‘Race’ And Racism: Sharing Some Thoughts

By Charles Sarvan -May 24, 2014

Prof. Charles Sarvan

“Racism” in discourse is a palimpsest written differently to suit varying emotions and agenda. For example, Caryl Phillips’ novel Cambridge and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children are said to deal, inter alia, with the issue of “racism”. But the “racism” in these novels is different, one based on colour, and the other primarily on religious affiliation, and secondly/secondarily, on notions of “race”. In the West, the phrase “race problem” or “race conflict” invariably signals one based on skin-colour, as if the world consisted of just two “races”: the (so-called) white, and the non-white. I have suggested, tongue-in-cheek, “colourism” for this variety of “racism” as being more precise. Here and in what follows, I draw from an article included in my anthology, ‘Sri Lanka: Literary Essays & Sketches’ (pages 182 – 193).

Benedict Anderson states that though nations exist, there is no scientific definition of a nation. A nation is a cultural artefact with emotional legitimacy; an imagined political community – imagined because not even those who go to make up the smallest of nations will ever know most of their fellow-members, yet in the consciousness of each lives the image of their communion.  Six pages on in the same work (‘Imagined Communities’) Anderson cites Ernest Gellner’s argument that nationalism does not awake nations to self-consciousness: rather, it is a certain kind of consciousness which invents nations. To belong to a state (a legal status implying citizenship, obedience to a particular set of laws etc.) may not have emotional connotations, while a sense of belonging to a nation usually does. An individual living in exile may be a citizen of one country, and yet feel that s/he belongs to, and is a part of, a nation geographically far away. The Kurds, fragmented in different countries, scattered in many European and U.S. centres, are a case in point: emotionally, they belong to a “nation” which they are struggling to bring into existence, to give it an internationally recognized, legal, reality. Much of the foregoing comments on “nation” can be applied to “race”, and the latter term substituted for the former. A certain kind of consciousness invents and thinks in terms of “race”.         

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