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Racism Albert Memmi |
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An eminent social analyst examines the way racism works—and how it can be overcome. Racism: It is social, not "natural"; it is general, not "personal"; and it is tragically effective. In a remarkable meditation on a subject at the troubled center of American life, Albert Memmi investigates racism as social pathology--a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another. By turns historical, sociological, and autobiographical, Racism moves beyond individual prejudice and taste to engage the broader questions of collective behavior and social responsibility. The book comprises three sections—"Description," "Definition," and "Treatment"—in which Memmi delineates racism's causes and hidden workings, examines its close affinity to colonialism, and considers its everyday manifestations over a period of centuries throughout the West. His topics include bigotry against Blacks, anti-Semitism, the meaning of "whiteness," and the status of the Quebecois. For Memmi, the structure of racism has four "moments": the insistence on difference; the negative valuation imposed on those who differ; the generalizing of this negative valuation to an entire group; and the use of generalization to legitimize hostility. Memmi shows how it is not racism's content—which can change at will—but its form that gives it such power and tenacity. Born in a poor section of Tunis, a Jew among Muslims, an Arab among Europeans, Memmi brings his own experience of the complex contours of prejudice to his analysis of a problem that divides societies the world over. Writing in the tradition of Frantz Fanon, Memmi redirects debates about racism—and offers a rare chance for progress against social prejudice. “The kind of in-depth, critical-theoretical exposition too often missing or marginalized in contemporary sociology.” —Contemporary Sociology “Memmi’s book remains a provoking and intelligent attempt to tackle a burning issue. Translated fluently into English and shorn of jargon, it is a book everyone who wants to understand the world she lives in should read.” —Interventions Albert Memmi is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Paris, Nanterre, and the author of numerous books, including The Colonizer and the Colonized and Decolonization and the Decolonized as well as the novels Pillar of Salt and The Desert. Steve Martinot is an independent scholar who lives in the Bay Area and teaches at San Francisco State University. 176 pages | 4 3/4 x 7 1/2 | 1999 |
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$22.50 paper