Harold R. Isaacs
Essay
Apr
1975
We are experiencing on a massively universal scale a convulsive ingathering of men in their numberless groupings of kinds, a great clustering of separatenesses in which people feel they can find the physical and emotional security they find nowhere else. These are the basic group identities that all people possess by virtue of having been born into a particular family at a given time in a given place. They are tribal, racial, religious, national. These elements cluster in each person in endlessly varying ways. Their sources and their power are rooted in physical facts, in history, in language, in systems of belief and values that make up our cultures. For most of the people on earth in our own time, these elements of identity have come to be embraced in what we call our "nations." It has to be seen in its other shapes and guises, but basic group identity does come most largely into view dressed in its national colors, marching under its national flag, wearing its national tag. In its many definitions and usages, the "nation" or "nationality" appears as the ultimate, the most political, the most inclusive, even the "terminal" form of the basic group identity itself.
Essay
Jan
1969
Matters of race and color are not actually more important in world affairs now than they were, say, a generation ago; only the thrust and direction of their importance have changed. This has been, of course, quite a change. The world of the 1940s was still by and large a Western white-dominated world. The long-established patterns of white power and nonwhite non-power were still the generally accepted order of things. All the accompanying assumptions and mythologies about race and color were still mostly taken for granted, hardly as yet shaken even by the Japanese challenge to Western primacy in Asia or by the attempt of the Germans to make themselves masters of the master race. The world of these late 1960s is a world in which this white dominance no longer exists, certainly not in its old forms. The power system which supported it has crumbled. Its superstructure of beliefs about the superiority-inferiority patterns of races and cultures lies in pieces amid the ruins. While some people cling to chunks of the debris and stand defiantly in the door-openings of their shattered towers, most of us are stumbling blindly around trying to discern the new images, the new shapes and perspectives these changes have brought, to adjust to the painful rearrangement of identities and relationships which the new circumstances compel. This is now the pressing business of individuals, nations and whole societies, and in the cluster of matters with which they must deal, hardly any is more nettling and more difficult to handle than the matter of race, especially as symbolized by differences of physical feature and color of skin. Of all the elements involved in this wrenching rearrangement, race or color is surely one of the most visible, more important in some cases than in others but hardly in any case not important at all.
