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Re: 'race' and 'racism'Sandy Hawk (HAWKS@CGS.EDU)Sat, 22 Oct 1994 05:04:01 -0700
curious, so I went to the OED. In my 1971 compact edition, the word 'racism' has no entry. There is an entry for 'race', and 'race' and 'racialism' are listed in the supplement. 'Race' seems to enter English from the Romance languages -- French, Italian, Spanish, and Portugese. It first occurs in poetic usage in 1570 in John Foxe's _Acts and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes_. Its meaning, in the sense we have been using it in this thread however, seems mostly to be a nineteenth century development. Its early meanings are either general --'genus' or 'species' seem to be non-poetic synonyms -- or specific -- referring to offspring from a single progeniture. In both cases, humans, animals, or plants may be the referent. The 'human race' is one of its older usages. It could also be used to refer specifically to the process of breeding -- both with respect to animals and humans. [The last citation for this usage is Milton's _Paradise Lost_ (1667), and it is now obsolete.] In another early usage, 'race' seems simply to refer to a set or a grouping with some shared characteristic/s. In 1600, Sir John Wynn uses it in his _History of the Gwydir Family_, in reference to the last of the "race" of British royalty. Alexander Pope's translation of the _Iliad_ (1715) applies it to the house/people of Troy. And in 1768, Laurence Sterne uses it to refer to the descendents of the house of Bourbon in _A Sentimental Journey through France and England_. It is first applied to a physically identifiable grouping of humankind by Oliver Goldsmith in _A History of the Earth and Animated Nature_ in 1774. There he says, "The second great variety in the human species seem to be that of the Tartar race." A multitude of uses linked to ethnic or national identity and/or observable physical differences linked to those identities arise in the 19th century, including attributive and combinatory usages: race-characteristic, race-difference, race-distinction, race-hatred, race- maintenance, race-poem, race-portrait, and race-skull, among them. Most of the citations under 'race' in the main entry of the OED arise in what appears to be a religious/historical (here these seem often to be wound together) or scientific/technological context. A second entry for 'race' occurs in the OED Supplement that expands its usages into the social and political realm: race-conflict (1880), race-conscious (1927), race feeling (1907), race quarrel (1932), race-sense (1909), race suicide (1901), race-type (1927). The supplement also lists 'racialism' which is defined as, "Tendency to racial feeling; antagonism between different races of men." Its citations range from 1907-1925, and all of them are from journalistic contexts. I am intrigued by this, and wonder if others are also. To me at least, the usage shifts are suggestive. They seem to intersect with European expansion and colonization, and the religious/scientific/and social shifts that accompanied it. It also seems that in this case, shifts in the world lead to shifts in the language, which lead to more shifts in the world... It's like a peek at a hermeneutical cycle in action. In effect the possibility for a reality/concept of race/racism seems to emerge from the OED's tracing of this thread of meaning spun through English history as found in English letters. If this reflects reality, it also seems to me to have deep ethical implications. Things like Rushton's postings, and publication of the book that occasions them are not then value neutral events. They can impinge on society's patterns of lived meaning whether science or pseudo-science, and insofar as they do so they will produce additional societal effects. Sandy Hawk hawks@cgs.edu
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