Universal discrimination and the democratic camouflaging of culturalism

By Saladdin Ahmed

March 27, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The ideology that initiated the recent anti-leftist campaigns has been developing democratic discursive strategies for the last 75 years following the fall of old fascism in Europe. For instance, race-talk is no longer part of official and academic discourse; instead, culture-talk is prevalent, which is far more effective for the racist massification of people and the normalization of exclusionary fanaticism among ordinary people. 

Despite its democratic-sounding claims of plurality, the culturalist mentality is racist through and through. There is a long history of anthropologizing the non-white Other. In accomplishing that racist purpose, the paradigm of “culture” has been decisive, especially since the demise of internationalism in the 1980s. The collapse of Communism as an international/ist movement meant the immediate rise of neofascist ideologies. Thanks to the paradigm of culture, it has become possible for fascist worldviews to find a home in liberal discourses. The mystifying and pseudoscientific notion of “culture” makes essentializing all non-Europeans possible without having to use the outdated term of “race” and at the same time allowing the speaker/writer to sound like someone who believes in diversity. Today’s fascists and liberals alike take it for granted that the world is composed of different cultures, and those cultures are at the essence of “identities.”

The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, assumption is that Europeans, Euro-Americans, and Euro-Australians, represent a civilization whereas others in the world embody “cultures”. The civilization, by definition, entails infinite potentialities and universal freedoms whereas culture is definite anthropologically, local geographically, closed up communally, and a finished product historically. The essentializing premises of culturalism are not among the subjects of the dispute between liberals (including many self-proclaimed leftists) and extremists on the right. Rather, the main subjects of the dispute have to do with the degree to which the West should be open toward other “cultures.” While this difference is not insignificant in terms of state policies, the mentality of the-West-and-the-Rest is deeply racist and tribalist. The implicit premises of culturalism alone are enough to render adherents of culturalism fanatic sectarians — contrary to their image of themselves as faithful embodiments of a democratic, pluralist, and tolerant canon.  

Culturalism is the direct offspring of the mentality that justified committing true barbarianism against First Nations Americans and Australians in the name of a war of the “civilized” against the “barbarians.” Some of today’s spokespersons of the Enlightenment’s liberalism and the civilization are not liberal enough to even tolerate the term “colonialism,” which is precisely why post-colonial studies have become the new racist campaign’s latest obsession in both France and the United States. While the new object of this old phobia is post-colonial studies, the real targets are neither post-colonialisms nor studies. The real target is the same old one: universal equality and leftists who still dare to struggle for it. 

Global tribalism in the name of universality

Let us take an example of a text that embodies the old universal discrimination presented in a language of what should be termed ‘democratic camouflage’ of cultural racism or culturalism. Recently, Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College and former editor of The New York Review of Books wrote a commentary supposedly defending classics and the Enlightenment liberalism against scholars who dare to question some of the premises in those fields and criticize the prevalent homogeneity in the relevant scholarship. 

The accused in this case is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an educator, historian, and scholar of classics, featured in a New York Times article by Rachel Poser. To start, nowhere does Padilla calls for abandoning classics or European philosophy, contrary to the false claims Buruma uses to make a case of red herring.        

Buruma expresses grievances that the term “White” is used in the New York Times article, but he has no problem using the term “Black” for the purpose of racializing Padilla. To show how Buruma’s self-deceiving mentality actually commits racism at the very moment it denies it, we need to examine the implicit premises in his language. For instance, he writes, “The two Western democracies established from revolutions based on liberty and reason were France and the United States. People of both countries like to claim the universality of their values.” A few paragraphs later, he writes, “Blacks, Asian-Americans, Latinos and others would like to assert their own cultures, their own values, their own representations, their own ‘souls’.” Putting these two statements together, it becomes evident that it is Buruma who thinks in terms of race, perceives the world in terms of race, and classifies societies in terms of race because his unspoken premise is that the people of the United States are White. The rest are American by some sort of indirect association. For if he actually thought Blacks and others are part of the subject, “the people” of the United States, he would not pen both of those statements simply because, on the basic logical level, both assertions could not be true at the same time.

Buruma’s class of “the people” whose project is based on the universal values of “liberty and reason” designate all Whites, including those who slaughtered the native peoples, the Confederates, the members of the Ku Klux Klan, and Trump supporters, but not Blacks. Even the Blacks who joined the Civil Rights movement, not to mention those who fought for the Union in the 19^th Century, are excluded. Buruma could not have been more mistaken in his judgment. Had he reversed the subjects or predicates, he would have been less wrong. Historically and presently, African Americans have been leading the most democratic and emancipatory movements in the United States. All one needs to consider in order to reach this conclusion is the anti-slavery uprisings in the 1700s and 1800s, the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement.

The fundamental intellectual problem with denialism is the double deception, inwardly and socially. That is to say, denialists do not know that they do not know. They deny their denial of truth so meticulosity that they might genuinely be clueless about what they deeply believe. What they deeply believe, however, will inevitably be embedded in their discourse. Such a contradiction in utterances is not necessarily a sign of hypocrisy, if we take hypocrisy to be conscious or premeditated behavior. Rather, it is simply the way things appear to the kind of mentality that is formed within and around privilege if that mentality is not challenged according to an emancipatory epistemology.   

Buruma advises anti-racist critics not to racialize the Enlightenment, unaware of the fact that what he does is exactly that. He claims universality using a language that is itself racializing and exclusionary. Repeating the same logical fallacy of contradiction, in his very defense of the Enlightenment against racialization, he does nothing but racialization of the Enlightenment. Instead of including the local, say the French, in the universal (the Enlightenment), he reduces the universal to the local. Instead of rejecting tribalism universally, he universalizes his own tribalism. Having internalized the ideological distortions that are built into neoliberalism, he mistakes a globalized form of tribalism for the globally human. Also, like most other denialists, he denies racism but recognizes race, instead of rejecting race and recognizing racism.

Buruma is upset that the neutralized/racist monopoly on universality is challenged by “a Black critic of classics education.” Being so certain and confident, not only does he unknowingly commit the fallacy of logical contradiction, but he also projects his own epistemological crisis on the critics of racism. Padilla aims to deracialize knowledge, but Buruma accuses him of racializing knowledge. In the court of the dominant, the victim is found guilty twice: for existing and for speaking up. Victims of social inequality are habitually blamed for daring to speak about victimhood. The real falsehood, we are told, is the result of a false perception of the victims, who falsely claim victimhood.

To meet the liberal criterion of openness and thus show that he is capable of seeing both sides of the issue, Buruma admits that there have been “blind-spots” and “blemish”, yet, as usual, we are supposed to believe that the abused is the actual abuser simply because they dare to speak of abuse. The underprivileged as a body and a voice is normally exiled from public space because the cancelation of her existence is the norm. On the other hand, if the privileged are held accountable for their acts on any level, we are told that freedom of speech and inquiry is under attack due to the “cancel culture.” Ironically, it has become typical for those who are intolerant of the voices of the silenced to preach about “freedom of speech.” Within the same absurdity, the ideological heirs of anti-abolitionists, American libertarians, present themselves as the true believers of freedom. To the anti-abolitionists in the 19^th Century, freedom included the freedom to purchase and sell human beings without the intervention of the state, and when the state tried to put an end to slavery, they adamantly opposed the state.

During the current pandemic, to the libertarians, freedom means the freedom to spread the virus as they wish without the intervention of the state. Somehow, their freedom seems to always entail death for others. That in itself should tell us how fanatically they try to further unfreedom, violence, and death for the majority of human beings outside their clans. Similarly, the “liberty” that has been translated into so many wars and genocides, embargos and famines, planetary destruction and ecological catastrophes, is anything but universal liberty. Rather, it is the liberty of a small number of people to inflict suffering on living beings and destruction of the conditions of life. It is no wonder that libertarians and neofascists, assuming that they are distinguishable, support the same racist and fanatic kind of political leadership. 

A typical characteristic of denialism is the habit of suppression, which in turn is based on the assumption that if we do not talk about the problem, the problem does not exist. To denialists, those who talk about racism are guilty of racialization, just as feminist women are often blamed for the degeneration of the institution of family or accused of discrimination against men. We are supposed to believe the way things are should not be disturbed or the natural balance of existence as such will be destroyed. Those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy should learn how to be positive. They should be taught that their misery is some sort of good luck. They should be taught that happiness is a state of mind. How else could so much misery and oppression be sustained socially?

At the heart of historical marginalization is silencing the oppressed. The guardians of social privilege, who fanatically identify with power and all that represents power, cannot stand the voice of the silenced. The moment the silenced speak up, the entire social reality is disrupted. The elites who benefit from social hierarchy and are paranoid about losing their privileges react to serious critique in ways that are semi-instinctive. Theory, philosophy, and politics are all driven by those naturalized interests, not vice versa. In fact, the “natural” modes of knowledge production and perception in a hierarchical society simply reproduce hierarchy. That is precisely why without a philosophy of negation committed to solidarity with the silenced and their struggle for equality, education will only deepen unfreedom. In hierarchical societies, which are almost all societies under the prevalent patriarchy and capitalism, education is part of the problem, not the solution unless it is founded on the pedagogy of unlearning. The social world we are born into is founded on inequality, so the value systems and modes of perception that we learn as we grow up serve the regime of unfreedom, and education is more like a process of cementing intellectual bureaucracy for the purpose of sustaining the existing inequalities. 

What do Whiteness and Blackness mean in an anti-racist philosophy?

According to the racist worldview, “Whiteness” and “Blackness” can only be references to skin color. In anti-racist discourses, on the other hand, these terms should be used as references to social conditions plus politics. One could be born into the social conditions of “Whiteness” but choose a politics that is anti-racist, re-educate oneself by unlearning racist prejudices, and even join the politics of “Blackness” as a struggle for universal liberation. In this sense, all revolutionary subjects are Black.

When “Blackness” became an indicator of progressive political awareness, it became even more liberating, both qualitatively and quantitatively, precisely because it inspired a new political space that was progressive, emancipatory, and inclusive.[1] That is to say, the racial categories were politicized allowing for the transformation of identities on the basis of a free and freeing politics. In the case of South Africa, this progressive transformation of the frame of reference led to the birth of a struggle for not only the social emancipation of Blacks but also the epistemological emancipation of those who might not be identified as Black in the racial system of classification. In other words, the racist social regime of Whiteness vs Blackness was confronted with a revolutionary movement inclusive of all those who rejected the racist order. Blackness is the title of emancipatory politics for not only those who had been born into racially disadvantaged social conditions but also those who had been born into epistemologically disadvantaged social conditions. The struggle for Black freedom opened a horizon for being not only free as Black but also Black as free. A robust form of cosmopolitanism aimed at the realization of personal, social, and political freedoms, necessitates a Black proletarian politics.

Politically, the social condition into which one is born matters only insofar as what one would make out of them. The first anti-racist rule should be evident: there is nothing inherently valuable or devaluing in any particular social construct such as “race.” Of course, we are born into societies where those identities are predetermined in terms of social advantages or disadvantages, but the point of emancipation is precisely to reject (not deny) such a reality, to unlearn its knowledge, to negate its episteme, to bring down its oppressive institutions and constitutions, and simply to take the side of the oppressed whoever they may be in any given society at any given time. These rejections and negations are what constitute one’s emancipatory politics. In principle, politically every person can aspire to become Black. If one is not born into Black social conditions, one could and should unlearn until one’s social conditions are radically undone. That is a process of self-emancipation, which is a precondition for emancipatory social movements capable of changing the world. Those who are born into social privileges are sometimes even more unfree not despite but because of those privileges. At least intellectually, everything else being equal, the underprivileged are better situated to comprehend what freedom entails. Therefore, the struggle for universal liberty is located in the margins of the margins and led by the most marginalized.         

Who commits racialization of the Enlightenment? The intellectual downsides of privilege

Buruma takes upon himself to defend some of the Enlightenment philosophes in an imaginary trial in which his (long dead) clients are, allegedly, defamed. Buruma sets out to prosecute all those who fail to understand (what to him is) the universality of the French and American projects and the inherent neutrality of Whiteness. He writes, “Voltaire may have disparaged Africans, but he was an avid reader of the 13th-century Persian poet Saadi.” As if Diderot’s Encyclopedia has not been published yet, Buruma preaches to the reader about his version of the Enlightenment values. Even more shamelessly he minimizes the significance of racism in the works of European philosophers to “blindspots” inside quotation marks and followed by a disclaiming “but” sentence.[2] It is true they had some inappropriate views about Africans, and that is due to the era they lived in, but Voltaire knew of an Iranian poet, as Buruma enlightens us. The implied point is that the European philosophers were not universally discriminatory. It seems Buruma suggests that the Eurocentric (racist) views on Africans were somehow justified because, in Buruma’s thought, Africans did not have great poets. Recall Fanon’s line: “I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic” (1986, 98).

One might get the impression that Buruma is trying to make a transition to the entertainment industry, but what is truly disturbing is that Buruma makes these explicit and implicit claims without a sense of irony. According to Buruma:

He adds:

Does Buruma think that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush thought people like being bombed? Perhaps, the missionaries of the Enlightenment did not know that people are not particularly crazy about being burned alive. Perhaps, the “mission to spread universal liberty to less-enlightened peoples” was misunderstood by the “less-enlightened peoples” who did not sit in Buruma’s classes to be prepared for the somewhat painful operation of enlightening. The statement, “American efforts to invade countries in the name of democracy have been equally misguided” amounts to saying that there had been some mistakes in the methods the United States has used to liberate Koreans, Vietnamese, and Iraqis, not to mention Cubans, Guatemalans, and Chileans. Due to the “misguided” efforts, instead of delivering the Enlightenment philosophers’ books, bombs were utilized to introduce liberty to the “less-enlightened peoples”.

If we go by Buruma’s banal assertions while considering his proclamation that the “American efforts” to carry on the mission of liberty were “misguided”, the events of the past four decades seem even more absurd. When the United States actively supported jihadis in the 1980s, perhaps the intention was purely Voltairean. In the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan to remove those same jihadis, i.e., the former allies, perhaps, the enterprise was still spreading “universal liberty”. In 2020, however, the US government made a deal with the Taliban, perhaps to hand over the Enlightenment project once more to the jihadis. The experiment in Iraq was more or less similar. First Saddam Hussein was supported. Then, to remove Saddam Hussein the entire population of Iraq was starved for more than a decade. Eventually, the country was invaded to remove Saddam Hussein. Today, thanks to the neoliberal missionaries of universal liberty, entire generations are impoverished, and Islamist militias rule the ruined country, where nobody is safe. How misguided Buruma’s efforts to enlighten us about the absurdity he takes for liberty and reason.

Being faithful to the principle of universal discrimination, Buruma sees the same problem of “identity politics” in the United States where “more and more people feel that a set of values — a civilization, if you like — is being imposed on them, a civilization loosely based on the Enlightenment, on liberalism, on the classics, and, above all, on ‘whiteness’.” Notice Buruma puts “whiteness” in quotations because he allegedly rejects racialization. 

Somehow Buruma manages to commit red herring, covert racism, and projection, all at the same time. First, those who protest against racial inequality “feel that” … etc. In addition to grouping entire populations of faceless, nameless, and voiceless human beings together and making a claim about how this imaginary collective feel, it is worth noticing Buruma’s word choice to refer to what motivates their politics. In and according to the dominant modes of knowledge production, just how femininity has typically been associated with emotions, which in turn is posed as the antipode of rationality, the racialized Other is typically depicted as collectives whose main motivations are rooted in raw feelings, which have already been posted as the opposite of objectivity or reason. 

Culturalism: Politically correct racism 

Buruma, who allegedly rejects racism — after all, everyone rejects racism even though somehow racism is alive and well — protests against the use of the term “Whiteness” to racialize what is (to him) truly nothing but universality, or “a civilization, if you like.” Thanks to the confidence that comes with privilege, which is at the same time an obstacle for personal enlightenment, Buruma presses his finger on his problem when he announces, “the main problem is the confusion of race, ethnicity and culture.” Thus, even if cultural racism did not exist, Buruma would invent it.

Clearly, Buruma does not realize that the language of racism has already been updated since the 1950s and 1960s, when “racial identity” became “ethnicity” and “race” became “culture,” allowing educators and scholars like himself to preserve and disseminate the old ideology using more democratic-sounding terminology.[3] However, even by the standards of democratic camouflage, Buruma quickly re-exposes his problematic worldview using the expression, “high cultures.” The main point of the politically correct language of culturalism is the alleged rejection of hierarchy inherent in the old language of race, but Buruma ruins the culturalist persona immediately exposing his old self when he uses the obvious substitute for “superior races”. Culture-talk in the first place was invented to mask the deep belief in racial hierarchy, superior vs. inferior, high vs. low, but Buruma’s democratic camouflaging is just as embarrassing as his (mis)representation of the universality of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment could and should be defended especially against those who own it on a chauvinistic basis whether knowingly or unknowingly and regardless of the discursive strategies they adopt.[4]  

Let us pause again on the claim Buruma makes so confidently about non-White Americans while he allegedly rejects racialization: 

I suggest the following revision of Buruma’s statement to make it less false, less racist, and more fitting to the Enlightenment Buruma’s liberalism scandalously fails to defend: 

The Burumas who run the dominant regime of knowledge production simply project their problematic views of humanity on humanity in the name of universality. In their very arguments for the “universality” of the Enlightenment, they manage to racialize the Enlightenment. In essence, what the Burumas of the world are claiming is that all the non-White peoples have cultures, in the anthropological sense of the term, but the (White) European has produced the “high culture,” in the philosophical and sociological sense, a universal project for all humanity, a civilization.

In their alleged attempt to refute relativism or absolutism, they reproduce the worst form of relativism and absolutism, which is absolute relativism. By attributing universality to themselves in a culturalist/racist manner, they prove to be the true global tribalists. Never mind the Enlightenment philosophy, all that is needed to expose this kind of imperialist affection for the mythology of the dark ages is some basic Aristotelian logic. 

In the culturalist mindset, “Whiteness” is not a social condition; rather, it is the state of being pure, the neutral state of being a human, the founder of the civilization, and the missionary of liberty. This universal confusion and habitual categorical distortion cannot be excused in terms of blind-spots. It is dark-agism. It is the curse of certainty that comes with the unlimited sense of entitlement and undeterred embracement of the social conditions of privilege. It is a mode of perception that mythologizes the world in the name of objective knowledge (of course claimed by the in-group self). Christian and Islamic theology claim enlightenment too. They too speak in the name of the universal truth. They too in the name of universality and truth mythologize the world. However, unlike religion, the Enlightenment can and should be defended philosophically, especially against the chauvinists who try to turn it into another form of universal tribalism.

The civilization is threatened by Euro-centrists, from culturalist liberals to White-supremacists, and by other absolute relativists such as religious fundamentalists who, similarly, divide the world according to an in-group vs. out-group dichotomy. The logical contradictions committed by these ideologies of universal discrimination are similar. The difference is their respective discursive strategies. The strain that developed democratic camouflaging of culturalism is arguably the most fatal one for the universalist horizons of the Enlightenment project given this strain’s ability to operate on behalf of democracy’s immune system, i.e., with unlimited authority. Today, culturalists not only have access to the most powerful platforms of opinion making but also enjoy a kind of authority that is by far more totalitarian globally than any other authority in history. If somehow a voice of critique against this total hegemony makes it to an influential platform, they are immediately Othered, criminalized, or racialized to ensure that the unlimited hegemony is maintained. 

It is interesting that fanatic missionaries of liberalism typically do not include Karl Marx in the list of the great philosophers of “universality”. Marx was, in fact, a universalist, and what scares the missionaries of liberalism about universalism or cosmopolitanism is the adherence to true equality, an equality that exceeds the constructed walls among nations, republics, and classes. From Marx to Walter Benjamin, egalitarian universalists, those who struggled to save the Enlightenment project from falling into the abyss, were denied a place in Europe and its universities. There is a pattern that cuts through philosophy and politics, from pedagogy and education to nationalism and patriotism. Those who want to make it great again, in practice, try to make it barbarian again. Those who criminalize critique, are the Enlightenment’s worst possible representatives.  

One can only feel sorry for the state of the Enlightenment project when educators like Buruma are its defenders. Surely, such advocates of the enlightenment are its true destroyers. Just to be clear, one should defend the enlightenment especially against chauvinist and racist attempts to use it as a tool for universal discrimination. Just as we should remain conscious of its catastrophic side represented by fascism, colonialism, and imperialism, the Enlightenment must be defended against chauvinism. Also, let us not be deceived by racist distortions and culturalist tribalism advocated through discursive strategies of Euro-chauvinism. What is worth defending in the Enlightenment has always been a universalist project of humanity as such. There would have been no Enlightenment without discoveries and inventions that are universally human, including those that had emerged in China, India, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, and Africa. Just as writing, for instance, is inseparable from the human civilization, despite the fact that it was first discovered in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Enlightenment cannot be claimed based on a chauvinistic frame of reference that is itself a product of an anti-Enlightenment movement, best represented by cultural racism. In reality, the Enlightenment today is defended by those in the margins of the margins, the women and men who resist capitalism, imperialism, and internal colonialism at the same time. The Communists in the Indian subcontinent, Rojava-Bakur revolutionaries, Zapatistas, Black Lives Matter activists, and their allied anti-fascists are the true defenders of what is worth defending in the Enlightenment. Revolution represents a leap in human emancipation, insofar as the revolutionaries realize the inherent universality of reason and the inevitable rationality of emancipation.

Saladdin Ahmed is the author of Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (SUNY Press, 2019). Currently, he is a visiting assistant professor of Political Science at Union College, Schenectady, New York. Twitter @SaladdinAhme. Website sladdinahmed.com

Notes

[1] The Black Consciousness movement in South Africa aimed to actualize something similar in terms of revolutionizing Blackness. For instance, the prominent revolutionary figure in the Black Consciousness movement, Steve Biko, states, “Being Black is not a matter of pigmentation — being Black is a reflection of a mental attitude.” Then he adds, “merely by describing yourself as Black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight all forces that seek to use your Blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being” (1987, 49).

[2] This is one of the common strategies in racist discourse (for more on this see Bonilla-Silva 2003; Van Dijk 2011).

[3] Philomena Essed is among the prominent scholars who has written on cultural racism. The following is worth quoting here:

[4] For an overview of discursive strategies of racism and how they can be detected and analyzed critically, see Wodak & Reisigl 2015. The source is also useful as an introduction of relevant works by other Critical Discourse Annalists.

Bibliography

Biko, Steve. 1987. I Write What I Like: Steve Biko; A Selection of his Writings. Edited by Aelred Stubbs C.R. Johannesburg: Heinemann.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Essed, Philomena. 1991. Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Fanon, Franz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto.

Van Dijk, Teun A. 2011. “Discourse Analysis of Racism.” In Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods, pp. 43-66. Edited by John H. Stanfield, II. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Wodak, Ruth & Martin Reisigl. 2015. “Discourse and Racism.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd edition, vol. 1. Edited by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, pp. 576- 596. West Sussex, UK: Willey Blackwell.