Race, racism, xenophobia and migration.

AuthorFletcher, Bill
PositionEssay

We must begin by establishing, without any ambiguity, that "race" is not a biological or genetic category, but is a political construction. The origin of all of humanity is to be found in southern Africa, so in that sense, all of humanity is African.

Yet the notion of race, and the corresponding practice and theory of racism, is very real. Prior to both the so-called "Reconquista" in Spain with the Catholicization of Iberia and the purge of the Moors and the Jews in the 15th century, as well as the English occupation and colonization of Ireland in the 16th century, "race," as we have come to know it, did not exist on planet Earth. While there were certainly religious, tribal, ethnic and imperial conflicts, this was transformed over the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.

Race came to be associated with so-called inferior and superior peoples, and fundamentally with the occupation of lands and the displacement of populations. Eventually, this came to be associated with skin color, but it is worth noting that, in the beginning, race did not depend on skin color, with Irish Catholics and Spanish Jews being a case in point. This overall process of racial construction was linked with the development of capitalism and in that context, the notion of race must be understood as an ideological and institutional mechanism for both the suppression of specific populations in perpetuity, as well as the introduction of social control over the working masses as a whole, be they of the suppressed/oppressed population or of the suppressor/oppressor population.

In Latin America, the art form and classification code called the castas, along with the introduction in both North and South America of slavery for life for specific populations (Africans) and marginalization and genocide perpetrated on others (Indigenous) had nothing to do with science generally or genetics specifically. Rather, it became a means to divide up populations, turning them against one another through the associated system of racial privileges that tended to be meted out according to how close someone got to being supposedly pure white.

"White" was always the reference point for the dominant bloc, even though this did not in any way mean that everyone who was designated by the ruling classes to be "white" was automatically part of the ruling classes. It has also been the case that who is and is not considered white in a specific society is not always self-evident. A classic example from US history in the early 20th century was the debate over whether Armenians were to be considered "white" or not.

In sum, the construction of race was linked, from the beginning, to the rise of capitalism and later imperialism. It was not an add-on or a device that was to be used and thrown away at a whim.

The second piece that is important to grasp about race and migration is that the current global wave of migration, which the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates to be more than 86 million, is fundamentally different from earlier waves during the history of capitalism, i.e., those from the 1500s through the early 1900s. In the waves of migration that began with the invasion of the Western Hemisphere and the colonization of other parts of what we reference today as the global South, the migrating populations were part of the process of colonization and, as in the cases of the USA, Canada, Australia and South Africa, to name just four locales, the...

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