1.2: Anti-Racism, Equity, and History

Racism is a Structural and Systemic Issue

In 1900, at the 1st Pan-African Congress, the African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois stated that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Racism, in other words, was deeply embedded in the world order of his time and it stood in the way of any attempts to create a better, fairer, and more just global society. Decades into the 21st century some things have improved in this regard, but the problem of the color line has still not been solved. In a simpler world, the challenge of racism could be dealt with by each of us deciding not to be racist. However, racism is not actually just an issue of individuals which can then be solved through an individual’s choice to not have racial views or engage in racist actions. That is why an anti-racism perspective is necessary since it begins from the understanding that racism is a structural and systemic issue. What that means is that we must differentiate between individuals in power and systems of power. Individuals come and go, but systems are more durable because they form the unseen structures within which we live our lives. Those systems and structures emerge historically. The modern world emerged in the context of a global system in which the power and wealth of emergent European nations were founded on the sins of enslavement and colonialism. In turn, many of the key intellectual foundations of the modern world, including academic history, were based on either erasing or justifying those sins. For that reason, it is vital for historians to examine the process by which race and a racialized power structure became deeply embedded in our own contemporary institutions, systems of knowledge, physical geography, and even our sense of the past. 

Explicit racism is very rare in contemporary scholarship. Yet, there are many ways in which 19th and 20th-century racial assumptions still pervade the popular understanding of history. Just as one example, we can think of the way that notions of freedom and liberty so often get discussed as Enlightenment concepts developed by white political thinkers in Europe and the Americas. The abolition of slavery itself is then attributed to a vote in Parliament, battlefield victories won by Simón Bolívar or Ulysses S. Grant, or the work of the “Great Emancipator”, Abraham Lincoln. This is not to say these institutions and individuals were unimportant, but that emphasizing their efforts crowds out the work, struggle, and sacrifice of enslaved people themselves. One need only count the number of rebellions and the many independent communities formed by escaped formerly enslaved people, examine the infrastructure of policing and surveillance needed to maintain the forced labor camps that the traditional narrative calls plantations, observe the physical geography of enslavement ships necessitated by the constant fear of uprising, or note the prevalence of runaway ads regarding enslaved people in colonial newspapers to see that for enslaved people freedom and liberty were not abstract concepts to be discussed in salons or coffeehouses, but basic necessities that not even the most oppressive labor system ever devised could keep them from pursuing. Anti-racism requires that we center the very people whose freedom and basic humanity were at stake instead of keeping them as minor characters in their own liberation. Only by doing so can we combat the racist notion that historical change, development, and progress were the sole provenance of white civilization. 

The concept of equity differs from the idea of equality. Equity refers to fairness and justice as opposed to equality which is about treating everyone the same. The production of this textbook, for instance, has been animated by several principles. Key among these is simply the notion that there can be no equity in education when some students can purchase their materials as an afterthought while others must plan and save and sacrifice to afford theirs. In other words, to charge everyone the same price for a book is to treat them equally, but not equitably. Of course, the equity element of this text is not just about cost, it is about the material itself. In response to the Eurocentrism that had been so built into the curriculum, there has been an effort over the last few decades to increase the diversity of people and places discussed in a world history class. A typical World History textbook now provides much more content and coverage of Africa, Asia, the Americas outside the United States, and the Pacific. However, wider coverage alone does not result in an equitable history. In the context of World History this means that when we broaden our narrative to include more people, we must do so in a way that does not just relegate them to side characters in a story that is still largely told about Europeans. Just as importantly, we must be careful not to universalize the European experience so that all the world’s people end up being judged according to what is actually a very particular set of norms, standards, assumptions, and logic. Doing so leads to the assumption that the only path forward for every society is to follow or mimic the Western historical path. 

The pressure societies were put under to transform themselves along the Western model (what we call “Westernization”) was profoundly distressing. So distressing, in fact, that in 1963 the Iranian intellectual Jalal al-I Ahmad likened it to a disease, “a plague from the West”, that he called Occidentosis. Its key symptom was its ability to turn its victims into unthinking imitators: “…we marry just like the Westerners. We pretend to be free just like them. We sort the world into good and bad just like them. We write like them. Night and day are night and day when they confirm it.”(Ahmad, p.44) What Ahmad was describing was the trauma of experiencing a world where one was told that your own culture and values were worthless in comparison to those of the “superior” Western civilization. A world in which one’s past was a prison, and that Westernization and modernization offered the only key to escape. Presenting history equitably means taking the advice of the Maori historian Madie Williams when she noted that, “[t]he real challenge of global history is to write from other perspectives, not write about other places from your own particular worldview.” (Williams, 2) Greater representation is a start, but equitable history requires that it is accompanied by other perspectives as well.