The issue of the policies of apartheid of the Government of South Africa remained on the agenda of the United Nations for almost 50 years. After numerous efforts to urge the Government of that country to abandon its policies—declared a crime against humanity—the international campaign reached a watershed in 1989. That year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Declaration on Apartheid and its Destructive Consequences in Southern Africa, paving the way for the holding of the April 1994 historic and first-ever democratic elections in South Africa. © UN, 2007. Developed by DPI/News and Media Division/Multimedia Resources Unit American anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, divided humanity into five races. In his landmark The Races of Europe, Coon defined the Caucasian Race as encompassing the regions of Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Northeast Africa. Coon and his work drew some charges of obsolete thinking or outright racism from a few critics, but some of the terminology he employed continues to be used even today, although the ‘-oid’ suffixes now have in part taken on negative connotations. American anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, divided humanity into five races:
In the contemporary world, it is difficult to employ the criterion of pure race. Human history is replete with instances of migrations, mixing of races, and of cross-fertilization. The world divided into more than 200 nation-states does not allow classification of them in terms of race: the single race single nation formula does not work. People belonging to the same race—that is, possessing dominant characteristics of any given racial type—are to be found in several nation-states, and any single nation-state consists of people belonging to several races. It is the latter feature that has allowed the entry of the concept of stratification to be employed for discerning the internal structure of a given society. Originally, there were societies that developed a sort of symbiotic relationship between different groups; power struggle or numerical preponderance in several places later resulted in a hierarchical placement of the racial groups within a society. A tendency towards preference for endogamy made races to function as castes. In fact, the Portuguese word casta that came to be employed for the Indian Jatis originally meant ‘race’. ‘breed’ or ‘lineage’. That is why, Gunnar Myrdal used the metaphor of caste to describe the black-white relationship Deep South, based on the empirical research conducted in the 1930s in the Southern United States. The relationship between the two groups distinguished on the basis of colour defied the use of the concept of class in that context. The purpose of this usage, according to Béteille, ‘was not so much to explore its similarity with the Indian system as to emphasize its difference from the class system in America and other Western societies’ (Béteille, 1991: 37). Caste, in this sense, is a structural and not cultural category.
Smelser4 suggests that the transition from some biological notion of race to its socio-logical significance actually involves two distinct transitions. The first is a shift in the point of reference. Race as a sociological phenomenon is a culturally and socially constructed and sustained category … The second transition–and this leads to racism proper–occurs when another range of beliefs is invoked: for example, that particular races are superior in some way and deserve to dominate other races. With the development of racism, moreover, the issue whether race has any physical or biological basis recedes more or less completely into the background … [R]ace remains a sociologically relevant variable when it becomes the structural basis for human interaction, stratification, and domination” (1994: 280–81).
In multiracial societies—Furnivall called them plural societies—race and class ‘merged as blacks were assigned to slavery, immigrant yellows and browns to indentured labour, and natives to agriculture’ (ibid.: 281).
Oommen introduced a new concept of racity to distinguish it from racism. In his formulation, racism refers to stigmatization and oppression; racity, in contrast refers to racial solidarity and efforts to cope with racism. Thus, racity implies the tendency of those belonging to a distinct physical type to provide others of their type with support and sustenance, particularly when confronted by an oppressive force. Some scholars also talk of ‘aggregative racism’, referring to a tendency to put a number of peoples—African, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian, etc.—into a single category of ‘Black’ (of course, with different shades from dark to brown). This is a ‘stereotyping’ device employed by the dominant white population in countries like the United Kingdom.
In recent years, the terms ‘ethnic group’ and ‘ethnicity’ have also come in vogue. In the Indian context, for example, ethnic group has been used by some as a synonym of tribe on the one hand, and also of caste on the other. M. Blumer, in his 1986 article on ‘Race and Ethnicity’,5 defined an ethnic group as
… a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared past, and cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements which define the group’s identity, such as kinship, religion, shared territory, nationality, or physical appearance.
This definition is almost identical with the definition of a tribe given by S. C. Dube, which we mention later in the section on Tribe. The reference to physical appearance in the definition alludes to race and, thus, makes the distinction between race and ethnic group somewhat problematic. But an ethnic group that tends to be endogamous and localized is likely to have a greater degree of resemblance amongst its members. One can infer that people of a broader category of race are divided into several groups and these sub-groups or sub-races are to be named ethnic groups. We must also be alert to the use of the term ‘ethnic’ as an adjective for food, dresses, etc., becoming popular with the rising middle class. Here, the term refers to ‘traditional’ and exotic—almost a synonym for ‘folk’—and thus applicable not only to the tribes but also to the peasant society.
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