I was recently the victim of a vicious verbal attack. I am always wary of
using the word racism, but for the purposes of word economy, we will call it what it was, a race attack.
The odd thing about the attack was that it came from a black person, one who
I would in every day life, even if not in spirit, have considered a brother. My
light skin irked him, much in the way that I was once irked by boys who were
doing things to girls behind the rabbit hutches at lunch-time in primary
school. They had what I wanted, so I hated them. So it was that being mixed race, my accent, and
the way I dressed meant I hated black people, that I considered myself white,
and that I thought I was too good to associate with other black people.
The historic idea of race in the
western world divides humans into distinct groups on the strict basis of
phenotype, or outward appearance. Over time, this came to be used to evaluate
the distinct biological and cultural standing of the peoples of the world. The
three major groups, by this thinking were then apportioned names, the
Caucasoids, the Mongoloids and the Negroids. This purely arbitrary invention
has so taken hold that it is now accepted as scientific fact. Just as durable
and even more pernicious was the creation of a racial hierarchy, with the
Euro-Caucasian race assigned the topmost rank and the greatest status.
By the time the Northern races came into their first close contact with
black Africans, whether it was through Arab civilization's Ibn Battuta or
through the stories of the explorers, a fabric of rich fantastical tales had
been woven about the black man. Even where civilizations had flourished and the
ruling classes enjoyed lifestyles far superior to those of their northern
contemporaries, the desire of the traders to keep the mysterious hinterland and
its treasures secret ensured that the accounts of their travels were
embellished with such untruths as would discourage competition.
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Ibn Battuta, 14th century
"........merriment dominates the black man because of his
defective brain, whence also the weakness of his intelligence."
Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1331
"They [the Shu`ubiyya] maintain that eloquence is prized by all people at
all times -- even the Zanj, despite their dimness, their boundless stupidity,
their obtuseness, their crude perceptions and their evil dispositions, make
long speeches."
Ibn Battuta, 14th century
"Like the crows among mankind are the Zanj (black people) for they are the
worst of men and the most vicious of creatures in character and
temperament."
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After the reconquista of Andalusia and other parts of
Iberia, the Moors
[Africans from North West Africa] were expelled from Spain
and an emboldened Western Europe began its long--still
ongoing--foray into the rest of the globe. The economics of a nascent
capitalism was the basis for the ensuing racial ideology. The Africans who were
transported into the Western hemisphere for capitalist labour purposes had their
sociologies transformed from ones of ethnic kinships and languages to ones
based purely on the idea of race as determined by phenotype. The Yoruba slave
and the Mandika slave may have thought themselves different in the Old
World. In this new one, their blackness insisted that they were
kin. As the centuries swept by, their religion, their culture and everything
that could be called an identity was swept away from their mind, and in its
place a definition of the self put in place that decreed only that they were
black, and therefore slaves. It has been written that South American (Brazil
especially) and in parts of the Caribbean knowledge of
kinship, and an attachment to some of the Old World was retained
but such was subordinated to the European idea of race as a hierarchical
construct.
The New World saw millions of deaths, and with every
one a denudation of the memories of the Old World. It
also saw millions of new births, and many of these were mixed births, across
racial
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lines. The progeny of these illicit unions, most often rapes, were
clearly different than both their parents, even as they clearly bore
resemblances to both race groups. The new sociological model with its racial
hierarchy had to adapt to these new entrants, determining that human worth in
all dimensions was determined by a perceived proximity to the European
phenotype. The African cultures of origin were also seen as inherently less
developed and inferior to those imposed by the dominant Europeans. The result
of all this was that humans were conditioned to relate to each other on the
basis of racial-phenotypical caste rank predominantly. As phenotypical
similarities to the Europeans brought a better lifestyle, and a keener adoption
of European ways, the idea quickly took hold among the traumatized slave
populations that they were actually inferior, that their culture and their
beliefs were inferior. Even later, as families grew it became desirable among
the mixed race families, to maintain for their children the social standing
that they had enjoyed. For those not mixed who could, union with a mixed race
partner ensured a social jump as some of the benefits of their lighter-skinned,
straighter nosed partner rubbed of on them and their offspring.
This new paradigm was further universalized as Europe's
economic, cultural, ideological and technological powers grew and became more
dominant over the whole globe. Matters were further cemented with the colonization
of Africa by the powers of Western Europe.
The ease with which the Gatlin gun and the musket conquered the plains and
pacified the tribes, entrenched the perception of superiority and inferiority
respectively in each side. Even to this day, note the manner in which the
western world continuous to exercise arbitrary dominance and destruction of
other societies. As in Iraq today, as in large parts of Africa, the Caribbean
and South America, the immutable rule being destroy or manipulate the social
fabric and wait for a Hobbesian state of nature to develop.
As its comparative technological and knowledge dominance and development persisted
from the start of the European Renaissance onwards, it was the conventional
assumption of Europe's major intellectuals that Africans ( and other peoples )
looked not only radically different from Europeans but were also culturally and
biologically inferior in the human sense. Even Europe's
greatest minds Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Stendhal;
et al. wrote that persons of African origin were anthropologically inferior [culturally]
because they were less evolved than the other races.
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invisible man
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And so it is with Africa and the European concept of race.
It is claimed that North Africans--separated from the rest of Africa by the
Western imposed euphemistic concept of sub-Saharan Africa--have been
conditioned to believe that purely in terms of phenotype they are higher up the
racial caste system than other Africans. In the Sudan and Mauritania, phenotype
again is the deciding factor for caste-privilege, and Northern Sudanese who may
be just so slightly phenotypically different-on average-from the other Sudanese
yet the pseudo-racial caste structure still determines much. It is the European-imposed
race-caste ideology of the West that explains the caste view of Tutsis over
Hutus, Ethiopians and Somalis over other Africans, and the still strong racial
feelings felt by South African "coloureds" and Indians towards South
Africa's ethnic blacks.
Within black African populations the reverse is evident. Conceding in the
most part that they are at the bottom, attempts are then made to rank the rest
of the races in their proper place. Therefore a marriage union with an Indian
or an Arab is inferior to one with a European, and one with a Western European
is considered superior to one with say a Pole or a Romanian. Such hierarchies
also demand that every community seek another to suppress beneath them in a
similar fashion. Therefore, Australian Aborigines, or Khoisan, or even Kenya's
pastoralists and hunter gatherers are looked upon as inferior.
So it was that I considered the assault on me, by a black African to whom my name,
skin color and hair suggested I was Caribbean, and
therefore worthy of his rage. It is true that this racist hierarchy oppresses
black people everywhere, but it is also true that nowhere is there a steadier
buttressing, nowhere are these ideas more keenly held, more deeply entrenched
or more ardently argued than in the sweaty glands of the Third World.
One day we will realize that the notion of race is nonsensical, that it is
oppressive and demeaning, that from its beginnings the idea of the African as separate
from the rest of mankind was determined to paint a picture of a beast.
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I was not aware that science had theorised the notion that there is a difference in races. Could this be pseudo-science? or the plain non-sense?