Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T05:28:29.015Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Racism and Nationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2021

Peter Rutland Open the ORCID record for Peter Rutland [Opens in a new window]
Peter Rutland*
Affiliation:
Government Department, Wesleyan University, CT, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article reviews the current scholarship around racism and nationalism, two of the mostly hotly debated issues in contemporary politics. Both racism and nationalism involve dividing humanity into groups and setting up some groups as innately superior to others. Until recently, racism and nationalism were both widely seen as unpleasant relics of times past, destined to disappear as the principles of equality and human rights become universally embraced. But both concepts have proved their resilience in recent years. Scholars have been devoting new attention to the “racialization” of ethnic and national identities in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, the regions that are the main focus of this journal. The article examines the prevailing approaches to understanding the terms “racism” and “nationalism,” which are distinct but overlapping categories of analysis and vehicles of political mobilization. Developments in genomics have complicated the relationship between perceptions of race as a purely social phenomenon. The essay explores the way racism and nationalism play out in two self-proclaimed “exceptional” political systems – the Soviet Union and the United States – which have played a prominent role in global debates about race and nation. It briefly discusses developments in other regions, such as the debate over multiculturalism in Europe.

Keywords

nationalismracismEastern Europepost-SovietSoviet Union
Type
State of the Field
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , July 2022 , pp. 629 - 642
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adida, Claire, Laitin, David, and Valfort, Marie-Anne. 2016. Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alba, Richard. 1992. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Alesina, Alberto, Devleeschauwer, Arnaud, Easterly, William, Kurlat, Sergio, and Wacziarg, Romain. 2003. “Fractionalization.” Journal of Economic Growth 8: 155–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexeev, Mikhail, and Hale, Henry. 2016. “Rallying around the Leader More Than the Flag.” In The New Russian Nationalism, edited by Kolstø, Pål and Blakkisrud, Helge, 192–220. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalisms. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Anderson, David G., Arzyutov, Dmitry V., and Alymov, Sergei S., eds. 2019. Life Histories of Etnos Theory in Russia and Beyond. Cambridge: Open World.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Association for the Study of Nationalities. 2020. “Racism and Nationalism,” (webinar), Debra Thompson, Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, Diego von Vacano, and Peter Rutland, July 23, 2020. https://nationalities.org/virtual-asn/racism-and-nationalism. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baber, Zahir. 2021. “‘Race Might be a Unicorn, but Its Horn Could Draw Blood’: Racialisation, Class and Racism in a Non-Western Context.” Critical Sociology. Published online ahead of print, February 11, 2021. doi: 10.1177/0896920521992093.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Catherine. 2018a. Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Catherine. 2018b. “Postcoloniality without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies.” Interventions 20 (6): 759–784.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balibar, Étienne. 2008. “Racism Revisited.” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 123 (5): 1630–1639.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balibar, Étienne, and Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1988. Race, Nation and Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Barth, Fredrik, ed. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. New York: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Bassin, Mark. 2016. The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Blaut, James M. 1992. “The Theory of Cultural Racism.” Antipode 24: 289–299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2017. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Bonnett, Alastair. 2018. “Multiple Racializations in a Multiply Modern World.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (7): 1199–1216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers. 2015. Grounds for Difference. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruk, S. I., and Apenchenko, V. S., eds. 1964. Atlas Narodov Mira. Moscow: Institut Etnografii Akademii Nauk.Google Scholar
Bryc, Katarzyna, Durand, Eric Y., Macpherson, J. Michael, Reich, David, and Mountain, Joanna L.. 2015. “The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States.” American Journal of Human Genetics 96 (1): 37–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chatterji, Angela, Hanson, Thomas, and Jaffrelot, Christophe, eds. 2019. Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism Is Changing India. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chin, Rita. 2017. The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Cleuziou, Juliette, and Direnberger, Lucia. 2016. “Gender and Nation in Post-Soviet Central Asia: From National Narratives to Women’s Practices.” Nationalities Papers 44 (2): 195–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2013. “What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct.’” The Atlantic, May 15, 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)Google Scholar
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. New York: One World.Google Scholar
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2018. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. New York: One World.Google Scholar
Connor, Walker. 1994. Ethnonationalism. The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edgar, Adrienne. 2019. “Children of Mixed Marriage in Soviet Central Asia.” In Ideologies of Race, edited by David, Rainbow, 208–233. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1967 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Farris, Sara. 2017. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fearon, James. 2003. “Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country.” Journal of Economic Growth 8: 195–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fields, Barbara, and Fields, Karen. 2012. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Fredrickson, George M. 2002. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fuentes, Agustin. 2016. Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis. 2014. Finding Your Roots: The Official Companion to the PBS Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Gellner, Ernst. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. New York: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 2020. Interview with Francis Wade, “Whiteness Just Ain’t Worth What It Used to Be.” The Nation, October 28, 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/paul-gilroy-interview/.Google Scholar
Greenfeld, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gupta, Alisha. 2020. “Teacher’s Famous Racism Experiment.” New York Times, July 4, 2020.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 1996. Race: The Floating Signifier. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Francine. 2005. Empire of Nations. Empire of Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hobsbawn, Eric, and Ranger, Terence. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Daniel J., and Washington, Samantha. 2020. “The Rise of Trump, the Fall of Prejudice? Tracking White Americans’ Racial Attitudes via a Panel Survey, 2008–2018.” Public Opinion Quarterly 84 (1): 119–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horowitz, Donald L. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (3): 22–49.10.2307/20045621CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaskulowski, Krzysztof. 2020. “The Politics of a National Identity Survey: Polishness, Whiteness, and Racial Exclusion.” Nationalities Papers, 1–14. Published online ahead of print, December 9, 2020. doi:10.1017/nps.2020.68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Richard. 2014. Social Identity. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaufmann, Eric. 2014. “Immigration and Integration in Britain: The Great Nationalism Debate.” Nationalities Papers 42 (6): 1072–1077.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaufmann, Eric. 2019. Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. New York: Abrams Press.Google Scholar
Kowner, Rotem, and Demel, Walter, eds. 2012. Race and Racism in Modern East Asia. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.Google Scholar
Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Laruelle, Marlene. 2012. Russian Eurasianism: Ideology of Empire. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Lind, Michael. 1995. The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Lipset, Seymour M. 1964. The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Lowes, Sara, Nunn, Nathan, Robinson, James A., and Weigel, Jonathan. 2015. “Understanding Ethnic Identity in Africa: Evidence from the Implicit Association Test (IAT).” American Economic Review 105 (5): 340–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Terry. 2001. Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–39. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marx, Anthony W. 1998. Making Race and Nation. A Comparison of the United States, South Africa and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mayer, Tamar, ed. 2012. Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCall, Leslie. 2008. “The Complex of Intersectionality.” In Intersectionality and Beyond, edited by Emily Grabham, Cooper, Davina, Krishnadas, Jane, and Herman, Didi, 49–76. London: Taylor and Francis.Google Scholar
McMahon, Richard. 2009. “Anthropological Race Psychology 1820–1945: A Common European System of Ethnic Identity Narratives.” Nations and Nationalism 15: 575–596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metz, Cade. 2021. “Who Is Making Sure the AI Machines Are Not Racist?” New York Times, March 15, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/technology/artificial-intelligence-google-bias.html?searchResultPosition=1. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)Google Scholar
Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Modood, Tariq. 2013. Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Morning, Ann. 2011. The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morning, Ann. 2018. “The Constructivist Concept of Race.” In Reconsidering Race: Social Science Perspectives on Racial Categories in the Age of Genomics, edited by Von Vacano, Diego and Suzuki, Kazuko, 50–61. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Morozova, Irina, Evsyukov, Alexey, Kon’kov, Andrey, Grosheva, Alexandra, Zhukova, Olga, and Rychkov, Sergey. 2012. “Russian Ethnic History Inferred from Mitochondrial DNA Diversity.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 147: 341–351.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Murray, Charles, and Hernstein, Richard. 1994. The Bell Curve. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Myers, B. R. 2010. The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves – and Why It Matters. New York: Melville House.Google Scholar
Naxidou, Eleonora. 2012. “Nationalism versus Multiculturalism: The Minority Issue in Twenty-First-Century Bulgaria.” Nationalities Papers 40 (1): 85–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noah, Trevor. 2016. Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. New York: One World.Google Scholar
Pap, Andras. 2021. “Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Identity, Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality by Law.” Nationalities Papers 49 (2): 213–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
PBS. 2020. “Race – The Power of an Illusion.” March 10. YouTube video, 57:02. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBBcim_sJhc. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)Google Scholar
Pew Center. 2020. “What Census Calls Us.” February 6, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/what-census-calls-us/. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)Google Scholar
Polynczuk‐Alenius, Kinga. 2020. “At the Intersection of Racism and Nationalism: Theorising and Contextualising the ‘Anti‐Immigration’ Discourse in Poland.” Nations and Nationalism, 1–16. Published online ahead of print. doi:10.1111/nana.12611.Google Scholar
Project Implicit. 2021. “About Us.” https://www.projectimplicit.net/. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)Google Scholar
Rainbow, David, ed. 2019. Ideologies of Race Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context. Montreal: McGill–Queens University Press.Google Scholar
Reeskens, Tim, and Hooghe, Marc. 2010. “Beyond the Civic–Ethnic Dichotomy: Investigating the Structure of Citizenship Concepts across Thirty‐Three Countries.” Nations and Nationalism 16: 579–597.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roman, Meredith. 2002. “Making Caucasians Black: Moscow since the Fall of Communism and the Racialization of Non-Russians" Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 18 (2): 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. 2018. The New Immigrant Whiteness. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Sahadeo, Jeff. 2019. Voices from the Soviet Edge. Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science. London: 4th Estate.Google Scholar
Shnirelman, Victor. 2009. “New Racism, Clash of Civilizations, and Russia.” In Russian Nationalism and the National Resurgence of Russia, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 125–144. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Shulman, Stephen. 2002. “Challenging the Civic/Ethnic and West/East Dichotomies in the Study of Nationalism.” Comparative Political Studies 35: 554–585.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Anthony D. 1987. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. New York: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Snyder, Jack. 2000. From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Die Philosophin 14 (27): 42–58.Google Scholar
St. Julian-Varnon, Kimberly. 2020. “A Voice from the Slavic Studies Edge: On Being a Black Woman in the Field.” ASEES Newsnet 60 (4). https://www.aseees.org/sites/default/files/downloads/august%202020.pdf. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)Google Scholar
Stalin, Joseph. 1913. Marxism and the National Question. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)Google Scholar
Stone, John, Dennis, Rutledge M., Rizova, Polly, and Hou, Xiaoshuo, eds. 2020. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stovall, Tyler. 2021. White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Telles, Edward. 2014. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Debra. 2016. The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomson, Jennifer. 2020. “Gender and Nationalism.” Nationalities Papers 48 (1): 3–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tolz, Vera. 2019. “Constructing Race, Ethnicity and Nationhood in Imperial Russia.” In Ideologies of Race, edited by David Rainbow, 29–58. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van den Berge, Pierre L. 1978. “Race and Ethnicity: A Sociobiological Perspective.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1 (4): 401–411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Varsa, Eszter. 2017. “‘The (Final) Solution of the Gypsy-Question’: Continuities in Discourses about Roma in Hungary, 1940s–1950s.” Nationalities Papers 45 (1): 114–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verkhovsky, Alexander. 2017. “Russian Nationalists at Low ebb.” In Russia before and after Crimea: Nationalism and Identity 2010–17, edited by Kolstø, Pål and Blakkisrud, Helge, 142–162. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Virdee, Satnam, and McGeever, Brendan. 2018. “Racism, Crisis, Brexit.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (10), 1802–1819.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitalis, Robert. 2015. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Von Vacano, Diego. 2012. “Las Casas and the Birth of Race.” History of Political Thought 33 (3): 401–426.Google Scholar
Von Vacano, Diego, and Suzuki, Kazuko, eds. 2018. Reconsidering Race: Social Science Perspectives on Racial Categories in the Age of Genomics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Walke, Anike. 2019. “Was Soviet Internationalism Anti-Racist?” In Ideologies of Race, edited by David Rainbow, 285–311. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press.Google Scholar
Weitz, Eric. 2002. “Racial Rolitics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges.” Slavic Review 61 (1): 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilderson, Frank B. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright.Google Scholar
Wolczuk, Kataryna, and Yemelianova, Galina. 2008. “When the West Meets the East: Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Eastern Europe.” Nationalities Papers 36 (2): 177–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yuval Davies, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Zakharov, Nikolay. 2015. Race and Racism in Russia. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zakharov, Nikolay, and Law, Ian. 2016. Post-Soviet Racisms. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Zvogbo, Kenebogilie, and Loken, Meredith. 2020. “Why Race Matters in International Relations,” Foreign Policy, June 19, 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race-matters-international-relations-ir/. (Accessed September 1, 2021.)Google Scholar