Race, history and culture - Ethics - March 1996

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 2001 by Claude Levi-Strauss

The unsatisfactory nature of the traditional solutions to the problem perhaps explains why the ideological struggle against racialism has proved so ineffective on a practical level. There is nothing to indicate that racial prejudice is declining and plenty of evidence to suggest that, after brief periods of localized quiescence, it is reappearing everywhere with increased intensity. It is for this reason that UNESCO feels called upon to renew from time to time a battle whose outcome appears uncertain, to say the least.

But can we be so sure that the racial form taken by intolerance results primarily from false beliefs held by this or that people about thc dependence of culture on organic evolution? Are these ideas not simply an ideological cover for a more real form of antagonism, based on the will to subjugate and on relations of power? This was certainly the case in the past, but, even supposing that these relations of power become less marked, will not racial differentiation continue to serve as a pretext for the growing difficulty of living together, unconsciously felt by mankind, which is undergoing a demographic explosion and which... is beginning to hate itself, warned by a mysterious prescience that its numbers are becoming too great for all its members to enjoy freely open space and pure, non-polluted air?

Racial prejudice is at its most intense when it concerns human groups confined to a territory so cramped and a share of natural resources so meagre that these peoples lack dignity in their own eyes as well as in those of their more powerful neighbours. But does not humanity today, on the whole, tend to expropriate itself and, on a planet that has grown too small, reconstitute, to its own cost, a situation comparable to that inflicted by some of its representatives on the unfortunate American or Oceanic tribes? Finally, what would happen to the ideological struggle against racial prejudice, if it were shown to be universally true--as some experiments conducted by psychologists suggest--that if subjects of any origin whatever are divided into groups, which are placed in a competitive situation, each group will develop feelings of bias and injustice towards its rivals?

Minority groups appearing in various parts of the world today, such as the hippies, are not distinguished from the built of the population by race, but only by their way of life, morality, hair style and dress; are the feelings of repugnance and sometimes hostility they inspire in most of their fellows substantially different from racial hatred? Would we therefore be making genuine progress if we confined ourselves to dissipating the particular prejudices on which racial hatred-in the strict sense of the term-can be said to be based?

The mirage of universal entente

In any case, the contribution ethnologists can make to the solution of the race problem would be derisory; nor is it certain that psychologists and educators could do any better, so strong is the evidence--as we see from the evidence of the so-called primitive peoples--that mutual tolerance presupposes two conditions which in contemporary society are further than ever from being realized: one is relative equality; the other is adequate physical separation.