Samuel Francis
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The Origins of "Racism" |
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American Renaissance
May 1999 |
the curious beginnings
of a useless word
The Oxford English Dictionary is a multivolume
reference work that is one of Western scholarship's most remarkable achievements -- the
standard dictionary of the English language on what are known as "historical
principles". Unlike most dictionaries, the OED also provides information
on the first historical appearance and usage of words. The range of the
erudition in the OED is often astounding, but for AR readers, one of its
most interesting entries is for the word "racism".
According to the second edition (1989) of the OED, the earliest known
usage of the word "racism" in English occurred in a 1936 book by the American
"fascist", Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism. The second
usage of the term in English that the OED records is in the title of a
book originally written in German in 1933 and 1934 but translated into
English and first published in 1938 -- Racism by Magnus Hirschfeld,
translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Since Hirschfeld died in 1935, before
the publication of Dennis' book the following year, and had already used
the word extensively in the text and title of his own book, it seems only
fair to recognize him rather than Dennis as the originator of the word
"racism". In the case of the word "racist" as an adjective, the OED ascribes
the first known usage to Hirschfeld himself. Who was Magnus Hirschfeld
and what did he have to tell us about "racism"?
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German-Jewish medical scientist
whose major work was in the field of what came to be known as "sexology" -- the
scientific study of sex. Like Havelock Ellis in England and Alfred Kinsey
in the United States, Hirschfeld was not only among the first to collect
systematic information about sexuality but also was an apostle of sexual
"liberation". His major work was a study of homosexuality, but he also
published many other books, monographs, and articles dealing with sex.
He wrote a five-volume treatise on "sexology" as well as some 150 other
works and helped write and produce five films on the subject.
It is fair to say that his works were intended to send a message–that
traditional Christian and bourgeois sexual morality was repressive, irrational,
and hypocritical, and that emancipation would be a major step forward.
His admiring translators, Eden and Cedar Paul, in their introduction to
Racism,
write of his "unwearying championship of the cause of persons who, because
their sexual hormonic functioning is of an unusual type, are persecuted
by their more fortunate fellow-mortals." Long before the "sexual revolution"
of the 1960s, Magnus Hirschfeld was crusading for the "normalization" of
homosexuality and other abnormal sexual behavior.
Hirschfeld was the founder of an Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin
and helped organize "sexology" on an international scale. In 1922, he was
physically attacked and almost killed by anti- Semites in Munich. In May,
1933, the Nazis closed down his "Institute of Sexual Science" and Hirschfeld
fled to France, where he lived until his death in 1935.
Racism is largely devoted to a highly polemical "refutation"
of some of the main racial ideologies and theories of the 19th and 20th
centuries. The writers whom Hirschfeld criticized, aside from his favorite
target of the National Socialists themselves, were figures like Arthur
de Gobineau, Vacher de La-Pouge, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and others
generally denounced today as "pseudo-scientists". In fact, that is an inappropriate
term. Some of them were not trying to write as scientists at all but rather
as political theorists, while others are better described as pre-scientific
writers on race who worked with inadequate information, concepts, methodology,
and terminology. While Hirschfeld may have been correct in rejecting their
more egregious errors, his sneering at them for these mistakes is rather
like ridiculing Copernicus and Kepler because they continued to accept
some erroneous ideas from medieval astronomy.
Even when Hirschfeld is right in his critique of the early race theorists,
it is often because he has chosen easy targets. His "refutation" of "racism"
is largely centered on irrelevant common-places that even extreme exponents
of racial differences might readily acknowledge–that all human beings are
part of the same species and can interbreed, that blood transfusions can
take place between races, that "there is no such thing as a pure race,"
that the races are identical in the vast majority of physical characteristics,
that cephalic index is not a meaningful measurement of intelligence or
character, etc. Yet his "scientific" evidence is often merely anecdotal
or simply his own opinion asserted as unquestioned truth.
In another section, he recounts the names of those he considers the
70 most outstanding figures in world history and announces that "all such
lists, when made without bias, will show that persons of genius and persons
of outstanding talent are not set apart from the ruck by any colour of
their eyes, by a peculiar shape of the skull or the nose, by any 'ethnological'
characteristics whatever. What is decisive in human beings is not race
but individuality." It does not seem to occur to Hirschfeld that all but
about 8 or 9 of the 70 world-historical figures on his list are white Europeans.
There are no Negroes and only two Asians (Confucius and Sun Yat Sen).
It is interesting that for all his contempt for "racism", Hirschfeld never
once mentions IQ studies or the considerable psychometric evidence about
race and intelligence that was already available even in the 1930s. Most
of Hirschfeld's polemic is aimed at the proponents of intra-European racial
differences (Nordics, Alpines, Mediterraneans, Dinarics, etc.) and not
at differences between whites and other major races (though he steadfastly
denies such differences as well). Curiously, he never cites the work of
Franz Boas and his disciples against "racism", though that work was available
in Europe at the time, nor does he invoke the ideas of the Frankfurt School,
though Hirschfeld's own claim that "racism" is rooted in fear, loss of
self-esteem, and other social and psychological pathologies resembles the
ideas the Frankfurt School was formulating.
Nor, despite Hirschfeld's own Jewish background and the Nazi threat
to Jews, does he seem preoccupied with anti-Semitism; in one or two passages
he criticizes Jews themselves for their own ethnocentrism and faults Zionism
for having created a new "race hatred" between Jews and Arabs. Moreover,
Hirschfeld is a stout defender of eugenics, though not on racial lines,
and he even has a brief chapter exploring a distinction he calls "Gobinism
or Galtonism" –- that is, attacking the ideas of French "racist" Arthur de
Gobineau and defending those of Francis Galton, who coined the word "eugenics"
and pioneered its development. Today most critics of "racism" would lump
Galton and Gobineau together rather than distinguish between them.
As a serious critique of the view that socially significant natural
differences between the races exist, Hirschfeld's book is a failure, and
even as a polemic against some of the more politicized and unverified claims
about race made a century or more ago, it is weak. The importance of the
book is not so much its content, however, as what it tells us about the
word "racism" and how the enemies of white racial consciousness have developed
and deployed it for their own purposes.
Hirschfeld describes his own political ideals as "Pan-Humanism," a version
of political, cultural, and racial universalism. The Pauls themselves write,
"we think that the readers of Racism will detect a very definite
orientation to the Left. . . . [Hirschfeld] was one who fully realized
that sexual reform is impossible without a preliminary economic and political
revolution."
In Racism, Hirschfeld offers what is essentially a definition
of "Pan-Humanism": "The individual, however close the ties of neighborhood,
companionship, family, a common lot, language, education, and the environment
of nation and country, can find only one dependable unity within which
to seek a permanent spiritual kinship–that of humanity-at-large, that of
the whole human race." With one exception, he is unsparing in his denunciations
of the ethnocentric loyalties of nations, races, and cultures: "Always
and everywhere, except in Soviet Russia, xenophobia, xenophobia, xenophobia."
Later, he informs us, "It may be too early to speak, but perhaps the problem
of nationalities and races has already been solved on one-sixth of the
land-surface of the globe [i.e., Stalin's Russia]."
"Racism", therefore, is a term originating on the left, and has been
so defined and loaded with meanings the left wants it to have that it cannot
now be used by the supporters of white racial consciousness for any constructive
purpose. Anyone who uses the term to describe himself or his own views
has already allowed himself to be maneuvered onto his opponents' ground
and has already lost the debate. He may try to define the word differently,
but he will need to spend most of his time explaining that he does not
mean by it what everyone else means. As a term useful for communicating
ideas that the serious supporters of white racial consciousness wish to
communicate, the term is useless, and it was intended by those who developed
it that it be useless for that purpose.
But understanding the origins of the word "racism" in Hirschfeld's polemic
also makes clear the uselessness of the word for any other purpose. No
one seems ever to have used the word to describe his own ideas or ideas
with which he agrees; its only application has been by the enemies of the
ideas it purports to describe, and hence it has no objective meaning apart
from its polemical usage. If no one calls his own ideas "racism" and its
only application is to a body of ideas considered to be untrue and evil,
then it has no use other than as a kind of fancy curse word, the purpose
of which is simply to demonize anyone who expresses the ideas it is supposed
to describe.
It is clear that Magnus Hirschfeld himself harbored deep ideological,
professional, and personal animosities against those to whom he applied
the word, and those animosities may have extended to the entire society
that throughout his career he associated with sexual repression and which
he wanted replaced by a kind of global communism under the label of "Pan-Humanism".
Whatever the flaws or virtues of his polemic against "racism", his own
opposition to racial consciousness was neither entirely rational nor disinterested.
It is time that the enemies of racial, national, and cultural consciousness
like Hirschfeld and the Frankfurt School cease to be able to claim a monopoly
on rationality and sanity and that the obsessions and motivations that
seem to shape their own ideologies and political behavior be subjected
to the same scrutiny they apply to the societies and peoples whom their
thinking could destroy.
Samuel Francis, a syndicated columnist in the USA, passed away on February 15, 2005
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