Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 27

The invention of race begins with the history of transatlantic slavery and the racial capitalism that it inaugurated and that continues to shape global society and political economy. As an ideology of modern childhood developed alongside the deepening of racial capitalism, race became the dividing line between those children who were entitled and those children who were excluded from the new childhood (Wells 2018). Since such a distribution depended on the sorting of people into categories of humans that could be simply and visibly distinguished from one another, colonial states enacted particular forms of actual (physical) and bureaucratic violence over mixed-race children. This was a global project, enacted everywhere in the Americas, in Australia and in South Africa by the colonial-settler state, and in the remainder of the European empires by the colonial state.

Like all social identities race is based on a fiction that has real effects. The fiction is that race is biological and visible; that when we look at one another we know by looking how to classify one another into one racial category or another. Despite being a fiction the inscribing of people into racial categories has real effects on their life chances and their access to resources. The fact that race is a fiction means that a lot of work has to be done to classify people into racial categories and to maintain the boundaries between one classification and another.

A lot of this work on racial classification gets done by state bureaucracies in collecting statistics, by census reports, equal opportunity monitoring reports, identity cards and so on. Throughout the history of racial classification people that cross the boundaries of racial classifications have generated anxiety in those whose world-view and privilege depend on the maintenance of racial boundaries. The ongoing debate in the USA about how to ask about multiracial individuals on the census form is a reflection of this anxiety (Brunsma 2005: 1132, 1136).

All of the European powers and the settler states in the Americas, Southern Africa, East Africa, Asia and Australia anxiously and obsessively policed the classification of people into races and sought to maintain the boundaries between these classificatory groups by outlawing sexual contact between people of different races and persecuting their children. The forced removal of the children of white fathers and Aboriginal mothers from their mothers in Australia did not end until 1967 (van Krieken 1999). In the United States interracial relationships were illegal in many Southern states until 1967, when the case of Loving v. Virginia found that anti-miscegenation laws contravened the Fourteenth Amendment and were therefore unconstitutional (Pascoe 1996).

In the United States the children of mixed relationships were classified as Black under the so-called ‘one-drop rule’; elsewhere in the colonies mixed-race children were more likely to be classified as mixed (métissage, mestizo) or coloured. In French West Africa (White 1999), in Belgian Congo and in Belgian-governed Ruanda-Urundi (Heynssens 2016), in Indonesia and Vietnam (Stoler 1995; Firpo 2017) and in Australia (Manne 2001; Moses 2004; Jacobs c.2009) the state and the church encouraged or enforced the separation of these children from their African, Asian or Aboriginal mothers so as to assimilate them into whiteness or to form a racialized middle class.