One
The causes of racism are not the same as a description of racism itself. If a room in a house were to get flooded, someone might ask: what is a flood? Answer: that’s when a lot of water suddenly appears and everything gets wet: chairs, table, floor, everything. But the question, what is the cause of the flood, calls for a different kind of answer.
It is not enough to say the cause of the flood was when water came in the house and the furniture got wet. That is only repeating description of the damage. If instead one answers “the cause of the flooding in the house was “a pipe burst” or “a river overflowed its banks”, then one is dealing with cause and effect.
Simple, right? The consequence—everything got wet—is not the same as the cause of the flooding.
Likewise with Racism: describing the practice of racism tells us little about the causes of racism. Everything has a beginning: the practice of stereotyping, of engaging in racist thought and acts, also had a beginning. We must travel back in time to deal with racism as a social phenomenon that arose during America’s colonial era.
It is generally not adequate to assume that racist attitudes are innate in human nature, which would imply that the first time people from two different cultures met that “racism” was the immediate result. This is not true and is not supported by the historical record. That is accepting a racist myth promulgated by white supremacists: whites were meant to hate blacks.
Racism, in fact, requires an unequal relationship, usually found when one race proves stronger than another in terms of wealth, level of social development, or military strength—and thus is able physically to conquer and subdue the other.
When, however, there is a steadfast equality among individuals, groups, or nations, racist attitudes are far less likely to develop since there is no attempt at the complete subjugation of one group by the other. Without social oppression, one group forcing another to labor, there is no need to develop a racist mythology to justify either the conquest or subsequent oppression.
Case in point: Native Americans were frequently represented as “savages” which seemed to make it easier for European-Americans to engage in their murderous campaigns against Indians as part of their efforts to grab as much land as they could steal.
Blacks were represented as “inferior” by European-Americans to “justify” slavery. Racism is built on a web of lies that continuously multiply for as long as the racist practices last within a given set of social circumstances.
Two
Schoolchildren will play freely with other children if allowed and encouraged–so long as they are not growing up in a family or society that enforces racism by custom and law. Where virulent racism is always present and widespread, as in the South during Slavery and Segregation, even innocent children are forced at an early age to adopt the irrational prejudices of their parents.
Southern racists might then point to the prejudices of their own children as “natural” but of course such reasoning is circular and flawed; the children were not given an opportunity to grow up free of their parents’ bigotry and prejudices.
The falsehood of such fallacious reasoning is no different than justifying laws prohibiting Black people from learning to read because Black people are incapable of literacy, when in fact it was the existence of such laws under Slavery that prevented Black people from becoming literate in the first place!
Enforced illiteracy cannot be used as proof of its necessity or inevitability except by the twisted rantings and ravings of the diseased racist mind.
Perhaps no other group in America faced such an odious law as this one: the simple act of “reading” was a crime under slavery—as it was a crime for anyone to teach a slave to read! Thus it is highly irrational to claim Black people shouldn’t be or can’t be taught to read because there are so many slaves who could not read!
Black children and adults learn to read as readily as anyone else. They did so in overwhelming numbers as soon as the Civil War ended, yet before the Civil War this same kind of flawed reasoning still persisted. Of course, expecting any kind of logic from racist laws and customs is to wish for something that never existed and never will.
Racism is inherently illogical, unnatural, and cruel. Where such attitudes and institutions persist, it is due solely to the heavy hand of the oppressor, past and present.
Three
Southern racists from slavery days also argued that Blacks could not be expected to accomplish much “even if free” since so few examples exist of Black men and women being identified with great personal achievement. Again, racists can only engage in such twisted reasoning by ignoring the fundamental fact that it was the countless unjust laws governing slavery that prevented Blacks from getting the education and freedom they needed to accomplish all such goals and dreams.
Slave-owners and their sympathizers who justified Slavery had to turn Truth into Lies and Lies into Truth. They may have deceived themselves into believing their own warped cock-eyed reality but racist nonsense repeated day after day does not cease to be racist nonsense.
The institutionalized racism of slavery was based on brute force to enforce extreme labor exploitation; racist lies were invented to justify this immoral mistreatment of other human beings. Southern whites were not interested in studying the culture, religion, language, and civilization of Africa. Instead, they foolishly let their ignorance and greed shape their attitudes toward Black laborers.
The slave-owners entered into what is known as the descending spiral of evil through their accumulating acts of immorality and worsening rationalizations; eventually they were forced to claim that Blacks were sub-humans in order to create an imaginary chasm between white and black Americans.
Lies brokered more lies, faster and faster, until the whole mess ends up as an irrational out-of-control descent into madness. Southern slave-owners were forced to make ridiculous assertions to defend their cruel mistreatment of Blacks, relying heavily on the poisonous effects of racism.
The southern bigot did not see the Black man as a human being; the only thing the Southern slave-owner saw was a cheap source of labor. Even if slaves died from excessive brutality, their consciences didn’t skip a beat, since more could be purchased readily to replace the dead and dying unfortunate ones.
Once this class of wealthy slave-owners committed to buying slaves, they developed falsehoods to dehumanize Africans in their futile attempt to make slavery appear reasonable. The spread of racism did not happen overnight but was part of a long process of European-American enslavement of Africans, followed closely by an intense campaign of racist lies to mask the brutal realities of slavery.
Four
The first contact between European and African kings saw them treating one another as equals in their letters, trade arrangements, and exchange of gifts. One African king sent his son, considered a prince, to be educated at a European university.
The kings of the nations of the Ivory Coast were initially powerful enough to restrict the Portuguese to an island off the coast of West Africa. It wasn’t until the Portuguese (later the Spanish, English, Dutch, etc.) realized that they had such a distinct advantage in the possession of superior firearms, did the enslavement of Africans get under way in earnest.
The kings of the interior nations, who sold captives of war from enemy tribes to the Portuguese, soon felt increasing pressure to deliver more and more slaves—until making war to capture prisoners to sell as slaves became its own enterprise.
For that reason, historians and lay readers alike must study that crucial period of time when Africans were first captured and sold as slaves to truly understand the origins of racism: the slave trade in Africa, the horrors of the ocean-crossing “middle passage”, and finally the auctioning off of slaves in the New World.
The slave-owning class had a vested interest in misrepresenting the enslaved group’s culture as “low” or “barbaric” and “culturally insignificant” compared to “superior” Europe—merely to justify their own greed and brutality.
Thus they created new phrases and repeated them often to convey and deepen this prejudice: “darkest Africa”, “jungle villages”, “witch doctors”, and even references to the supposed biblical “curse” placed on Africans which condemned them to slavery.
In the Southern slave-owner’s racist mind, Africans never achieved anything of importance in Africa and were therefore only fit for the life of slaves: a more convenient rationalization for getting rich on the back of slaves one can hardly imagine!
Some slave-owners (including Christian ministers among them) went so far as to argue that slavery was “good” for Black people! They wished to convince people that they, the slave-owners, were helping the Black people by making them civilized! With whippings and instruments of torture, with beatings and mutilations, they were “civilizing” their slaves! Today, what else can we call such thinking but preposterous rationalizing that exposes itself as psychopathic in nature and intent?
In fact, Africa is a continent with many diverse nations and peoples with a long history of cultural achievement in music, art, wood-carving, iron-working and artistry in gold. It simply did not suit the purpose of Southern slave-owners to acknowledge or study Africa’s tremendous linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity.
The story of American racism, with all its ignorance and bigotry, is essentially no different from the attitudes and actions of the conquering Spaniards in Mexico. They showed little interest in preserving or celebrating the magnificent accomplishments of the native civilizations established in Meso-America centuries before Hernan Cortes arrived.
Instead, the conquistadores took great care to destroy the ancient temples. They threw priceless Aztec writings into huge bonfires as they established their dominance over the country. They soon began their propaganda campaigns about the inferiority of the indigenous peoples and debated whether they were animals or sub-human.
The conquerors made little or no effort to understand the magnificent achievements of the indigenous peoples in astronomy, law, mathematics, philosophy, and mathematics. They made no great effort to learn native tongues in order to engage in an exchange of ideas. The great bonfires ordered by Bishop Landa burned a chasm in the pages of history but some truths escaped and still persist down to this very day.
Five
One cannot mistreat, enslave, brutalize and dehumanize a conquered people and at the same time engage in a genuine effort to respect and preserve their true accomplishments. One or the other has to give—and time and again the Spaniards, English, French, Dutch and other European nations committed their resources–read military force—to acquiring natural resources, especially gold and silver, while forever tightening the obligations of forced labor upon native populations, once proud and free but now reduced to the horrific conditions of beaten and starved slaves.
Whatever truths were still available to the conquistadores–had they been interested in learning about the indigenous peoples’ civilizations—were to be replaced by racist lies that bore no resemblance to historical reality. Even today, scholars face an especially difficult task when studying pre-Columbian societies and trying to resurrect the many amazing accomplishments of the original American civilizations.
Progress is steady and cumulative but requires the on-going efforts of thousands of scholars to reconstruct this marvelous and fascinating past!
This process of conquest, labor exploitation, and racism has been going on for centuries in North and South America as well as Meso-America and the many islands of the Caribbean Sea. In the United States, slave-owners created an endless stream of racist lies about black slaves as a way to rationalize their own greed-driven exploitation, lies backed by cruel and torturous physical punishment. Anyone who challenged the lies would be subject to intimidation, prosecution, and violence.
Six
If you constantly dehumanize the group you are oppressing, it makes it easier for others to accept slavery as being “sensible” or “natural.” It is neither but that did not stop Southern slave-owners from insisting that their slaves only had the mental and emotional capacity of a child so someone had to tell them what do; in their irrational rhetorical excesses, slave-owners even claimed that their slaves were “happy” in slavery!
All these lies were used as excuses to support the institution of slavery which was in its essence a system of unpaid labor imposed and maintained by the threat of deadly force, a labor system aimed at increasing the wealth of the slave-owner regardless of the physical and psychological harm done to the slave.
This greed is what drove the spread of slavery in the United States and this greed set the stage for all the “racism” that followed. A large body of racist writing soon developed to justify the enslavement of Black people, so large that it took on a life of its own. Racism was found everywhere: in books, in the press, and in the pulpit.
Racist attitudes and speech became so commonplace as to be considered “normal”; speaking out against racism was seen as “abnormal”, an unwarranted attack upon the system of Slavery which southern whites hoped would last forever.
Still, racist utterances and writings (however vulgar or irrational) are not the cause of racism; however much racist propaganda contributed to the perpetuation of Slavery, we cannot say it created Slavery.
Racist lies and myths are, rather, the consequences of slavery in America. That is the legacy we have inherited for better or worse from the distant past down to the present.
Racist rhetoric does not precede Slavery but rather follows it. Today, due to the many advances made in education and social institutions, students can freely criticize racists known for their lies and stereotypes. Fair-minded Americans can help destroy the false foundations of racist mythology through knowledge and historical analysis.
Thus, to the question: How can students help overcome prejudices in society? First, by learning the truth about the cultural achievements of oppressed minorities. Their true history is incredibly distorted during the process of conquest and subjugation, along with the mindless brutality that invariably accompanies all such severe labor exploitation.
Many minorities in America have been deprived of the right to feel meaningful pride in their own culture because of the way history was taught in school. The standard approach was largely derived from earlier periods of conquest, subjugation, discrimination, and social prejudice. Many lies passed into textbooks and went largely unchallenged for years. By becoming educated individuals, students can better prepare themselves with facts to counter all such malicious lies and historical distortions.
Second, students can become better informed of what the laws state, what their legal rights are, and what steps can be taken when fighting specific acts of injustice.
Lastly, students can make a huge difference by joining the movement to establish equal rights for all people in this country. Racism is a disease and if it is to be eradicated, it will take the combined effort of all Americans!!
