Abstract
‘All is race. There is no other truth.’ So claimed Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Tancred or The New Crusade. In the late Victorian era race indeed did seem to be all. ‘Scientific racism’ claimed to have an explanation for everything from the cause of criminality to the nature of Britain’s special destiny, from the origins of ‘savage’ people in Africa and Asia to the temper of class relations in Europe. Race explained the character of individuals, the structure of social communities and the fate of human societies.
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Notes and References
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics ( London: King, 1887 ) pp. 20–1.
Lancelot Hogben, Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science ( New York: Knopf, 1932 ) p. 123.
For an elaboration of the race relations paradigm see Michael Banton, Racial and Ethnic Competition (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
John Rex, Race Relations in Sociological Theory ( London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970 ).
For a more radical perspective see CCCS, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain ( London: Hutchinson, 1982 )
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986 )
For Robert Miles’ critique, see Racism and Migrant Labour: A Critical Text ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982 )
For Robert Miles’ critique, Racism after ‘Race Relations’ ( London: Routledge, 1993 ).
Michael Banton, ‘The Race Relations Problematic’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 42 no. 1 (1991).
Johann Friederich Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friede-rich Blumenbach, trans and ed. by Thomas Bendyshe (London: Anthropological Society, 1865 ) p. 98.
William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study ( New York: D. Appleton, 1899 ) p. 111.
See Stephen Rose, R. C. Lewontin and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 ) pp. 119–27.
Steve Jones, The Language of the Genes: Biology, History and the Evolutionary Future ( London: Harper Collins, 1993 ).
Robert Miles, Racism ( London: Routledge, 1989 ) p. 71.
George W. Stocking Jnr, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 1982 ) p. 45.
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© 1996 Kenan Malik
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Malik, K. (1996). Introduction. In: The Meaning of Race. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24770-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24770-7_1
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