These Children are All the Same Race: Human
Race is an imaginary and very bad idea, and, listen up, people, its our direct forebears' fault, some of them, particularly the rich and powerful ones, back in the day. They did it for the sake of power, wealth and the ability to maintain something resembling self-respect.
For some of the history of race and racism as human ideas, step out into the tall grass.
In the ten thousand years, or so, that humans have settled together in ways that we call civilization, the ideas of race, and its evil intellectual sidekick, racism, only popped up very recently, traced by historian, Geroge M. Frederickson of Stanford University, to the Late Middle Ages in Europe. Race doesn't actually exist in nature and racism does not represent any kind of natural, unavoidable or permanent condition among humans:
An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition in the West during the modern period. No clear and unequivocal evidence of racism has been found in other cultures or in Europe before the Middle Ages. The identification of the Jews with the devil and witchcraft in the popular mind of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was perhaps the first sign of a racist view of the world. Official sanction for such attitudes came in sixteenth century Spain when Jews who had converted to Christianity and their descendents became the victims of a pattern of discrimination and exclusion.
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The Nineteenth century was an age of emancipation, nationalism, and imperialism--all of which contributed to the growth and intensification of ideological racism in Europe and the United States. Although the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews from the ghettoes (sic) received most of its support from religious or secular believers in an essential human equality, the consequence of these reforms was to intensify rather than diminish racism. Race relations became less paternalistic and more competitive. The insecurities of a burgeoning industrial capitalism created a need for scapegoats. The Darwinian emphasis on "the struggle for existence" and concern for "the survival of the fittest" was conducive to the development of a new and more credible scientific racism in an era that increasingly viewed race relations as an arena for conflict rather than as a stable hierarchy.
Columbia University historian, Barbara J. Fields,
here explains how human institutions prior to The Enlightenment never required people to justify the enslavement of others, in societies where everyone, in essence, was the property of someone else:
Freedom did not become possible for Americans of European descent until they had established slavery for Americans of African descent, had defined Afro Americans as a race and had identified their innate inferiority as a justification or at least a rationale for enslavement. It was during the era of the American Revolution that that ideology coalesced in the debate between opponents and proponents of slavery, thus it was during that era that the Siamese twins as I call them - American democracy and American racism - were born.
I don't say that racial ideology developed as a justification for slavery because I think that is not right. The view that slavery is so obviously wrong that anybody who practiced slavery would need an elaborate self-justification is a very modern view, because slavery has been a characteristic form of social organization for most of recorded human history. It is only in relative modern times that human beings have seen a need to justify it in the first place. Instead they have for the most part taken it for granted just as people today take for granted the sovereignty of the market without seeing it as something bizarre or indeed as something animistic. There is no need to justify bondage in a society in which everybody stands in the relationship of inherited subordination to someone else: servant to master, serf to nobleman, vassal to overlord, overlord to kings, and king to king of kings.
It required, I argue, extraordinary circumstances to make people think that slavery called for any rationale beyond the common sense. And so it was the prevalence of freedom rather than the fact of slavery that created the extraordinary situation calling for the extraordinary invention that American racial ideology represents. English people might find Africans and their descendants to be heathen in religion, outlandish in nationality, and weird in appearance but that did not become a ideology of racial inferiority until one further ingredient became part of the mixture, and that was the incorporation of Africans and their descendants into a polity and society in which they lacked rights that others not only took for granted, but claimed as a matter of self-evident natural law. That is why the slave society of the United States was the only one in the hemisphere that developed a systematic pro-slavery doctrine. You don't find that anywhere else. Bondage does not need justifying as long as it seems to be the natural order of things. You need a radical affirmation of bondage only where you have a radical affirmation of freedom.
So, the very idea of racial difference between Europeans and Africans was simply a self-justification invented by the unscrupulous to justify continuing the profitable institution of chattel slavery after the intellectual advances of the Age of Reason had identified freedom as every human's natural state. In that sense, the very ideas of race, and its evil twin racism, disturbingly evoke the dissembling and lies by Big Tobacco to cover-up the human slaughter caused by their products or the lies today by Big Oil and its tools in Congress and elsewhere, trying to undermine the inconvenient truths of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). What Dylann Roof referred to as
racial awareness, his knowledge that the so-called "races" differ importantly from one another, has no objective existence in the real world; it is utterly imaginary.
An additional gloss on this history comes from the viewpoint of radical socialism, which stirs Capitalism into the blame mix for the perpetuation of racist thought, because the ideas of race and racism provide a useful tool for dividing and controlling the masses, as discussed in this post:
imilar to the slave societies of antiquity and of the early U.S., under capitalism today, a small, wealthy minority exploits and oppresses the immense majority of people. Racism is the main division among workers today, and it provides a convenient scapegoat for problems created by the system. But ordinary people--regardless of their race--don't benefit from racism.
It's no coincidence that the historical periods in which workers as a whole have made the greatest gains--such as the 1930s and the 1960s--have coincided with great battles against racism.
Capitalism created racism and can't function without it. The way to end racism once and for all is to win a socialist society--in which the first priority is abolishing all traces of exploitation and racism.
Race does not exist in the objective world as anything more meaningful than eye color or hair color or handedness, among humans, who are a single species of primate. The very idea of race was invented, only very recently, to allow for the creation of the related and more evil idea, and practice, racism. That happened solely to provide a justification for the perpetuation of chattel African slavery in America despite mankind's discovery of the truth of innate and natural human freedom, supposedly embraced by the Founders of the Republic.
If all humans are naturally free, the Africans whom we wish to enslave for our profit must be something else became accepted as Divinely ordained throughout an entire region of the nation in the 19th Century, and widely accepted elsewhere in America.
Though the reason for the creation of the propaganda of race was snuffed out by the Civil War and the subsequent Constitutional Amendments, the legacy of that propaganda has endured and still generates endless tragedy year after year. Identifying the history of this phenomenon and the forces behind it does little to offer solutions to what America must do to recover from the terrible affliction that racism remains. But knowing that race is neither truly a real thing, with roots in the real, objective world could help people understand how unnatural it is to believe in race or engage with others on a racist basis. Maybe. One only hopes.