Our understanding of race and racism is constantly evolving. Countless occasions in recent years, coupled with the election of former President Donald Trump and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, have catalyzed more debates about race. Attention is now focused on critical race theory, and many oppose the prospect of teaching it in schools. In what is a race-obsessed country, the concept of race has gone through many iterations. Lisa Betty is a historian and educator who uses her social media platform to engage with her audience in a culturally critical dialogue. In this interview, Betty sat down to talk about how race has traditionally been used as a tool of exploitation and how whiteness has evolved over time.
Janice Gassam Asare: What is race?
Lisa Betty: Race is a social, economic, and political structure that organizes society through a hierarchy. There are very few biological differences between human beings, yet the history of race and racialization based on ancestry, physical characteristics, etc. , was established to make sense of the complex societies that normalized colonialism, European domination, and slavery. The enslavement and subjugation of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and mainland Africa has played a vital role in the progress of the race. For example, in the early sixteenth century, Spanish slaveholder-turned-priest Bartolomé de las Casas advocated for the protection of the human rights of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean by racializing indigenous Africans as more apt for slavery and exploitation. . . Historically, race is based on hierarchy and exploitation.
The racial categories we perceive today—white, black, Asian, Native American—evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as clinical and sociopolitical theories of the Enlightenment. German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach divided humans into five other species: Caucasians, Mongolians, and Malays. , Ethiopian and American. In the descriptions of those other five species, some races were more humane than others, and the Caucasian, or white/European, category was at the top. Enlightenment thinkers were directly and indirectly connected to the exploitation of Africans. and black slaves, which is applicable in the progression of their “clinical” theories. The breed has been very tough for over 500 years.
Asare: How has the concept of whiteness evolved over time in the United States?
Betty: Whiteness is related to freedom. Especially the era of slavery, from 1619 to 1865 in the United States. Being white meant you weren’t enslaved as a Black user or an Indigenous African. The slavery code legislation is set to say that the black user is equated with slavery and African ancestry and the white user is equated with freedom. Racial legislation and sociopolitical meanings are deeply rooted in manifest destiny and anti-Indigenousness in America. Nell Irvin Painter’s White History is one of the most productive resources for understanding how whiteness has been replaced over time. . . Whiteness has been framed around capitalism and concepts of innate racial superiority. In the early 19th century, being “American” meant being white/Caucasian of European descent, which was now different from being European or a European immigrant. Academia and higher education have also played a pivotal role in creating whiteness.
First, when we think about immigration to the United States. . . Historically, we’ve had German and Irish immigrants arrive in gigantic numbers, especially in the 19th century. These were teams of permanent immigrants who were not necessarily welcomed or perceived as American and “white. “”Whiteness just didn’t take place when we arrived. . . immigrants from northwestern Europe were explained as “old strains” and new immigrants from central, eastern, and southern Europe entered a political context centered on whiteness, assimilation, and acculturation. Most of those immigrants were Catholics and Jews and came from countries such as Austria-Hungary, Italy and Poland. These immigrants have become accustomed to expressing conceptions of whiteness based on the fight against blackness and xenophobia.
In the U.S. with targeted anti-Asian immigration laws of the 1910s and 1920s that went beyond the Chinese Exclusion Act, the boundaries of whiteness were also pushed by Asian ethnicities that found obvious holes in racial logic. In the Thind case of 1923, Bhagat Thind from India, pushed the courts for a white classification and U.S. citizenship due to his high-caste Aryan ethnicity. We have to remember that in addition to Nordic, Aryan, which is a kind of Indo-European collapsing of whiteness, was a part of political and scientific theories of the time. The Supreme Court ruled against Bhagat Thind, ultimately codifying the boundaries of whiteness as definitively European and solely assimilable to white Americanness. Very soon European immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were determined as unfit immigrants based on racialized logic, and overwhelmingly barred from immigrating. Additionally, the Aryan category was used within Nazi Germany to ascribe a particular type of a racialized hierarchy and racialized whiteness using United States racial and sterilization laws to targeted ethno-religious identities and ethnicities such as Jewish and Romani people and Germans of African descent, and led to genocide during World War II.
Asare: Is the difference between race, ethnicity, and nationality important?Why or why not?
Betty: The distinction between race, ethnicity, and nationality is of utmost importance, but is very much misunderstood. Critical race theory would be integral in understanding these differences particularly as it has played out in the U.S. legal system. With ethnicity one shares a common language, religion, or culture. Nationality is one’s place of birth, citizenship, and/or state provided identification that connects a person to a specific bordered nation. Race is foremost one’s phenotype…it is what people see and how you are classified by the state and by people in your immediate environment. Race is also personal or familial identification based on ancestry. Race is based on histories of race, racial categories, racial thinking and policies. Ethnicity, nationality, and race are collapsed into structures of racism, anti-blackness, anti-Asian-ness, anti-indigeneity, colorism, etc.
Asare: How do you think whiteness will evolve in the future?
Betty: When framed, whiteness is pretty scary because… it’s always necessary for those same people to participate in anti-blackness as a rite of passage to enter or move up within whiteness. Be participatory and then you can enter whiteness in a legitimate type of way. That’s the scary part of whiteness. It’s not just a specific qualification on the census. For the future of whiteness, I see many things. I see people who are racialized as white phenotypically and have identified as white throughout their lifetime and generationally opting out of the white category. This is not in an ‘unsettling’, anti-racist, decolonial way, but solely to self-absolve from systemic accountability, while still sustaining and maintaining power, privilege, and positionality. I think the world will become more racialized while being color evasive.
In addition, other geopolitical regions are migrating to the U. S. They are explained within the racial systems of the U. S. U. S. This is evident for ethnicities and nationalities in the Middle East and North Africa that are classified as “white” under U. S. Census legislation and categories. U. S. But complicate this category with culture, Arab ethnicity, the fact of being Muslim, and the fact that there are other black people in those spaces with a not unusual ethnicity and nationality. We will also have to be aware that the fight against blackness is endemic in this region and that racialization is also a component of the design of these societies.
We have to ask ourselves: who formed these categories?What kind of society do these categories seek to organize us in?Educational systems have socialized generations of other people about race without instructing them about race. And we want critical race theory and whiteness studies to allow us to perceive all of this.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.