6. The Evolution of Racism in Guatemala: Hegemony, Science, and Antihegemony

Over the past 100 years the meaning of "race" and "racism" has undergone a series of transformations as different sectors of the world's peoples constructed models for their particular needs. At the turn of the 20th century, race referred to populations that shared common cultural and biological origins and that were usually allocated within a hierarchical ordering of the larger society. It was widely but not universally held that behavior was in some manner hinged to biological inheritance. The term racism referred to ideas about the behavior-biology linkage that facilitated the political hegemony of one society or social segment over another. Colonial and European industrial society saw ethnically distinctive peoples as separate and inferior "races," and they, in turn, reciprocated with antihegemonic ideas about their oppressors, recognizing them too as separate races, although often accepting the characterizations of their own inferiority. The racism that emerged most clearly in this era was that of the dominant classes—be they socioeconomic classes of the industrializing societies or the colonialist classes of the imperial world. The clearest expression of prejudice and discrimination marked the behavior of these hegemonic classes and manifested what I will here refer to as "hegemonic" racism.¹

A new construction emerged in the first half of the 20th century from the work of Euro-American scientists and social scientists who rejected the notion that biological inheritance could account for social behavioral difference. For them social behavior, culture, was socially transmitted. I will refer to this as "scientific" racism because of its origin among scientists, not as a claim to its value as truth.² This development was particularly important in the United States, where race could then be argued to be less of an obstacle to the assimilation of European immigrants into U.S. society. The scientific view held that the term race was to be restricted to the purely biological. These arguments at first gained ground slowly in Western intellectual communities, but with the emergence of Nazi hegemonic racist politics, the differentiation of cultural behavior from the biological race became politically significant for many Westerners. World War II brought these concerns further into focus, and with the founding of the United Nations, UNESCO formulated the first of a number of statements on race that basically conformed to the positions taken by the social and genetic scientists. They allocated "race" to being something that had to do with biology, whereas social and cultural behaviors were totally independent. These statements paid little attention to the hegemonic role of racism.

With the end of World War II, the breakup of colonial empires challenged the hegemonic position on race and led to overt accusations of racism by colonized peoples against the imperial powers and their societies. This evolved into a distinctive position marked by characteristics that differentiated it from the previous hegemonic and scientific positions. I will call this "antihegemonic" racism.³ The principal elements that marked it were (1) the rejection of the hegemonic usage that linked culture and biology, and the acceptance of the scientific position; (2) the definition of racist groups by social opposition and political dominance rather than by common origins or inheritance of either biological or cultural antecedents; (3) the claim that racism is practiced only by the hegemonic; (4) the exhibition of discrimination and prejudice against the hegemonic racists; and (5) the use of any traits—cultural and/or biological—as identifying markers of race for purposes of identity and discrimination. This construction in many instances followed the prevailing elimination of the biological component but retained the earlier vocabulary and called it "racism." This racism was defined by colonialist oppression and was a racism without biological race. This perspective was central in the founding of many new states and became important to the New World subordinated indigenous peoples and peoples of the African Diaspora, who began to seek their revindication in the New World and other regions where "internal colonialism" prevailed. While this new racism gained wider acceptance in some parts of the world, the older forms of racist thought—hegemonic and scientific—did not disappear...