Race/Ethnicity
Jean Popeau
A dichotomy is associated with a division of a class or category into two mutually exclusive subclasses, yet race and ethnicity are not popularly regarded as mutually exclusive concepts. In the field of multi-ethnic education it has apparently become standard practice to substitute the term 'ethnicity' for 'race' in publications carrying government approval: 'ethnicity' is the more polite and less controversial term for 'race' in the thinking of certain bureaucrats. Where matters of classification according to ethnic origins are concerned for official enquiries, ethnicity is often regarded as determined by geography, by country of origin rather than 'race', thus giving ethnicity a geographical connotation not usually associated with 'race'. However, historically the major 'races' are associated with the natural peopling of certain parts of the earth: Africans, vaguely with the area south of the Sahara; Asians, or 'the yellow race', with the continent of Asia; whites or Europeans with the Caucasus (a geographical area comprising the mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas). Ethnicity is popularly seen as a matter of cultural plus geographical cohesion: 'ethnies' live in tightly knit cultural groups who sometimes seek to defend their territory by establishing boundaries with other 'ethnies' - boundaries which are sometimes fiercely defended, as in the former Yugoslavia, though they may form the area across which commerce between groups occurs (Barth 1969). 'Ethnicity' is associated with cultural unity, a cohesive Weltanschauung which seeks to define itself in relation to other value systems proclaimed by different groups.
In this chapter I shall examine the concepts of 'race' and 'ethnicity' individually, prior to an examination of the possible dichotomies between them.
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RACE
The term 'race' is often placed within cautionary inverted commas to indicate the dubious scientific meaning of the concept. Modern genetics avoids reference to 'races': there has been so much sexual interaction between human populations that it would be meaningless to talk of absolute divisions between 'races'. The distribution of hereditary physical traits does not recognize clear divisions between populations: there is often greater variation within a 'racial' group than between two different groups.
Although based upon a 'biological fiction', the huge sociological ramifications of 'race' are however generally recognized by theorists. Howard Winant declares that 'race has become a fundamental organizing principle of contemporary social life' (1994: 270), and many social scientists would recognize some value in Winant's statement when faced with raging controversies surrounding race and intelligence, race and criminality, race and the ability to hurl a cricket ball at ninety miles an hour. The complexity which is 'race' does not deter the adoption of popular and journalistic assumptions based upon some vague notion of the importance of 'race', while the difficulties of the issue seem to fuel, rather than add an element of caution to, such opinions. Thus Winant's declaration of the fundamental importance of race for modernity is simply the reiteration of a social fact. In the metropolitan areas of the USA, France and Great Britain, to name but three countries, 'race' has begun to assume great categorial importance even where it is disguised by reference to 'ethnicity', 'multiculturalism', 'ethnic minorities' and 'other cultures'.
In order to appreciate the importance of race in Euro-American culture, it is necessary to examine the history of the concept. The debate surrounding race in Britain, Robert Young (1995: 118) notes, was initially based on liberal ideas of universal brotherhood stemming from the Enlightenment, and Biblical notions placing the origins of all races in one source. The diversity amongst peoples was explained in terms of culture rather than race. The values of the abolitionists of slavery and this liberal theorizing on race coincided with, and was strengthened by, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. However developments in the British Empire, and elsewhere, with racial themes, saw the political tenor of the debate move from paternalistic liberalism to a hard-edged racial superiority. The Indian 'Mutiny' of 1857, the American Civil War (1861-5) and the Jamaican Insurrection of 1865 were incidents in whose scenario race was important. The publication of Robert Knox's The Races of Men in 1850, which Robert Young terms 'the first substantively racialist scientific work in Britain' (1995: 119), saw the entry of 'race' as a concept into the popular imagination in Britain kindled by the new theory of 'scientific racism'. Similar developments had taken place on the European continent with the publication of works by Gobineau of France and  Cams  of Germany,  all  treating  race  as  a  fundamental  cultural,
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sociological and ultimately scientific explanation of human differences. 'Scientific' explanation had come to replace theological explanation in the theory of 'race':
The new racialism could be described, therefore, as the overdetermined product of the conjuncture of a loss of belief in Biblical explanation and its replacement by apparently authoritative scientific laws, a sense of European cultural and technological pre-eminence, accompanied by working class unrest at home, revolution and colonial rebellion abroad and a civil war in the United States focussed on the issue of slavery. (1995: 120)
The term 'race' in its modern sense is associated with the publication of Gobineau's Essai sur ľinégalité des races humaines which appeared in 1853-5. Collette Guillaumin (1991: 10) notes that Gobineau gives no definition of 'race' in the work yet his idea of 'race' came to dominate the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gobineau had been familiar with the writing of his British and American contemporaries who had linked race with history, as well as those who, like the American craniologist S.G. Morton, used empirical science in the formulation of their racial theories. Gobineau's theory differed from that of Josiah Nott, Henry Hotze and other polygenesists in its propagation of the fertility of hybrids, the result of the interbreeding of the different races. The racialist ideas of the American and British theorists depended on the belief in the infertility of hybrids for its thesis that the races were really separate species - so separate that hybridity was bound to be disastrous. As with most racialist ideas, fact was never a barrier to the popularization of tendentious theorizing: the fact that hybridity flourished in the colonies of Britain and the slave plantations of America did not affect the fervour with which this theory was propounded. Gobineau's theory was a peculiar mixture of negative and positive in its attitude to hybridity. For Gobineau hybridity was bound to lead to degeneration yet the production of civilization depended on it.
In Gobineau's system the sexualization of race manifests as the division of peoples into 'masculine' and 'feminine' races; the strong 'masculine' races (white Aryans) are associated with utilitarianism, materialism, technological progress, aggressive conquest; the 'feminine' races (black and yellow) with intellectuality and spirituality. Civilization or culture depends upon the mixing of the 'masculine' and 'feminine' races initiated by the sexual attraction of the white males for black and yellow females, to the ennoblement of the latter. The mixture of the white and black races produces great art and literature.
The prospects for miscegenation filled Gobineau with fascinated horror despite his recognition of its inevitability; for him, it was bound to lead to cosmopolitan metropolises, democracy, anarchy and violence. All civilization emanates from the white male's tendency to fuse with females of other
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races, a process which leads inevitably to the degeneration of the white race in the very production of civilization.
The concept of 'race' as a mixture of phenotypical, mental and social characteristics passed in Europe from Gobineau's idea to the advent of Nazi ideology and their inauguration of the 'Nuremberg Laws' which instituted the concept of 'race' in the German legal system (a similar concept was to be followed later by the South Africans in their apartheid system). This action of the Nazis led to a debate about 'race' amongst social scientists, who, while disowning the Nazi connection between phenotype, culture, and psychology, attempted to redefine the centuries-old meaning of the concept. Collette Guillaumin (1991: 11) notes that the American Anthropological Association's declaration of 1938, for example, implicitly rejects the connection between phenotype, culture and psychology. The debate which followed the dissolution of the Nazi regime saw the publication of UNESCO's 1978 document Declaration sur la race, which attempted a definitive examination of the meaning of 'race'. The document rejected popular and common-sense notions while accepting that there is such a 'thing' as 'race'.
The phenomenon of class racism suggests that the whole notion of 'race' may have begun as a prejudice based upon class before it became one based upon phenotype and colour. 'Class racism' began in Europe as a feeling of superiority by the privileged and educated classes who advocated policies to 'stop the lower orders breeding defectives' and to promote the breeding of the 13681' members of 'the race'; this feeling later manifested as the theory and political movement of 'eugenics' (Hayes 1994: 180). In Britain such figures as Francis Galton and Marie Stopes believed that the 'genius' of the 'British race' should be perpetuated in its eminent families, and the 'lower classes', representing the 'inferior' members of society, should be discouraged from breeding and 'mongrelizing' the population. Francis Galton believed in the relationship between phenotypical and mental characteristics, that human beings could be classified according to the upper limits of their physical capacity, and that 'if this be the case with stature, then it will be true as regards every other physical feature - as circumference of head, size of brain, weight of grey matter, number of brain fibres, &c; and thence, by a step on which no physiologist will hesitate, as regards mental capacity' (Galton 1869, quoted by Nicky Hayes 1994: 183). Only a brief step is required to make the connection between physical, mental and cultural characteristics, manifesting as a belief in 'race', and the belief, like Galton's, in the hereditary transmission of 'racial characteristics' with the accompanying idea that only the aristocracy can carry the 'best' characteristics of the nation. Indeed, as Guillaumin (1991: 12) notes, in France until the eighteenth century 'race' was a term used to refer to the great families of the aristocracy; no one outside the royal lineage could be said to belong to a 'race'. The nineteenth century  saw  the  formulation  of today's  popular  association between
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phenotype and mental and cultural characteristics which is vaguely known as 'race'.
Gobineau was instrumental in the development of the concept of racism from 'class racism', that is, racism within the same population or ethnic group, to a racism based on colour, or phenotype, across populations and continents. According to this formulation, civilization is as unknown to the Tower races' as to the Tower classes'. Gobineau makes a Manichaean division between the purer lineage of the upper classes (achieved through interbreeding) and 'the degenerate, miscegenated anarchic working class, with its materialistic democratic tendencies' (Young 1995: 114). Just as it would be impossible to change a member of the Tower class' into an aristocrat, so it would be impossible to alter the status of a member of the Tower races' to a position of equality with a 'race' of higher rank: the races are basically unequal and no amount of education will close the gap between them. This position of Gobineau's was echoed by the American educational psychologist Arthur Jensen in the 1970s, who justified his stance against improvements in black education by citing the Negro's hereditary difference in intelligence compared with whites, which no improvement in Negro education would bridge or reduce (Hayes 1994: 208-10).
Thus 'race' is defined in terms of lineage and kin solidarity, but also with the idea of superiority and inferiority between groups or classes within the same ethnic group or nation, and between nations and continents.
ETHNICITY
As a term, 'ethnicity' is recognized by sociologists as having relatively recent coinage. Eriksen (1993: 3) cites Glazer and Moynihan as noting that the word's first appearance was in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1972. The word 'ethnic' is derived from the Greek ethnos (in turn derived from ethnikos), originally meaning 'heathen' or pagan. It was used in this sense from the mid fourteenth century until the mid nineteenth century, when it gradually began to develop 'racial' connotations (to be linked with lineage and kin solidarity). As was noted earlier, ethnicity is often associated with geographical and cultural integrity.
Ethnicity theory is sometimes divided between 'primordialists' and 'instrumentalists'. The primordialist position defines ethnicity as a fundamental, indefinable aspect of populations: primordialists like Van den Berghe (1981) and Clifford Geertz (1973) see ethnic identity as an essential aspect of human populations. Van den Berghe, whose theory we shall examine later, regards ethnic identity as a basic biological tendency. Geertz conceives ethnicity as an inchoate but powerful characteristic of human life: "These congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on are seen to have an
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ineffable, and at times overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves' (1973: 259). In this concept 'race' (euphemistically termed 'blood' in Geertz's formulation) is subsumed within ethnicity which, as we shall see later, is the relationship between 'race' and 'ethnicity' formulated by other theorists (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Van den Berghe, 1981).
Instrumentalists define ethnicity as an instrument for the pursuit of material interests by competing cultural groups within complex societies. Abner Cohen is regarded as propounding an extreme example of 'instru-mentalism' in his severing of the tie between ethnicity and culture; he conceives of ethnicity solely as a means for the pursuit of political objectives in the contemporary world, and therefore needing no historical or cultural explanations (Eriksen 1993: 55). In Cohen's (1974a; 1974b) notion that London stockbrokers constitute an ethnic group, no question of an atavistic, ineffable residue of sentiment and l^lood' manifests as an element of cohesiveness within the group; rather, the binding relationship is based on naked political self-interest. Cohen's position has been criticized for its failure to consider what constitutes the factors which enable ethnic groups to define themselves in relation to other ethnic groups and maintain their ethnic identity in the face of social and political developments (Eriksen 1993: 55). Most theorists take Milton J. Esman's middle position between that of Geertz and Cohen in regarding ethnicity as a dynamic element of social and political relations which maintains some form of identity through time (Esman 1994: 9-14).
Ethnicity was regarded in the America of the 1920s as a phenomenon associated with the European minorities who had come to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and had eventually 'assimilated' into white Anglo-Saxon America. Omi and Winant (1994: 16) refer to the confusion in the minds of the Chicago School - the originators of the 'ethnic paradigm' - between ethnic inequality and racial equality, ethnicity and race. The Chicago School's ethnicity theory could be divided into two concepts propagated by two groups of theorists: assimilationism and cultural pluralism. Both concepts used Anglo-Saxon America as the paradigm or standard by which the new immigrants from Europe - Irish, Italians, Jews, for example - were to be judged. Both groups of theorists used the new European immigrants as the basis for their empirical studies. The assimilationists stressed the possibilities of ethnic assimilation into Anglo-Saxon America; the cultural pluralists emphasized the acceptance of different immigrant cultures. Both sets of theorists concentrated on 'ethnic minorities', that is, minorities based upon white ethnic groups from Europe, and tended to ignore the experience of racial minorities, that is, black, brown, red and yellow peoples.
The 'melting poť theory of ethnic relations, in which each ethnic group is regarded as an element which will eventually assimilate into the dominant culture, envisaged the demise of the 'Negro' and therefore of the 'race problem', according to its own 'ethnic paradigm' theory. Blacks were
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i
regarded as another ethnic group who would follow the pattern of the other ethnic groups through a process of assimilation. The theory failed to account for the differences between ethnic minorities and racial minorities, based as it was on a concept of ethnicity whose elements did not share the experiences of blacks and other racial minorities in the United States. It failed to take account of the experiences of blacks rooted in institutional structures of discrimination and a history of slavery, and the resulting tendency amongst blacks to defend a concept of black culture and to resist absorption into the dominant culture. It suggested that blacks' failure to assimilate into the dominant culture was due not to these structures of discrimination and exclusion but to inherent weaknesses in black 'norms' (lifestyles, families) resulting in a failure, unlike other ethnic minorities, to use their opportunities. The theorists of the 'ethnic paradigm' thus seemed to have failed to distinguish between 'race' and 'ethnicity', between the experiences of racial minorities and those of ethnic minorities.
RACE/ETHNICITY
The difficulty of distinguishing between race and ethnicity is acknowledged by most theorists. Eriksen notes that their separation 'is a problematic one' since ethnicity manifests in many forms, and 'ethnic ideologies tend to stress common descent among their members' (1993: 5). Banton's dicho-tomization of 'race' and 'ethnicity' by reference to 'us' and 'them' (1983: 106), in which ethnicity is a means of categorizing 'us' and race is a categorization of 'them' or 'the other', has some plausibility when placed in the context of the Chicago School's ethnicity theory which, as we noted earlier, was based on a categorization of the ethnic groups familiar to them, that is, the white European immigrant groups settling in North American cities in the early twentieth century. The Chicago School's tendency to theorize black and Asian groups en masse, as 'races', suggests an instinctive tendency to theorize those groups unfamiliar to 'us' as 'them', or 'other', that is, in racial terms.
Van den Berghe's theory of ethnicity sees it as consisting of linguistic and kin solidarity. For Van den Berghe (1981: 241) racism is the result of a particular case of ethnic solidarity based on phenotype as an ethnic indicator. In his theory it is ethnic solidarity which is the more 'natural' and atavistic mark of group solidarity, not race, which is a 'relatively uncommon and recent indicator of common descent' (1981: 240). His theory suggests a nature/culture divide between ethnicity and race, with ethnicity assuming the role of the 'natural element' in this relationship. Racism is a 'cultural invention', although ethnocentrism is 'inborn' or natural (1981: 240). His is a variation of sociobiology in which human action is analogized to that of animals: the human world with its complex cultural configuration
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is compared to the animal world at the level which they are both assumed to share - that is, the biological. At that level humans are instinctive agents of their 'selfish genes' who wish to maximize the value of their genes, either through interbreeding and co-operation with those who share them, or through coercion of groups who do not share their genes in a form of a parasitism which ensures the maximum well-being and survival of those genes. This tendency towards genetic or group solidarity leads to nepotism: ethnocentrism assumes the role of nepotistic solidarity with those who share the same ethnic descent as yourself. Given the 'natural' origins of this solidarity it is assumed to be inevitable and worthy. Racism, which is nepotistic solidarity with those who share the same phenotype (physical features including skin colour) as yourself, is relatively recent, a 'cultural invention', and not as worthy as ethnocentrism.
The implied dichotomy between race and ethnicity here arises out of the ramifications of Van den Berghe's theory. Ethnocentrism, kin solidarity based upon kin selection from shared genes, is 'natural', that is, a propensity shared with the other animals of nature, according to the terms of Van den Berghe's theory. Racism, a particular form of ethnocentrism which for Van den Berghe arises out of contact between groups with very different phenotypes, and continues only until interbreeding has blurred such phenotypical divides, is 'cultural', and not a characteristic shared with the rest of nature. Earlier in his book Van den Berghe (1981: 240) states that ethnic markers, that is, the outward signs by which kin solidarity is recognized, are all cultural in origin; therefore ethnocentrism, no less than racism, is based upon cultural norms.
Van den Berghe's attempts to formulate ethnicity in terms of genetics emerge as flawed in the light of the fact that 'ethnicity' like 'race' is a socially produced concept which cannot simply be reduced to a 'biological' content which it is assumed will give it greater rigour. The vague, complex and dynamic aspect of ethnicity which resists attempts at essentialization is a reflection of the reality of the operation of 'ethnicity' as a concept in society. It is necessary here to reaffirm the Wittgensteinian idea that the meaning of a word is its use (Wittgenstein 1968: 175-6), not that which the specialist would like to give it, especially when that word depends for its very sustenance on its social construction.
Unlike that of Van den Berghe, Etienne Balibar's formulation of ethnicity recognizes its complex social and cultural connotations. He conceives of race and ethnicity as engaged in a symbiotic relationship in which the 'fictive' construct of ethnicity is produced out of a combination of 'language' and 'race' in the creation of the ideal, the 'nation'. Balibar's term fictive ethnicity is modelled after Benedict Anderson's (1983) notion of ethnicity in terms of the sum of a collection of people who form 'the nation', very few of whose members they will know individually, and who therefore must base their sense of 'the nation' upon an imagined ethnic solidarity. Ethnicity must be 'produced' in Balibar's theory; it is a 'fictive'
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construct which must nonetheless be seen as having 'the most natural of origins' (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 96). Language and race are the two routes to this production. Language and race appear at once as both 'natural' accepted givens in the order of nature, and transcendent: they constitute two ways of rooting historical populations in a fact of 'nature' (the diversity of languages and the diversity of races appearing predestined), but also two ways of giving a meaning to their continued existence, of transcending its contingency (1991: 96-7).
The modern idea of 'race' is based upon a monoracial system to which members of the nation are thought to belong; this idea of racial solidarity within a national context (for example, 'the French', 'the Germans', 'the English') is used to overcome class differences in the production of the national ideal. For Balibar and Wallerstein the nation is the authentic representation of the racial community rather than the clan, the neighbourhood community or social class. It is when nationals can marry and engage in sexual relations across social class or other local allegiances that the racial community becomes real at the national level. Ethnicization occurs at the level of the nation and ethnicity is produced out of a sense of racial solidarity which likens the nation to 'a great family' (1991: 100). Thus here the relationship between 'race' and 'ethnicity' is not dichotomized. Rather, 'race' is one of two elements involved in the production of ethnicity; 'race' is itself a cultural concept utilizing the idea of 'nature' or 'the natural' in the creation of its notion of spiritual and kin solidarity.
In the next two sections we shall examine two recent divergent views of the relationship between 'race' and 'ethnicity', those taken by minority groups and the new right respectively.
'BLACKNESS', 'RACE' AND 'ETHNICITY'
In the form in which ethnic groups from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean came together to affirm their solidarity in the face of margin-alization, and to fight for their political rights, the concept of blackness in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s embraced a political programme. The term 'black' here assumed a political rather than a 'racial' connotation in which individual ethnic differences were deferred for the 'bigger prize' of political and social justice. Here the term 'black' covers a diversity of cultural groups and experiences and is therefore a formulation with a wide political rather than racial reference, as Stuart Hall defined it, '"black" is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed transcultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature' (1992b: 254).
Later developments find certain members of these ethnic groups challenging the terms of this 'solidarity', calling for recognition of the specificity
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of the experiences and values of each ethnic group. These developments represent a movement in the political history of British ethnic minorities in which 'race' no longer plays the same role as during the period of political solidarity, and rights do not have to be fought for under the former racial banner. The ethnic groups are able to affirm the uniqueness of their own cultural and social needs while coming together in solidarity with other politically marginalized groups such as gays, and single parents, where the political need arises.
The point is reached for the affirmation of what Stuart Hall calls 'new ethnicities', which, as Hall observes, beckon away from the essentialized 'racialized' construction of the black subject, with its negative colonial connotations, towards an 'ethnic' construction which acknowledges the role of history, culture and politics in the construction of the subject. Hall maintains: 'If the black subject and black experience are not stabilized by Nature or by some other essential guarantee, then it must be the case that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically - and the concept which refers to this is "ethnicity"' (1992b: 257). Hall seems to gesture towards the traditional nature/culture difference which associated blackness and therefore 'race' with nature, and 'ethnicity' with culture, in the process of denying the validity of that difference. We are moving, in Hall's formulation, away from the racialized notion of blackness with its suggestion of fixity and essentialism, towards the more dynamic concept of 'ethnicity' which recognizes the role of various social and political forces in the formation of the subject.
'ETHNICITY', 'RACE' AND THE NEW RIGHT
The new right is also aware of the social movement away from the biological and colonial connotations connected with the old meaning of 'race', towards the present championing of the rights of ethnic groups, and the recognition of the unique right of minority groups to affirm their religion, language and morality, in short their difference, manifest in 'multiculturalism'. Since the 1970s the right has seized on the notion of 'difference' and used it to propagate the old racism in the new guise of 'cultural difference'. It asserts that minority cultures are different, especially minority cultures of people of colour, so different that this difference is, and is likely to remain, permanent: therefore they should not be allowed to mix with the culture of the majority. As Collette Guillaumin puts it: 'apartheid is a form of institutionalized difference and "separate development" is a form of the right to be different' (1991: 12).
'Ethnicity' as an idea has been used by the new right to refer to concepts associating nation, race and colour in a sinister melange in Britain. The new right's notion of 'ethnicity' would, for example, link 'Englishness' with a
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mixture of nationalism (being part of the English nation), racism (it is impossible to be black and English), and xenophobia. In a discourse employing the culturalist definition of 'race', a form of what David Gillborn (1995) refers to as 'deracialized talk', 'ethnicity' is employed by the new right as a reference to 'race' in which 'race' is present by its absence, in which the coded reference to 'culture' masks an incipient reference to 'race'. Margaret Thatcher's pre-election speech to the 1987 Conservative Party conference is a typical example:
people are really afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture. And, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world, that if there is fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in. (Margaret Thatcher, January 1978: quoted in Gillborn 1995: 27)
Racist theorizing has developed in France, Balibar notes, into an attempt to justify and explain the spontaneous aggression of the 'masses', or proletariat youth, in terms of an instinctive awareness of the effects of 'unfair' and 'unnatural' mixing of cultures as proposed by anti-racists or 'the anti-racist industry'. The neo-racist attempts to employ the 'turnabout' effect, that is, a ruse by which he uses the arguments of anti-racists against their intentions. Anti-racists have hitherto demanded respect for dominated cultures against the oppressive universalism of the West, or, as Balibar and Wallerstein term it, 'the hegemony of certain standardizing imperialisms' (1991: 21). Anti-imperialists such as Lévi-Strauss have argued for the preservation of the integrity and difference of minority cultures, that all civilizations are complex and necessary for the preservation of human thought. They now find their theories 'turned about' by this new racism, calling itself not so much a 'racism' but a bias in favour of its own ethnic group, nation, culture and 'fundamental way of life', all of which are threatened by the presence of alien immigrant cultures, leading understandably, as they see it, to spontaneous violence against certain immigrant sections of the population. If racism is associated in the thinking of liberals and humanists with moral obloquy, the new right argues for its 'naturalness' and therefore its value. 'What's wrong with racism?' Enoch Powell asks, and he defines 'racism' not in terms of irrational hatred of blacks or Asians but as the instinctive and 'natural' desire to preserve the ethnicity and national character of the United Kingdom threatened by alien cultures. What Hall refers to in his use of the term 'ethnicity' is its reclamation from the right for the purposes of a positive celebration of difference:
The fact that this grounding of ethnicity in difference was deployed, in the discourse of racism, as a means of disavowing the realities of racism and repression does not mean that we can permit the term to be permanently
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colonized. That appropriation will have to be contested, the term disarticulated from its position in the discourse of 'multiculturalism' and transcoded, just as we previously had to recuperate the term t>lack', from its place in a system of negative equivalences. (1992b: 257)
This celebration of diversity and difference would involve a recognition of the cultural, historical and political forces which form individuals, positively breaking away from old racial stereotypes: in this guise 'ethnicity' could also embrace gender and sexual orientation as other elements to be considered in the formation of someone's individuality.
CONCLUSION
'Race' and 'ethnicity' have historically been synonymous in Europe. In European terms it is possible, for example, to regard Wales as a Celtic nation, to talk of the Welsh 'race', of 'Welsh' as an ethnic category without contradiction: 'race' and 'ethnicity' embrace in the concept of 'nation'. Banton (1983: 64) observes that 'nation', 'race' and 'ethnic group' have until recently been used in Europe to denote groups of the same order of magnitude and not segments of one another. As Robert Young (1995: 93) notes, the terms 'ethnicity' and 'race' were often used interchangeably in nineteenth-century Britain. Following the turbulence created around 'race' by the policies of the German Nazi regime of the 1930s, J.S. Huxley and A.C. Haddon proposed the use of 'ethnic group' as a substitute for 'race' based on its original ancient Greek connotation which designated a self-governing political unit (Banton 1983: 64).
The modernist connotation of 'race' and 'ethnicity' sees 'race' either subsumed in 'ethnicity', or referred to euphemistically through 'ethnicity'. We are returning to the nineteenth-century dynamic relationship between the two concepts in which 'race', 'nation' and language intermingle in the complexity which is the idea of 'ethnicity'.
KEY CONCEPTS
RACE Race is a concept that has long been used to ascribe natural differences to people from different cultural backgrounds. It has always operated as an explanatory device to confuse physical differences with cultural, intellectual and moral differences. Race is a crude attempt at a biological explanation of human difference whereas ethnicity speaks of the social differences between groups.
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ETHNICITY A term coined by Van den Berghe {1981) to characterize an ethnic group, that is, a collection of culturally related people living within a designated ethnic boundary.
Polygenesis The theory that the various races are derived from different and unrelated origins, as opposed to monogenesis, the theory that the races are derived from the same origin.
Phenolype The physical constitution of a person or ethnic group based upon the interaction between their genetic constitution and the environment, normally associated with outward physical characteristics.
Class racism Class prejudice based upon a belief in the inferiority of those regarded as 'the lower orders' in the same ethnic group. The belief that they are so inferior as to constitute a separate 'race'.
Fictive ethnicity Ethnic solidarity based upon an imagined relationship with members of the same national community who are thought to constitute one racial community.
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