Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race by Charles Hirschman
In modern times, the reality of race is indisputable, especially for American eyes. Racial discrimination is not just skin deep and based on skin color, features and hair texture, but it has rather existed since ancient times to date, with age-old exploitation and discrimination. Through this essay, Hirschman discusses the theory of racism history, in relation to social science. He concludes that this concept of race and racism is not a primordial or ancestral belief rather it has developed with modernity over the past 40 decades and reached its pinnacle in the early twentieth century (385).
Since ancient times, cultural diversity evolved naturally as people learned to survive and settle in different climatic zones and their physical features like skin color and hair varied according to climatic conditions. Different outcomes were recorded as they interacted; some were accommodated calmly while others faced antagonism, fear and conflicts. This feeling of fear and social distance is taken by the concept of ethnocentrism, which, as defined by Simpson and Yinger, is human tendency to believe in self-righteousness and natural aversion to other's belief (Hirschman 388). According to recent psychological research, such anger against an alien group can create prejudice, and in conflicts, can motivate people to attack those who behave and speak differently. While racism is different from ethnocentrism, it believes that all humankind is divided into different races with varied characteristics and abilities as per their genes and other genetic biological features, which can never change even...
Racism is an institute of belief that the "other group" is inferior and cannot create a society as their own. He further argues that ethnocentrism exists in most societies while racism is a current development in the same (389).
The scholars have their own outlook, as Snowden expresses the Egyptians view of racism: people who considered themselves as "the people" and others as outsiders (Hirschman 389). While Kamen describes patterns of conflicts, subjugation and discrimination amongst Christians, Muslims and Jews in early medieval Spain, an unusual degree of mutual respect can be seen as they lived in the same society, sharing many aspects of language, food, culture and ideas (Hirschman 390-391). Multicultural cities had great fortune in business as their brokers could converse in multiple languages and work with cultural differences. However, this ended as the thirteenth century witnessed the Spanish Inquisition, as discussed by Hannaford, i.e. the task of attacking blasphemy and heresy, which later turned into uprooting Jews who adapted Christianity, thereby giving rise to the flare of racism (Hirschman 392.
Hirschman's claim that the emergence of racism in recent centuries on the basis of three revolutions responsible for the intense division between Europeans and the 'others,' were: 1) the servitude in the New World's plantation economies by millions of Africans; 2) the escalation of European colonial rule across the world in the nineteenth century, specifically in Asia and Africa; 3) the expansion of the theory of European superiority known as…
