The idea of Race is one very familiar to everyone today in the early 21st century, but it wasn’t always the case. In fact, the idea of race is relatively new.
Jeremy Helligar, writing in July 2020 for Reader’s Digest states, “We tend to think of race as a scientific construct that has existed as long as people have, but, in fact, it’s a relatively recent concept. Today, the meaning of the word pretty much depends on who is using it. To some, there is a single race, the human one. For others, its as simple as Black and White – a distinction that forms the basis of the anti-Black sentiment we now think of as racism.”
Our concept of race came out of the Spanish Inquisition, of all things. During that time, Spanish nationalists became concerned with a rising influence of Christian converts from Jewish backgrounds. To satisfy their concerns that these new Christians were genuine Christians, Pedro Sarmiento issued his Sentencia-Estatuto that, as Helligar states, “…barred Jewish converts from holding private or public office,” or “receiving church land grants,” unless they could prove four generations of affiliation with the church.
Leon Pliakov, the author of The History of Anti-Semitism wrote that this was “the first example in history of legalized racism.”
However, it was Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus during the 18th century, who did the most to stratify the already existing concept of race by adapting the genus and species classification system for plants with which he was familiar. Adapting this system, Linnaeus divided humanity into four subdivisions: Homo americanus (Native Americans), Homo africanus (Africans), Homo europaeus (Caucasians) and Homo asiaticus (Asians). One might ask, why a botanist, entirely untrained in human sciences, has had such a profound influence on society’s idea of race and indirectly on racism.
So, one might ask, how did these unsupported ideas of race, translate into racism? A measure of that can be attributed to German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Blumenbach created his own set of human categories: American, Malay, Ethiopian, Mongolian and Caucasian. He chose the term Caucasian to represent the European people because he considered a skull he’d found in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia to be his most beautiful discovery. Both Linnaeus’ and Blumenbach’s categories contributed to our modern classification system of Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid. When assembling his five categories, Blumenbach arbitrarily placed Caucasian as first in line on the top of his list. This simple act of placement ended up suggesting that the Caucasian people were first, or best.
To be fair, its not just Caucasians (European White people) who think they are more superior than others. The ancient Greeks referred to everyone who was not Greek as “Barbarians” and their usage suggested that these non-Greek people were less than Greek. One of the worst punishments that a Greek could have to suffer would have been exile out of Greek society and the resulting horror of having to live among the Barbarians. The Greeks weren’t alone in this type of generalization. The Ancient Egyptians called themselves “the people”, and like the Greeks, saw an inferiority with those who weren’t “the People.”
In North America, likewise, the Navaho Native Americans also refer to themselves as “the Diné” or “the people” or “the children of the holy people” and the various Sioux tribes – Lakota, Dakota, and Oglala all call themselves “the people” as well.
Even today, the Japanese, call non-Japanese “gaijin,” or “foreigner,” “alien,” “stranger,” or “not a friend.” This concept of “the people” and “not the people” has been described as “otherness.” It is a concept of nurture versus nature. Humans have a history of learned racism and gender discrimination, stretching back five thousand years or so, based on an “Us versus Them” mentality, but there isn’t evidence that racial prejudice was part of humanity from its conception in the dimmest and remotest past.
Despite such pejorative use of terminologies intending to suggest a lessor ‘otherness’ these ancient people didn’t have a history of associating ethnic prejudice with skin color or tone. That didn’t come until the early 1700’s and developed out of the Sub-Saharan African Slave Trade.
Some anthropologists believe that gender discrimination began first and opened the door to racial discrimination. I believe that long before humans started the agricultural revolution, they began to distinguish between those who risked their lives hunting wild animals, mostly males due to a stronger upper body strength, and females who gathered fruits, vegetables and fished. Not only did women gather food for the meals, but as today, they also tended to the children and cleaned the habitats whether that was a cave, a clay brick structure or a Hogan or tent. This work was as needed as the work of the males, but far less exciting. Judging from cave paintings and later the stories of travelling story-tellers like Homer it seems that it was the male’s roles as hunters and warriors that made good stories and captured the imaginations of the clan and tribe, similar to the ‘action’ movies of today.
Once race discrimination appeared, and that discrimination centered on Black Africans, racial prejudice wasn’t far behind. Growing up, I was under the impression that Africans were selected as slaves for the European/American slave market because Black Africans were considered to be inferior humans fit only for exploitation. Although there is a tiny grain of truth there, for the most part it turns out I was wrong. What I had been taught was wrong. The slaves of Africa came from the coastal plains of West Africa for the most part, and likewise, for the most part they were highly intelligent members of their tribes, cultured, educated, able to speak several African languages, and sometimes wealthy, high-class individuals. Often they were targeted for slavery by their own people due to their high places in society.
There is a parallel I can tell you that illustrates this principle that comes from the history of my Faith. I am a Bahá’í, a new religion, as religions go, starting in the mid 1800’s in Persia, now Iran. In the earliest days of my Faith it was known as the Bábí Faith and when it arose in Persia it soon drew the attention of the Islamic clergy, particularly because one of its principles is the elimination of a clergy. The reaction of the Islamic clergy was to launch a terror campaign against the Bábís that cost nearly 20,000 lives in mass public executions called for by the clergy and supported by the government. There were two brothers in the capital city of Tehran who were publicly known to be very pious men, men who were kind to all, supported charitable causes, etc. There was an Islamic clergyman who owed the two brothers a large debt from a loan that he had borrowed and hadn’t paid back. This man was the opposite of everything the brothers stood for, even though he was a clergyman. In the chaos of the day, this clergyman saw an opportunity to avoid his debt and so he arose one Friday, ascended his pulpit and denounced the two brothers as dangerous Bábís conspiring to destroy the Faith of the Prophet Muhammad, and calling for their death.
What I learned from this story, and from a closer look at the history of African slavery was that it wasn’t an innate inferiority of Black Africans, but it was a set of very unfortunate factors for the Africans. The first of these factors was the existing, centuries old slave trade, running between Sub-Saharan Africa and the slave markets of Egypt and the Middle-east that had supplied slaves to Egypt, Persia, the Ottoman Empire and earlier to the Byzantine Empire. The second unfortunate circumstance, unfortunate for Black Africans, was the closeness of Africa to the New World. The sad fact was that it was simply a matter of economics – it was cheaper to grab slaves off the coasts of West Africa than it would have been to sail around the horn of Africa to India, Southeast Asia or China for slaves.
It was the cotton and tobacco fields of the Southern colonies, later states, that required cheap labor, and slavery was the cheapest of labor. The great plantations of the South didn’t immediately seize on the Black African as slave labor. Their gaze fell, first of all, on the First Nations Native Americans. Native Americans however posed two problems to the plantation owners. The first was supply. Slave labor working in the hot sun of the Southern United States, in a day of little medical knowledge or practice resulted in many deaths and there simply weren’t enough Native Americans to supply the needs of the Plantations. Additionally, the Native Americans that were available to the Plantations knew the countryside and kept running away. Black African slaves on the other hand were more plentiful and didn’t know the land so would hesitate to run away and were usually easily caught.
Humans are innately good. In order to engage in behavior that harms another human, we trick ourselves into believing that that person, or those people, aren’t fully human. Our military, in fact all militaries, use a systematic program in what we call ‘bootcamp’ to break down a recruit’s personality and then replace it with a new personality designed to impel the individual soldier/sailor to obey. Every now and again we hear the odd story of a bootcamp training gone wrong and a recruit dying. When that happens, the bootcamp system isn’t described as training but is called abuse. The truth is that it is all abusive. How else could you convince hundreds, even thousands of men to climb out of trenches and charge across a field to attack an enemy that has dug-in positions with automatic guns trained on the field. That is, in fact, the history of warfare in general, and specifically the battle of the Somme in World War I. Row after row of men climbed over the edge of the trenches and began running across the field, only to be cut down by the German machineguns. Thousands died in the first minutes of the battle. The Battle of the Somme is among the bloodiest in all of recorded human history. It lasted 141 days. On the first day the British alone had 57,000 casualties, 20,000 of those killed. By the end of the battle over a million men, from both sides, were dead or injured.
We hear about the horrible death camps of Nazi Germany and how more than eleven million people, six million of whom were Jews, were worked to death as slaves or gassed as worthless animals, but even here, the German military had to be convinced by their leader Adolf Hitler that these Jews, Poles, Catholics, Gypsies, Bahá’ís, etc., were somehow less than good Germans, less than human, and therefore, it was alright to exterminate them.
Another example is the Khmer Rouge militants lead by Pol Pot in Cambodia during 1975 – 1979. They were extreme Communists who believed that they had to restructure Cambodian society and in order to do so had to purge non-communist elements from the population. In their infamous ‘killing fields’ they executed between 1.5 and 2 million of their own citizens. One of the targets of all Communist regimes are the intellectuals. In Khmer Rouge Cambodia tens of thousands of people died simply because they wore glasses and the Khmer Rouge believed that glasses were a sign of being an intellectual. Humanity is brutal to itself, and it might be easy to fall into the trap of believing that violence and racism are innate, meaning that they are attitudes that are part of our basic human personality and that can’t be eliminated. What I believe is that although we are violent, we have to go through a lot of convincing and a lot of pressure to impel us to do such violent things. We have to somehow shut off our conscience, but even then we end up scarred for life after the fact. Soldiers from all countries and from all wars suffer from ‘Shell Shock’ as they previously called it, and today call PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Soldiers and veterans fight for years attempting to forget or explain what happened in the war and why they did what they did, and tens of thousands commit suicide each year unable to come to grips with the experience.
Racism is all wrapped up in this, particularly in the examples that I chose to present to you, my reader. Racism, and the belief that Black Americans are less than White Americans, two fifths less, according to the Founding Fathers, is what enables American police to shoot African-American men and boys in the back seven times or shove their knee into a Black man’s neck until he suffocates, or shoots an innocent Black woman in her own home, or a grandson in his grandmothers driveway, etc.
I’ve described how the concept of multiple races developed and how racism developed and now we need to do something to counteract what we now know to be true. I mentioned a little while back that I am a Bahá’í. I’d like to leave you with a thought from the primary founder of my Faith. His title is Bahá’u’lláh, in English it translates to “the Glory of God.” He teaches that there is no such thing as multiple races or sub-races, there is only a single race and that is the human race. He also teaches that there is no room for a feeling of superiority over others. His teachings are designed to bring about a feeling, a belief, a realization that we are all one human family each with uniqueness’s but all equal in the eyes of our creator. One of the ways He expresses this concept is through analogy. Here are a couple of quotes from His writings on this subject.
“The Earth is but one Country and Mankind It’s Citizens.”
“O People of the world, ye are all the fruit of one tree and the leaves of one branch.”
Bahá’ís know that quotes like these will never heal the wrongs and harms of racism, that will take millions of dedicated individuals working hard for decades, maybe centuries, to address all the minutia that we will need to do or undo to set things right. However, Bahá’ís also know that to fix this problem we need a positive philosophy that we can embrace, one that will speak to us, that inspires us to strive to accomplish these great, but difficult, goals. We don’t need temerity and uncertainty, we need certitude.
