Racism

In recent years, “Racism” has become a byword in our culture, especially in our political culture, and the word has been used far beyond the boundary where “used” becomes “abused”.

As a culture evolves, it will be more successful if it instills pride by teaching that our people are better than others. Throughout history, examples abound.
Romans knew that all other peoples were barbarians.
Jews know that they are God’s chosen people.
Christians know that they alone will enjoy eternal life.
Muslims know that Infidels should be annihilated or enslaved.
Germans know that Poles are stupid, lazy drunks.
Castellanos know that Gallegos are stupid.
Catalanes know that the Castellanos are lazy.
English know that the Irish are dumb drunks.
Irish know that the English are arrogant asses.

In America, when we say “Racism” we mostly think of “White” versus “Black”, although this is a gross oversimplification of the concept of ethnic or cultural discrimination. How did the American culture get here?

As European culture came out of the Dark Ages, Europeans began to explore the World. The Portuguese began sailing down the coast of Africa, looking for valuable commodities to trade for or just take. We know that the greatest deposits of gold and diamonds were eventually found in southern Africa. Another valuable commodity was ivory. But the first great treasured commodity was slaves. The west coast of Africa, between Mauritania and Namibia, was populated by tribes who fought with each other, and were willing to sell their captives to the Europeans.

Of course, the institution of slavery had existed for thousands of years, so it was not a new invention. The Portuguese found that slaves from Africa could be sold for a good price in America, where they could be used to work on plantations growing many agricultural products, or to work in mines.

If you want to discriminate between ethnic groups, it is very convenient if the groups have very different colors. This is very true because Homo Sapiens depends on the sense of vision for most of the information his brain receives, and H. Sapiens has very well-developed color vision.

In 1865, the slaves became free citizens of the USA.

There was a lot of prejudice against Black people. Why?

I don’t know whether any of this was resentment for the myriads of White Americans who had died in the most gruesome war in American history, fought on behalf of the Black Americans.

Many considered Blacks as innately inferior people. The fact that their slavery had been rationalized by their supposed inferiority for centuries no doubt contributed to this.

It was an observable fact that the great majority of Blacks were illiterate. This fact might be blamed on inferiority, or attributed to the effects of slavery, and even laws that prohibited teaching a slave to read. (We wouldn’t want our slaves to read “…that all men are created equal, ….”. Might give them funny ideas. )

Today we have DNA studies that tell us that the different races are very close to identical genetically, but this fact was not known in almost all of our history.

The uniformity of a species is maintained by sharing DNA with the groups (subspecies or races) within the species.  Homo Sapiens has been very sharing.  H. Sapiens has been a very mobile species, leading to the sharing of DNA over long distances.  Consider how many ancestors each of us has.  I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents: the number doubles with each generation.

10 generations means 2^10 One Thousand (1024) ancestors.
20 2^20 One Million (1048576)
30 2^30 One Billion
40 2^40 One Trillion (1000 yr)
60 2^60 One Sextillion
70 2^70 One Sextillion
80 2^80 One Octillion (2000 yr)
100 2^100 One Decillion
120 2^120 One Duodecillion (3000 yr)

Given that a generation runs about 25 years, we see that when Christ was born, I have an octillion ancestors, and when the pyramids were built I have perhaps a duodecillion, or perhaps a septillion times the number of people in the world. And subspecies H. Sapiens Sapiens has been around for thousands of generations. Obviously, a lot of duplication has occurred, i.e. a whole lot of mixing of genomes.

When Homo Sapiens Sapiens spread into Europe around 30,000 years ago, we interbred with Homo Sapiens Neanderthal. Our modern DNA science has shown that Neanderthal genes exist in every race on every continent [except Antarctica—penguins do not have homo genes] today. With modern transportation, the mixing is accelerating rapidly today, but in the past mixing was more than fast enough to make us perhaps the most uniform species in existence.

We classify people by color because color is a convenient and very obvious discriminator. Yet biologically color is a very superficial and flexible quality. Google “wild horse photos” and you will see herds (tribes?) of animals living together in mixed colors. Black, bay, brown, chestnut, sorrel, palomino, gray, white, pinto. Each herd lives together, and they don’t give a …. about color. Our history has convinced us that color matters.

An illustration of the meaning of color can be illustrated by the following anecdote:
I had never been to a horse-race, and I decided to go to one to see what it was like. I found that I had the opportunity to bet on the winner in the first race. Should I bet on:
A. A white horse ?
B. A black horse ?
C. A brown horse ?
At this point, it seems a bit obvious that color will be a very poor discriminator between horses. Suppose I change the choices a bit:
A. A white horse ?
B. A black horse ?
C. A brown horse ?
D. A fast horse ?
Now it seems even clearer that color will be a very poor discriminator between race horses.

In our culture, there were cultural differences between the races. Politicians work to use and maintain these differences to garner votes.
After the slaves were freed and got the right to vote, they tended to vote Republican, remembering that the Republican party had led the fight to free them. Democrat politicians in the South worked hard to convince white voters that they needed to fear the blacks, and thus should vote Democrat. In some counties, blacks actually outnumbered whites. So the Democrat party started a terrorist wing, called the Ku Klux Klan, to convince blacks to stay away from the polls on election day.

As time went on, more and more whites seemed to realize that Republicans were not necessarily their enemies, and voting rights legislation led to a political situation where Democrats could not guarantee their electoral victories by preventing blacks from voting.

Thus the Democrat party sought to convince blacks that Republicans were their enemies, and that it was in their interest to vote Democrat. They were surprisingly successful at this, and by the late 20th century, blacks voted mostly Democrat. Perhaps because, due in part at least, to racism, many blacks were poor, and poor people tend to support socialism, and the Democrat party has shown more affinity for socialism than the Republican.

The colonial militias played an important part in the American Revolution. After independence, George Washington convinced the country to make the militia a part of law. (Read the second amendment to the Constitution.) Each able-bodied male citizen must own a rifle, and be ready to join with his neighbors to defend the nation in an emergency.

George Washington’s militia system was copied by Switzerland, and still exists today in that nation. Over the years Switzerland has been very successful in keeping its independence. In WWII, the Nazis took control of all the countries around it, but Switzerland remained free.

Around 150 years ago in the USA, the laws were changed and the militias disbanded. (Today we have the National Guard, which claims to be the descendent of the militia. The militias required each member to have a gun and keep it at home and ready in case of need. The National Guard keeps the rifles locked up for safekeeping.) Why was the militia disbanded? By 1870, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution gave full citizenship to ex-slaves. Too many senators and congressmen were horrified by the idea of having to arm all those black men.

Black people went from being slaves to being pariahs, to being mistreated in many ways. It is not, of course, surprising to see that some learned to hate whites.

The Frontier gave us a feeling for economic and political freedom, and our schools taught us that throughout our history citizens fought and died for these principals. After Blacks became free citizens, they too were taught these ideas. Given the discrimination against black people, it is perhaps surprising that blacks became as patriotic as they did. Thus, Doris Miller did not hang back when he had a chance to risk and lose his life in fighting for his country.

More recently, schools have taught less of these concepts and history. Schools and politicians have taught that government should run our lives for our own good. Politicians have worked hard to break us into groups such as White Americans, African Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, …. Each group is told to vote for me and I will protect and advance your interests against those other evil groups. Many politicians are urging these racist ideas in order to gain support. A few years ago, a black president made the news by condemning white policemen accused of abusing a black man, without bothering to investigate the facts of the act. Racism is still going strong.

Many of our government burrocrats have built their jobs around the effort to combat racism.  Thus it is in their interest to see that racial categories are maintained.  So we will see census and other government forms with a question like

Check one: 

( ) African American

( ) Asian American

( ) Inuit

( ) Hispanic

( ) Native American

( ) White

In order to force us to fit into categories that the burrocracy prefers.  Because ethnicity is mostly a cultural thing, it would make much more sense to say

Ethnic Group: ______________ . 

But this would allow us to damage the stereotype categories by filling in such answers as “American”, “Texan”, “Human”, or even “Cornhusker” or “Longhorn” or “Aggie”. 

The message of unity among all Americans is being lost. Such a message is necessary for the survival of a culture and its society. Today, many would call Doris Miller a sucker, or Uncle Tom.

Does racism ever make sense? A lady I know once told me that in college she had a friend from a small town in Mississippi, who told her that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. She was surprised at this, because her friend seemed like a good and tolerant person. She asked him why he joined the Klan, and he replied, “where I come from, you join the Klan if you know what’s good for you”. It occurs to me that, if you estimate the strength of the KKK by a count of members, you should not count on much strength from those who are members whose loyalty is because they know what’s good for them.

In Germany in 1940 it was in one’s interest to hate Jews, or at least pretend to.

Back in the 1930’s a young man worked at a tile yard in Chicago Heights, and the workforce was mixed black and white. After work they would stop in at the bar to have a beer or two together. More recently, the blacks and whites would sit at separate tables, because a black who sat with the whites would find himself called “Uncle Tom”.

Racism tends to build racism. Racism, like many cultural ideas, is illogical. It would be wonderful if racism would disappear overnight. But don’t hold your breath.

Can we eliminate racism from our culture? Great idea, but not an easy thing to accomplish. It seems to exist in every culture, and thus likely has some value to a culture? The best hope I can see is to teach our kids that the subspecies homo sapiens sapiens is so genetically mixed and uniform, and that there is no other surviving member of the genus homo. Not impossible, but nothing like easy. Perhaps like trying to exterminate a contagious virus.