Apartheid

world, both in extent and in intensity. It appears to have declined only
because its form and strategies have changed. If we take the
Manichaean divisions and rigid exclusionary practices (in South
Africa, in the colonial city, in the southeastern United States, or in
Palestine) as the paradigm of modern racisms, we must now ask what
is the postmodern form of racism and what are its strategies in today’s
imperial society. 71
The basic idea is not new. It goes back to distinctions made between ‘traditional’ and
‘new’ racism, and between ‘blatant’ and ‘subtle’ racism. 72 But I will confine my discussion
here to Hardt and Negri’s conception.
One of the main differences between modern and postmodern racism, aside from the
uneven playing fields of the global market, is explained by Hardt and Negri as one based on
justifications by means of ‘biology’ and ‘culture’, respectively. Thus, modern racism,
epitomized here as apartheid, is rigid and essentialist with its postulated genetic differences,
whereas postmodern racism is through and through ‘culturalist’ in character. The latter is,
moreover, contingent, flexible, and a result of free competition, ‘a kind of market meritocracy
of culture’. 73 At first glance, there is much speaking for this distinction. It shows, among other
things, how racism has adapted to and continues to thrive under globalized capitalism, but its
theoretical context still runs the risk of overemphasizing differences between the postulated
two kinds of racism, modern and postmodern.
It is in my opinion symptomatic that Hardt and Negri fail to mention racist genocides
in this context, most conspicuously Nazi crimes, the genocides of Native Americans or the de
facto genocides due to the racist system of transatlantic slavery. The reason for that failure
seems to be that it would be very hard to defend their view of current ‘postmodern’ racist
practices, due to globalized capitalism, surpassing – ‘both in extent and in intensity’ – possibly
the three most horrific racist crimes in human history. All of the latter were in fact
‘essentialist’, ‘blatant’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, as opposed to ‘postmodern’. Perhaps
postmodern racism will eventually prove even worse, even more extensive and intense than
those genocides, but, as far as I can determine, there are as yet neither any strong indications
nor any strong counter-indications for such a disaster to take place. In any case, Hardt and
Negri’s judgement appears to be premature.
I will argue that ‘biology’- and ‘culture’-based racisms are both morally and
scientifically wrong. Racist ‘justifications’ are, in fact, nothing but transparent and feeble
excuses. They all represent instances of ideology, in the original meaning of that term: false
consciousness. Racism, or as I prefer to say, ethnicism, is therefore the more extensive
concept here. Modernity and postmodernity may indeed be seen as different strategies of
ethnicism, in this case of the overwhelmingly white elites that have dominated most of the
world during recent centuries. But ethnicism is much older than modernity, and in the course
of this investigation we will find many apparently postmodern attributes of it in Graeco-
Roman Egypt and elsewhere, i.e. during time periods that are considered pre-modern rather
than post-modern. Furthermore, the culturalist, ‘subtle’, ‘new’, and ‘postmodern’ attributes of
Greek and Roman racism towards Egyptians between 332 BCE (Before the Christian Era) and
642 CE were in fact the dominant ones. Ethnicism is also older than capitalism itself, of which
Hardt and Negri sometimes seem to consider it a mere subcategory. 74 On a global scale –
71 Hardt & Negri 2000: 191 (emphasis in the original)
72 Miles, R.: Racism, 1989
73 Hardt & Negri 2000: 193
74 Ibid: 124f; see also Fredrickson 2002: 4f. For more nuanced views of the complexities associated with the
definition of capitalism and the possible application of the term to Egypt in the late Roman period, see footnote
435, below. It should be emphasized in the present context that capitalism (or fully-fledged proto-capitalism) was
actually not developed in Egypt until centuries after Alexander’s conquest and the accession of Ptolemy I, i.e.
until long after the establishment of ethnicism and apartheid in Egypt. On culturalist racism, i.e. ‘post-modern’
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