AfricaFocus Bulletin
May 25, 2015 (150525)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor’s Note
“The failure to acknowledge race as a fundamental feature of today’s
unequal world order remains a striking weakness of radical as well
as conventional analyses of that order. Current global and national
socioeconomic hierarchies are not mere residues of a bygone era of
primitive accumulation. Just as it should be inconceivable to
address the past, present, and future of American society without
giving central attention to the role of African American struggles,
so analyzing and addressing 21st-century structures of global
inequality requires giving central attention to Africa.”
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As readers are aware, AfricaFocus features reposted material
published recently, with the editor’s own comments limited to a
short introduction. This week is an exception, in that the article
reposted (and quoted in the paragraph above) is one that I wrote
more than a decade ago. I was led to
reread it while trying to reflect on the many recent events
reminding all of us of the unequal values given to human lives in
today’s world order, both between and within countries and
continents. These inequalities are shaped by race, place, class,
gender, and multiple other factors. But they are also molded by a
long history that systematically makes the African continent, those
who live there, and those who come from there particularly
vulnerable.
In my view, the connection between global and African realities is
most directly apparent in the realm of issues such as climate
change, migration, and the unequal flows of economic resources,
which are regularly featured in AfricaFocus. But how these
structural stresses affect the highly visible terrain of political
conflict, violence, and human rights varies enormously in its
particularities by country. General narratives, including that
sketched in this essay, are always inadequate, and in many respects
subjective. But today’s date (May 25, Africa Day) is also an
appropriate one to turn to more general reflections. I am convinced
that the basic points made in this essay still hold true and hope it
may be of interest to many AfricaFocus readers.
For two publications in which I have attempted to address the
global/African connections with respect to the issue of migration,
see the background paper “African Migration, Global Inequalities,
and Human Rights: Connecting the Dots,” 2011
(http://www.africafocus.org/editor/nai-migration.php), written for
the Nordic Africa Institute, and the short pamphlet “Migration and
Global Justice: From Africa to the United States” 2008
(http://www.africafocus.org/editor/afsc0804.pdf), written for the
American Friends Service Committee.
An earlier related essay on “Global Apartheid,” by Salih Booker and
William Minter, appeared in The Nation in 2001
(http://www.thenation.com/article/global-apartheid).
Links to additional publications available on-line can be found at
http://www.africafocus.org/editor.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++
Invisible Hierarchies: Africa, Race, and Continuities in the World
Order
Science & Society, Vol. 69, No. 3, July 2005, 449-457
William Minter
Abstract:
The failure to acknowledge race as a fundamental feature of today’s
unequal world order remains a striking weakness of radical as well
as conventional analyses of that order. Current global and national
socioeconomic hierarchies are not mere residues of a bygone era of
primitive accumulation. Just as it should be inconceivable to
address the past, present, and future of American society without
giving central attention to the role of African American struggles,
so analyzing and addressing 21st-century structures of global
inequality requires giving central attention to Africa.
“We acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade, including the
transatlantic slave trade, were appalling tragedies in the history
of humanity not only because of their abhorrent barbarism but also
in terms of their magnitude, organized nature and especially their
negation of the essence of the victims, and further acknowledge that
slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should
always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade, and
are among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial
discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that
Africans and people of African descent, Asians and people of Asian
descent and indigenous peoples were victims of these acts and
continue to be victims of their consequences. — Declaration of the
World Conference Against Racism, Durban, South Africa, September 8,
2001
Coming only days before September 11, this acknowledgment by world
governments of the legal premise of the reparations movement gained
little media attention. The 62-page declaration and program of
action, already undermined by a last-minute U. S. withdrawal from
the conference, faded into obscurity even more rapidly than the
conclusions of other global conferences that have proliferated in
recent decades. In any case, the commitments made in Durban to
repair the consequences of racism were even vaguer than most such
conference commitments, such as new pledges to finance development
adopted by consensus at the Monterrey poverty summit in March 2002.
Yet the failure to acknowledge race as a fundamental feature of
today’s unequal world order is not confined to Bush administration
unilateralists or international diplomats crafting new compromise
language for promises destined to be betrayed. With some notable
exceptions, such as Winant, 2001 and Marable, 2004, authors of the
vast array of commentaries on globalization and even of the more
recent crop of writings about empire treat race only in passing —
if they mention it at all. Such reticence about race applies not
only to advocates of the Washington Consensus of free-market
fundamentalism and to cheerleaders for U. S. empire, but also to
more critical analysts of a variety of persuasions from center to
left.
The end of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994 marked the
demise of racial discrimination as explicit state policy, just as
the mid-1960s victories of the civil rights movement in the United
States had marked the end of the Jim Crow system of segregation in
the U. S. south. But the persistence of de facto racial inequality
into the 21st century is pervasive in both nations, as well as
globally. Its relative invisibility in public commentary and
analysis must be considered a fundamental feature of the current
moment requiring explanation.
21st Century Color Lines
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) and other analysts, focusing on the
current U. S. racial order, have posited an ideology of “color-blind
racism,” which allows for continuation of racial inequality while
firmly rejecting overt racial distinctions or discrimination. One of
the key components of this ideology is to deny the link between past
and present, so that people regardless of their background are seen
as starting on a level playing field. This assumption fits well with
the companion ideology stressing the virtues of the neutral market,
which all are presumed to approach with similar possibilities of
success. Such an ideology gains credibility from the visible success
of individuals from the subordinate group, which does in the case of
race mark a break with earlier ideologies of rigid discrimination.
With successful individuals in the foreground, and even celebrated
as illustrating diversity, it becomes easier to view continuing
structural inequality as relatively unimportant, or even to dismiss
it altogether. Persistent poverty or other disadvantages can
conveniently be attributed entirely to individual defects, and seen
as unrelated to past or present discrimination.
The dominant ideology thus diverts attention from the structural
bases of persistent and rising inequality. Contrary views are
portrayed as divisive promotion of class warfare or racial
hostility. Meanwhile, progressive forces have failed to forge a
persuasive counter-perspective integrating both race and class that
similarly facilitates united opposition to the dominant order.
Recently Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres have argued that race is
like a miner’s canary, with damage to minority communities signaling
the damaging structural hierarchies permeating the society (Guinier
and Torres, 2002). They further argue that racial mobilization,
combined with openness to wider coalition-building, must be a
fundamental component of progressive action in the United States.
Many others have made similar arguments, while documenting the
persistence of racial inequality, in unemployment, incarceration,
denial of voting rights, and other arenas. Yet it is no secret that
progressive forces have had little success in implementing such
strategies on more than a fragmentary local basis.
Building a progressive U. S. internationalism that acknowledges the
impact of race, both internally and globally, is an even more
intimidating challenge than that on the domestic front. The growing
impact of immigration also makes such issues unavoidable in other
industrialized countries as well. The much-celebrated demonstrations
in Seattle and similar anti-corporate globalization events have been
notable for their failure to make such connections, despite efforts
to do so by many of the activist groups involved (Martinez, 2000).
Despite trans-Atlantic contacts made at the World Conference against
Racism, even for most supporters the U. S. reparations movement
retains an almost exclusive domestic focus, rather than a campaign
situated within the context of damages done to the African continent
as well. Despite overwhelming opposition among Black Americans to
Bush’s war in Iraq, and efforts by groups such as Black Voices for
Peace, the anti-war movement has generally been unable to make
connections with broader opposition to domestic and global
inequality.
Neither the conceptual nor practical solutions to this impasse are
easy to discern. But surely one prerequisite is for progressive
analysts to acknowledge that W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction that the
problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line
applies to the new century as well. Such continuity must surely
count among the deep structures still characterizing the world
today.
This is not to deny the significance of recent changes, whether the
shift from a bipolar to a unipolar geostrategic order, the
accelerating velocity of global communication, the triumph
symbolized by Nelson Mandela’s election in 1994, or the
globalization of threats of terrorism and counter-terrorism.
Nevertheless, both the visible and real global hierarchies, whether
measured in terms of economic power and privilege, human security,
or access to effective political rights, show a close correlation
with the order established by the centuries of slavery, conquest,
and colonial rule.
To the extent that the gatherings of the World Social Forum in
Brazil and India do prefigure another possible world vision, it is
still a world in which one continent — Africa — is strikingly
underrepresented. [as of writing of this article in 2005]
Speculation about the rise of new forces to global prominence to
challenge U. S. hegemony center on the advance of Asia, including
China and India as well as Japan. The potential weight of the Asian
continent, with more than half of the estimated world population of
some 6.4 billion, is clearly linked to sheer numbers as well as to
the structure of the world system. But the profound gap between
Africa (some 870 million people) and less populous continents such
as Europe (729 million), North America (509 million) and South
America (367 million) is easily visible in any compilation of
comparative statistics of development, from life expectancy to gross
national product to vulnerability to the AIDS pandemic.
The point here is neither to rehearse such familiar statistics nor
to call for continent-based quotas in reflections about the current
state of the world. Rather, it is to suggest that the Guinier-Torres
analogy of the miner’s canary applies globally as well as in the
United States. Just as it should be inconceivable to address the
past, present, and future of American society without giving central
attention to the role of African American struggles, so analyzing
and addressing the structures of global inequality requires giving
central attention to Africa.
The mechanisms responsible for creating and maintaining such
inequality are not unique to Africa, but their effects are most
starkly visible there. That is why Africa figures prominently on the
agenda of international institutions, from the World Bank to the
panoply of specialized UN agencies. The fact that Africa
nevertheless remains marginal to public debate across the political
spectrum outside the continent is an indicator of the absence of a
global social contract and of the current weakness of movements to
establish a world order based on principles other than market
values.
Within the United States, as Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro
convincingly showed in their landmark book Black Wealth, White
Wealth (1995), inheritance remains a central mechanism in
perpetuating racial inequality, even when there is significant
upward mobility in jobs and income for some. On a global scale, the
common-sense case for the lasting effect on the current global
hierarchy of centuries of primitive accumulation of wealth by
violence is so obvious that it seems incredible that it is not
generally acknowledged, whether or not one argues that there should
be a statute of limitations on responsibility for repairing the
damage. Yet in fact such causal links are commonly dismissed as
irrelevant “ancient history” or simply ignored by policy- makers and
scholars alike. The debate opened up by such classic works as Eric
Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and Walter Rodney’s How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) has yet to be integrated into
current reflections about globalization and empire.
Global Apartheid
Certainly there is much that is new about the current moment in
Africa, as elsewhere in the world. The end of the Cold War removed
the primary strategic imperative for outside subsidies to African
re- gimes. The AIDS pandemic, which in the 1980s was largely
confined to central Africa, has swept through much of the continent,
revers- ing previous advances in raising life expectancy. It now
threatens almost every sector of economy and society. Few African
cities now lack multiple internet cafes, and the growth of mobile
phone use is the most rapid anywhere. Although the trend is less
well studied than in the Caribbean or Latin America, the dispersion
of new African immigrants throughout the world has made remittances
a central feature of survival for many African communities and a
major com- ponent of many national economies. Each of these trends,
it could be argued, is a sign of deep structural change as well as a
feature of the current moment.
Nevertheless, continuities with previous periods and reinforcement
of long-established structures are equally striking. As recently
summarized in an article analyzing the causes of increasing world
inequality (Wade, 2004), the statistics on recent inequality trends
are much disputed. Results vary widely with the measures and data
used. But what evidence there is for structural advance in the
global South comes almost entirely from trends in China and India.
At a structural level, despite such blips as a modest increase in U.
S. textile imports from several African countries as a result of
tariff concessions in the U.S.-Africa Growth and Opportunity Act,
the role of African countries in the world economy is still
overwhelmingly that of suppliers of primary commodities, as has been
the case since colonial conquest over a century ago. The dynamics of
world markets are of course different for different commodities
ranging from coffee and cotton to oil and gold. But not even South
Africa has managed to find a sustainable strategy to emulate the
East Asian competitive challenges to the established G-7 economic
powers.
Despite multiple shifts in terminology and emphasis, moreover,
neither reformist African governments nor stronger critics of the
Washington Consensus among African activists and scholars have
succeeded in altering the course of the international financial
institutions that have insisted on putting macroeconomic adjustment
and trade liberalization above all else. The World Bank and the IMF
have indeed forfeited any credibility with both African and
international civil society. But alternative agendas for
“sustainable development” and “human development,” despite
endorsement by multilateral agencies, global conferences, and even
dissenting voices within the World Bank, have lost ground to market
fundamentalism in practice.
While the first decades of African independence saw significant
advances in health and education, subsequent decades have instead
seen an overall pattern of decline. Disparities such as these were
and are reinforced not only by economic structures such as commodity
markets and the accumulation of capital controlled by the capitalist
classes of rich countries, but also by continuities of political
influence. The victories of greater autonomy won by anti-colonial
struggles were eroded first by the Cold War and the continued
influence of ex-colonial powers. Regardless of the political
ideology of post-colonial leaders, the model of the colonial state
remained the dominant guide to the exercise of power. And in
response to the economic crises of the 1980s and the 1990s, African
states lost more and more influence to the directing hand of the
World Bank and clubs of creditors/donors.
While contemporary critics of globalization lament the loss of
autonomy of national states, in Africa the empirical evidence for
such an earlier golden age is weak indeed. Whether for the first
wave of independent states in the 1960s, or for those winning power
in the 1970s and 1980s after armed struggles, the period of hope and
popular mobilization was quickly cut short. The entry of a free
South Africa onto the African scene in the last decade has
significantly changed the context for continental cooperation, and
many see the African Union as an arena for both wider public debate
and action on some of the continent’s crises. But whether one
attributes Pretoria’s compromises to pragmatism or to class
interests, it would be difficult to argue that the vision of African
renaissance has won much leverage for Africa in institutions
deciding global policies affecting the continent.
Debates on the causes of this reality, and on how to find a path
ahead that avoids both Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism, are
complex. But surely it is necessary to go beyond national arenas or
the failure of particular leaders and to include analysis of the
lack of democracy in global institutions that have relatively more
weight in Africa than almost anywhere else in the world. To counter
growing global inequality requires state action on a scale
equivalent to the global mechanisms that reinforce that inequality.
Multilateral institutions dealing with almost every conceivable
issue have in fact proliferated in parallel with economic
globalization. There has also been significant involvement by a
burgeoning “international civil society,” ranging from non-
governmental organizations in the global North to activist groups in
both North and South. The impact at the level of ideas has been
significant. But it is also the case that the more influential the
institution, the more likely its effective governance is effectively
controlled by representatives of rich, predominantly white,
countries.
Whether or not one uses the term “global apartheid” (Booker and
Minter, 2001), any short-hand description of the global order at the
dawn of the 21st century must somehow acknowledge the double
standards implicit in an international system of global minority
rule, based on the entrenched assumption that some human lives are
more valuable than others based on the accident of place and race of
birth. The tragedy of 9/11 and the war on Iraq is not only the
direct damage inflicted by those events, but also the
reinforcement given to diversion of attention from the global
holocaust of the AIDS pandemic and parallel threats to human
security.
It would be a mistake to see this tacit acceptance of the differ-
ential value of human life as simply a cultural or ideological
epiphenomenon less worthy of analysis than the “hard” structures of
global political economy, geostrategic competition, or preemptive
militarism. Long-term rationality, even from the point of view of
the more farsighted guardians of global capitalism, may dictate
attention to the range of global crises that have their most severe
impact in Africa (see, for example, the report of the World
Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, at
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/wcsdg). Seemingly race-neutral
goals such as poverty alleviation and other noble objectives may win
approval in conference after conference.
But just as national divisions are not only conceptual but embedded
in laws distinguishing citizens and non-citizens, so the assumptions
of racial and cultural hierarchy are embedded in the political
discourse and practices that reinforce global apartheid.
Making “another world possible” requires analyses and strategies for
political mobilization that do not evade this stubborn legacy from
the past.
References
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind
Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United
States. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Booker, Salih, and William Minter. 2001. “Global Apartheid.” The
Nation, July 9.
Guinier, Lani, and Gerald Torres. 2002. The Miner’s Canary:
Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Marable, Manning. 2004 “Globalization and Racialization.” Znet,
August 13.
Martinez, Elizabeth (Betita). 2000. “Where Was the Color in
Seattle?: Looking for Reasons Why the Great Battle was so White.”
Colorlines, 3:1 (Spring).
Oliver, Melvin L., and Thomas M. Shapiro. 1995. Black Wealth, White
Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge.
Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London/Dar
es Salaam, Tanzania: Bogle L’Ouverture Publications and Tanzania
Publishing House.
Wade, Robert Hunter. 2004. “On the Causes of Increasing World
Inequality, or Why the Matthew Effect Prevails.” New Political
Economy, 8:2 (June).
Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, North
Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.
Winant, Howard. 2001. The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy
Since World War II. New York: Basic Books.
*****************************************************
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providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a
particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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