The Theory of Cultural Racism  

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"The Theory of Cultural Racism" (1992) is an essay by critical geographer James Morris Blaut.

In 1992, Blaut argued that while most academics totally rejected biological racism, cultural racism was widespread within academia.

He argued that in Western contexts, cultural racism replaces the biological concept of the "white race" with that of the "European" as a cultural entity. He noted that as a result of cultural racism, many white Westerners saw themselves not as members of a "superior race", but of a "superior culture", referred to as "European culture", "Western culture", or "the West". For Blaut, cultural racism "needs to prove the superiority of Europeans, and needs to do so without recourse to the older arguments from religion and from biology". In his view, it does so by "constructing a characteristic theory of cultural (and intellectual) history" which maintains that "nearly all of the important cultural innovations which historically generate cultural progress occurred first in Europe, then, later, diffused to the non-European peoples." He suggested that the idea did not hold that this cultural superiority was a new phenomenon but that it had appeared in the ancient world and had continued into the present; "cultural racism claims that a vast number of these European cultural causes of progress, cultural mutations, occurred, throughout history, one after another, each adding further impetus to the progress of Europe, each pushing Europe farther ahead of all other civilizations." Blaut was of the view that most of those who held to culturally racist ideas were not personally prejudiced and he cautioned against referring to said individuals as "racists".

Blaut argued that after the First World War, biological racism began to lose ground in the scholarly communities of many European countries. One of the cause of this was the growth of egalitarian values, reflected in particular by movements like socialism which challenged longstanding ideas about the superiority and inferiority of different human beings. Another contributing factor was opposition to Nazism, a far-right German movement which placed strong emphasis on racial hierarchies. In the 1950s and 1960s, biological racism lost the respectability it had previously held in Western countries.

Blaut argued that culturally racist ideas were developed by Western academics tasked with "formulating a theoretical structure which would rationalize continued dominance of communities of color in the Third World and at home." He expressed the view that culturally racist ideas were devised so as to promote neocolonialism in the Third World. In his opinion, the sociological concept of modernization was developed to promote the culturally racist idea that the Western powers were wealthier and more economically developed because they were more culturally advanced. This argument, Blaut thought, presented "the path already trodden by Europeans as the only means of overcoming backwardness" and thus emphasized the idea that non-European countries needed to seek the help and advise of European and other Western powers.

Building on these ideas, Blaut referred to the German sociologist Max Weber as "the godfather of cultural racism" because he provided later "social scientists with a theory of modernization, essentially an elegant and scholarly restatement of colonial-era ideas about the uniqueness of European rationality and the uniqueness of European culture history."

References

Blaut, J. M. (1992). "The Theory of Cultural Racism". Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. 24 (4). pp. 289–299. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.1992.tb00448.x.