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 MAPPING GLOBAL RACISMS
Series Editor: Ian Law

UNCOMMODIFIED
BLACKNESS
The African Male
Experience in Australia
and New Zealand

Mandisi Majavu
 Mapping Global Racisms

Series Editor
Ian Law
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK
There is no systematic coverage of the racialisation of the planet. This
series is the first attempt to present a comprehensive mapping of global
racisms, providing a way in which to understand global racialization and
acknowledge the multiple generations of different racial logics across
regimes and regions. Unique in its intellectual agenda and innovative
in producing a new empirically-based theoretical framework for under-
standing this glocalised phenomenon, Mapping Global Racisms considers
­racism in many underexplored regions such as Russia, Arab racisms in
North African and Middle Eastern contexts, and racism in Pacific contries
such as Japan, Hawaii, Fiji and Samoa.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14813
 Mandisi Majavu

Uncommodified
Blackness
The African Male Experience in Australia
and New Zealand
Mandisi Majavu
Department of Sociology
The University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand

Mapping Global Racisms

ISBN 978-3-319-51324-9    ISBN 978-3-319-51325-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51325-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931364

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
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 Acknowledgements

The research presented in this book is largely derived from my self-funded

PhD project. The rewriting of the thesis into a book was done without any
institutional support. The past four years have been tough and rocky, but
a number of people have made this journey bearable.
Without the support of my wife—Anna—I would not have had the emo-
tional strength and financial means to complete this project. For four years,
our family primarily relied on her financially. My beautiful two daughters—
Nkwenkwezi and Zara—to whom this work is dedicated, helped me stay
focused and sane in a myriad of ways. Many of the ideas in this book came
to me while taking my youngest daughter—Zara—to walks in the park.
I am grateful to my younger brothers, Luzuko and Phumlani, for all
their financial support. Luzuko financed my first year of PhD. I would also
like to thank Tracey McIntosh, David Mayeda, David Bedggood, Rose
Hollins, Jim Gladwin for their assistance along the way.
Special thanks to Dr Laurence Cox, a friend and colleague on the
editorial team of Interface—A Journal for and about Social Movements.
Laurence encouraged me to think critically and carefully about my PhD
thesis which has resulted into a book.
My gratitude goes to my mentor, Professor Finex Ndhlovu, who has
been supportive in every possible way during the time of writing this
book. To my long-time mentor, Michael Albert, thank you for intuitively
teaching me how to think deeply and critically about society. Some of the
material presented in Chaps. 5 and 6 were first published by the Journal of
Asian and African Studies.

v
vi Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research participants for taking part in this

project. Thank you for sharing your personal stories with me and for being
generous with your time. I am thankful to the University of Auckland’s
Faculty of Arts for providing me with NZ$3000 in financial assistance via
the Doctoral Research Fund, which enabled me to make my second field
trip to Melbourne, Australia.
I would like to thank Sharla Plant, Senior Commissioning Editor at
Palgrave Macmillan, for giving me the platform to share my ideas with
the world. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Ian Law, Palgrave
Macmillan’s Mapping Global Racisms series editor, for his invaluable feed-
back on the arguments made in this book.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Conceptual Issues 15

3 The Genealogy and the Discursive Themes

of the Uncommodified Blackness Image  29

4 The Wizardry of Whiteness in Australia  43

5 The Whiteness Regimes of Multiculturalism in Australia59

6 Technologies of the ‘Kiwi’ Selves  75

7 Africans on an ‘English Farm in the Pacific’  93

8 Conclusion: New Racism in Settler States  107

References123

Index143

vii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This is the introductory chapter. Therefore, it outlines the

­philosophical logic that underpins the theoretical assumptions of the proj-
ect, as well as the methodological framework of the book. It points out
that there are no research studies that investigate and theorise the lived
experience of Africans in either Australia or New Zealand via what
­
Goldberg (Ethnic and Racial Studies 32(7):1271–1282, 2009) terms rela-
tional racisms. It justifies the use of the relational account of racism by
arguing that the power of relationality lies in its ability to offer a cartogra-
phy of reiterative impacts of racism, its discursive transformations and redi-
rections (Goldberg, Ethnic and Racial Studies 32(7):1271–1282, 2009).

Keywords Relational Racisms • White Australia Policy • Colonialism

• Whiteness • Race • Racisms

This book is a study of the lived experience of African men in Australia and
New Zealand. It applies the race category in order to interrogate the lived
experience of research participants (Massao and Fasting 2010). By focus-
ing on the lived experience, ‘it gives room to interrogate race not as a bio-
logical fact or an essential component of identity but rather as a historically
constituted and culturally dependent social practice’ (Alcoff 2006; cited
in Massao and Fasting 2010, p. 148). Put differently, this book does not
essentialise race, rather it rejects the approach of those who wish to erase

© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Majavu, Uncommodified Blackness, Mapping Global Racisms,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51325-6_1
2 M. MAJAVU

difference without first removing the structure that produces differences

in life chances (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008).
Before going any further, perhaps it is worth pointing out that
I chose to research Australia and New Zealand because, to my knowledge,
there are no research studies that investigate and theorise the lived
­experience of Africans in either Australia or New Zealand via what Goldberg
(2009) terms relational racisms. A relational analysis of racism underscores
how ‘state formations or histories, logics of oppression and exploitation
are linked, whether casually or symbolically, ideationally or semantically’
(Goldberg 2009, p. 1275). A relational account of racism differs to a com-
parativist analysis of racism. The latter may choose to contrast racisms in
one place and another, whereas, the former discursively foregrounds how
the colonial shaped the contemporary (Goldberg 2009).
This is not to say that contemporary racisms are colonial, but, rather, the
point is to highlight racisms’ constitutive connection even though racisms’
expressions may have morphed over time (Goldberg 2009). Similarly, this
is not to say that a comparativist analysis is not employed in this book;
on the contrary it is, but in service to the relational analysis of racisms.
In service to the relational, the comparative’s discursive insights are
extended and theoretically deepened (Goldberg 2009). The power of rela-
tionality lies in its ability to offer a cartography of reiterative impacts of
racism, its discursive transformations and redirections (Goldberg 2009).
The reading of the literature revealed that there is a dearth of scholar-
ship providing a relational analysis of Australia and New Zealand, which is
surprising given the colonial history of these two countries, as well as the
geographical and cultural proximity of the two nations (Fozdar 2013).
Research about Africans in Australia and New Zealand often uses a reset-
tlement discourse or integration paradigm to frame some of the chal-
lenges and issues faced by Africans. The concept of resettlement is often
used interchangeably with integration. According to Fozdar and Hartley
(2013, p. 24), ‘successful settlement is defined as integration’ of refugees
into a host society. Dhanji (2010) writes that appropriate accommodation,
health and welfare comprise the social determinants of resettlement.
Consequently, the problems faced by Africans are largely understood
to be only ‘problems of integration; too little of it, and too many people
who refuse to integrate’ (Lentin and Titley 2011, p. 193). The upshot is
the under-theorisation of the lived experience of Africans in Australia and
New Zealand. Marlowe et al. (2013) anthology, entitled South Sudanese
Diaspora in Australia and New Zealand, is a good case in point.
 INTRODUCTION 3

The book comprises an edited collection of studies that explore the reset-
tlement experience of South Sudanese who reside in Australia and New
Zealand. Although Marlowe et al. (2013) book is entitled South Sudanese
Diaspora in Australia and New Zealand, it is really about Australia for
of the 17 chapters that make up the book, with only 2 chapters discuss-
ing and exploring New Zealand. Furthermore, no attempt is made to
pull all the chapters together in order to highlight insights that could
be shared about the lived experience of South Sudanese in Australia and
New Zealand. Furthermore, although the book attempts to locate the
discussion of people of Sudanese heritage living in Australia and New
Zealand within the broader African diaspora, it neither seriously nor
rigorously engages with a wider literature on the African diaspora or
African immigration in the West. In short, Marlowe et al. (2013) book is
discursively narrow and thus its theoretical analysis does not adequately
account for the lived experience of Africans in Australia and New Zealand.
Consequently, it is not clear what the book’s theoretical contribution is
to the field of African diaspora.
To reiterate, I chose to study Australia and New Zealand because
the two countries’ racial dynamics have similar developments as settler
states (Winant 1994). For instance, in 1900, when several of the former
British colonies were being federated into Australia, New Zealand had
an option to join the federation but chose not to (Galligan et al. 2014).
As settler states, both countries were intent on establishing white nations.
The socio-political systems that both countries adopted following coloni-
sation largely benefitted whites. Australia and New Zealand are historically
racially conceived states, which were both moulded in the image of white-
ness to reflect the values and interests of white people (Goldberg 2002).
In other words, in both countries, whiteness did not just become racial,
but, rather, whiteness became the national identity (Goldberg 2002).
The following section outlines the colonial history of Australia and
New Zealand. It underscores the fact that although white settlers in
these two countries expressed their whiteness and their racisms towards
Indigenous peoples via different discursive themes, those themes how-
ever originate from one source—the discourse of white supremacy.
For instance, white settlers in Australia regarded Indigenous peoples as
barbarians who deserved to be exterminated, whereas white settlers in
New Zealand viewed the Indigenous peoples in the country as ‘noble sav-
ages’ who essentially needed to be tutored the ways of the white world.
4 M. MAJAVU

Whitening Australia and New Zealand:

A Relational Analysis
Australia
As settler states, both Australia and New Zealand were founded on the
values of white supremacy and through colonial violence, as well as via
the colonisation of Indigenous peoples. History teaches that colonialism
subordinates, kills, rapes and exploits the colonised and their resources
and lands (Pateman and Mills 2007). To justify and make colonisation
morally acceptable, the British Empire utilised the concept of ‘Discovery
Doctrine’ to rationalise colonisation. The Doctrine was developed
by European countries to give their colonial projects legal credibility.
The Doctrine is the original and controlling legal precedent for Indigenous
rights in countries like Australia and New Zealand (see: Miller et al. 2010).
I use Mills’ (1997a) concept of the ‘settler contract’ to refer to the
Doctrine. The settler contract legitimated British rule over Indigenous
peoples of Australia and New Zealand. According to Pateman and Mills
(2007, p. 38), ‘the settler contract is a specific form of the expropriation
contract and refers to the dispossession of, and rule over’, Indigenous
peoples by British settlers in settler societies.
It is worth pointing out that the implementation of the Discovery
Doctrine in Australia and New Zealand took two different forms. The set-
tlers regarded Australia as terra nullius (the land of no one), and to settlers
that meant they had every right to occupy Australia. According to Short
(2003), the philosophical underpinnings of the legal doctrine of terra nul-
lius are based on John Locke’s philosophy of property ownership. John
Locke argued that:

property in land originated from tilling the soil, in ‘mixing labour with
land’… The apparent absence of such activities led to the colonizers’ convic-
tion that the natives had no investment in the soil and hence no legitimate
claim to it. (Short 2003, p. 492)

The foregoing partly explains why British settlers disregarded Aboriginal

people from the moment they landed in Australia and proclaimed British
sovereignty (Pateman and Mills 2007). Additionally, the settlers viewed
the Aboriginal peoples not only as inferior to whites but also as inferior
people to other Indigenous people who the British Empire had colonised
 INTRODUCTION 5

(Behrendt 2010). As far as the British settlers were concerned, Aboriginal

peoples in Australia needed whitening. Put another way, from first contact,
British settlers believed they were going to compel Aboriginal peoples to
assimilate into the European society (Haebich 2005).
However’ ‘the failure of the civilizing experiments convinced the set-
tlers that the natives were irredeemably inferior, indeed vermin that should
be exterminated’ (Moses 2000, p. 96). Researchers working on this field
do not agree on whether or not the colonisation of Australia involved a
genocide of the Aborigines. What researchers do agree on however is that
the British violently seized the land of Aboriginal groups without compen-
sation and excluded them from their source of food (Moses 2000).
As part of the broader efforts to make Australia white, the colonial
government removed Aboriginal children from their families to institu-
tions to be trained to behave white and be ‘civilised’ (Haebich 2001).
Apart from the fact that the colonial government believed that Aboriginal
parents served as bad role model for their own children, the ultimate goal
behind taking children from their parents was to biologically ‘breed out’
the Aboriginal people through forced state marriages between lighter
castes and whites. According to Haebich (2005, p. 6), in the 1930s, in the
Northern Territory and Western Australia, a policy was implemented to
‘“breed out” Aboriginal physical as well as cultural characteristics through
forced state marriages between lighter castes and whites’.
The foregoing is reminiscent of the white settlers in the United States
who, between the 1880s and 1930s, removed Native American children
from their parents to have them adopted by white families (Goldberg 2002).
By removing Indigenous children from their families, white settlers in the
United States and Australia wanted to strip these children of their culture,
to deracialise them in order to recreate them—racially reconfigure them as
white (Goldberg 2002).
As part of additional efforts to reinvent the country as a white nation,
the constitution of the Federation of Australia, which was adopted in 1901,
excluded all Aborigines from citizenship (McGrath 1993). Furthermore,
the government introduced the Immigration Restriction Act which effec-
tively ended all permanent Chinese immigration (Inglis 1972). Known
as the White Australia policy, the Act was designed to keep out Chinese
immigrants and other immigrants of colour from Australia. The foregoing
history partly reveals the long-standing efforts of white settlers to build and
maintain a white country in Australia. I argue in this book that although
the kind of political tactics that are employed to keep Australia white have
6 M. MAJAVU

changed, the colonial objective to make Australia a white country and for
white people still shapes the commonsense understanding of who belongs
in Australia and who does not. In other words, Australia’s settler state his-
tory shapes the social order and social life in contemporary Australia.

New Zealand
The Indigenous people of New Zealand were regarded by the white settlers
as being a ‘higher race’ than the Aboriginal people (Ballara 1986). As far
as the British settlers were concerned, Māori people were the ‘noblest’ of
the ‘coloured’ peoples (Ballara 1986). Consistent with this white suprem-
acist logic was the claim that the British imperial policy was relatively
more enlightened than it had been in other colonies (O’Sullivan 2007).
It was further argued that the foregoing factors ‘made a nation of “one
people” a positive inevitability’ (O’Sullivan 2007, p. 11). The white set-
tlers vigorously promoted the ideology of ‘one people’ which was based
on the idea of two social groups existing in racial harmony (Walker 1990).
However, Walker (1984, p. 269) points out that ‘the difficulties of liv-
ing out that ideal soon became apparent, as two races of vastly different
cultural traditions competed for the land and its resources’ (Walker 1984,
p. 269). Hence, in the 1850s’ the British colonisers forced the purchase
of Indigenous Māori land, and in turn, the Māori people resisted and that
led to the ‘brutal land wars of the 1860s’ (Morin and Berg 2001, p. 196).
By 1900, the white settlers owned close to 95 per cent of the land in
New Zealand (Walker 1984). Moreover, the outcome of colonisation by
the turn of the century was impoverishment of the Māori (Walker 1990).
Additionally, diseases and poor nutrition led to the decrease of the Māori
population (King 2003). As the Māori population decreased, white settlers
whitened the country via European immigration. The colonial govern-
ment brought in about 100,000 European immigrants into the country
between 1871 and 1880 (King 2003). In the 1970s, the New Zealand
government decided to extend the subsidised immigration scheme, which
previously applied mainly to the United Kingdom, to other European
countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
West Germany, and the United States (Trapeznik 1995). According
to Brooking and Rabel (1995), successive New Zealand governments
favoured white immigrants because they viewed New Zealand as a Utopia
for the chosen few, preferably white people from Western Europe and
North America.
 INTRODUCTION 7

The efforts to make New Zealand a white country via European

i­mmigration continued throughout most of the twentieth century. What
the foregoing reveals is that although New Zealand never explicitly adopted
a White policy like Australia, it nevertheless had its own unstated white
immigrants only policy to keep the country white. The ‘unstated whites
only policy’ approach is consistent with the colonial illusions and white
myths that shaped how white settlers approached the colonial project in
New Zealand—the fantasy that the colonial project in the country was rel-
atively benign and enlightened. In other words, one of the long-standing
white myths in New Zealand is the belief that white settlers who colonised
the country were ‘good’ guys, who basically transcended ‘bad colonialism’
by introducing a kind, caring and considerate kind of colonialism.
Whiteness in New Zealand is of the view that bad colonialism happened
in Australia and other places like in Africa. Similarly, whiteness in New
Zealand associates racism with policies like White Australia policy. As far as
whiteness is concerned in New Zealand, it does not know anything about
racism and thus could not possibly be motivated by racist sentiments
because New Zealand whiteness, since colonialism, is supposedly beyond
white supremacist values and therefore benign (Kenny 2000). I argue in
this book that in contemporary New Zealand, these white myths and illu-
sions are expressed via phrases such as ‘fair go’—a key phrase that describes
the country’s values (Rashbrooke 2013). This white New Zealand atti-
tude is similar to the Brazilian lusotropicalist ideology—a white narrative
celebrating the practice of racial-cultural intimacy among the Portuguese
and those they colonised (Fikes 2009). According to Fikes (2009, p. 1),
‘multiple sources further claimed that the Portuguese believed themselves
incapable of racism because of this ideology’.

Race, Whiteness and Racism

Race has shaped the modern world; it is present everywhere—it is palpable
in the distribution of resources and power, as well as in the desires and
fears of individuals (Winant 2001). Race is more than a set of ideas, but
rather a way of being in the world, of meaning-making, and those ways of
being and representation differ across space and time (Goldberg 2006).
From a racial formation standpoint, ‘race is a matter of both social struc-
ture and cultural representation’ (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 56). Modern
societies are suffused with racial projects to which all are subjected, and
this racial ‘subjection’ is typically ideological (Omi and Winant 1994).
8 M. MAJAVU

Through these racial projects, everybody learns some version of the rules of
social classification and of her own racial identity (Omi and Winant 1994).
Consequently, ‘we are inserted in a comprehensively racialized social
structure. Race becomes “common sense”—a way of comprehending,
explaining, and acting in the world’ (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 60).
Put simply, race is infinitely embodied in societal institutions and people’s
personalities; it is etched on the human body, in other words, ‘racial phe-
nomena affect the thought, experience, and accomplishments of human
individuals and collectivities in many familiar ways, and in a host of uncon-
scious patterns as well’ (Winant 2001, p. 1).
The race of all Europeans in the colonies was regarded to be more
or less white (Goldberg 2002). Although all Europeans were viewed as
white in colonial settings, ‘it was not quite so “at home”’ (Goldberg
2002, p. 172). For example, poor whites and the urban English work-
ing class were explicitly identified with immigrants and degraded races
in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Goldberg 2002). Thus,
working-­class English migrated to the colonies like Australia and New
Zealand to become white where they might not be so fully regarded in
English cities like Manchester, Birmingham or London (Goldberg 2002).
In other words, settler states like Australia and New Zealand have his-
torically offered poor whites, working-class whites and other whites
who struggled to fit in in the mainstream societies of the big European
metropoles an opportunity to be elevated to the property of whiteness
‘by making at least the semblance of privilege and power, customs and
behaviour available to them not so readily agreeable in their European
environments’ (Goldberg 2002, p. 172).
Whiteness has three dimensions:

(1) a set of social relations in which people are categorized hierarchically

by race, and those who are accepted as white collectively hold power and
control over material resources; (2) an ideology that renders white power
and white people’s participation in an oppressive system as invisible to them;
and (3) an identity when people of European descent accept these relation-
ships, this ideology, and ways of life lived within this system of relations as
‘normal.’ (Sleeter 2011, p. 424)

To put it summarily, whiteness stands socially for superiority, politically

for power and control, economically for privilege and wealth (C. Harris
1995, cited in Goldberg 2002), and culturally for self-assertion and arro-
gance (Goldberg 2002). Built into whiteness is a set of elevated moral
 INTRODUCTION 9

­ ispositions, social customs and norms from which the working class, like
d
immigrants and blacks, are taken to be morally degenerated (Bonnett
1998, cited in Goldberg 2002).
Since whiteness is an embedded set of social practices, it renders all
white people complicit in larger social practices of racism (Yancy 2012).
Historically, racism was expressed via a pseudo-scientific perspective that
argued that some groups are inherently intellectually, culturally or socially
superior or inferior to other groups due to some biological characteristic
they do or do not possess (Hall 2005). In the twenty-first century, racism
is increasingly articulated in terms of national self-image, of cultural differ-
entiation linked to custom, heritage as well as of exclusionary immigration
policies and anti-immigrant practices (Goldberg 1990a).
This book is premised on the view that a unified grammar of racist dis-
course does not exist, but what does exist is the body of racist discourse that
consists of evolving racist themes and changing racist presumptions, premises
and representations (Goldberg 1990b). In other words, racism is not theo-
retically conceived as a singular monolithic phenomenon in this book, but
rather, I underscore and identify a manifold of racisms (Goldberg 1990a).
Further, racism does not need to be affirmative in nature, meaning one
need not take some action X to demonstrate a racist attitude or disposition
(Hall 2005). One may further racist agendas by failing to challenge racist
institutions and practices (Hall 2005).
For many white people, racism does not exist. For Europeans, rac-
ism died with the demise of the Third Reich (Goldberg 2006), for many
Australians racism died when the country abandoned the White Australia
policy, and for white New Zealanders, racism is something that happens
in places like the United States and Australia. According to Goldberg
(2006), for many twentieth-century seminal white intellectuals, the
Holocaust signalled the horrors of racial invocation and racist summa-
tion. Consequently, race was seen as having no social place, and race was
to be excised from any characterising of human conditions and relations
(Goldberg 2006).
To that end, ethnicity became an acceptable concept to replace race with.
As Goldberg (2006, p. 349) puts it, ‘ethnicity is comprehensible, religious
tension understandable if regrettable, migration and refugeedom unfortu-
nate but perhaps unavoidable’. It is against this backdrop that race became
only the United States’ problem, and religious tension between Christian
secularism and Islam became Europe’s concern (Goldberg 2006).
10 M. MAJAVU

The reality, however, is that race and racism have played a vital role
in the global reproduction of capital for 500 years; it remains so today
(Winant 2001). It is a truism to point out that after the World War II,
the racial landscape discursively shifted. The current global racial dynam-
ics reflect the uneasy tension between the centuries-long legacy of white
supremacy and the post-World War II triumphs of the movements of the
colonised and racially oppressed (Winant 2001). We are witnessing the
dawn of a new form of ‘anti-racist racism’ (Winant 2001). Thus, in this
post-World War II racial landscape, race is rarely ever invoked to legitimate
social structures of inequality, and crude appeals to white superiority have
been largely jettisoned (Winant 2001).
The new racism rejects the old racism which was heavily invested in
biologism and notions of superiority/inferiority (Winant 2001). Instead,
the new racism puts an emphasis on ‘cultural differences’, national
­belonging—­basically it focuses on concepts that are ostensibly non-hierar-
chised but generally consistent with national borders and national identi-
ties, ‘and with supposedly homogenous national cultures’ (Winant 2001,
p. 273). Among other things, the foregoing indicates that the new r­ acism
benefits from mainstream patriotic white discourses, which portray Western
countries as having achieved the ideals of democracy (Winant 2001).
It is against this discursive backdrop that when the new racism is charged
with racism, its spokespeople often invoke national democratic ideals
(Winant 2001).
The foregoing analysis highlights the notion that white supremacy is
capable of absorbing political changes and adapting to new racial land-
scapes. It is quite capable of presenting itself as both conservative and
democratic, it repackages itself as ‘colour-blind’, pluralist and merito-
cratic, while articulating popular fears in a respectable and intelligible way
in respect to national culture (Winant 2001). It is within this discursive
­climate that this book argues that today racism operates in societies that
explicitly condemn prejudice and discrimination (Winant 2001).
According to Winant (2001), the new racism has been largely detached
from its perpetrators, and in its most advanced forms, it has no perpetra-
tors; it is taken for granted and therefore it has become a commonsense
feature of everyday life and global social structure (Winant 2001). In other
words, under the current global racial dynamics, racist effects are sustained
‘by their routinization in social and state practice, and by state silence and
omission’ (Goldberg 2002, p. 161).
With the foregoing in mind, this book investigates racism in an age of
globalisation, an era in which liberal settler states have generally dispensed
 INTRODUCTION 11

with explicit racial hierarchies of the past (Winant 2001). This book will
show that racism still distributes advantages and privileges to whites, rac-
ism still pervades the exercise of political power, and in settler states like
Australia and New Zealand, racism still shapes ideas about history, society
and national identity (Winant 2001).

Liberalism and Race

Dominant discourses that are often utilised to talk about difference, race
and ethnicity in Australia and New Zealand are multiculturalism and diver-
sity. This book problematises multiculturalism and diversity by pointing
out that these discursive concepts are part of the liberal tradition, which
has historically played a foundational role in the process of normalising
and naturalising racial dynamics and racist exclusions (Goldberg 1993;
Mehta 1999; Mills 1997a; Pitts 2005).
This work is premised on the view that modern liberalism is inherently
racist because liberalism and racial ideas evolved together and shaped each
other (Goldberg cited in Valls 2005). In other words, whiteness is the
unnamed socio-discursive order that has made the modern world what
it is today (Goldberg 1993; Mills 1997a). It is partly for this reason that
some scholars, particularly scholars of colour, have argued that ‘modern
philosophy as whole (or at least major schools of thought within it) is
deeply racist’ (Valls 2005, p. 4).
It is against this discursive backdrop that European philosophers, from
Voltaire, Kant, David Hume to Hegel, have depicted Africans as primi-
tive, savages, backwards, irrational and essentially inherently inferior to
whites—a people whose humanity is questionable and a people who
have not contributed to modernity and thus a people who are in need of
­civilising influence (Goldberg 1993; Hoffheimer 2005; Sala-Molins cited
in Bonilla-Silva 2012; Valls 2005).
Mainstream liberals often treat liberalism as a transcendent political
philosophy— ‘it comes into the human world untainted, all sweetness and
light’ (Bogues 2005, p. 230). However, I am of the view that no proper
account of the history of liberalism can be presented without the histories
of colonial empire (Bogues 2005). Ultimately, race is one of the central
conceptual inventions of modernity, ‘the concept assumes specificity as
modernity defines itself, refining modernity’s landscape of social relations
as its own conceptual contours are mapped out’ (Goldberg 1993, p. 3).
Furthermore, the importance of race changes theoretically and materially
as modernity is renewed, refined and redefined (Goldberg 1993).
12 M. MAJAVU

Book Structure
This book analyses and discusses the data from Australia and New
Zealand separately. The aim is to show sensitivity to historical context
and political nuances that make the national identities of these two
countries. There are too many complex historical and social issues to
capture and to explain for each country, and it is only by separating
the analysis of the data that I can attempt to convincingly explain the
subtleties that shape the participants’ lived experience. To discuss the
data as if it were from one country would have obscured many impor-
tant historical differences and would have led to a superficial analysis of
each countries’ political and social context.
Australia and New Zealand are two different countries, with two differ-
ent histories, two different political systems and two different economies.
Sociological imagination compels researchers to avoid obscuring these
vital historical differences in our intellectual explorations. The objective
is to produce nuanced, sophisticated and historically informed analyses
of ideologies and discourses that shape the lived experience of differently
situated black people. Separating the discussion of the data as I have done
allowed me to be rigorous in my investigation, while contextualising issues
within the relevant historical analysis.
Thus, while some participants’ quotes in this study communicate a
similar lived experience, my analysis of those experiences is informed by
political and historical contexts that fundamentally differ. I do not aim
to cover everything in this book nor does the book contain everything
about Australia and New Zealand. Similarly, it was never the intention of
this book to research ‘everyone everywhere doing everything’ (Miles and
Huberman 1984, p. 36).
The book is divided into eight chapters. Following this Introductory
chapter, Chap. 2 explores the theoretical and methodological assumptions
that shape this research project. It locates the book within the Africana
Studies tradition. The term Africana refers to people of African descent
and Africa-descended communities, wherever they are found worldwide
(McDougal 2014). Africana Studies researches the ‘lived-experience of
the black’ (Rabaka 2015).
Chapter 3 is a theory chapter and thus comprehensively details the
theory that is utilised to engage with the research data. This work devel-
oped its own theoretical concept, uncommodified blackness image, to
deconstruct whiteness’ imagining of a diasporic African identity as the
 INTRODUCTION 13

e­mbodiment of warfare and the ‘heart of darkness’. It argues that the

ideological function of the uncommodified blackness image is to deny
Africans full humanness and human qualities such as civility, refinement,
beauty, intelligence, dignity and voice.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the Australian research findings. Chapter 4
argues that, in Australia, the dominant discourse on the uncommodified
blackness image is characterised by the discursive simultaneity of dehu-
manisation and demonisation— ‘each of which offers a narrowly defined
inscription of blackness that elicits societal panic and fosters a climate jus-
tifying state violence against’ Africans (Leonard 2006, p. 18). Chapter 5,
on the other hand, explores ways in which the whiteness regimes of mul-
ticulturalism in Australia are employed to manufacture the illusion of a
post-white Australia policy, while, in reality, normative whiteness main-
tains the view that Africans are not the embodiment of the true, legitimate
Australian citizenry.
Likewise, Chaps. 6 and 7 discuss the research findings from New
Zealand. Chapter 6 accentuates the discursive methods in which human-
ness of Africans is denied in subtle and commonplace ways in New Zealand.
Chapter 7 foregrounds the colonial history of New Zealand to argue that
the legacy of the white project to build a ‘Better Britain’ for white settlers
shapes the discursive order in twenty-first-century New Zealand.
Chapter 8 is a concluding chapter. This chapter highlights key similarities
between the Auckland findings and the Melbourne findings. It concludes
that whiteness is what makes both Australia and New Zealand distinctively
Settler States of Whiteness. The notion of ‘Settler States of Whiteness’
is derived from Goldberg’s (2009) trope of ‘States of Whiteness’, and
it is used in this book to point out that, historically, Settler States of
Whiteness are states that become engaged in the constitution and mainte-
nance of whiteness (Goldberg 2002). Within Settler States of Whiteness,
racism has been reformed, cleaned up and streamlined (Winant 2001).
Consequently, one of the defining features of the new racisms in Settler
States of Whiteness is that the discourse of the new racisms openly con-
demns discrimination while it portrays whiteness as the norm and the rule
(Goldberg 2002).
 CHAPTER 2

Conceptual Issues

Abstract This chapter locates the book within the Africana Studies tradition.
One of the challenges facing African scholars in Australia and New Zealand
is the lack of institutional power to forge and develop intellectual paradigms
based on the lived experience of African people. What Rabaka (2010) terms
‘epistemic apartheid’ compels African scholars to utilise Western liberal dis-
courses such as multiculturalism, diversity, the resettlement discourse and
the integration paradigm to research issues faced by Africans in Australia and
New Zealand. This chapter argues that by employing the Africana Studies
framework, and through the introduction of the theoretical concept of the
uncommodified blackness image, this book disrupts the prevailing academic
refugee discourse and the migration studies which often locate Africans from
a refugee background within a policy-oriented discourse.

Keywords Uncommodified Blackness Image • Negritude • Black

Diaspora • Africana Studies • Epistemic Apartheid

Theoretical Questions
This book is a discursive venture that aims to ponder over the place of
Africans in the diaspora, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. This
study is inspired by Negritude and thus is of the view that black people
in the West share a common set of experiences that centre around the

© The Author(s) 2017 15

M. Majavu, Uncommodified Blackness, Mapping Global Racisms,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51325-6_2
16 M. MAJAVU

struggle against racism, white domination, the pursuit of economic free-

dom and slavery and colonialism (Bassey 2007; McLeod 1999).
The recurring themes of Negritude include exile, alienation and racial
consciousness (McCulloch 1983). The writings of the Negritude move-
ment present alienation as an essentially racial problem emanating more
from the experience of lived racial experience than from being of a differ-
ent class or nationality to the majority (McCulloch 1983). In other words,
the Negritude movement foregrounded ‘an abstract solidarity joining all
members of the Negro race irrespective of the social or economic realities
governing the interests of individuals’ (McCulloch 1983, p. 8).
This work advocates for the recognition of the shared sense of identity
and historical linked experience that binds the black diaspora irrespective
of nationality, class and gender (Leonard 2006). The historical construc-
tion of blackness in Western countries largely revolves around an image
of an uncivilised and an inferior Other to whites. This perspective is based
on Mills’ (1997a, p. 1) philosophical claim that ‘white supremacy is the
unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today’.
Although different Western countries differ in their construction of black-
ness, the overarching theme that shapes the construction of blackness is that
blacks are deviant, criminogenic and inferior to whites.
It was Fanon (1986, p. 173) who once said ‘wherever he goes, the
Negro remains a Negro’. In the United States, ‘Negroes are segregated.
In South America, Negroes are whipped in the streets, and Negro strikers
are cut down by machine-guns. In West Africa, the Negro is an animal’
(Fanon 1986, p. 113).
This study is cognisant of the historical fact that the white supremacist
discourse has historically been used to argue that:

Some non-whites were close enough to Caucasians in appearance that

they were sometimes seen as beautiful, attractive in an exotic way (Native
Americans on occasion; Tahitians; some Asians). But those more distant
from the Caucasoid somatotype—paradigmatically blacks (Africans and also
Australian Aborigines)—were stigmatised as aesthetically repulsive and devi-
ant (Mills 1997a, p. 61).

Writing about the racialising processes in the United States, Vaught (2012)
points out that the ‘people of colour’ trope has historically been con-
structed based on the ways in which whites perceive others as approaching
the assigned characteristics of blackness or whiteness. Hence:
 CONCEPTUAL ISSUES 17

Asian Americans, South Asian Indians, Chicanas/os or Latinas/os have not

become White, and Chicanas/os, Southeast Asians, and Latinas/os (among
others) have not become Black, in spite of various legal and cultural designa-
tions over time and geography. In dominant discourse and ideology, White
and Black are racial categories against which other groups are often mea-
sured and defined (Vaught 2012, p. 571). (italics in the original)

At this juncture, it is worth pointing out that it is beyond the discursive

scope of this book to explore the global history of white supremacy and
how it has been deployed to racialise different groups in different coun-
tries over the past centuries. Rather, the point in the foregoing discus-
sion is to underscore that, in this book, the label ‘black’ is utilised to
refer to people of African descent. Moreover, historically, discourses about
‘blackness’ in Western countries have been conceptualised in reference to
a white supremacist discourse about people of African descent.
Historically, whites, as a social group, have always regarded people of
African descent as incapable of logic or reason, hence implying that people of
African descent rely on animal-like instincts to negotiate their way through
life (Dawson 2006). Whites used the same discourse to rationalise enslaving
people of African descent. Through the same discourse, ‘the Enlightenment
articulated the language of democracy in spite of its dependence on the slave
trade’ (Eisenstein 2004, p. 5). When people of African descent in Haiti used
the Enlightenment discourse to revolt against slavery, they paid heavily for
their efforts to express their humanity (James 1989).
The larger point in the foregoing historical analysis is to show that
people of African descent ‘have a special place in the Western imagina-
tion’ (Hoberman 1997, p. 207) as fantasy objects associated with childlike
simplicity, alleged high-powered and unbridled sexuality and presumed
low moral character. Obviously, these aforementioned discursive tropes
have historically been expanded upon and employed differently in differ-
ent Western contexts. Be that as it may, this study utilises the history of
the overarching discourse of white supremacy in relation to alleged black
inferiority to discuss the lived experience of Africans in Australia and New
Zealand via the West’s (in particular American) discourses about blackness.
This approach is consistent with the philosophy of Negritude and is
inspired by Fanon’s (1986) Black Skin, White Masks. Although Fanon
was not an orthodox Negritudist, he explored and deconstructed
‘Negritudesque themes throughout his oeuvre’ (Rabaka 2015, p. 247). In
other words, Fanon’s philosophy asked and offered answers to questions
that continental and diasporan Africans struggled with (Rabaka 2015).
18 M. MAJAVU

Uncommodified Blackness
The originality of this book lies in its ability to bring numerous disparate
discourses into critical dialogue and then employ them to interrogate the
life struggles of Africans living in Australia and New Zealand (Rabaka
2015). This study attempts to make sense of the lived experience of
Africans in Australia and New Zealand by employing disparate intellectual
analyses ranging from institutional analysis to race analysis to discourse
analysis. Among other things, my approach is influenced by Alfred Lee’s
(1976) question: ‘Sociology for whom?’ The debates around this ques-
tion are long-standing in the discipline. According to Alfred Lee (1976,
p. 925), ‘the character of any sociological inquiry depends upon by and
for whom it is conceived and applied’. It is in that spirit that my sociologi-
cal inquiry is underpinned by Negritude and is conceived for Africans.
With the foregoing in mind, this study developed its own theoreti-
cal concept to analyse and to make sense of the data. The theoretical
construct of the uncommodified blackness image was developed by the
author with the aim of deconstructing whiteness’ imagining of a diasporic
African identity as the embodiment of warfare and the ‘heart of darkness’,
as well as to interrogate stereotypical imagery that associates African dia-
sporic identity with disease, poverty and famine. In the imagination of the
Western public, the African diasporic identity is conceived as an unpalat-
able kind of blackness—the type of blackness that has fallen ‘back into the
pit of niggerhood’ (Fanon 1986, 47).
In Western popular culture, African American celebrities have been
passed by whiteness (Tate 2015) as embodying palatable blackness—black
bodies that have been modified by ‘technologies of whiteness’ (Salter 2009)
and thus commodifiable in Western mainstream media and popular culture.
It is worth noting that the phrase ‘technologies of whiteness’ is derived
from Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of self’. According to Foucault,
technologies of self enable individuals to modify their bodies, thoughts and
their ways of being so that the presentation of self is consistent with the
prevailing discourses of a society that individuals reside in (Thorpe 2008).
Dominant discourses of any society embody different types of logic for
males and females. For instance, the discursive presentation of femininity
in the West foregrounds white femininity as the ideal beauty standard, and
thus all women in the West are compelled to aspire to this beauty standard
through the use of ‘technologies of whiteness’. Moreover, the discursive
construction of white femininity in the West revolves around the notion of
altering female bodies via dietary exercise and through cosmetics and surgery
 CONCEPTUAL ISSUES 19

(Hobson 2005). Within this discursive framework, African female bodies are
regarded as largely unmodified, unfixed and ‘unhealed’ (Hobson 2005) by
technologies of whiteness, and hence uncommodifiable. However, African
American women celebrities such as Beyonce, Rihanna and Tyra Banks have
been passed by whiteness (Tate 2015) as representing palatable blackness.
American popular culture has also constructed a commodified black
male image that mainstream whites in Western countries find appealing,
safe to mimic and to consume (Leonard and King 2010). Through hip
hop and certain sports like basketball, black male bodies are increasingly
admired and commodified in many Western countries (Leonard 2012).
The construction of this commodified blackness is achieved through a
complex and contradictory discourse which presents black male bodies as
fashionable and deviant at the same time (Leonard and King 2010). The
public discourse that shapes the commodification of black male bodies
through hip hop and sports is characterised by the deployment of long-­
standing discursive practices of locating black male athletes or hip hop
celebrities within an aura of deviance and criminality (Hoberman 1997;
Leonard and King 2010). Thus, just as the black male athlete or hip hop
celebrity may radiate an aura of criminality, ‘so the black criminal can radi-
ate a threating aura of athleticism’ (Hoberman 1997, p. xxix) with hyper-
masculinity often depicted in hip hop music videos.
This is a book about the African male experience in Australia and New
Zealand. Therefore, it builds on the foregoing discourse about the commodi-
fication of American black male bodies by developing its own theoretical con-
cept—the uncommodified blackness image—to locate a particular Western
discourse that is often used to create a stereotypical image of African males
that becomes central in the discussions about diasporan Africans in the West.
Unlike commodified blackness, ­uncommodified blackness is not a discursive
construct that mainstream Western society finds appealing. Uncommodified
blackness derives from the long-standing racist image of the ‘nigger-savage’
(Fanon 1986). In the collective unconscious of mainstream Western society,
uncommodified blackness equals ugliness, darkness and immorality (Fanon
1986). Through the image of uncommodified blackness, diasporic Africans
are portrayed as humanity at its lowest and are associated with an Africa of
poverty, chaos, black magic and primitive mentality (Fanon 1986).
The image of commodified blackness in Western countries has two
discursive sides to it—fashionable blackness and criminogenic blackness.
Uncommodified blackness, on the other hand, has only one discursive
side—deviance and all the alleged pathologies that go hand in hand with
deviance. Thus, the global construction and representation of blackness in
20 M. MAJAVU

the public imagination of the West are defined by the fetishisation of com-
modified blackness (Leonard 2006), which is associated with modernity
and being Western (largely American), on the one hand, and the dehu-
manisation of uncommodified blackness which is largely associated with
underdevelopment, poverty, Africa, uneducated Others who speak poor
English or an accented English and being a refugee, on the other hand.
The discursive power of the uncommodified blackness image is its abil-
ity to frame its discursive articulations about uncommodified blackness
as articulations relating to modernity and the liberatory values associated
with the West, against the supposedly anti-social behaviour and allegedly
oppressive social practices of the ‘Third World’. It is against this discursive
backdrop that African males are routinely typecast as deviant, misogynis-
tic, aggressive and dangerous by Western mainstream institutions (Essed
1991). Thus, in their research project with Australian police informants,
Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (2008, p. 46) found that informants understood
Somalis primarily as people who ‘have been living off their wits for years in
the civil war; they’ve had to defend themselves; some have been child sol-
diers’. Similarly, in her research project, Nunn (2010, p. 186) discusses a
newspaper article that quotes an Assistant Police Commissioner saying that
Sudanese Australians come from ‘a culture of violence and boy soldiers’.
Racist discourses about African men have resulted in the racial profil-
ing of Africans in Australia. For example, in 2006, the Flemington Police
Station in Melbourne, Australia, rolled out what it termed ‘Operation
Molto’ (Michael and Issa 2015; Waters 2013). The covert operation
by the Victoria police force was tasked ‘to find criminality in young
­African-­Australians living in or visiting the Flemington public housing
estate’ (Waters 2013). According to Michael and Issa (2015, p. 8), who
experienced Operation Molto first-hand:

During Operation Molto, plain clothed police officers patrolled the parks
using racial taunts to stir up some action. …This policing was different—it
was indiscriminant targeting of African young men. It was compounding,
perpetrating violence, constant harassment, intimidation and denigration. It
freaked us out because no one knew if one of us would be killed.

Michael and Issa (2015) were lead applicants in the Federal Court Race
Discrimination case in 2013, which resulted in commitments by Victoria
Police to changing its practices and policing of African communities.
In New Zealand, racist narratives about supposedly barbaric, aggressive
and violent African men have also led to the over-policing of Africans.
 CONCEPTUAL ISSUES 21

The practice of over-policing in New Zealand involves punitive police

practices, police surveillance, racial profiling, harassment and sometimes
police brutality of Africans. In their study of over-policing of African
youth in Auckland, New Zealand, Nakhid et al. (2016) found that police
subjected their participants to name-calling and racist abuse. Additionally,
they found that the New Zealand police behaviour appeared to intention-
ally criminalise African youth and consequently, African youth arrested
for minor offences at night were often taken to police stations and locked
up for the night while their white friends were separated from them and
taken home to their parents by the police. Research by Elliott and Yusuf
(2014) and Mugadza (2012) also found that Africans are racially profiled
as potential criminals at New Zealand airports and by the police.
This book introduces the concept of the uncommodified blackness
image to interrogate the racist narratives about supposedly violent African
men out to raise havoc in the West. It will show that via the image of
uncommodified blackness, Africans residing in the West are cast as
unschooled and pathological Others. In short, this book explores ways in
which the whiteness regimes of truth about Africa underwrite Australian
and New Zealand discourses about Africans.

Disrupting the Migration and Refugee Studies

Discourse
Through the use of the theoretical construct of the uncommodified black-
ness image, this book disrupts the prevailing academic refugee discourse and
the migration studies which often locate Africans from a refugee background
within a policy-oriented discourse. Research about people from a refugee
background often uses a resettlement discourse or integration paradigm to
frame some of the challenges and issues faced by individuals from a refugee
background. In their influential paper, entitled Understanding Integration:
A conceptual framework, Ager and Strang (2008, p. 166) identify features
‘central to perceptions of what constitutes ‘successful’ integration’, which
include access to housing, health care and employment. Although Ager and
Strang (2008) point out that there is no generally accepted definition of
‘refugee integration’, the key domains of integration form part of the domi-
nant research tools used by numerous researchers in the field.
For instance, research (see: Correa-Velez and Onsando 2009; Dhanji
2010; Haggis and Schech 2010; Marlowe et al. 2013; Wille 2011) on
Africans in Australia often frames its discussion of research data by deploying
an integration, resettlement or acculturation framework. Similarly, New
22 M. MAJAVU

Zealand researchers often utilise the resettlement and integration paradigm

to frame the experiences of Africans (see: Elliott and Yusuf 2014; Ibrahim
2012; Marete 2011a; Mugadza 2012).
The aforementioned studies are useful, but their intellectual approach
limits the discursive exploration of the lived experience of Africans who
live in Australia and New Zealand. This book neither subscribes to nor
utilises the integration paradigm and the resettlement discourse. Rather,
this book is interested in interrogating how societal institutions function
and how these institutions operate according to prevailing ideologies and
discourses which are rooted in history.
The point of an institutional analysis is to move from examining per-
sonal factors to investigating institutional factors (Albert 1995). Society is
structured around institutions that allow its citizens to interact and accom-
plish a variety of functions that are key to life (Albert and Majavu 2012).
Moreover, societal institutions are legitimised through ideologies and dis-
courses that reflect the interests and values of the ruling class. According
to Althusser (cited in Thompson 1984), society is produced through
two types of institutions, namely: the state apparatus which comprise the
­government, the police and the courts, as well as the ideological state
apparatuses which include schools, family and communication networks.
It should be noted that ideology is used in this book in a very broad
sense (Therbon 1980). The production of ideology cannot be separated
from the production of institutional roles and social practices (Susen 2014).
Thompson (1984) further adds that the analysis of ideology is, in a funda-
mental respect, the study of language in the social world. This work utilises
the concept of discourse to highlight the relation between language and ide-
ology (Thompson 1984). The analysis of discourse includes a discursive anal-
ysis of linguistic constructions, as well as a social analysis of the conditions in
which discourse is produced and received (Thompson 1984). Put differently,
discourse analysis focuses on language and on forms of social interaction
(Thorpe 2008). Language is often socially and politically charged, loaded
with issues of race, class, citizenship and other forms of social identification
(Alim and Smitherman 2012). Thus, this book researches the ways in which
discourse functions and the effects that it has on Africans (Mills 1997b).

Africana Studies versus Epistemic Apartheid

One of the challenges facing African scholars in Australia and New
Zealand is the lack of institutional power to forge and develop intellectual
paradigms based on the lived experience of African people. What Rabaka
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 Cold water, taken a swallow at a time at intervals during the day,
has a tonic effect upon the relaxed muscles. It also incites the flow of
gastric juice.

Ulcer of the Stomach. Where this condition is severe,

accompanied with severe pains and vomiting of blood, the dietetic
treatment is to give the nourishment through the rectum for from five
to ten days. Then follows a period of ten days milk diet, with bouillon,
barley water, a beaten egg, and once a day, after the third day,
strained oatmeal gruel.
Limewater is added to the milk to avoid the formation of leathery
curds and to neutralize the acids of the stomach. The patient is given
half a cup of milk every hour for three days, from 7 A. M. to 9 P. M.
From the third to the tenth day increase the quantity to one cupful,
then to a cup and a half and lengthen the periods between feedings
to two hours. If the milk is brought to a boil before the limewater is
added, it digests more readily.
After ten days, for the succeeding ten days the nourishment
should be given every two hours and the diet varied by semi-liquid
foods, such as gruels, toast water, soft boiled egg (once a day) beef
juice, two softened crackers (once a day) gelatin, buttermilk and
strained soups.
After twenty days the patient, if all is well, may very gradually
resume a normal diet, beginning with baked potatoes, softened
toast, lamb chops, a small piece of steak or white meat of chicken. It
is imperative that all food, liquid or solid, be thoroughly mixed with
saliva and that solids be chewed to a pulp.
Liquids must not be swallowed either hot or cold, but about body
temperature. Cold water may be taken into the mouth when more
palatable than warm and held there until about body temperature
before it is swallowed. All liquid should be sipped, not swallowed in
gulps.
 Cancer of the Stomach. Since the growth most often obstructs
the pylorus, the stomach is usually dilated and the general directions
for dilation of the stomach should be followed. If the food will not
digest in the stomach, one must resort to rectal feeding. Where
gastric digestion is near normal, the general principles of diet for
ulceration of the stomach should be followed.

Most cases of intestinal difficulties may traced to

Intestinal a clogged condition, either due to a weakness of
Disorders the nerves and of the intestinal muscles, and a
resultant weak peristalsis, which does not strongly
move the mass along its course, or to a failure of the liver to
discharge sufficient bile to lubricate the mass. If the waste is not
promptly moved through the intestines, irritation may result and the
poisons from bacterial fermentations will be absorbed by the system.
Deranged stomach digestion also interferes with the digestion in
the intestines.

Constipation. The causes of this difficulty are so varied that it can

seldom be regulated by diet alone. It can be helped. A large number
of cases of chronic constipation are due to the failure to respond to
Nature’s call at a regular time each day, thus establishing a regular
habit at a certain hour. Many others are due to the weakness of the
muscular walls of the intestines or to the nerves controlling them. In
this event the intestinal peristalsis is weak. Still another cause is a
failure of the liver to discharge sufficient bile into the intestines to
lubricate the foeces. Many chronic cases are due to the pill and drug
habit. Where one continues to take pills, the condition brings a result
similar to the feeding of “predigested” food,—if the work is done for
the organs they become lazy and rely upon artificial aid. Every part
of the body requires activity for strength.
If the straight front corset cramps the intestines it may cause
constipation by restraining their normal exercise during movements
of the body in walking, etc. Every woman who wears the straight
front corset should take exercises for the intestines morning and
night.
The most natural relief for constipation is exercise,—particularly
exercise directed to the muscles of the intestines and to the nerve
centers controlling them.
Such foods as are laxative in effect, with the free use of water are
helpful. Figs and raisins (due to their seeds), prunes, dates, grapes,
apples, and rhubarb are laxative, due to their acids. These have best
effect when eaten just before retiring.
Oatmeal, or any cereal containing the bran, is laxative,—such as
bran bread or green corn.
As must be inferred from the above statement, the cause of the
difficulty must first be reached.
Children should be trained to attend to Nature’s call regularly
every day. The best time is shortly after breakfast.

Enteritis. (Inflammation or Catarrh of the Intestines) is similar

in its nature to Gastritis or Catarrh of the Stomach and is treated in a
similar manner.
Acute Enteritis, as Acute Gastritis, is usually caused by a strong
irritant,—either by some food which disagrees, or by a mass of
undigested food. A fast of two or three days is the initial dietetic
treatment. A free drinking of water not only soothes the irritated
intestines but it cleanses the intestinal tract and assists the kidneys
in eliminating elements of fermentation; if these are not eliminated,
they will absorb into the blood.
 Physicians usually give a course of calomel and castor oil to
eliminate all intestinal contents.
After the fast, a liquid and semi-liquid diet is followed until
inflammation is relieved. Milk, strained gruels, broths, strained
soups, buttermilk, eggs (soft cooked or raw), beef juice, barley water,
custards, gelatines, soft puddings, etc., are the foods most
nourishing and causing least irritation.
All irritating foods as coarse vegetables, pickles, acid fruits and
fruits with coarse seeds, candies, beer, wines and salads should be
omitted.
Chronic Enteritis has the same general cause as Acute Enteritis,
though its onset is slow and it takes a correspondingly longer time to
correct.

Dysentery, if acute, demands complete rest in bed. The diet in

both Acute and Chronic cases must be confined to easily digested
foods, such as peptonized milk (see page 244), boiled milk, pressed
meat juice, and the white of egg, beaten and served with milk.
Blackberry brandy, and tea made from wild cherry bark, tend to
check the inflammation.
During convalescence, care must be taken not to over-feed. Begin
a more liberal diet with a more liberal allowance of beef juice,
gradually adding tender beef steak, roast beef, fish, white meat of
chicken, eggs, custards, wine jelly, dry toast, blancmange, well
boiled rice and other easily digested food. The beef and egg are
particularly valuable, because of the anaemia occasioned by the loss
of blood.

is sometimes necessary in cases of ulcer,

Rectal Feeding cancer, or tumor, along the digestive tract. Since
food is not absorbed in the large as readily as in the small intestine,
the strength cannot be fully maintained through rectal feeding. In
cases where the stomach is not able to digest the food, it is the best
expedient, however, until the functioning of the stomach is re-
established.
The rectum should be prepared about an hour before the feeding
by a full injection of water, to thoroughly cleanse the intestine. Place
the patient on his side with the hips elevated. If for any reason he
cannot lie on his side, let him lie on his back and elevate the foot of
his bed. After the water cleansing, inject two or three ounces of
water in which a small pinch of salt (6%) has been added and let it
go high up into the rectum.
Two to three ounces four to five hours apart is the desirable
quantity of rectal nutrition for an adult. The white of egg, beef juice,
and milk, all peptonized, are the best foods. The pancreatic trypsin,
sold in preparations of “pancreatin” is best. Unless milk is peptonized
the casein will be difficult to absorb. The food should always be
salted, as salt aids the absorption.
The white of egg should be diluted with four or five times its
volume of water; to beef juice add an equal volume of water. The
yolk of egg contains too much oil to absorb readily. Fats are not
absorbed through the rectum. If egg and beef juice are used without
milk, a little sugar may be added. Milk contains sugar in proportion.
It is not advisable to inject wine as it interferes with absorption of
other foods.
The nutriment should be forced eight to ten inches up into the
rectum to insure absorption. This can be done by using a small
injection point on a rubber tube and gently and patiently turning it as
it is inserted. The tube may be oiled to prevent irritation.

The liver is not, in a strict sense. a digestive organ, but it is very

dependent upon them, as all products of digestion must pass
 through it and the starches, sugars and proteins,
Derangements after they enter the blood, undergo chemical
of the Liver changes here.
For a fuller understanding of the reasons for the following
suggestions regarding diet for the liver, the writer would request a re-
reading, at this point, of the chapter upon the “Work of the Liver”
upon pages 81 to 92.
It will be recalled that the liver acts, not only upon proteins, sugars,
and starches,—the nourishing foods, but it also stands guard over
poisonous ferments, due to putrefactions absorbed from the
intestines, rendering them harmless; to a limited extent it also
oxidizes the poisons of alcohol. The fats also pass through the liver.
Since all products of digestion must pass through this organ, it is
easy to see how it may be overworked, for it is an undisputed fact
that most people eat more food than is required to maintain the body
in nitrogenous equilibrium and to supply the necessary heat and
energy.
After the gorging of a heavy meal, the overloaded blood and liver
express themselves in a sluggish brain and one feels mentally, as
well as physically, logy, or overloaded.
Since both sugar, carbohydrates and protein undergo chemical
changes in the liver, it is evident that a diet consisting of an excess of
either, must overwork the liver, not only through the nutritive food
elements absorbed, but through the toxic substances which must be
absorbed,—due to the excessive amount of food not being digested
as readily as a smaller amount. If the food remains in the intestines
too long, it is attacked by the bacteria always present there,
fermentation results and poisons are absorbed and carried to the
liver, where they must be broken down and rendered harmless, so
as not to affect other parts of the system. If for any reason the liver is
diseased, overloaded, or its action is sluggish, it will not promptly
oxidize these toxins.
One of the most important corrective agencies for an inactive liver
is exercise directed to this organ, to bring a free supply of blood, and
deep breathing of fresh air. It is apparent that the blood must carry its
full quota of oxygen to assist in oxidizing both the nitrogenous waste
and the poisons; and it must be remembered that the liver must
oxidize the waste from its own tissues, as well as from other parts of
the system.
It is apparent, from the above, that the regulation of diet for an
abnormal liver must be more in the quantity than in the quality of
food and in the perfect digestion. It depends also upon the activity of
the intestines, since the poisonous products of imperfectly digested
and fermenting food, not being regularly eliminated, must be
absorbed and carried to the liver. It is to free the intestines of the
waste containing the toxins that physicians give calomel and other
strong cathartics, to work off the toxins. These cathartics also work
off foodstuffs from the intestines before they are absorbed, so that
the liver has more rest.

Torpid Liver or Billiousness. This condition is due to the

sluggish action of this organ and a consequent failure to eliminate
the bile through the bile ducts into the duodenum. It may be caused
by inactivity and a resultant sluggish circulation of blood, to overwork
of the liver, due to overeating, to breathing of impure air, or to
insufficient breathing of pure air. It may also result from constipation
and a resultant absorption of toxic matter as described above.
Many cases of billiousness are occasioned by obstruction of the
opening of the bile ducts into the intestines, which is often
occasioned by an excess of mucus in the duodenum. In such cases
exercise for the intestines is clearly indicated.
In the bending, twisting and squirming movements which the infant
in the cradle makes, the liver is regularly squeezed and relaxed. The
same is true in the free movements of an active child at play. If
during adult life these same free movements of bending and twisting
the trunk were continued daily and correct habits of free breathing of
pure air were established, there would be little call for “liver tonics.”
 The elaboration of carbohydrates in the liver is an important part of
its work and in case of inactive liver the sugars and starches should
be limited, allowing that function to rest. Yet it is a mistake to allow a
diet too rich in protein. The best method is to cut down the quantity
of a mixed diet.
Two glasses of water an hour before breakfast followed by brisk
exercise for the vital organs and deep breathing are important. The
daily action of the bowels is imperative. In extreme cases a fast of
two or three days, with a copious use of water, is recommended.
Following this fast the diet should consist of easily digested foods,
eliminating those containing starch and sugars in too great
proportions, and it should be as limited as possible, consistent with
the actual necessity for rebuilding and for energy.
Some authorities restrict fats in a diet for billiousness but the
presence of fat in the duodenum stimulates the flow of pancreatic
juice, which in turn stimulates the secretion of bile.
Lemon stimulates the action of the hepatic glands and thus tends
to increase the liver activity.
There is a prevalent thought that eggs and milk cause sluggish
liver action. There is no physiological reason for this if too much food
is not eaten. One often loses sight of the fact that milk is a food as
well as a beverage, and that when milk constitutes an appreciable
part of the diet other foods should be limited accordingly.
The DIET may be selected from the following:[10]
Soups.—Light broths and vegetable soup with a little bread toasted
in the oven.
Fish.—Raw oysters, fresh white fish.
Meats.—Mutton, lamb, chicken or game.
Farinaceous.—Whole wheat or graham bread and butter, toast
buttered or dry, toasted crackers, cereals in small portions.
Vegetables.—Fresh vegetables, plain salads of watercress, lettuce,
and celery.
Desserts.—Gelatins, fruits, cornstarch, ice cream, junket, simple
puddings,—all with very little sugar.
 Liquids.—Hot water, lemonade, orangeade, toast water, buttermilk,
loppard milk and unfermented grape juice,—not too sweet.
AVOID.—All rich, highly seasoned foods, candies, cheese, pies,
pastry, pan cakes, or any fried foods, salmon, herring, mackeral,
bluefish, eels, dried fruits, nuts and liquors of all kinds.

The diet for gall stones need have no reduction

Gall Stones in protein nor carbohydrates, since the oxidation,
or the chemical action upon sugars is not
interfered with. The presence of fat in the duodenum increases the
flow of pancreatic juice which, in turn stimulates the flow of bile, so
olive oil is often recommended in case of gall stones.

is a serious disturbance of nutrition. It is known

Diabetes and tested by the appearance of sugar in the urine.
However, the conclusion should not be drawn that
one has diabetes if the urine test for a day shows sugar. This may be
due to an excess of carbohydrates, particularly of sugar in the diet a
day or two previous and all trace of it may disappear in a day. If
continued tests for some period show an excess, nutritional
disturbances are indicated.
The most usual form of diabetes is diabetes mellitus. It is
supposed to be due to a disturbance in the secretions from the
pancreas. Experiments have shown that the general process of
putting the carbohydrates in condition to be absorbed into the blood
is controlled by a secretion from the pancreas.
The difficulty which confronts the dietitian is to prescribe a diet
without carbohydrates which will keep up the body weight and not
disturb the nutritive equilibrium. The diet must consist of protein and
fat and one danger is in the tendency to acetic and other acids in the
blood, which involves the nervous system. The patient has a craving
for sugars and starches, but the system cannot make use of them,
and the heat and energy must be supplied by fats. While, as a rule,
the craving for certain foods is an indication that the system needs
the elements contained in it,—this is true in the craving of the
diabetes patient for carbohydrates,—yet the desire must not be
gratified, because of the inability to digest them.
There is often a distaste for fat, but its use is imperative and in
large quantities, because the weight and general vitality must be
maintained. The effort of the physician is to get the system in
condition to use carbohydrates.
Fats may be supplied in the yolk of egg, cream, butter, cheese,
bacon, nuts, particularly pecans, butternuts, walnuts and Brazil nuts.
In beginning a diet, the change must not be too sudden. At least a
week’s time should be allowed for the elimination of all sugar and
starch. Begin by eliminating sugars and next bread and potatoes.
Van Noorden gives the following diet, free from carbohydrates,
which has been in general use in Europe and America.
BREAKFAST.
Tea or coffee, 6 ounces.
Lean meat (beefsteak, mutton chop, or ham), 4 ounces.
Eggs one or two.
LUNCH.
Cold roast beef, 6 ounces.
Celery, or cucumbers, or tomatoes with salad dressing.
Coffee, without milk or sugar, 2 ounces.
Whisky, drams, diluted with 13 ounces of water.
DINNER.
Bouillon, 6 ounces.
Roast beef, 7½ ounces.
Green salad, 2 ounces.
Vinegar, 2½ drams.
Butter, 2½ drams.
Olive oil, 5 drams, or spinach with mayonnaise, large portion.
Whisky, 5 drams, diluted with 13 ounces water.
SUPPER, 9 P. M.
Two eggs, raw or cooked.

Van Noorden includes alcohol, in whisky, in his diet and most

physicians follow the theory that whisky or brandy aids in the
digestion and absorption of fats; the need is recognized since fats
must be supplied in so large quantities, yet the sweet wines and
beers contain sugar while the sour wines contain acids, which
disturb digestion.
There is a grave question in regard to the advisability of including
alcohol in the diet of a young person afflicted with diabetes and the
greater activity of the young patient will insure more perfect
digestion, so that the physician may not consider alcohol necessary.
Dr. Hall gives the following as a reasonable diet for a diabetic
case, after the first week or two, allowing potatoes.
BREAKFAST.
Tea or coffee, 6 ounces.
Cream, 2 ounces.
Meat, (beefsteak, mutton chops, or ham), 4 ounces.
Bread and butter, 2 slices.
Baked potato, with butter.
LUNCH.
Cold roast beef or cold boiled ham, 6 ounces.
Bread and butter, two slices.
Salad with mayonnaise dressing, egg garniture.
Tea or coffee with cream.
4 P. M.
Egg lemonade or egg orangeade.
DINNER.
Clear soup of any kind.
Roast beef or mutton, or pork.
Potatoes, baked or boiled.
Olives, celery, or radishes.
Side dish of green vegetables.
Bread and butter.
Dessert, milk-egg custard, sweetened with saccharin.
After a week on either of the above diets, in mild cases, sugar will
disappear from the urine. In extreme cases, it may be necessary to
follow this strict regime for two weeks. When the patient begins to
eat a little starch, potatoes and bread are re-instated first. Sugar is
kept out of the diet, except the little in fruit and vegetables, until the
urine shows no trace of it.
The following is a list of foods allowable:
Fresh meat, fish, oysters, clams, lobster, turtle, meat extracts, fats
of all kinds, eggs, such fresh vegetables as peas, beans, lentils,
lettuce, celery, asparagus, cabbage, pickles, clear soups (all kinds),
cheese (all kinds), coffee, tea (without sugar), cream, butter, fruit,
acid drinks and carbonated waters.

In the dietetic treatment of any diseased organ,

Derangements the object must be to give that organ as much rest
of the Kidneys as consistent with keeping up the general nutrition
of the system. The stomach and intestines are so
closely allied that, where one is affected, the other is liable to
affection also, and the dietetic treatment is regulated accordingly. Yet
generally speaking, in stomach disorders the quantity of protein is
limited; in intestinal disorders the starches, sugar and fats are
limited. Since the office of the kidneys is to pass from the system the
soluble salts and the nitrogenous waste, which dissolve in water, the
work of the kidneys in most conditions is aided by a copious drinking
of water. Since uric acid is stimulated by the kidneys, the proteins
should be restricted in the diet, particularly those formed from the
glands of animals,—as liver, sweetbreads, kidneys, also brains.
Potatoes, green vegetables, stone fruits and cranberries aggravate
an acute condition.

Acute Nephritis. In case of inflammation of the kidneys the

excretions are interrupted. In this event the quantity of water should
be limited to three to four glasses a day. In the event that the kidneys
will not excrete the water, the pores of the skin must be kept freely
open by sweat baths to assist in the elimination of waste.
Dr. Hall recommends a milk and cream diet of from three to seven
pints a day, for a few days, according to the case,—two parts of milk
to one of cream. If the urine is scanty, he reduces it to one and one
half pints a day, taken in four or five installments. After the three to
seven days of milk diet he gradually introduces starches and fats.

Brights Disease. This term covers forms of diseases of the

kidneys, associated with albumin in the urine.
Where for any reason the kidneys have difficulty in discharging the
nitrogenous waste of the system, the work of the dietitian must be to
eliminate protein from the diet as closely as may be consistent with
the body necessities. Besides restricting the amount of nitrogenous
foods, the kidneys must be assisted in eliminating the nitrogenous
waste, and the products of the inflammation, by a copious drinking of
water. Hot water and hot diluent drinks are best, such as toast water,
barley water, cream of tartar, lemon and acid drinks. In acute cases
the patient is put on a milk diet of from two to three pints of milk a
day, given one-half pint every three or four hours, diluted with one-
third as much hot water. If the case be a prolonged one, broths may
be included.
Even in cases which are chronic and not acute, it is well to follow a
milk diet for a number of weeks. The quantity of milk, for an
exclusive milk diet, must depend upon the age and size of the
patient as well as upon his ability to exercise. If he is confined to his
room, from five to seven pints of milk a day are sufficient. If he is
taking a great deal of exercise, he may take from eighteen to twenty
glasses of milk a day. If he loses weight on the milk diet, bread and
rice may be added.
It is unwise to begin a milk diet at once, by feeding from eighteen
to twenty glasses of milk a day, but this amount may be
approximated within a week’s time and the change in diet should be
begun by cutting down all meats and legumes and gradually
eliminating starches. In changing from a milk diet to a diet including
more hearty foods, the transition should be gradual.
A. F. Pattee gives the following diet for Brights Disease.
DIET: Soup.—Vegetable or fish soup, broths with rice or barley.
Fish.—Raw oysters or clams, fresh fish broiled or boiled.
Meats.—Eat sparingly, chicken, game, fat bacon, fat ham.
Farinaceous.—Stale bread, whole wheat bread, toast, milk toast,
biscuits, macaroni, rice, cereals of all kinds.
Vegetables.—Onion, cauliflower, mashed potatoes, mushrooms,
lettuce, watercress, spinach, celery, cabbage.
Desserts.—Ripe raw fruits, stewed fruits, rice tapioca, bread and
milk puddings, junkets, cocoa.
Liquids.—Toast water, weak tea, pure water, peptonized milk,
malted milk, fresh buttermilk, milk with hot water, equal parts, whey,
unfermented grape juice.
AVOID.—Fried fish, corned beef, hashes, stews, pork, veal, heavy
bread, batter cakes, lamb, mutton, beef, gravies, beans, peas, malt or
spirituous liquors, tobacco, coffee, ice cream, cake, pastry.
 The condition of the nerves depends upon the
general condition of the system and upon general
Nervous
Disorders nutrition. There is no one food or set of foods
which directly affect any nervous trouble, unless
this trouble be localized by disturbance in some particular organ.
Then the effort must be to correct the difficulty in that organ.
There is no disturbance in any part of the body requiring less
medicine than a disturbance in the nerves. The correction must
come through general hygienic treatment. Regular exercise,
alternated with regular rest periods, the formation of the habit of
complete nerve relaxation, the general regulation of an easily
digested, nutritious diet, with deep breathing exercises, are the best
remedies.
In many cases of nerve debility the nerves seem to be stronger in
the latter part of the day. Where this is the case the hearty meal
should be eaten at this time.

Neurasthenia. In cases of Neurasthenia, or “Tired Nerves,” all

vital organs are more or less affected, because the nerves do not
properly direct digestion, absorption, assimilation or elimination and,
for this reason, the diet should be light and of easily digested foods.
A free, correct breathing of fresh air, day and night, is imperative. It is
important also to thoroughly masticate all food and drink freely of
water. A change of thought, induced by a change of scene or
companions, is helpful.

This difficulty is usually the result of high living. It

Gout most often attacks people past middle age, who
have indulged in rich pastries, puddings, meat
three times a day, or who have frequently indulged in alcohol.
 Being supposedly caused by an excess of uric acid and other
waste deposited in the joints, resulting from too much protein and an
insufficient elimination of the waste of the system, the dietetic
treatment must be a low protein diet. Alcohol is absolutely prohibited
and the quantity of carbohydrates and fats must be cut down as well
as the protein.
In acute cases a diet of bread and milk, or toast and milk, with light
vegetable broths should be followed for one to three days.
In chronic cases the diet may consist of the following:[11]
Soups.—Vegetable broths.
Fish.—Fresh fish, shell fish, raw oysters.
Meats.—It is better to omit all meats. If meat is eaten at all, it should
be confined to game, chicken and fat bacon.
Farinaceous.—Cereals, crackers, dry toast, milk toast, macaroni,
graham or whole wheat bread, rye bread, oatmeal and any of the
breakfast foods.
Nuts.—With salt.
Vegetables.—Celery, lettuce, watercress, all greens, with vinegar,
string beans, green peas, potatoes, carrots and beets.
Fruits.—All fruits, stewed or fresh. Unpeeled apples are especially
recommended. (Greens, with vinegar and unpeeled apples increase
the action of the kidneys.)
Desserts.—Plain puddings, junket, rice, stewed or fresh fruits.
Liquids.—Pure water, toast water, barley water, butter milk, malted
milk, milk.
Eat eggs sparingly and in severe cases, not at all.
AVOID.—Alcohol, coffee, tobacco, dried fruits, nuts, cheese,
candies, pastries, pies, spices, rich puddings, fried foods, vinegar,
pickles, lemons, rhubarb, mushrooms, asparagus, sweet potatoes,
tomatoes, gravies, patties, rich soups, lobster, salmon, crabs,
mackeral, eel, veal, pork, goose, duck, turkey, salted, dried, potted or
preserved fish or meat, (except bacon).
 Since the medical profession is unable to
Rheumatism. determine just what rheumatism is, it is difficult to
prescribe a diet. The theory so long believed that it
is an excess of uric acid in the system is no longer held by most of
the advanced physicians. Some authorities hold that it is a nerve
difficulty; others that it is an excess of lactic acid. Some authorities
put one on an entire meat diet, in case of rheumatism, and others
entirely exclude meat. Uric acid may accompany the disease.
Assuming that it is due to the failure of the system to promptly
eliminate its waste, whether this failure to eliminate be through a
weakened condition of the nerves, and the consequent failure to
properly direct the body activities, the correction of the difficulty must
lie in building up the general vitality and in aiding the system in its
elimination. Hot sweat baths, a free use of water and a free use of
fruits, particularly the citrous fruits, such as lemons, oranges, limes,
etc., are desirable, because they increase the alkalinity of the blood.
The acid unites with other acids of the body acting as a re-agent.
Often when the acids of the stomach are strong, sodium carbonate
(baking soda) produces an alkaline reaction.
The diet should be cut down in quantity. Meat may be eliminated if
an excess of uric acid exists and the above suggestions under the
diet for Gout be followed.
Fruit juices should be used freely because of their alkaline reaction
and because of their diuretic effect. Lemonade, orangeade and all
fresh fruits and vegetables are diuretic.
Regular exercises, until the body is thoroughly heated, deep
breathing of pure air day and night and a copious drinking of water
are necessary.

Interference in the action of the kidneys is apt to

Uremia or result in a retention within the system of the
Uremic elements, which the kidneys, in normal condition,
Poisoning eliminate from the system, such as urea, uric acid,
 urates, sulphuric acid, sulphates, sodium
phosphate, xanthin bodies and conjugated sulphates. These
substances are not thrown off by the skin, or by the lungs, and must
all be eliminated through the kidneys. They are the result of the
oxidation and the breaking down of the proteins of the body. If the
kidneys do not throw these off, the result is Uremic Poisoning, and
the dietetic treatment must be to cause a free action of the kidneys
by the use of diuretics. Of these the citrous fruits, (lemons, oranges,
limes, etc.,) are the best; they neutralize acids and produce an
alkalinity of the blood. They should be used freely.
Meats, eggs and legumes should be eliminated from the diet. A
free drinking of water, milk with limewater, cereals, buttermilk,
kumyss, barley water, toast water, lemonade, orangeade, vegetables
and fruit should constitute the diet. Exercise and free breathing of
fresh air are imperative. All food should be thoroughly masticated.

An excess of uric acid may not always cause

Excess of Uric uremic poisoning, but it indicates an excess of
Acid protein in the system above the amount eliminated
by the kidneys and the skin. This excess is often
the cause of chronic ailments, such as bronchitis, asthma, hay-fever,
severe nerve depression, gout, rheumatism, neuralgia, tonsilitis,
grippe, influenza, colds, etc.
The natural relief is to control the diet, supplying less protein and
to increase the elimination through a free action of the kidneys, of
the pores of the skin, and of the lungs. Systematic exercise, deep
breathing, a copious drinking of water and fresh air day and night,
are the best reliefs.
One may either eliminate the proteins from the diet, or may cut
down the entire quantity of food, and, by exercise, breathing, a
freedom of the pores of the skin and a free drinking of water, so as to
create an activity of the kidneys, may continuously eliminate more
uric acid than is consumed in the food.
 The regulation of the quantity of the food, rather than the cutting
down of the proteins and the feeding of a larger proportion of
starches, is the course pursued where one is inclined to an excess of
uric acid and still has an excess of fat.
In case of an excess of uric acid in thin persons, such proteins
food as meat and eggs may be eliminated and the diet consist
almost wholly of carbohydrates and fats.
The diet is the same as that given above for Gout.

All diets for obesity must be prescribed for the

Obesity individual condition. A large number of the obese
are afflicted with rheumatism, sluggish livers,
sluggish action of the intestines and weak nerves, and the diet must
be governed accordingly.[12]
The regulation of food for reduction of flesh must, also, be
governed by age, sex, by the manner of breathing and by the
amount of daily exercise.
Exercise, breathing and diet are the scientific means of reduction,
the food must be regulated in accordance with the quantity of
carbohydrates and fats daily consumed in heat and energy.

No definite diet can be given for flesh building,

Leanness because a lack of sufficient fat to round out the
figure is due to faulty digestion or assimilation and
the cause must first be eliminated.
It may be that the strength of the muscles and nerves of stomach,
liver and intestines must first be built up by exercises and deep
breathing, and it may be that the habit of nerve relaxation must be
established. Where one’s nerves are tense much nourishment is
consumed in nervous energy and the nerves to digestive organs and
muscles being tense, interfere with digestion and assimilation.
It is apparent that the cause must first be corrected, because to
overload the digestive organs with sugars, starches and fats, further
weakens them.

FOOTNOTES:
[10] Alida Frances Pattee; “Practical Dietetics” Mt. Vernon, N. Y.
[11] A. F. Pattee; “Practical Diatetics,” A. F. Pattee, Publisher,
Mt. Vernon, N. Y.
[12] Editor’s Note: The causes and relief of Obesity are fully
discussed in my book of this series “Poise, Obesity and
Leanness, their Causes and Relief.”