Showing papers by "Maurice Freedman published in 1954"

Some Recent Work on Race Relations: A Critique

Abstract: tT might be as well if we tried to find out what useful role in the growing dis| cussion on race relations in this country can be played by sociologists, social Aanthropologists, social psychologists, and social historians. Domestically and imperially we are beset by problems which pass in public discourse as problems of race. We know that these problems have only an indirect relationship with the " race " of physical anthropology, that " race " in " race relations" may be a trap even for the more wary, and that it does not requ*e very great dialectical proficiency to be able to pull the house of race relations about the ears of those who claim to profess it as an independent subject. But, unpleasing as it may seem, the subject is with us and we must try to make some sense of it. It is clear that in this we have both an academic and a public duty. One duty we certainly do not have: to decide pontifically which books shall be considered as essays in race relations and which not. Yet it is not the whim of review editor or of reviewer mrhich selects a set of books such as I propose to deal with in this article. Each one of these boolis, although certainly in widely different ways and with varying emphases, discusses situations in which the ties between groups and individuals in society are seen, in the situations themselves, as being affected by racial factors. This, however, by no means implies that the field to be appropriated by the student of race relations is crucially distinguished by the presence of racialist notions. For he would be foolish to set up problems which always and necessarily exclude, say, the tensions between religious communities or linguistically defined blocs in so-called plural societies simply because they show no signicant element of racialist thinking. RacialismJ by which I mean attributing differences in social and cultural behaviour to differences in racial inheritance, is only one criterion to be used for marking out a Seld of study, and it is by no means an altogether satisfactory one. The extent to which racialist ideas enter into group conflict and discrimination araries not only between different situations, not only within particular situations over time, but also within particular situations at one time. How could one possibly assert, to take 342 Some Recent Work on Race Relations: