Globalization of Racism by Donaldo Macedo Panayota Gounari

Author:Donaldo Macedo, Panayota Gounari [Donaldo Macedo, Panayota Gounari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317258872
Google: qGfvCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-17T05:59:55+00:00

CONCLUSION

When nation-states create a “threshold of inequality,” when economic organizations select their employees according to economic, cultural, social and symbolic criteria, when people feel hostile towards “foreigners,” we are observing complex systems of domination, which are partly rational, partly traditional and partly hostile. They cannot be characterized by a common content. But they do address a widespread problem: the particular closure of universal modern institutions. I am arguing that structural racism comes in, where official and legitimate reasons fail to justify social closure. Structural racism is a system of tacit domination, which can stabilize barriers to mobility in a globalizing world.

The new racism in Germany can be treated as a testing case for this assumption. It is rarely based on biologist criteria and in fact uses varying concepts, such as citizenship, language, religion, group membership and so on. Nevertheless it offers a social mechanism which can distinguish on a long-term basis between those who interact as equals and those who are either kept at a distance or forced to accept lower status.

I am not proposing that every kind of nationalism is by definition racist. One could imagine shifting limits to the nation-state and criteria for closure which are related in content to the goals of the nation-state. Instead I am suggesting a continuum of closure ranging from benevolent nationalism to outright racist closure. The difference is not in content, but in the form and rigidity of closure and the contingency of criteria. Structural racism works through the tacit and long-term assumptions of symbolic power and it can refer to a wide range of varying criteria. This kind of racism becomes more important when borders are crossed by increasing numbers of migrants and when groups change their status, for example, from colored to Asian to white. By creating stable borders out of contingent criteria, structural racism addresses one of the major problems of modern institutions in a globalizing world: the particularist closure of universalizing institutions.

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