THE INTERCONNECTIONS OF DISCRIMINATION

ABSTRACT

Relations between race, nation, class, and gender as categories of social inclusion and exclusion have been subject to contemporary international debates in the social sciences. Critically reflecting upon these debates, this article examines the complex interplay of patterns of discrimination based on race, nation, gender, and class in an international racist campaign in the early 1920s. It was conducted by a wide range of organisations and individuals from different backgrounds in objection to the use of black French colonial troops in the Allied Rhineland occupation. These were denounced as a ‘Black Shame’, a primitive alien element in ‘civilized’ Europe. Patterns of inclusion and exclusion referring to the four categories were not strung together in a purely summative way. Gender, race, nation and class presented flexible, interlocking categories, and could even substitute for one another, when the ‘Black Shame’ was condemned as French aggression against white womanhood, the German nation, European civilisation, and the white race, and used as an ideological call for the cohesion of all Germans and ‘Whites’. I focus on the central role of the category gender in the campaign, and argue that campaigners used the German woman figuratively as an embodiment of the German nation and white race, seemingly threatened by desecration. German women, who refused to play this role and had relationships with black soldiers, were socially excluded from both imagined communities – nation and race. The discourse on the ‘Black Shame’ is an example of the intensive connections of the categories race, nation, gender, and class in modern racism and racist discrimination. My research advocates their conceptually combined and historically reflexive analysis.

Keywords:

• race
• nation
• gender
• class
• interconnected discriminations
• ‘Black Shame’

Notes

1. This and all following German quotes were translated by the author.

2. His ‘Inequality Tableau’ clearly reflects his attempt to keep them analytically separated. It pairs each mode of inequality with its own ‘myth’, ‘antidode’, and ‘practice’ (Dugger 1996: 21-38).

3. In this context their research clarifies how ‘the categories of difference and exclusion on the basis of class, gender and ethnicity incorporate processes of racialization’, and ‘are intertwined in producing racist discourses and outcomes’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 2f). Identifying several structural connections between categories of social inclusion and exclusion, they focus on ‘racial/ethnic divisions and the nation’ (21-60), ‘race and class’ (61-95) and ‘race and gender’ (96-131).

4. Howard J. Sherman for example is convinced that racism, sexism, and class exploitation are ‘intimately tied together in a complex mosaic’ as they all serve the ‘white, male part of the ruling class’ and promote inequality (Sherman 1996). Brian Taylor similarly aims at discussing ‘racial, nationalistic, ethnic’ and other ‘collective form[s]’ predominantly in the context of economic interests (Taylor 1997: 266).

5. Studies with a similar focus look at sexism, racism and classism as interlinked lines of separation (Meulenbelt 1988), discuss the historical relations between gender, nation and nationalisms (Blom et al. 2000), or reflect on the connections between race, class, gender, and ‘White Supremacy’ (Ferber 1998; also Daniels 1997).

6. For a more detailed discussion of the controversial scholarly debate surrounding the categories race, nation, gender, and class, and their relations, see Wigger (2007: 28-30).

7. She uncovers reciprocal connections between these categories across a diverse range of historical and contemporary data including census data, fieldwork, poetry, images, ethnographies, biographies and archival documents (Nagel 2003: 4).

8. In this context her work aims at examining thoroughly how ‘cultural distinctions went into the making of class in the colonies, what class distinctions went into the making of race, and how the management of sex shaped the making of both’ (Stoler 2002: 16). For a similar argument see Pickering (2001: Chapter 5).

9. My study is based on an analysis of historical data researched in over 20 German and British Archives.

10. For a detailed analysis of the novel ‘The Black Disgrace’ as an example of this sensationalist populist literature, see Wigger (2007: 66-81).

11. In German these organisations were called Deutscher Notbund gegen die Schwarze Schmach and Hamburger Landesverband zur Bekämpfung der Schwarzen Schmach.

12. Edmund D. Morel: The Horror on the Rhine. London 1920. Morel was well known for leading a successful campaign against the cruel regime of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo in 1900, making his intensive involvement in this campaign surprising at first glance. After mainly mobilizing against the failures and negative consequences of European imperialist colonial policy for a long time, he became after the end of the First World War a critic of the peace Europe had settled for, of French policy, and the Versailles Treaty. His involvement in the campaign against the ‘Black Shame’ has to be understood in the context of this critique.

13. Edmund D. Morel: The Horror on the Rhine. London 1920. The pamphlet reached eight editions, was translated into different languages, and sold around 10,000 copies in less than one month.

14. Edmund D. Morel: The Employment of Black Troops in Europe. In: The Nation, Vol. 26, 27.3.1920, p. 893. Some newer literature dismisses his important role in the campaign against the ‘Black Shame’, focussing entirely on his anti-imperialistic activism against the Belgian Congo policy, or seeing his involvement in the campaign against the ‘Black Shame’ as a paradox. On the basis of an analysis of Morel's writings, my study argues that his perception of black Africans was rather concise, and based on the racial convictions of his time. He believed in a biologically based fundamental cultural difference between white and black, which for him prohibited the imposition of white ways of life on blacks, while at the same time calling for an imperialism based on indirect rule and respect for indigenous customs (see epilogue Hund in Wigger 2007: 340–341).

15. See for example British Parliament. Parliamentary Question Wedgewood. 16.4.1920. Source: Public Record Office (PRO), file FO371/3784; Parliamentary Question Kenworthy. 15.4.1920. Source: PRO, FO371/3784; Parliamentary Question Aubrey. 17.3.1923. Source: PRO, FO371/8720.

16. For a more detailed discussion of the international protests, see Koller 2001, Wigger 2007; for the protests in Britain see also Reinders (1968) and Koller (2001).

17. For a detailed analysis of Francesco S. Nitti's role in the campaign, see Wigger (2007: 46–55).

18. This statement was made during the presidential campaign in Connecticut, quoted in Koller (2001: 297).

19. For an intensive discussion of the important role of Ray Beveridge in the campaign, see Wigger (2007: 56–65).

20. In a separate article, Koller even calls the campaign hypothetically an example of the ‘discursive meshing […] of racism, sexism, and nationalism’ (Koller 2002).

21. For a more detailed investigation of the contributions of different researchers to the analysis of the campaign, see Wigger (2007: 18-33).

22. For an intensive discussion and critical analysis of such violent male sexual fantasies, see Theweleit (2000).

23. See for example the plot of the novel ‘Die Schwarze Schmach’ by Guido Kreutzer (1921), and my analysis of it, in Wigger (2007: Chapter 2.2).

24. This motive can be found in several writings on the topic from the 1920s. Of particular interest in this context are the novels ‘Freiwild am Rhein’ by Magda Trott (1922), and ‘Elisabeth’ by Arthur Landsberger (1923). For a detailed discussion of the meanings and representations of class in the campaign, see Wigger (2007: Chapter 3.4).

25. Regarding the origins and development of this discourse on race, eugenics, ‘racial hygiene’ in different countries, see e.g. Becker (1988); Fout (1992); Gilman (1985); Grosse (2000); Kevles (1985); Mazumdar (1992, 2006); Sloan (1973); Smedley (1999); Soloway (1995); Stone (2002); Weindling (1989); Weingart (1992).

26. Joanna de Groot investigated the historical development of this gender stereotype in the nineteenth century in a convincing and well-thought article. See De Groot (2000).

27. This crude racist caricature stands in a longer tradition of similar images, and shows clear similarities to Emmanuel Frémiets award-winning sculpture ‘Gorille enlevant une femme’ from 1887. Unfortunately, due to copyright issues, it was not possible for the author to include this image as a figure in the article. The image can be found in Wigger (2002: 122).

28. Ann McClintock's impressive study of how women were in the colonial contest used as markers of boundaries between ‘races’ and nations links up well with the construction of women as carriers of national and racial honour in the discourse on the ‘Black Shame’ (see McClintock 1995).

29. Reiner Pommerin has examined their fate in the first German study on this subject. See Pommerin (1979).

30 For a more detailed discussion of this argument, see Wigger (2004, 2007: Chapter 3.2).

31. ‘The Coloured Watch on the Rhine’. Newspaper article by Paul Nilsson. In: Göteborg Dagblad. No. 281, 3.12.1921 (translation). Source: Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amt (Archive of the German Foreign Office, Bonn). File: R74421. The ‘worst thing about the use of coloured troops for the surveillance and domination of a white people’, was the supposed ‘damaging of the coloured peoples’ respect for the white race’. Letter Der Preußische Minister für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung and Auswärtiges Amt (The Prussian Minister for Science, Arts, and National Education to the German Foreign Office), 13.10.1922. Source: Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amt (Archive of the German Foreign Office, Bonn). File: R74431.

32. Hund, epilogue in Wigger (2007: 342). For a detailed discussion of this thesis, see Hund (2006, 2007).