IThis post is about race. There are two portions: one is about history and the other personal.
Principles in human relations are often discarded in deference to "business". This is the basis of slavery, which is an historic basis for business and a business in it's own right that still occurs today. Business included war, so government, military and even religion were tightly integrated for most of the history we know of, because of the evolution of tribal to civil society and because of the need to ensure security.
Similarly, the historical consequence of losing a war is dispossession and subjugation. Throughout history, whole cultures have vanished due to conflicts, having been unable to secure the areas of their habitation.
In the United States and other modern countries, this started to change. But only two generations, in my grandmother's time and just beginning, two generations ago in these modern countries. And there are large parts of the world where this change has not occurred.
Principles, the basis for civil society, have been advanced in a way that human rights and dignity have been extended to the most vile people imaginable. This is because these vile people, although vicious, brutal, criminal and murderous, have rights due to them as a basis for modern society.
There is a very good article by a man named John Mohawk that discusses race, the foundation for racism. He traces a significant amount of modern racism to the Roman church, whose papal authority could in turn imbue kingdoms' rulers with divine imprimatur.
In essence, this church endorsed the dispossession and subjugation of non-Roman Catholics by the Catholic-endorsed kingdoms, much in the way the Roman citizen had certain privileges that non citizens did not. The first people to be so attacked were the Irish, who were also some of the first "races" to suffer this new type of onslaught. Then, the Canary Islanders, then mainland Africans.
The term race has evolved over time. Currently it refers to "phenotypes". In the era discussed at this point, several hundred years AD, it referred to cultures/linguistic groups and nationalities. The article by John Mohawk links this rolling series of dispossessions to racism. It happened that non-Catholics looked different. They were freckled, or darker. Non-Catholics were less than human therefore they could be disposed of as seen fit: tortured, killed, dispossessed, enslaved, all with papal blessing. Similar attitudes were held in Islamic controlled regions, and a common African racist attitude persists where Eastern Africans hold Western Africans inferior for this reason.
Every area of the world has it's racist pseudo-anthrophilosophy, where various peoples have various shortcomings or strange abilities. Unfortunately, these only obscure the truth.
As the European expansion and consolidation moved forward, Mr. Mohawk asserts, the association darker-pagan-expendable became ingrained. The pattern had been set, such that at the time of American initial settlement, it was nearly automatic. One of Columbus' first orders of business was to kidnap Caribbean natives and ship them back to his imperial sponsors.
The condition of the average European was poverty. People, serfs, peasants, etc. and the land "went together". The ruler/owner of the land owned the bulk of their output. As a result of some early adoption of various common laws, people had some rights, but not many. The thrall, or slave, had even fewer. There was competition for various favors from the landed nobles, who were "noble" based on the extension of those limited rights.
More rights and privileges were granted when it alleviated pressures and produced popular support, which included the provision of able bodied men to fight the nobleman's battles and extend his influence. It heightened the adherence to one's ruler to convey a sense of "Us and them", capital 'U' us. Racism served that purpose: making one army believe they were superior to the other, particularly blessed and righteous.
This pseudoChristian-Europeanism is now referred to as "white supremacism", based on the most recent propaganda of that ilk which was expanded and adopted as some type of actual divine mandate. Europe is not alone, of course, various supremacism occurs in the middle east, caste system in India, and there are similar belief systems in Far East Asia.
But any of these of course hold no bearing when held up to scientific study. Because these belief systems are not fact based, but are mechanisms to help ensure various armies wouldn't bolt and run, and that they would feel justified in fighting to expand the holdings of their ruler, paradoxically killing people who were more like themselves than these for soldiers were like their rulers.
Kurt Vonnegut used a wonderful phrase in one of his books, but I don't recall which. 'Breakfast of Champions', maybe: "Flipping them orts with their cane", describing the 19th-early 20th century tycoon who would take the briefest of moments to execute a one handed putt, chipping a discarded crust of bread on the street towards a beggar. It is the quintessential 'trickle down', the essence of relationship between "noble" and "peasant".
This may seem "apologist", it is not. It is to demonstrate the utility of racism as it is applied by ambitious people. They created these divisions as suited their purposes as social controls, then left the half-baked theories implanted in their subjects to fester and breed.
Questioning the reality of these divisions, racism, ethnism, culturism... this seems to happen almost by chance, but once the question is raised, the "-ism" is slowly erased, supplanted by truth. The truth shall set us free, so to seek it is to seek freedom.
The world of humans, on the whole, can be vicious and brutal. These old ways, the ingrained historic programming, are a fallback: only two generations away at this point, they are still ready for activation. These are powerful motivators and powerful identity carriers, but they work in a world based on greed and ambition above all else.
Can we imagine someone witnessing the brutality of one group against another-- the conquistadors against the Incas perhaps-- and imagine them thinking "did Christ really die so that at might do this?". It is easy to imagine, but the reality undoubtedly made dissent very risky.
Where does one go, where does one go, with such ideas? These are the ideas that when spoken aloud gets one hanged, shot, abandoned our otherwise put in harm's way.
So that is all of that. Read native American authors like Vine DeLoria, Jr. for excellent research and commentary on modern racism.
I'm going to tell a personal story, it is true and so I will eliminate actual names.
When I was young, my mother had a lady that came to do the cleaning. She was African American, and I loved her. I still love her, I love her because she helped take care of me.
My mother had a disease that made her life difficult and she felt hugely guilty for that also. Having this help was a blessing for her.
The drive that this lovely lady made to come work at our house was a long drive. When I think about that, I realize we helped her also. She had a difficult situation at home, and eventually divorced her husband once her son grew up.
My mother had been taught by her father, who worked for the railroad, that we should live by the words in the Declaration and Constitution with respect to equality of humankind. As a result, he did not tolerate racist attitudes or language, my mom told me does of him helping all manner of folks during the depression, and my mother also worked to ensure people with racist attitudes were not among friends of the family.
(Having said that, she was not fond of Muhammad Ali, whom she thought was very vain, but it had nothing to do with his phenotypical characteristics.)
My father found the whole subject of racism somewhat amusing in the abstract, and was repulsed by it in the concrete. His experience was different, he knew full well the attitudes of various people. When I became older, I recognized why he reacted the way he did in certain situations with certain people that we should happen to meet, and then when I became a teenager, he would parody racists in a way that was very amusing. It was his way of making sure I knew people with those attitudes were cartoonish at best.
At the time of this story, the cleaning lady's son was my age: 8 or 9 or so. We did refer to her by her first or last name preceded by "Ms.". As I tell this story, it is very personal and really very brief, occurring over an hour or so, but this is important.
I know now that people who lived in my small town where I grew up (in a northern state, a middle class area) had very different, ugly, attitudes about race. But at that time two very important people around me were my mother and this woman who came to clean, one was white and one was black. I could observe that was unusual in the area where I lived, but that was the way it was and that was ok.
In fact, it was unusual in the area where I lived to see *any* non-white person, and my first encounter with racism was to be a result of that demographic. It has changed considerably since then.
When she came to our house to clean, she would from time to time bring her son. He was energetic and happy, more animated than me, but also quiet like me, so we could do things together. We'd go exploring in the creek to catch tadpoles, skip rocks and explore in the remaining trees around the nearby park.
The park itself was rather sterile: it had been a nice forest, but it had been flattened and turned into a playground with swings and such. We preferred to play in the trees and creek, looking for crayfish and other odd things. We would walk across the park, to get from one part of the creek to the other where the bank did not allow walking.
He and I were doing this one day, talking a bit but mostly remaining quiet, and a kid came up on a bike. He slammed on the brakes and yelled something, a name. This was a word I'd never heard, and it didn't make sense to me.
The kid was scrawny, buck-toothed with kind of a vicious face. I had not seen him in this park, so I picked up a rock and threw it at him. Skipping rocks was one of my favorite things. In this area, there was a lot of slate, flat and sharp, and it was easy to throw. The kids next door used to start rock fights, so I knew how to use this brittle stone to get them to back down, and I threw it as hard as I could.
He was a little far, but I could hit him. I didn't really want to get in a rock fight just then, but I did want him to go away. So I threw it arching over his head, landing well behind him so he could see how easily I could hit him if I wanted. I yelled at him, I cannot remember what I said but the gist was for him to go away, and picked up another rock, carefully selecting one and measuring the next throw. The desired effect was achieved, he was frightened and rode off as fast as he could.
I turned around and looked at my friend. I remember asking, "Aren't to going to do anything?" as I did this.
Then I saw how he looked.
He was a strong young man with a lot of energy, but he seemed to have shrunk. His shoulders were rounded, and his head was drooped. He seemed to have shriveled in front of me, and I could not understand it. That kid on the bike was a pipsqueak compared to us.
All I could think of was to get him to our fort, a stand of trees with a rocky depression in the center, where we could talk in private. But he didn't want to talk about it. So we started doing some things, I gave him a thing to do, to help fix the fort, so we started to dig it out a little further on one side pulling out stones.
I was upset. This was my friend, the son of my mother's friend. But he had withdrawn into a place I couldn't reach him. Also, I felt responsible, I didn't know why. I couldn't remember that word, it seemed like a silly sounding word. I was angry, and confused.
Some other friends of mine came along. I introduced them to my friend and we started to talk. They were a little surprised, but just because it was so unusual to see a non-white person. I told them about the jerk in the park, and how he called US names and how we might need to pile up rocks in case he came back. They were game for that, and so the conversation shifted. The kid didn't come back, so we left after a while.
That young African American man went on to do several things, for a while he was an NFL football player: not a star, but was paid to play. But he was successful at the things he did.
Many years later, when my mother called me to tell me his mom had died of a heart attack, I sent him a letter. I was very sad at the time to hear this, but at the same time I had no doubt that I now knew someone in heaven who would remember me.
My mother has since passed as well.
So that's three generations now since things began to change. It will take a while, I think, but it gets better and better. Forward motion, maintaining forward motion, is the key to moving it ever closer to the goal.
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