1.8
Race and development
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Forged in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the assemblage of the development
apparatus coincided with the unfolding of the cold war, the decolonization in Asia and
Africa, and the proliferation of military regimes in Latin America. Towards its goal,
development mobilized personnel and institutions (financial, governmental,
educational, etc.) to explain and solve the social, cultural, and economic troubles of
the Third World – namely, overpopulation, the threat of famine, poverty, illiteracy,
and so on (Escobar 1994). Both as a practical and an academic enterprise targeting
the global space after WWII and decolonization (Power 2006), the development
project included three aspects: (a) a programme for intervention involving a variety
of institutions and international bodies, such as nation-states, banks, private
corporations, the Bretton Woods’s organizations (such as the IMF and the World
Bank), funding agencies (such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations), and, at times,
military forces; (b) the delineation of the object of knowledge rely ing on the concept
of the cultural which, in the 1950s, would support sociology as a properly scientific
field of inquiry, with a conceptual-methodological framework (structural
functionalism) that linked the structural (institutional) and cultural (meanings)
dimensions of the social; and finally (c) its objective of the development project, the
elimination of the ills of underdevelopment.
Formulations of research questions, policy and strategies implicitly assumed racial
and cultural difference, in the formulation of the meaning and direction for the
development project, as its fulfilment required both structural and cultural change in
the ‘Third World’ to make it more like the ‘First’. Nevertheless, scholars in the field
agree that silence dominates the theme of race and development but they do not
provide a definite explanation as to why this is the case (White 2002; Kothari 2006b;
Power 2006). Engaging this problematic, this chapter takes steps to delineate a
possible reason for this silencing. First, it reviews critiques of development that expose
the discontinuities and continuities between development and colonialism. Second, it
traces the relationship between race, as a socially and historically constructed
category (Omi and Winant 1994), and development back to the Enlightenment moral
lexicon. What these steps show is how breaking the silence requires tracing the
operations of racial power within the development project.
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Beneath development as discourse
A productive move in critiques of development as discourse is to relate the operations
of racial power to its relationship with colonialism. Focusing on the ideological level,
such critiques highlight the intersection of the development and the colonial project in
two moments. On the one hand, this highlights the programmes for intervention and
objectives: as part of this scholar’s focus on development as a practice and note how
racial meanings reproduce a distinction that sustains the power differential necessary
for the justification of both projects (White 2002; Goudge 2003). On the other hand,
regarding the object of investigation and objectives of the development project,
critiques of development as discourse expose the workings of colonial constructs
within development (Crewe and Fernando 2006; Escobar 1994; Kothari 2006b). Both
moments register deploy ments of racial meanings to construct postcolonial Asia,
Africa, and Latin America (the ‘Third World’) as an ‘Other’, one whose difference
resides in its inability on its own to reach the same levels of scientific, technological,
and economic development as white/Europeans and their descendants. Poverty,
illiteracy, famine, and so on, become the identifiers of a ‘Third World society ’, that
is, one in need of intervention to foster cultural change and the economic growth
necessary to resolve these social ills (Escobar 1994; Kothari 2006b).
These works reveal two truths in development discourse and show how, like its
predecessor (the colonial project), the development project relies on an ethical and a
political aspect. From the ethical point of view, establish: (a) moral deficiency – the
target of the project (the ‘Third World’) emerges as inherently unable to achieve the
objective to develop, to move forward, by themselves as they have a moral
deficiency (registered in a lack of scientific knowledge and technological advances);
and (b) an ethical imperative – both moments of the development project,
intervention and investigation, assume that the movement is unidirectional; that is, that
the difference between developed white/European and underdeveloped Third World
(Asia/African/Latin American) ‘others’ is a difference of capacity, hence the former
has the obligation to employ its superior capacity in order to help the latter (Escobar
1994). From the political point of view, these truths respond to how the development
project reproduces global power differentials, that is, the socioeconomic inequalities
that result from colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial relations between Europe and
(later) the United States, and Third World countries: (a) the diagnostic that the ‘Third
World’ is intellectually deficient registers the ‘First World’s’ superior power, also
expressed in scientific and technological achievements and economic prosperity and
(b) the directive that it is the responsibility of the First World to help its neighbours to
the South and to the East to catch up economically by providing them with a
programme and the scientific, technological, personnel, educational, and financial
means for economic development. Precisely these ‘findings’ raise a question about
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the workings of racial meanings: if the relationship is immediately traceable, why this
silence? A possible answer: it results from the notion that development and the ‘racial
meanings’ identified in these works are correlated.
For the most part, critiques of development as discourse do not elaborate on
precisely how ‘racial meanings’ sustain the distinction between the West and the rest
and justify power differentials in the postcolonial order. How racial difference
operates in the development project – and hence within the development
discourse/practice equation – becomes clear through a genealogy that refers both
concepts to the post-Enlightenment moral lexicon. As another word for progress,
development refers to the Enlightenment view of the human’s both necessary
(because of human nature) and morally desirable ability to use its unique intellectual
abilities to transform the natural environment, thus improving conditions of life. For
the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the ‘natives’ of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the
Pacific Islands are the ‘natural men’, lacking the basic moral traits that would allow
them to transcend the forces at work in their immediate (natural) environment
(Spivak 1998); they were ‘affectable’ minds (Silva 2007). Around the same time
natural history ’s descriptive tools for measurement and classification articulated the
‘others of Europe’s’ mental (intellectual and moral) deficiency, which it associated
with the phy sical traits and their continents of origin. Somewhat later, another
German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, postulated that progress is the direction of
history, but only among European peoples and places. Inhabitants of the Americas
and Africa, he stated, were outside the temporal movement of history (the trajectory
of progress) and Asians were stuck in the early phases of historical development.
None could move forward in time to realize, to materialize, humanity ’s superior
attributes because they lacked moral traits, such as an experience and understanding
of freedom and universality (Silva 2007).
Gathered in the arsenal of racial knowledge assembled in the mid-nineteenth
century, the science of man, these speculative and descriptive truths became the
basis for a scientific project for the knowledge of man and society, which included
concepts (‘racial ty pe’) and measures (‘facial index’) designed to show that they are
inde e d natural (scientific) truths, that is, expressions of how the laws of nature
determine human phy sical and mental conditions. Early in the twentieth century the
science of man came into disrepute, the concept of the cultural became the main
referent of intellectual and moral difference, as it is expressed in language, religion,
technologies, and social (legal, religious, economic) institutions. Nevertheless, bodily
traits separate out those not born in Europe and/or of non-European descent, in regard
to the ‘others of Europe’ and their descendants every where. Thus, racial difference
would remain the first, immediate, signifier of cultural (moral and intellectual) traits.
By the time the development apparatus was deploy ed, the ideas of racial and cultural
difference, developed by anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth
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century, were already part of political, sociological, and common sense views.
Because they view phy sical and territorial characteristics as expressions of mental
(intellectual and moral) traits. That is, racial and cultural difference defining the
specificities of European ‘civilization’ were linked to bodily traits (whiteness), and to
self-claimed intellectual superiority ; thus explaining capacity (or lack of) for progress
(to move forward, develop) as natural attributes of persons and places. This view also
immediately prevented considerations of present and historical relationships, such as
conquest and slavery. The wall of silence in race and development is a reflection of
racial power/knowledge, as racial and cultural difference identifies the very subjects,
objects, and sites for the development project.
How then to break this constitutive wall of silence? It should be evident now that the
silence does not result from a lack of correspondence but from the opposite, namely,
the excess of correspondence characteristic of a discursive situation in which one
term (race) gives significance (meaning) to the other (development). For both race
and development are referents of progress. First, race (as racial difference or
cultural difference) allows the distinction between those who can and will and those
who cannot and will not move forward (progress or develop). That is, racial (or
cultural) difference explains why the Third World lacks the intellectual and moral
capacity for developing. Second, development (progress) is precisely that which,
according to philosophical and scientific statements, is the privilege of Europeans and
their descendants elsewhere. Third, because development is the historical destiny of
every human being, it is their (white/European) moral obligation to help others (who
lack the capacity ) to catch up with them. Every iteration of progress (as economic
growth/cultural change) of the past 150 y ears or so repeats these racial truths: the
idea of civilization (as in the civilizing mission), modernization (which named the
knowledge aspect of development in the early y ears), and now globalization (which is
characterized by many things, including the demand that the state stay s away from
economic affairs). To speak of race and development, then, is not to speak about two
different concepts or two different discourses. For race operates within development.
To speak of this relationship, we need to describe how racial discourse functions as a
condition of possibility for every order of operation (project of intervention, object of
investigation, objective) of the development project.
Conclusion
Framing of the development project, after WWII, became possible because racial
difference and cultural difference functioned as discursive shortcuts, immediately
communicating three necessary ethical and political truths: (a) the targets of the
development project (illiteracy, poverty, famine) resulted from certain peoples’ and
places’ natural incapacity to move forward on their own, (b) those who could
develop, namely white/Europeans, had the moral obligation to help those (Asians,
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Africans, Latin Americans, and Pacific Islanders) who could not develop, and (c) the
naturalization of the Third World’s incapacity for development pre-empts attributions
of the failures of the development project either to existing mechanisms of economic
exploitation or to the effects of previous (colonial or imperial) unequal economic
relations. Existing analy ses of race and development show that ‘racial meanings’
operate in development discourse and practice. This chapter merely adds an account
of how racial meanings (as referent to racial and cultural difference) work within the
development project. These natural (biological or cultural) truths, which are signified
in bodies and territories, serve to naturalize the effects of (past) colonial and (present)
global capitalist architectures of economic exploitation.
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