Page 21 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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political relationships and institutions.” Colonialism, migration, and large-scale social
changes had caused the disruption of cultures both in the center and the colonized
areas of the world.A racist cultural movement emerged in the center to counter any
structural assimilation that would undermine the cultural stability of the core coun-
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tries by promoting ethnonational amalgamation.
Some Euro-American “scientific” elites created the “savagery” of nonwhites and
the “civility” of some White groups at the beginning and later all White groups and
their collaborators, such as Ethiopians, by defining human history according to the
cultural-racial categories of “backwardness,”“barbarism,” and “civilization” to natural-
ize and essentialize the phenotypic differences among human groups.By 1850 the En-
lightenment views of the universal sameness and equality of humanity were criticized
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and ridiculed. That is why Robert Young says that “modern racism was an academic
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creation.” The concept “race” entered into European languages in the fifteenth cen-
tury to identify people; it gained its “scientific” and popular context in the eighteenth
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and nineteenth centuries. Using geography and overt physical characteristics, some
biologists and anthropologists divided human groups into Black/Africa, White/Eu-
rope,Yellow/Asia, Red/original America arbitrarily without studying their genotypes.
Referring to Cavalli-Sforza’s book,The History and Geography of Human Genes, and ex-
posing the fallacy of racial classification based on geography and phenotypes, Sribala
Subramanian argues,“Once the genes for surface traits such as coloration and stature
are discounted, the human ‘races’ are remarkably alike under the skin.The variation
among individuals is so enormous that the whole concept of race becomes meaning-
less at the genetic level.” 75
With European colonial domination of the world, whiteness was seen as a marker
of civilization. Race was theorized and scientificized to justify slavery, colonial domi-
nation, and continued subjugation of colonized peoples.Young remarks that “no one
bothered too much about the differences between races until it was to the West’s eco-
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nomic advantage to profit from slavery or to defend it against the abolitionists.” Eu-
ropean capitalists who became racists had their own goals and reasons for using racial
classification and rationalization. It was in their interest to dominate nonwhites and
maximize profit by maintaining a cheap labor force and reducing the cost of produc-
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tion. Through large-scale and long-term social changes and colonial expansion, the
continental and national identities of “Europeanness,” “Asianness,” “Africanness,”
“Englishness,” “Frenchness,” “Americanness,” and other identities were invented. 78
Taking the identity of “otherness” that was bestowed on them through racism, ethno-
centrism, prejudice, and stereotypes, the colonized and enslaved peoples ultimately
began to mobilize themselves via the ideology of oppressed nationalism to fight cul-
turally, intellectually, and militarily against Euro-American colonialists and their col-
laborators.The discourse of oppressed nationalism focuses on the cultural and social
histories of the subjugated populations, challenges the dominant top-down paradigm
to a historiography, and transforms these populations into subjects rather than objects
of history. 79
The Concept Of Oppressed Nationalism
When the dominant racial/ethnonational groups have justified and rationalized their
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privileged position by racist and ethnocratic discourse, the oppressed ethnonational
groups—among them Oromos and African Americans—that have been denied cul-