Page 88 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

72 Ethnicity

money – who has it and who does not. It is the culture of the group that
in a way creates the illusion that ethnicity is something other than a physi-
cal accident, almost as relevant as blonde hair, that only appears signifi cant
because of its repetition over time.
Ethnicity is a genetic inheritance that embodies itself physically. But it
is also a sign with cultural meaning that links to emotions such as fear and
anger and actions such as lynching and genocide. Our skin color is not a

flat physical object; it has meaning for us and for others in systems
of cultural identification and demarcation, ways ethnic social groups have

of assigning places and roles and distinct essences to other people in order
to justify their subordination or their exclusion from access to scarce social
resources. Ethnic violence is a legacy of humans ’ primitive origins in a
world where resources were scarce and violence the only means of safe-
guarding access to them. Banding together with others in ethnic tribal
alliances was necessary to secure individual survival and to guarantee access
to resources because no laws existed, no institutions other than simple
tribal ones. That conservative disposition to safeguard our group, be it
ethnic, national, or social, is with us still, even though we have evolved
more modern liberal institutions that treat everyone equally and that in
principle transcend primitive ethnic tribal group behavior. A citizen can be
anyone with a legal right; the term should not in principle apply to just
one ethnic group. A parliament ideally represents all and gives all a voice
in governance regardless of ethnic group identity. These liberal inventions
help move human society beyond the jungle and into a more civil realm
guided by liberal principles. Our primitive conservative disposition to
safeguard our ethnic or tribal group by doing violence to other groups
undermines these efforts at liberal modernization. That disposition appears
in the midst of our modern lives as eruptions of hatred and murder, some-
times on a monumental scale as with the Jewish Holocaust perpetrated by
conservatives in World War II or the genocide carried out by conservative
Turkish nationalists against Armenians in 1915. But they also take the form
of statistics such as the datum that 8,000 African Americans die of high
blood pressure each year, an illness that is related to the effects of ongoing
racialized economic partitioning in the US.
Modern liberal ideals of ethnic tolerance and diversity are taking hold
in many places, but many ethnic - based societies exist where such ideals
have yet to gain wide acceptance. Usually, this is the case because one
ethnicity is dominant or in the much greater majority. In Japan, the Korean
minority is stigmatized and excluded from positions of power in the