Denying space: a tool of racial oppression of postmodern Western society

Insight by Youssef Siher, researcher

When talking about Western liberal democracies, it would be important to look at the way they have developed. They, in fact, thrive on a complex capitalist-colonial system, a key part of which is the repression - on a racial basis - of the Other. Violence has always been - and always will be - inherent in relations between human beings. The racialization of violence, on the other hand, is a distinctly European phenomenon, born in a very specific historical and cultural context, usually delineated in the 15th century and continuing to be perfected to this day. 

If xenophobia, “the general aversion to what is other,” is passive, that is, it acts mainly on a psychological and physical level on those who manifest it, racism, on the other hand, is an attitude of discrimination against a very specific subject, fueled by a preponderant substratum of ethnic-cultural superiorism and based on pseudoscientific theorems that tend to make the act morally acceptable. Racism is thus active, in the sense that it primarily touches, on a psychological and physical level, those who suffer it, taking the form of abstract or actual violence. Xenophobia therefore is an intrinsic condition of human beings. Racism is, on the other hand, a specific product of the modern West. Indeed, African-American scholar Frank Snowden, best known for his study of black people in classical antiquity, explains that despite awareness of color differences in the ancient world, neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans conceived of anything resembling a theory of racial superiority.

But how does racism manifest itself? One of the most obvious forms is the limitation of spaces, whether physical, psychological, economic, political, cultural or intellectual, concrete or abstract. Indeed, the earliest modern racist theories have their roots in the 15th-century Iberian Peninsula, where the concept of limpieza de sangre was developed to give an ideological basis to legitimize the inquisition, differentiating qualitatively between “old Christians” and “new Christians,” the latter descended from Jews and Muslim converts. This same Manichean system was later transposed to the context of early European colonialism in the Americas, where the Iberian colonizers built vast empires at the cost of equally vast genocides, and where the first forms of racial violence were experienced. 

Thus, the black/white paradigm, understood as a method of separation between what is European (gente de razón) and what is indigenous (gente sin razón), began to strengthen. One of the key aspects of early European colonialism in the Americas was the Catholic missions, so much so that Spanish expansion was summed up with the motto “gold, God, glory.” Gold represented economic interests; God represented the Christian mission; glory, on the other hand, implied the assumed crucial role for the white-Christian man (the conquistador) as an actor in history, pragmatically conceptualizing colonization as an “obligatory” divine task that had to be accomplished in order to bring the still untamed human beasts closer to the light of reason.

However, the black/white paradigm was perfected as a modern concept only after the eighteenth-century period of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. During this pivotal historical moment for Europe, the “racial” distinction between Europeans came to an end. Dismantled the ancien régime, there are no longer nobles and commoners. There are only human beings, all equal before the law, and therefore all acceptable within the collective space, as well as all full actors in the res publica. Modern bourgeois society is born. But this process, which ends the “racial” relationship among whites, transposes the latter to a broader context that finds in colonialism a fertile ground in which to perpetuate itself. The privileged all become colonizers at the expense of the societies subjected to them. Thus, the concept of mission civilisatrice, aimed at giving moral meaning to the bourgeois notion of “equality,” is developed and strengthened. For if we are all equal, how is it possible to accept and justify colonial violence and the enslaving subjugation of entire peoples? The answer is the dehumanization of the colonized subject.

Modern racism, also referred to as “scientific” racism, is thus the product of the historical period of the French Revolution, during which the ancient criterion of class segregation entered into full crisis, paving the way to criteria based on philosophical and pseudoscientific theories aimed at the legitimization of the superiority of the white race over others. A personality of this period and a pioneer in the legitimization of racist thought, as well as a theorist of the Aryan race and an assiduous bearer of colonial and racist positions, is the French philosopher and writer Ernest Renan. Indeed, Renan explained that “nature has made a race of laborers, it is the Chinese race [...] a race of workers of the earth, it is the Negro [...], a race of masters and soldiers, it is the European race.” It is therefore not surprising to find that the concepts of equality, freedom and democracy were not theorized to apply to non-Whites.

In order to maintain the value system that had come into being in the nineteenth century, Europeans therefore had to project their systems of racial oppression onto other peoples, having on their side the moral legitimacy they needed in order not to feel “hypocritical” in disapproving of their value systems while carrying out the worst violence against entire non-European populations. This stark Manichaeism could only be made explicit in the colonies, while the metropolises were to remain “safe spaces.” Thus, spaces and boundaries were created, erected and maintained through the use of violence and repression. Geographical boundaries between states become increasingly marked. Immigration is restricted, emigration encouraged. The goal: to colonize and Westernize the entire planet, with the ultimate goal of making it all a “safe space” for whites. Thus, were born the first penal colonies, concentration camps, the first socially accepted racial segregations. In the colonial context, cities were divided into areas inhabited by settlers and areas inhabited by the colonized. 

This hostile separation of space was predominantly found in all cases of settlement colonialism, where the restriction of space to indigenous peoples was-and still is-underlying the logic of the elimination of the native. In the United States, indigenous spaces were compressed into “Indian reservations,” in South Africa and Namibia into “Bantustans”, in Palestine with the creation of fictitious territorial entities such as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

However, the logic behind the hostile separation of space is not purely limited to the colonial context. It is in fact an everyday reality that still lingers in Western metropolises. In European societies, in fact, there are exclusive, segregated spaces inaccessible to non-Whites: these are the best schools, private universities, academic and cultural circles, apex job positions, and the leadership of power parties. Access is reserved only for those who conform to the value obligations established by bourgeois society, that is, only if one Europeanizes oneself and becomes white, completely abandoning one's identity. Colonial mentality, that is, the complex psychological system that a racialized person unconsciously adopts to self-determine himself as “white”, is the basis of this “integration” into European society. 

A false way out aimed at accepting and overcoming that state of cognitive dissonance that afflicts every racialized person in acontext of colonial domination or where hegemony belongs to a group, different from one’s own, that applies racist tools in its relations with the other. As the French-Caribbean psychiatrist Franz Fanon explained, “it is evident that what divides the world is first of all the fact of belonging or not belonging to a given species, to a given race. In colony, the economic infrastructure is pure superstructure. The cause is the consequence: one is rich because one is white, one is white because one is rich.” The same concept is applicable to Western metropolises.

In postmodern Western society, the space most denied to non-whites is that of citizenship. One is not a citizen until one passes linguistic, ideological, economic, political and social “tests.” And one is not fully a citizen even when one obtains said “citizenship.” The true citizen is - and always will be - the white person. The banlieues, suburbs and ghetto-neighborhoods are all spaces created to separate citizens from non-citizens, whites from non-whites. A veritable system of socially accepted apartheid in the eyes of postmodern bourgeois society. To make this repressive practice conceivable within the rule of law, the old evergreen tools of dehumanization and inferiorization of marginalized groups are used.

In addition to intra-social spatial limitations, in the European context, there is also a much more pronounced boundary of clear separation between us and them: the Mediterranean Sea. European anti-migratory policies are the most visible example of denial of space to the Other. A segregation of continental proportions, denying a priori access to “safe space” to the other simply because it is other. Those who manage to overcome this barrier remain hostile subjects all the same. And that is where the complementary mechanisms of segregation come into play, from hotspots to arbitrary detention and repatriation centers. Repression is even harsher the moment the subject in question dissociates from the system, becoming, according to the system itself, a nuisance to be eliminated. What matters is the rapid expulsion from the white society, regardless of whether there has been actual commission of any crime. A person is punished in advance. However, this is only the most dystopian cog in a system of racial repression that sustains the entire Western postmodern society.