We’re all racists. But it’s not our fault.
I’m going to attempt to tackle the tricky and turbulent subject of racism. I’m not going to cover its entire history. I’m not going to pretend that I’m entirely objective — no one is — though I will try my best to be as neutral as possible. If I say something upsetting, apologies; this a sensitive topic, one that most people tend to stay well away from.
As always, we’ll start at the beginning. Not many people know where racism actually begun. The slave trade? No. Eugenics and ultimately the Holocaust? No. Religion? Getting warmer, but still not quite.
Racism begun way back in tribal times. Racism is effectively synonymous with tribalism, which is itself similar to the concept of nationalism. It’s all about selfishness. Racism can take many forms: religious, cultural, skin-colour and are all equally ‘bad’ — but at one time, they weren’t. They were a matter of self-preservation. It’s you or them. Insular tribes and their inbreeding reaffirmed genetic and physical traits and thus ‘races’ were created — but even the term ‘race’ is, ironically, racist! Race is an American term coined hundreds of years ago to describe the difference between blacks and whites. It sadly gained credibility and traction, and was then exported around the world. It was borrowed from the French razza which means ‘lineage’.
Racism is all about lineage — all about blood, and the purity thereof. Racism is the act of erroneous differentiation of humans into different species. It’s about the justification of maliciousness and unfair, unfounded prejudice to those of different colour, culture, heritage or lineage.
We have the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview to thank for this little gem. For 500 years now we’ve been living in a world governed by the laws of physics. Action and reaction, cause and effect. Mechanics. Gravity. Cold, cool calculation of calculus. The control, utilisation and abuse of energy. The last five centuries have been all about physicality; it’s been all about what we can see and touch and push and stretch. Racism existed before of course, but it wasn’t the kind we see today — it was religious. For 1500 years racism was religious — though back then it wasn’t called racism of course. It would’ve been ‘persecution’ or ‘religious intolerance’.
Did you know that when Columbus first landed on what would become Mexico, the Portuguese and Spanish sailors did not hesitate to mate and marry the Indians, the native Americans? As long as they converted to Christianity via baptism, colour didn’t matter one iota. Only their religious beliefs mattered.
But that’s a topic unto itself and I’m not going to go into it here. The rise of contemporary racism is more interesting.
Let’s go back to skin colour. Other than the Holocaust, almost all modern examples of racism have stemmed from the concept of White supremacy and superiority. How on earth did those of white skin end up at the top of the food chain?
The Declaration of Independence, that’s how. But don’t stop reading yet, my dear American friends! You probably wouldn’t have drafted the Declaration if it wasn’t for the British.
The Declaration of Independence was the pinnacle of The Enlightenment. The single most important period for philosophical and scientific advancement ever also created racism. All it took one was one theory-treated-as-fact: Dr Charles White (what a name…) scientifically reasoned that Blacks were the stop-gap between monkeys and Whites. Voltaire and Kames — both bigwigs of the Enlightenment — proposed the idea of separate human species. Hume and Kant, Jefferson and Washington — almost every big name of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were White supremacists.
Here were the most influential thinkers, scholars and scientists the world has ever seen. It was their thoughts, mental machinations and ideologies that formed the world we live in today. And they were racists. They thought of Blacks as not-quite-human.
And I dare say… it’s not a very big surprise that they arrived at such a conclusion.
The Enlightenment was about culture; a big damn celebration of art and science and thinking — in essence, it was a riotous exaltation of everything that makes us human and not monkeys.
And Blacks didn’t have that culture. American Indians didn’t have that culture. Or, rather, they didn’t have any that we could see. So we subjugated them. We made them our bitches. We justified our brutal abuse of fellow man by declaring them sub-human — after all, would a fellow white man allow himself to be forced into slavery? God no, his intelligence and tenacity would prevent it.
We’re talking about a group of intellectuals that ranted and raved about the benefits of liberty and equality; freedom from tyranny and the virtues of democracy and representative government. Later, they even drafted a declaration formed from the tenets and axioms of these great thinkers. They formed a new, mighty nation that, at its very core, ratified slavery.
As Thomas Jefferson scrawled out the fundament, lynch-pin and rock-solid bastion of the New World, as he illustrated his idyllic imaginings on the loose paper that would later become the Declaration of Independence… he was writing it for the whites. There was just no way their way of life could continue if non-whites were afforded the same rights and privileges as the whites. Think about it.
But it wasn’t really Jefferson’s fault. Science had told him that blacks were little more than apes devoid of culture and intellect. Or perhaps science merely suggested it and human nature enforced it. I suppose we’ll never know.
But how do we fix it?
Racism is a pathological contagion. It passes from parent to child. That can never be changed.
What we need is a new worldview. We need to shift our perspective through 90 degrees and move towards a new frontier. I hesitate to say that we need to ‘re-find our spirituality’, because there are issues associated with organised religion: intolerance, persecution, zealotry. Oour infatuation with the physical nature of the world needs to change. Never again must we single-out and tunnel-vision a sole strand of science.
What we need is another Enlightenment…
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Ahh… good post! I wish you had one of those Facebook ‘Like’ buttons so I can click that
October 12th, 2009 at 8:25 amEveryone’s a little bit racist, to quote Avenue Q.
Oh, and “razza” isn’t a French word. Italian, maybe.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:19 amYeah, it doesn’t sound French — it’s old French, via old Italian. I said French because most of our modern words are from French, rather than Italy — especially American words
I think these notes are imported to Facebook, Jabula — can you see this? http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=178672550931&ref=mf
Hez, the original title of this entry was ‘The sensitive subject of race’… *grin*
October 12th, 2009 at 12:57 pmI was waiting for the bridge from then to now – with the male white population at the majority of corporate America all because they were raised with benefits not afforded to most blacks, and raised in corporate rankings faster during a time when discrimination was still allowed in the workplace. A large part of the world is run by this minority group making it still more difficult for women and people of all other races to get into this ‘men’s club’ – which is essentially what it is.
Through a trickle down effect, you start to see more diversity in populations as you look at lower incomes. The people that have never had money in their families are likely the ones that have lived in neighborhoods with poor education and are never even given a chance to succeed. A large part of this population is the black community based on the fact that even those who do succeed, it is still harder for them to move up, get that higher position than it is a white person based on stigma –> racism. It happens subconsciously with most people.
So essentially where all this is going is that if you are born white, you are racist because the socio-economical machine makes it easier for you to progress, thus you are using your race to your benefit. But how does everyone else factor in? Everywhere in the world… everywhere, people judge others by race. A friend of mine married a Chinese woman and her parents absolutely hate him because he is white. He’s one of the nicest people I know, but he’s not even given a chance. My Korean friends tell me the most judgmental and racist people on Earth are Korean women. I know people from northern India who think that southern Indians are racially below them. One said his family still had slaves….errr servants that aren’t really paid. And in America again, I understand that it’s white people in power of the major companies, but does that make it okay for black people to be bigoted to all white people? Sometimes I just want to shake these people and say:
Chill the fuck out. We’re all racist. It’s not our fault. What do you think is the right thing to do to make it change?
October 12th, 2009 at 2:40 pmIndeed, the problem is endemic. That’s why we can’t get our heads around it — because we’re stuck inside the problem.
Tricky, eh?
All we can do is look to history, before the problem of racial prejudice existed (well, in the serious form that it takes today). Once upon a time race didn’t really matter. There were cultural reasons for not marrying outside your tribe — distance, language, etc — but it was never monstrous like it is in some parts of the world today.
Something changed, around 500 years ago. I haven’t researched the Far East, so I don’t know if they’ve always been that bigoted or if it’s something that appeared roughly the same time as the West.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:00 pmI see it on Facebook! Yaaaay! Now I can “Like” it
October 12th, 2009 at 3:12 pmI guess it’s a good thing we had men in history like William Wilberforce and Abraham Lincoln. Otherwise we would still be trading people like we do stocks.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:37 pmOh, I think we still treat humans — and ourselves — as yet another resource
October 12th, 2009 at 3:43 pmBeautiful, thoughtful, insightful post, Sebastian. I like it a lot more than the one about you dribbling sauce onto yoru chin/naughty bits.
I don’t think, though, that we need another Enlightenment– a titlot of good the first one did us– I think we need billions and trillions of little enlightenments. Mark Twain once said that change occurs at the edges, in the thousands of little interactions we have every day– with the teacher, the dentist, the cop, the neighbor– the head nods or the smiles, real or faux, effortless or forced, in the way in which we choose to treat all living beings around us. Because, really, it is a choice, a choice that we make a thousand times a day, and we are responsible for racism, you and me, through the choices that we make. Goddamn Newton and Jefferson and Washington and Lord fucking Nelson– we are responsible, and we must therefore be responsible, inwardly, for its own little destruction inside us, every moment of every day.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:28 pmYes, I think you’re right, that we perpetuate it through our tiny (and almost unnoticeable) actions and inactions.
But there must be a reason we do it. It’s no good just observing that we do it… and that we must stop. We’ve known that for a long while now.
There are lots of little changes being made. Lots of people try to live their lives as ‘unracistly’ as they can. But is that enough? I suppose not.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:50 pmInteresting. Do you really think that the people of Columbus’s time only discriminated against religion, not race? I don’t have that much of a historical background in this subject, but I find it hard to believe that the conquerors of the Americas didn’t feel some racial superiority to the people they conquered. It may have been entwined with religion–the overall feeling that the natives were barbaric heathens. But did any of them bring their European sisters along to marry them off to the Native American men who had converted? (Well, maybe they did.) I guess you say this is a topic unto itself, so I’ll leave it there.
Now, about the Declaration of Independence… Yes, Thomas Jefferson was a racist. I have little doubt that he had only white men in mind when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. But where in the Declaration of Independence are there words that suggest racism? I can glean sexism from the text (”all men are created equal”), but you need to understand the social order at the time and how that makes the words in the document hypocritical in order to find racism. If there is nothing inherently suggestive of white superiority in the text, how can you say the document is responsible for the beginnings of white supremacy? As you recognize, Thomas Jefferson didn’t come up with the idea himself; the ideas of white superiority were already well developed at the time. I would say that white supremacy had its roots reaching back at least to the time of the Conquistadors, when the Europeans were so successfully conquering and subjugating the rest of the world, they couldn’t help but conclude they must be better in some way. In any case, if the Declaration of Independence doesn’t preach white supremacy, and if those ideas were already well established at the time, I don’t see how you can make an argument that the Declaration of Independence is responsible for people of white skin being at the top of the food chain. Not unless the Declaration cites Dr. White.
If you want to blame white supremacy on America’s founding fathers, at least look at the Three-fifths compromise or something. Or find some way to make your argument make sense. Sorry if I have misunderstood you (though not so sorry if your writing was unclear enough that I misunderstood you
October 13th, 2009 at 12:37 amWhat about this? I am a tiny white girl. I get up to 115 lbs at my heaviest, and have spent the vast majority of my life under 100 lbs. So when I see someone (regardless of race) looking all thuggish and like they could very possibly steal my stuff, cram me in a rain barrel, feed me to their dog, etc., I will cross the street, sit at a different bench, or whatever. I am a city girl raised by a city mom, and that’s just how it is.
BUT if I’m doing that in response to someone who’s not white, it’s racist. WTF? It’s not, it’s size-ist. It’s racist of you to assume I’m being racist! Trust me, I grew up in an area where the white teens were very much the ones you wanted to avoid.
Also, I have to object to the idea that all the differences between people should be ignored, or pretended not to exist. As a boring vanilla-white American, I have always been jealous of the interesting cultural tidbits that other people get, and I don’t! As long as everyone has equality in the form of their opportunities and social jumping-off points, I’d rather we preserve the interesting differences. Down with homogeneity!
Of course, I can only say this because I have documented African, Native American, and Irish ancestors, each from the timeframes when they were decidedly uncool to hang out with. So I’m, like, a triple-persecuted minority myself.
October 13th, 2009 at 6:20 amI ought to mention I have been chewing on the race issue a bit recently, though, because in this area there is a fairly large Mexican contingent, seemingly especially now, at harvest time. The other day I was lounging at a vineyard tasting grapes and stuff, while twenty feet away, the Mexican field hands picked grapes for only $1.20 per bucket. And that definitely felt not-right.
October 13th, 2009 at 6:23 amI’m here! At last!
I can see my writing abilities are going to be stretched thin in the coming weeks and months…
In England it’s a lot like you mention, Melissa. It’s the white ‘chavs’ that are generally considered a blight upon society. Obviously, due to our ‘melting pot’ type culture, racism is very rare here — we’re more objective. We don’t care much about colour or nationality, but more about what damages society more — which is often the white yobs knifing old ladies and the like.
I think the problem is that it’s such a stickler, such a pivotal part of Western culture. As long as there’s one old guy hanging on to the ‘old world ideals’ of subjugated races, racism will continue. As long as there’s always someone to point their finger at you and call you a racist (for avoiding the 200lb black guy), racism will perpetuate.
It’s a tricky one…
Eleni: I’m not trying to say that Jefferson was doing any more than continuing what was obviously ‘contemporary culture’. But how else can these things change?
Imagine if he’d said ‘no! Black people will have the same rights as us!’ back then, as he drafted the Declaration. What do you think the world would be like today?
Same way someone decided blacks were akin to apes, it only really takes 1 or 2 key players to change the flow in the other direction. Now it’s so damn systemic that I don’t know how we can kick it. It would be like trying to get rid of religion, or money.
October 14th, 2009 at 3:24 am