Communication

A communication will be considered only if it relates to an article or review published in this journal; publication is solely at the editor's discretion. The AHA disclaims responsibility for statements, either of fact or opinion, made by the writers. Letters may not exceed seven hundred words for reviews and one thousand words for articles. They should be submitted in duplicate, typed double-spaced with wide margins, and headed "To the Editor."

ARTICLES

To the Editor:
Since Jonathon Glassman's "Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa" (June 2004) is part of a "book-length project on the racialization of political thought in colonial Zanzibar," I shall suspend any judgment about the overall work until it is finished.
However, I would point out that—with regard to recent history—the argument of page 724 and footnote 18 may need to be revised or at least extended. The idea that racism's dominant theme may not be biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences did not, as Glassman claims, "first [arise in literature] in response to the arguments of Banton and other British sociologists that the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Tory politicians in the postcolonial UK could not properly be deemed 'racism.'"
Racial rhetoric is not merely anti-immigrant, nor Tory, nor postcolonial, even if one considers only the UK. The argument that racism must be biological was not only made by Banton and British sociologists. Likewise, the contention that racial thinking could be culturological, as well as hereditarian or biological, preceded the alleged "first" response and Martin Barker's 1981 The New Racism (1981). See, for example, Joan Leopold, "The Aryan Theory of Race in India 1870–1920," The Indian Economic and Social History Review VII (1970): 271–97 (produced in the U.S.); Léon Poliakov, Le mythe aryen (1971) (produced in France); Joan Leopold, "British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India 1850–70," The English Historical Review LXXXIX (1974): 578–603 (produced in the UK). The last article, which might possibly be construed in its import to respond to the "British" arguments above described by Glassman, was not the "first" response nor did it "arise" in response to those arguments, although it can count as a response to them.
Thus even recent history requires considerable analysis!
Joan Leopold London and Los Angeles

To the Editor:
I am grateful to Joan Leopold for refraining to assess my broader work until she has had a chance to read it. I wish she had extended the same consideration to the article on which she comments.
The paragraph in question begins with the widely recognized fact that biological definitions of race only attained scholarly respectability after the mid-nineteenth century. Then, for reasons of argument that seem to elude Leopold, I refer to a recent literature that focuses on the "post-scientific forms [of racial thought] that have flourished in the wake of raciology's postwar academic demise," that is, the so-called "new racism" of the contemporary U.K. as well as what sometimes passes as "multiculturalism" in the U.S.
This prominent literature is plainly the subject of the offending footnote, which reads, "This literature [emph. added] first arose in response to the arguments of Banton" et al.; it then cites Martin Barker, to whom many of these authors explicitly trace their intellectual debts. Leopold misquotes the footnote, supplying the main verb with a new subject ("the idea..."), and, in her bracketed insertion, transforming the verb's original subject into its indirect object. Given the context in which the footnote appears, it would have been as absurd for me to claim that Barker was the first to recognize culturalist notions of race (which after all had predated biological doctrines) as it would have been to claim that Banton was the first to suggest that racial thought is rooted in biology. On the contrary, in the following paragraphs I note that the "new racism" literature "is mistaken both in its depiction of the supposed newness of culturalist racial thought and in its depiction of the older forms, which in fact... [had never been] invariably built around a core of biological theory." The older forms, "including colonial racisms," were based on "a wide variety of ideologies," including "the anthropological concept of clearly bounded 'cultural monads'," a concept, I later observe, that was among the targets of Franz Boas's early critiques of racial thought. Moreover, "the historical literature on racial science itself ... charts the latter's own varied and multiple sources," including, inter alia, the non-biological notions of civilization and barbarism. I summarize much of this argument by quoting Etienne Balibar's observation, regarding the "new racism" literature, that "the idea of 'racism without races' [his coinage for culturalist racial thought] is far from revolutionary."
I could go on; the whole thrust of this section of the article is to argue that definitions of racial thought that restrict it to biological doctrines misrepresent both the historical reality and the historical literature. Joan Leopold apparently agrees with me; that must explain why she felt no need to actually read what I wrote.
Jonathon Glassman Northwestern University

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