intellectual capacities were correlated and heritable. What gets lost is that this very pernicious paradigm of racial difference emerged from already-existing understandings of human difference (often described in racial terminology) and has longlasting consequences that we can’t simply dismiss because the paradigm is objectively wrong.
Olmos also makes the creation of modern racial paradigms sound like a deliberate strategy, when it was a good bit more haphazard than that and happened in stages. The spread of sugar cultivation across the Atlantic, the Africanization of slave labor forces as a result of New World disease environments, the development of the human sciences (including 18th/19th century racial “science”), fights over abolitionism, colonialism, and the rise of the legal and bureaucratic forms of the modern state all worked to formulate and reformulate understandings of racial difference. So the pedant in me isn’t very satisfied.
Still, it’s amazing that someone was actually talking about the construction of race at the UN!
Yusifu – I’m with you on that. I see the claim a lot that racism is a modern invention, or a product of recent centuries. But recent work in my field (Ancient History/Classics) shows that it has its roots far, far earlier than that. The idea of racial superiority and an “inborn ruling nature / inborn servile nature” goes back to Hippocrates at the very least. Granted, it’s not in the terms of Social Darwinism or the Great Chain of Being. And it would be a mistake to call Ancient views on race “racism” in the institutionalized sense we have today.
But I thnk we’ve been making a real mistake in ignoring it, too.
Race as a biological concept is a non-starter. Pick two humans at random, say, an Aboriginal Australian and a member of Britain’s royal family. They will almost certainly be more closely related genetically than will two chimpanzees selected from neighboring troops. Humanity went through a severe population bottleneck about 70,000 years ago; all of us can trace our ancestry to a small pool of about 2,000 people. There simply isn’t enough genetic diversity in H. sapiens sapiens to justify a biological view of race, and that is, I think, what Olmos was trying to say.
Of course, race as a social construct is alive and well. I don’t think Olmos was denying this; I think what he was trying to say it’s silly that we have a social construct of race, and of course, it is. That doesn’t mean it’s going away anytime soon, though.
Before ocean-going sea vessels, the concept of “race” as we understand it today did not exist. There was, however, tribalism and nationalism. Ocean vessels shrunk the world in such a way that more people both felt a connection to more than just their local tribe and lead more people to regularly come into contact with other people born on or decended from people from other continents. Tribalism mutated into racism, allowing for more people to be part of “us”, while allowing for a continued simplified version of “them”.
Olmos also makes the creation of modern racial paradigms sound like a deliberate strategy, when it was a good bit more haphazard than that and happened in stages.
From a systems or memetic perspective, the spread of an idea can both be “haphazard” and still have a “purpose”. Intent is irrelevant. A biologist can sensibly say that eyes evolved for the “purpose” of allowing animals to better find food and avoid predators, even though the biologist understands that all of the genetic mutations that squentially lead to the development of eyes were chance events with no intent or purpose behind them. Ocean going vessels, “race”-based slavery, and the European Renaissance idea of all people deserving freedom and equality rose very soon in time to one another. Intentional or not, the concept of race became a way to relieve the cognitive dissonance that the ideas of slavery and equality could create in a person who believed in both. It also helps to explain why the conditions of slaves in America may have been especially brutal in comparison to the conditions of slaves in most other cultures. In most cultures prior to the U.S., some people were allowed to own other people. In America, people could only own “Negroes”.
What exactly do you mean by this? Because again, I think the origins of this idea go back at least to the 5th century BC. And there was clearly commerce that went from Central Africa to Europe to Far East Asia at that point: the only people the Ancient Greeks, for example, had never encountered in any form were Native Americans or Pacific Islanders.
First, goods usually traveled further than people, changing hands many times. With an ocean going vessel, a single crew makes the largest leg of the commerce trip. More importantly, when a specific person made the trip all the way, the forms of transportation available, over land, down a river, or along a shoreline, you never see a dividing line between the “races”; each tribe or nation just has slightly different features, if at all, from the last tribe or nation you left, all the way from Gaul to sub-Saharan Africa, and back up through Persia and India and on to China. But sail off in an ocean vessel from London, stop at the horn of Africa, sail on to India, and then end your trip going to Hong Kong, you will leave from a place with mostly all “white” people, stop at place with mostly “black” people, sail on to a place with mostly “brown” people, and end in a place with mostly “yellow” people. The earlier traveler sees a long continuum of humanity, the later traveler sees four distinct “races”.
Decnavda,
I’d go along with your statement that “race as we understand it today” is a relatively recent development, but Elizabeth Anne and I have been suggesting that it’s critical to look at more enduring uses of racial terminology. I think you’re distinguishing between “race,” “tribe,” and “nation” (however you define them–there’s no historically invariant use scholars would agree upon) much too mechanically. For somewhat different reasons, though biologists and historians would agree that it’s important to avoid teleological explanations, very few mainstream historians take mimetics very seriously; it’s an awfully reductive way to think about history.
As Elizabeth Anne just noted, there has been ocean-going trade for an extremely long time, bringing together different groups of people. As a historian of Africa, I immediately think of the Indian Ocean trade the east coast of Africa was involved in for a millenium. The simple fact of long-distance trade, or even long-distance trade involving Europeans, isn’t sufficient to explain the recent transformation of race as a category of difference.
In the end, I think all three of us agree on how events in the past five hundred years transformed race and why. My original point was that Olmos seems to posit a deliberate, coherent strategy, when the historical reality was very different. You don’t seem to object to that. Elizabeth Anne and I have emphasized patterns of continuity and discontinuity, and to emphasize particular historical specificities and to want to avoid reifying terms like “tribe” and “race” as objectively real descriptors of social existence. Would you object to that?
I suspect mainstream historians don’t WANT to take memetics seriously – it feels like the hard sciences stepping on their turf. But I see little in memetics which is that different from a more humanist systemic approach. Memetics CAN be used to promote an overly reductionist view of culture and history, but there is no reason it has to. Going back to the analogy to biology, it would be ridicuous to claim that a biologist is denying the web of interconectiveness of the biosphere just because she spends her time studying genetic evolution. And the point of bringing up memetics and systems theory is to explain what and why I disagree with your statement, “My original point was that Olmos seems to posit a deliberate, coherent strategy, when the historical reality was very different.”. I do not disagree that there was not actually a “deliberate, coherent strategy”, I just do not think that Olmos was (necessarily) positing such. An idea can develop and gain acceptance because it serves the status quo system without there having to actually be a “deliberate, coherent strategy.” Such a Grand Conspiracy can exist without there being any actual conspirators.
I agree with what you say about the terms, “tribe”, “nation”, and “race”. I do agree that pre-European Renaissance people talked about race, but they were almost always a LOT more narrow about who was part of their “race” than people since. And I consider them all to be versions of tribalism, but I wanted to avoid what I saw as colonialist connotations of talking about “tribalism” without including “nationalism”.
Elizabeth Anne and I have emphasized patterns of continuity and discontinuity, and to emphasize particular historical specificities and to want to avoid reifying terms like “tribe” and “race” as objectively real descriptors of social existence. Would you object to that?
Not really. I agree that they are all social constructs. Whether and to what extent social contructs can be said to be objectively real is an ontonological issue I am unsure of and would have to spend many hours thinking about.
Just a few points.
I’m afraid my last comment invoked Elizabeth Anne too boldly–I meant to summarize points of consonance between her comments and mine.
I may be being unfair to what Olmos actually believes, but I was judging from his speech, in which his historical account was awfully instrumentalist. So I think we basically agree on that, though you may think I’ve misinterpreted Olmos’s speech. However, emergent forms of modern racism couldn’t possibly have served a status quo, since they were developing in tandem with Euro-American systems slavery. The whole system was in flux. The discipline of history is devoted to explaining the reasons these transformations took the forms they did.
I don’t think historians avoid mimetics just because we don’t want to take it seriously. As far as I can see, it’s a reductive mode of description, which rests on somewhat strained analogies. It’s awfully easy to get seduced by teleologies (as in assuming that systems of slavery were a “status quo” rather than another changing system that demands explanation. The racism informing Portuguese relations with the Kongo kingdom in the sixteenth century were very different from that which led the French to appoint Louis Congo executioner for Louisiana in the early eighteenth century. And that was different still from the racism informing the emergence of Jim Crow after Reconstruction.
Perhaps more useful than debating ontology would be to think about whether terms like “race” and “tribe” are usefully thought of as rigid designators, always describing the thing. (To be honest, I’m not sure what you mean to invoke by “tribe.” It sounds rather like you mean something like “primitive nation.”) I was trying to say (and I think Elizabeth Anne was as well?) that the way people have used the term has changed over time. And understanding those changes is critically important if you want to understand the ways in which they have functioned in particular, situated historical conjunctures and political projects.
No, I don’t think you abused my com ment at all. :D
I think I’m getting your point about travel and the idea of four distinct races, but I think focusing on this as a late development really fails to understand the extent to which the physical, heritable differences of what we now call race formed opinions in the ancient world. The Romans certainly knew that Ethiopians and other Africans outside of what they called Libya had markedly different skin pigmentation, for example. While they didn’t posit a kind of racial superiority solely on that basis, they certainly had ideas about what those apparent differences said about personality, temperment, and general “fitness” for various activity – most notably, ruling. So while on one hand, they were certainly more nationalistic than racist (they saw, for example, that Germanic tribes were phenotypically more similar to them than Ethiopians, but considered them both Lesser to Romans) those ideas about nationality, race, and fitness would nevertheless shape the next two thousand years. To pretend that racism and our ideas about race sprung up as a product of modernity is to deny the roots of those ideas.
If nothing else it causes us to privilege narratives about our Noble Greco-Roman Ancestors. It causes other forms of bigotry: when people assign, for example, the rise of racism to the rise of Christianity, they’re overlooking the fact that those ideas were already implicit in structures the Church adopted rather than a product of Christian philosophy. We also miss out on just how profoundly diverse and nuanced and problematic ancient society and ideas about ancient ethnicity were. We also lose out on ways to examine how those problems were dealt with and how they might be adapted to today.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t the enslavement of Africans that necessitated the invention of the concept of “race”. It was the enslavement of Central and South American Indians by the Spaniards. Otherwise, though, Olmos is correct: racism did not cause slavery. Slavery caused racism – or rather, it invented the pseudoscientific concept of “race”, as a post hoc justification. Sure, prejudice is as old as sandstones and existed long before Christian Europe. But that was just plain xenophobia, not “racism” as we would recognize it. No doubt the classical Greeks saw Libyans as naturally inferior, but not more so than they did the barbarian Macedonians right in their own backyard. All non-Greeks were equally inferior. (And of course, to this day, many Greeks insist that Alexander the Great was a “Greek”, when Alexander the Macedonian was no more Greek than Genghis Khan was Chinese. Except the Chinese also insist that the Khan was Chinese… ugh, never mind.)
Most modern racism wears the same faux-scientific veneer, and I think the conceptual correction that Olmos promotes provides a more effective counterargument against that type of position. We don’t need to point out that racism is mean or inhumane – 90% of people out there get that already, and the remaining 10% would take it as a badge of pride. They’re the scorned antiheroes supporting the cause of cold rationality, after all. (Or at least, as antiheroic as one can be when too cowardly to say anything except when hiding behind an online handle.)
Pointing out the pseudoscientific roots of the concept of race, on the other hand, is a much more effective tack.
Not that we particularly need to winning arguments against racists. Their cause has been discredited in academia, and even amongst the folksy regular Joes of Main Street of which they pretend they’re a part, they’ve been reduced to hiding underground in spiteful lairs. I think it’s easy to mistake an actual threat with the mere desire to win an argument. But you know, if all you want is to win an argument, to get your rocks off… hey, I understand.
(In fact, my own coldly rational side kind of wishes their side’s racism won’t go away. Check out the demographics of our insurgent generation. Now check how we’ve voted during the past three elections. The two, I assure you, are most definitely related. Every self-identifying conservative who openly muses that the Bell Curve wasn’t complete hackery, is more momentum for liberal causes across the board. Of course, accepting racism, even to a minimal degree, means accepting harm to others. I fully admit this is rather cold of me.)
Race is a historical and social construct, but that doesn’t make its institutional, systemic or cultural manifestations and ramifications any less “real.” The conflation of “socially constructed” and unreal or nonexistent or false is endlessly frustrating to me.
Acknowledging that I might be missing something only seeing a fragment of the speech… I think Olmos’s speech in a way acknowledges the systemic nature of racism while making an argument that race is nonexistent, but from what we’re seeing here, it seems he unfortunately and disappointingly locates systemic racism primarily in the past rather than the present, feeding the “colorblind” discourse that I think a lot of white sci-fi fans are all too willing to buy into and perpetuate.
I wonder whether it’s maybe also fair to suggest that Olmos himself has been privileged by his skin color and the fact that his whiteness allows him to play roles other Latino actors could never play (like Adama, who I read as white-coded) It would be great to hear him acknowledge this.
However, emergent forms of modern racism couldn’t possibly have served a status quo, since they were developing in tandem with Euro-American systems slavery. The whole system was in flux.
The emergent forms of modern racism served the Euro-American system of slavery. The Euro-American system of slavery served the status quo power structures.
I think professional historians do a great job at establishing the facts of the past, but I am not impressed with their ability to extract meaning from those facts. The fashion of professional historians seems to swing from universalism to particularism, and you seem to be defending the current fashion of radical particularism. (For Pete’s sake, one of your objections to memetics is that is “awfully easy to get seduced by teleologies”, when the analogy to genetics implies complete randomness in the development of ideas – probably too much so, considering that ideas are actually thought up by actual people.)
Both radical universalism and radical particularism have the ironic outcome that studying history is useless, at least for the vast majority of people. If radical universalism were true, we would only need for professional historians to extract the themes and patterns from history, and the rest of us would just need to learn those themes and patterns, not the actual facts. If radical particularism is correct, then studying history is ENTIRELY useless, since nothing you could learn from a previous time and culture could possibly have any relevance to the here and now.
In contrast, views of history that follow biological models make learning history extremely important for everyone. There are re-occuring themes and patterns that inform predictions about what will, or at least *can*, happen in the future, but there is also a heavy path dependence that makes knowing the actual facts important to predicting how those themes and patterns may play out. More importantly, biological models of culture seem much more likely to actually be correct to me than radical universalism or radical particularism.
I wonder whether it’s maybe also fair to suggest that Olmos himself has been privileged by his skin color and the fact that his whiteness allows him to play roles other Latino actors could never play (like Adama, who I read as white-coded) It would be great to hear him acknowledge this.
I don’t see this. Olmos is a good bit darker than most stars of Mexican novelas, and his mannerisms and speech patterns are very Latino. I have not watched BSG (so no spoilers on this thread, please, I plan to watch the whole series on video), but I have never thought I saw him a role were he was passing for white.
Elizabeth Anne-
So you can agree that the modern division of “races” into four or five instead of dozens or hundreds ocurring more-or-less contemporaneously with the development of a form of transportation that significantly shrank the world is more than pure coincidence, and I can agree that the reality was a lot more complicated, messy, and long-term in its development than my neat explanation suggests. Sounds good to me.
Decnavda – Deal!
Sylphhead: No, actually, they wouldn’t have. That’s exactly my point. Macedonian and Thracian barbarians are animalistic, for example, and filthy, but admirable for their courage and ferocity. African barbarians are strange and mystical – Ethiopians, for example, were of a vastly superior moral standing to the rest of the world. Persians, and all peoples to the east, were decadent, effeminate, and given over to luxury. It isn’t simple xenophobia: it’s the root of Orientalism, the belief that the “Mediterranean” really is the center of the world. All later claims of white / European superiority are born out of this way of thinking.
Decnavda,
This is getting a bit far from the thread’s topic. Two things: I think we’re using “status quo” to mean different things. I’d agree with you that paradigms of race have generally served dominant interests. My point is that those dominant interests were also changing, and that evolving paradigms of race were wrapped up in those broader processes of transformation.
The way you’re characterizing history bears little relation to any real practitioners I can think of. I agree with you that evolutionary biology, like history, is anything but teleological. My concern with mimetics is that it more resembles much evolutionary psychology–methodologically vacuous just-so stories dressed up in evolutionary language.
So who are these radical particularists who are currently in fashion, and who are the radical universalists we displaced? I guess you’re right that there are relatively few people doing Braudel-style work now, but there are still remnants of the Annales school around, and much of that kind of approach has been picked up in global history, Atlantic history, Indian Ocean history, etc., etc., etc. Historians have always been expected to know their basic facts, and part of the trouble with the history you outlined above was that it just didn’t accord with the subtlety of the processes involved. It was sketched in such broad strokes as to be inaccurate.
I can sign onto the accord you’ve come to with Elizabeth Anne, that recent transformations in race (which we’d agree [?] were a lot more complicated than simply narrowing down the number of rarces supposed to exist) was tied to processes of globalization, in which long-distance ocean-voyages were an important part. But that relationship wasn’t monocausal.
So who are these radical particularists? Caroline Bynum? Rebecca Scott? Joan Scott? Dipesh Chakrabarty? Mamadou Diouf? Great historians, to my mind, bring together a mastery of empirical specificities (and understand these in a more complex way than simply amassing “facts”) and can place these in broad geographic, temporal, and theoretical frames. I simply haven’t found anyone who has done this using mimetics. I’m willing to be convinced if you can show me work that’s any good.