Blanquitud, Consideraciones Sobre El Racismo

Universität Wien
International Conference ON MODERNITY, December 11-14, 2009

Bolívar Echeverría
“Blanquitud”. Considerations on racism as a specifically modern
phenomenon
The general tendency throughout history – understood as a history of scarcity- is
to perceive otherness as animosity. Throughout “pre-history” -as implied by Marxall human communities perceive alterity as an openhostility towards their
selfness. People who coexist in the same territory with those who are residents,
need only to ground themselves firmly in their identity, in order to awaken in them
a feeling of menace. The other, the “barbarian” becomes an enemy, some one that
is hateful. Through this xenophobia or hatred of the foreign, the other appears as a
dangerous human being, that must be kept apart,neutralized, subjugated or
eventually destroyed. It would not be an exaggeration to say that all pre-modern
genocides have their origin in this perception.
Otherness appears as hostility only when and where a community or collective
subject chooses to understand and practice its self-assertion as an act of selfpreservation or selbsterhaltung (as Horkheimer called it), instead of realizing itas
a self-opening or selbstpreisgabe . To save and protect identity as an object that
might disappear -instead of bringing it into play as an event that could be
revitalized and strengthened it is confrontation with other identities- is of course a
suicidal strategy; the same steps leading to self-preservation can drive as well to
erosion, if time is kept in mind; or to decomposition, if theself critical consistency
of identity is taken into account. Nevertheless it is a strategy that seems to be
inevitable under the conditions of scarcity. Every community understands the
singularity of its own selfness as the reason why the gods select it as a preferred or
“chosen people”, superior to the others.
Throughout history, the selfness and otherness of a singular or a collectiveindividual have been detected or recognized according to many criteria, some of

them focus on animal or natural features, like bodily constitution or skin colour;
some others concentate on social characteristics, like language or éthos, while still
others combine both perspectives, the natural and the ethic. One of these
combined criteria sets identity and alterity in terms of race.
Thespecific determination of selfness and otherness as a race emerges when
human animal features begin to be perceived in a consolidated unity as the
signifier of an ethic substance that would be its signified; as the visible side of an
indivisible conjunction of expression and content. Thus, for instance, black bodily
features (black skin, etc.) would be the necessary manifestation of a black soul, andconversely, a “black soul” would belong only to a body with black features.
Consequently, a human behaviour would be racist behaviour when it addresses
other people through the filter of a previous determination that qualifies its
appearance as ethically meaningful. Racist treatment of, or engagement with other
people is seldom friendly; it’s mostly hostile. The threatening presence ofotherness impresses a negative mark on the natural features of other people’s
bodies.
Universalism and racism emerge together. The racial understanding of human
selfness and otherness should be considered as a specific phenomenon of protomodern and modern times. Actually, it begins as a complement to the abstract
universalism required of human behaviour by the mercantile circulation of
productsor goods, a universalism that Christian religion promoted implacably for
more than thousand years in western society. The great variety of definitions of
selfness and the consequently innumerable possibilities of otherness that exist
spontaneously in the western world undergo the homogenizing action of a
pragmatic definition of identity or selfness that comes from the everyday praxis of...