The role of racial ideologies and discourses: How ideas of race were used to justify colonialism - Essay Example

GENDER, RACE AND COLONIALISM The role of racial ideologies and dis s: How ideas of race were used to justify colonialism. Introduction. RACE: Concepts of white privilege, and belief in the superiority of the white people, were used to develop the practise of racism. Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961), a coloured French psychiatrist and revolutionary writer, said, “ I am being dissected under white eyes (that) objectively cut away slices of my reality”. The pull to be an individual especially felt by blacks and others was an effort to claim one’s humanity, by not being marked by race or gender.

It was an effort to become, or pass for , the white male1. Frantz Fanon also saw that the colonizer-colonized relationship was a struggle to the death, in which the former denied any “recognition” of the colonized, due to racism. His complex interrogations of cultural and political affairs were based on his being a colonized individual, who lived his own revolt. ( Fanon 1996). He was the spokesman for the Algerian revolution against French colonialism. Colonialism was a set of beliefs used for legitimizing for the establishment of settler colonies, in which the indigenous people were directly ruled or displaced2.

Fanon’s first major work Black Skin, White Masks (1952), analyzed the impact of colonialism and its deforming effects. It had a major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial and black conscious movements around the world3. GENDER: Cowlishaw (2000), said that race and racism continued to be omnimpresent in society, and racial processes were censored. Gilman, S (2002) argued that the representation of individuals in art was frequently iconographic in character, in which specific individuals came to represent particular classes of people.

Where that class of people was perceived as ‘other’, their differences from ‘normal’ (white, male) humanity was emphasized. Gilman explored the construction of female sexuality in art, literature and medicine: an iconography of female sexuality in the late nineteenth century. (Page 392). Frantz, Fanon (1967), discussed gender issues in the chapter ‘The man of colour and the white woman’ in his book Black Skin White Masks. He expressed his belief that black men preferred to marry white women, even if they were of a lower social position than them.

This was due to their wish to be loved like white men, and due to the colour prejudice that they themselves suffered from. By a white woman loving them, they felt that they were worthy of white love, which they valued very highly. Discrimination due to racism was seen in the character of Jean Venouse who was an African. Born in the Antilles. He had lived in Bordeaux for years, so he considered himself to be an European. He did not understand his own race, and the whites did not understand him.

He was hurt that the Europeand not only ignored the Negro of the colonies, but did not acknowledge him, whom they had shaped into their own image. When he went to the land of his ancestors to serve his adopted country, he wondered whether he was not being betrayed by everything, since the white race would not accept him, and the blacks rejected him. Fanon believed that violent revolution was the only means of ending colonial repression and cultural trauma in the Third World. "Violence," he argued, "is a cleansing force.

It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect." Fanon examined race prejudices as a philosopher and psychologist, although he acknowledged social and economic realities4. Gender and race were intricately woven together. Discrimination on the basis of both these concepts were suffered by coloured women, for whom the burden was doubled. Historically, in the Australian case, racial segregation and gender discrimination were systems that covered their own tracks and left few marks, apart from those left on the lives of its victims5.

Inherent racism which is inseparable from Australia’s institutions, undermine the country’s goal of achieving equality and opportunity for all. Racial villification laws and promotion of multi-culturalism would be beneficial.REFERENCESCowlishaw, Gillian K. (2000), Censoring Race in Post-colonial Anthropology: Critique of Anthropology, Vol.20, No.2. Web site: http://coa.sagepub.com/egi/content/abstract/20/2/101Fanon, Frantz. (1996), Black Skin, White Mask, Web site: http://www.

popmatters.com/film/reviews/f/frantz-fanon.shtmlFanon, Frantz. (1967), Chapter 3: The Man of Colour and the White Woman, Book: Black Skin, White Masks, Crown Press, New York.Gilman, Sandra (author), Stevi, Jackson; Scott, Sue Ed(s). (2002). Book review: Black Bodies, White Bodies, Book: Gender, A Sociological Reader, Routledge, U.K.