in traditional Hindu society. However it is clear that religious,
linguistic, tribal and other ethnic factors loom large in the con-
struction of many people’s political identity – but to different degrees
at different times and places depending on the political environment.Racial and ethnic conflict
An important psychological and political factor seems to be the
‘racial’ identity of the ethnic groups concerned. By ‘racial’ is meant
the existence of real or assumed visible physical differences –
particularly in skin colour – between the groups. Such differences are
socially rather than biologically defined – existing human com-
munities being virtually all extremely mixed genetically and not
divided according to the biological definition of ‘race’. For instance,
most US ‘blacks’ would be regarded as whites in tropical Africa: most
South African ‘whites’ probably have some ‘black’ ancestry. In
essence the major socially defined ‘racial’ division is that between
‘whites’ and ‘non-whites’.
The importance of the distinction between black and white ‘races’
seems to link quite clearly with our inheritance from the period of
European imperialism in which a racial justification was advanced for
both slavery and colonialism. For instance, British imperial prosperity
was for long founded on the triangular trade, in which arms, metal
tools and trinkets were exported to West Africa, these were exchanged
for slaves who were transported to the Caribbean or American
colonies to be used in growing tobacco, spices and cotton. These
valuable commodities, in turn, could then be transported back to
Liverpool, Bristol or London. Each leg of the journey was enormously
profitable, but the subjection of black slaves and the conquest of the
Caribbean and North America had to be justified in terms of the
superiority of white Christian civilisation over the alleged barbarity
of the ‘natives’. As the European powers, and later the United States,
continued their competitive acquisition of much of the globe, their
success in subduing less well-armed and aggressive societies was, in
turn, held to be an indication of this alleged superiority.
This historical legacy of racism has been accentuated by a web of
cultural and literary symbolism – with black seen as the colour of
evil, white the symbol of innocence – and racist pseudo-scientific
findings about the inherited lower intelligence of ‘non-Aryan’ races.110 PROCESSES