A cheer went up among the largely black studio audience of The Real McCoy when comedian Felix Dexter held up a copy of The Isis Papers. The book, by Black American psychologist Dr Frances Cress Welsing, has become a talking point amongst black people looking for a coherent explanation of racism. Paul Morris reviews the arguments in The Isis Papers and asks, do they really hold \u201cthe keys to the colours\u201d?<\/p>\n
it is not often that a book goes on sale in left wing and black community bookshops which argues that one section of humanity is genetically inferior to another, doomed to extinction, and that the world faces centuries of race war. Nor is it common to \ufb01nd a book advertised on a radical, \u201cright-on\u201d comedy show arguing that homosexuality is a disease and that women do not have the muscle mass to \ufb01ght the system.<\/p>\n
But Dr Frances Cress Welsing\u2019s book The Isis Papers contains all of this and more. In a collection of essays spanning more than twenty years Welsing spells out her theory of \u201ccolour confrontation\u201d and its implications for the struggle against racism in modern society. For Welsing it is white people who are genetically inferior; race war is predicated by genetics and there is a genetic root to all manifestations of racism\u2014social, political, economic and psychological.<\/p>\n
According to Welsing:<\/p>\n
\u201c. . . the quality of whiteness is a genetic inadequacy or a relative genetic de\ufb01ciency state, based on the genetic inability to produce the skin pigments of melanin (which is responsible for all skin color) . . . Color always annihilates (phenotypically and genetically speaking) the non-color, white. Black people possess the greatest color potential.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the basis of this genetic \u201cfact\u201d Welsing develops the theory that the needs of genetic survival cause white people to develop an \u201cuncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression\u201d against non-whites. Thus for Welsing:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe genocide of non-whites must be understood as a necessary tactic of a people (white) that is a minority of the world\u2019s population .\u00a0.\u00a0. the global white minority must act genocidally against people of color for the purpose of white genetic survival.\u201d<\/p>\n
This, Welsing claims, is the key to understanding not only all social and psychological behaviour (black and white), but the whole of human history to date. The rest of the book is an attempt to apply her \u201cpsycho-genetic\u201d theory to diverse instances of racism and its effects on black people.<\/p>\n
Welsing investigates the racist-phallic symbolism of the gun, ball sports and boxing in black culture, and investigates the role of drugs in inculcating passivity amongst black males in the USA. Indeed drugs, homosexuality and single mother families are criticised on the same level as racist lynchings and castration because they are seen as weapons to prevent black procreation.<\/p>\n
Behind each of the individual aspects of Welsing\u2019s analysis stands the claim that she has developed a \u201cuni\ufb01ed \ufb01eld theory\u201d modelled on Einstein\u2019s physics. Other theories of racism, she claims, cannot explain the whole experience. They compartmentalise its social, psychological and cultural aspects and do not relate it to the history of society as a whole.<\/p>\n
Most theories of racism, according to Welsing, also fail because they refuse to be determinist. They are the theoretical equivalents of the \u201cphysics of chance\u201d, which refuse to look for uni\ufb01ed or systematic causes of all aspects of the racist system.<\/p>\n
At one level it is easy to ridicule Welsing\u2019s theories. Many of the essays have dated palpably. Her critique of \u201cfeminised\u201d black male culture, \u201cthe braided and curled hair, the earrings and bracelets . . . the \ufb02owered underwear, the high heeled shoes with platforms\u201d could hardly apply to black street style today on either side of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n
But Welsing\u2019s theories have found a resonance amongst militants looking for more than just a series of slogans or partial political demands, looking precisely for a theory. So what is wrong with Welsing\u2019s theory?<\/p>\n
Let’s assume that she is right in asserting that whites are genetically \u201calbino mutants\u201d and that black skin colour is genetically predominant. This begs the question: why is \u201crace war\u201d between whites and non-whites genetically programmed? Why not a war between the tall and short peoples of the world? Why did the left handed people of the world not feel threatened by the genetically predominant right handed? Why did one of many genetic differences within humanity become the cause of a system of oppression?<\/p>\n
Welsing\u2019s explanation focuses on psychology. Being a \u201csmall minority\u201d whites felt beleaguered and were threatened with extinction if they didn\u2019t stop black\/white relationships. So they constructed a system to undermine the genetic potency of the black male.<\/p>\n
This theory just does not stand up to the test of facts. For a start it is unlikely that early human societies were aware of the relationship between sex and childbirth. Secondly there is ample evidence of spontaneous intermixing throughout history and especially throughout the history of earlier societies. Whilst there was prejudice, exclusionism and at times violent oppression against \u201calien\u201d peoples in pre-capitalist society, it did not take place simply or even predominantly between black and white.<\/p>\n
One of the weakest points of Welsing\u2019s theory\u2014but a vitally necessary element of it\u2014is that racial oppression is impossible between non-white peoples: \u201cthere is only one functioning racism in the known world\u2014white supremacy\u201d. Among \u201cnon-white\u201d peoples Welsing includes everybody from the Native Americans to the Japanese and the Spaniards. She challenges anyone \u201cto demonstrate the functioning supremacy of any of the world\u2019s non-white peoples over anyone\u201d.<\/p>\n
Well, the Spaniards massacred the indigenous peoples of South America. The Japanese held most of Asia under a reign of terror, systematically oppressing other nations\u2014for example Korea and China\u2014during the 1930s and 1940s. Idi Amin\u2019s Uganda practiced genocide and forced migration against its Asian population.<\/p>\n
Fear and loathing of other peoples did not assume the form of systematic racial oppression until the onset of a certain kind of society. It certainly has an effect on culture and psychology in that society, but the system of racial oppression and white supremacy is fundamentally determined socially, not genetically.<\/p>\n
It was a specific human society which chose the genetic features of skin colour as a dividing line between oppressed and oppressor. It was the capitalist system.<\/p>\n
As European capital expanded around the globe, it was obliged to create an ideological underpinning for the enslavement of Africans and the conquest of India and the Far East.<\/p>\n
Yet Welsing\u2019s theory abstracts completely from all forms of society and class. Welsing cannot see that her own ideas are determined by the very class society she refuses to consider. Welsing\u2019s theory takes black\/white con\ufb02ict as a natural, genetically programmed \u201cfact\u201d when it is socially determined.<\/p>\n
Onto this fundamentally \ufb02awed foundation she heaps piles of \u201cevidence\u201d. Everything from the white phallic Washington monument, to the Holocaust to \u201chomosexuality, rape, \ufb02ags, men\u2019s ties\u201d can be understood within the \u201cuni\ufb01ed \ufb01eld\u201d of Welsing\u2019s theory.<\/p>\n
But such a method has nothing in common with Einstein or any materialist, determinist scienti\ufb01c method. Real science, physical and social, seeks fundamental laws of motion in an analysis of concrete events themselves.<\/p>\n
Take Welsing\u2019s views on suntanning. Suntanning and cosmetics, which both add colour to the skin, represents for Welsing white people\u2019s psychological desire to be black.<\/p>\n
Maybe they do. But how then do we explain white people\u2019s desire, for most of the 18th and 19th centuries, to have white skins, to avoid the sun, to apply white cosmetics to their hair and faces? Both cultural practices were socially determined. White makeup in former centuries was a way of distinguishing the rarified and work-shy aristocracy from peasants whose grimy, outdoor lives often deeply coloured their skins.<\/p>\n
Welsing\u2019s theory cannot take account of such facts so it ignores them. Instead of a coherent, uni\ufb01ed theory of racism we have a non-theory, \ufb01lled with all the reactionary prejudices of a middle class American shrink.<\/p>\n
So what are the strengths of Welsing\u2019s book? At a political level the theory contains much that will be attractive to militants in\ufb02uenced by black nationalism. Its concentration on changing black people\u2019s \u201csubmissive\u201d attitude to racial oppression echoes a common theme throughout much of modern US black resistance writing:<\/p>\n
\u201cBlack women must learn to rear sons who will learn from the cradle that their major function as men is not to get a good job and a \ufb01ne car but to defend, protect and support their people (in that order) even should death be the consequence .\u00a0.\u00a0. There will be good jobs and self respect (if not \ufb01ne cars) once the people are liberated. There will be no true self respect until that task is completed\u201d<\/p>\n
Welsing\u2019s study of the Holocaust also attempts to combat the idea that racial \u201cassimilation\u201d or the integration of a few middle class blacks into white society can solve the threat of racist genocide. The experience of the Jews in twentieth century Europe proves, for Welsing, that:<\/p>\n
\u201cNo matter how much you may mix with and intermarry with people who classify themselves as white .\u00a0.\u00a0. no matter how many doctors, lawyers, judges, professors, scholars you produce, no matter how much money, diamonds and gold you obtain; if you are classified as non-white under conditions of white supremacy domination when the hammer of white supremacy falls, you will be under that hammer.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the ideas of struggle, not submission, and the impossibility of a solution short of destroying the racist system, revolutionary socialists can agree. But Welsing\u2019s book does not give a coherent guide for the struggle to smash that system. On solutions to the race war, she muses:<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps some psychiatrist will develop a method of mass psychotherapy . . . to help whites become comfortable with their color and their numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n
But since she rightly cannot see this happening, she concludes that a continuation of the war is inevitable. Since she rejects rioting as counterproductive, and the picket line as posturing, we are left with only the individual struggle against male \u201cfeminisation\u201d, against drugs, homosexuality and the single parent family within the black community itself. There is no strategy for collective resistance, and there cannot be one. The entire argument has nothing but reactionary conclusions.<\/p>\n
Marxists do have a \u201cuni\ufb01ed\u201d theory of racism. We understand that it is rooted in capitalist society, in the decaying imperialist system which condemns humanity to national wars, racial oppression and periodic racial genocide.<\/p>\n
Our theory can link that to individual cultural manifestations and its effects on the oppressed themselves, without recourse to reactionary anti-gay ideas, the depiction of women as physically weak child rearers, or the appropriation and inversion of 19th century white racist ideas. It can do so precisely because it understands the different laws of motion of different levels of human activity\u2014genetic, social, political, psychological\u2014and does not attempt to \ufb01t the facts of all these activities into one, crackpot, genetic theory.<\/p>\n
Also, Marxism, unlike The Isis Papers, contains a solution. It is not to hope fondly that assimilation will mollify the oppressor. Nor is it the pursuit of wealth by a black middle class. It is the revolutionary integration of black and white working class people\u2014into the workers\u2019 movement and the struggle to destroy capitalism. The Isis Papers do not contain \u201cthe keys to the colors\u201d. Those who want a coherent theory of racism, a systematic refusal to compromise with the racist system and a struggle for its total destruction will have to look to revolutionary socialism.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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