The Return of Race as a Structuring Concept in the West
Abstract
Museum displays, political discourse and demographic policy reveal the persistence of racial classifications beneath claims of equality.
Politics, representation and race · Full reading edition
The racialised gaze in the museum
At the Musée d’Orsay, the African visitor encounters representations of Black people marked by exaggerated lips, eyes, teeth, sexuality and laughter. These images contrast with the violence of slavery and colonisation and show that artistic representation contains a political classification.
Other racial images have rightly been removed from public display, while works such as Carpeaux’s kneeling Black woman and Rodin’s or Cordier’s African figures remain prominently arranged beside idealised European bodies. Exhibition itself produces comparison and hierarchy.
Aesthetic order and social Darwinism
The placement of works guides the visitor from bodies presented as beautiful and proportionate to bodies made strange or grotesque. The museum thereby preserves an aesthetic taxonomy inherited from colonial exhibitions and social Darwinism.
Art cannot be separated from politics when its categories naturalise inequality. The apparent opposition between the European ideal and the racialised Black body makes biology appear to govern civilisation and political worth.
From images to everyday experience
The author recalls working in the grape harvest while a student in Strasbourg in the 2000s and being exposed, with African friends, to crowds, insults and degrading jokes. They had come to earn money but became objects displayed before a stigmatising gaze.
Such behaviour was not invented on the spot. It drew on a popular imagery of the Black person as physically excessive, childish and fundamentally different—the same grammar made respectable by cultural institutions.
Race returns to political speech
Recent political discourse again treats biology as a natural boundary of civilisation and equality. Old claims that human beings are crushed by the weight of their race return through arguments about African fertility, poverty and the supposed demographic threat to the planet.
The language of ‘demographic transition’ may serve legitimate public policy, but it becomes racial when African bodies are treated primarily as a problem to be controlled by powerful institutions.
Old doctrines beneath new words
Fears of Black migration, demographic replacement and the erosion of a dominant aesthetic order keep racial imagination active in Western politics and beyond. Violence against Black Africans in Tunisia is one manifestation of a broader revival rather than an isolated event.
Ideas presented as new often repeat older doctrines in modern vocabulary. Criticism must therefore examine not only explicit racism but also the classifications, displays and policies through which race continues to structure perception.
Discussion about the article
This space is dedicated to scholarly discussion. Reasoned disagreement and criticism are welcome. Insults, personal attacks, humiliating, discriminatory or threatening remarks are not permitted.
No contributions yet.