Racism

The Christian, as a follower of Jesus, does not have the option of racism. Jesus was no racist. He told His followers to love enemies--not to kill them. He sought to "draw all men" to Himself (John 12:32). "He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26).

 

Introduction

Racism is the belief that some races or ethnic groups are superior to others, which is then extended to justify actions that create inequality and injustice.

Many scholars maintain race to be a social construct with potent social and political effects but no basis in biological science. Scholars such as anthropologist Audrey Smedley (2007) contend that the very idea of 'race' implies inequality and hierarchy. It has also been claimed that biologically there are no scientific classifications that delineate human groups into 'races' (Graves 2004).

Historians such as Theodore Allen (1994; 1997) have analyzed colonial records from Virginia and concluded that the idea of a "white race" was originally invented in the early 18th century to splice together various European ethnic groups who never before thought they had anything in common.

Noel Ignatiev (1995) has written an historical analysis of how the Irish became members of the "white race" in the 19th century. Smedley and Smedley (2005: 16) state: "The consensus among most scholars in fields such as evolutionary biology, anthropology, and other disciplines is that racial distinctions fail on three counts--that is, they are not genetically discrete, are not reliably measured, and are not scientifically meaningful."

The concept of racial superiority evolved to distinguish from other cultures that were considered inferior or impure. This emphasis on culture corresponds to the modern mainstream definition of racism: "Racism does not originate from the existence of ‘races’. It creates them through a process of social division into categories: anybody can be racialised, independently of their somatic, cultural, religious differences." This definition explicitly ignores the fiery polemic on the biological concept of race, still subject to scientific debate. In the words of David C. Rowe "A racial concept, although sometimes in the guise of another name, will remain in use in biology and in other fields because scientists, as well as lay persons, are fascinated by human diversity, some of which is captured by race."

A short History of Racism

Until recent history this racist abuse of physical anthropology has been politically exploited. Apart from being unscientific, racial prejudice became subject to international legislation. For instance, the Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 20, 1963, address racial prejudice explicitly next to discrimination for reasons of race, colour or ethnic origin (Article I).

Richard E. Nisbett has said that the question of racial superiority may go back at least a thousand years. The Catholic Spaniards formulated the Cleanliness of blood doctrine. It was during this time in history that the Western concept of aristocratic "blue blood" emerged in a highly racialized and implicitly white supremacist context, as author Robert Lacey explains...

“ It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin--proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. Sangre azul, blue blood, was thus a euphemism for being a white man--Spain's own particular reminder that the refined footsteps of the aristocracy through history carry the rather less refined spoor of racism. ”

Following the expulsion of most Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the remaining Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming "New Christians" which were despised and discriminated by the others Christians. An Inquisition was carried out by members of the Dominican Order in order to weed out converts that still practiced Judaism and Islam in secret. The system and ideology of the limpieza de sangre ostracized Christian converts from society, regardless of their actual degree of sincerity in their faith. In Portugal, the legal distinction between New and Old Christian was only ended through a legal decree issued by the Marquis of Pombal in 1772, almost three centuries after the implementation of the racist discrimination. The limpieza de sangre doctrine was also very common in the colonization of the Americas, where it led to the racial separation of the various peoples in the colonies and created a very intricate list of nomenclature to describe one's precise race and, by consequence, one's place in society. This precise classification was described by Eduardo Galeano in the Open Veins of Latin America (1971). It included, among others terms:

• mestizo (50% Spaniard and 50% Native American),
• castizo (75% European and 25% Native American),
• Spaniard (87.5% European and 12.5% Native American),
• Mulatto (50% European and 50% African),
• Albarazado (43.75% Native American, 29.6875% European, and 26.5625% African), etc.

At the end of the Renaissance, the Valladolid debate (1550-1551) concerning the treatment of natives of the "New World" opposed the Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de Las Casas to the Jesuit Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The latter argued that "Indians" were natural slaves because they had no souls, and were therefore beneath humanity. Thus, reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology and natural law. To the contrary, Bartolomé de Las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to Catholic theology. It was one of the many controversy concerning racism, slavery and Eurocentrism that would arise in the following centuries.

Authors such as Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, have said that the racist ideology ("popular racism") developed at the end of the nineteenth century helped legitimize the imperialist conquests of foreign territories, and crimes that accompanied it (such as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, 1904-1907).

Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden (1899) is one of the more famous illustrations of the belief in the inherent superiority of the European culture over the rest of the world, though also thought to be a satirical vantage of such imperialism. Racist ideology thus helped legitimize subjugation and the dismantling of the traditional societies of indigenous peoples, which were thus conceived as humanitarian obligations as a result of these racist beliefs.

Other colonialists recognized the depravity of their actions but persisted for personal gain and there are some Europeans during the time period who objected to the injustices caused by colonialism and lobbied on behalf of aboriginal peoples. Thus, when the "Hottentot Venus" was displayed in England in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the African Association publicly opposed itself to the exhibition. The same year that Kipling published his poem, Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness (1899), a clear criticism of the Congo Free State owned by Leopold II of Belgium.

Examples of racial theories used to legitimate the imperialist conquest include the creation of the "Hamitic" ethno-linguistic group during the European exploration of Africa. Used in different ways, the term was first used by Johann Ludwig Krapf (1810-1881) to qualify all languages of Africa spoken by black people. It was then restricted by Karl Friedrich Lepsius (1810-1877) to African non-Semitic languages. The term then became quite popular, and was applied to different groups (Ethiopians, Eritreans, Berbers, Nubians, Somalis, etc.) Europeans conceived "Hamitic" people, allegedly descendants of the biblical Ham, son of Noah, as leaders within Africa.

However, the allegedly Hamitic peoples themselves were often deemed to have 'failed' as rulers, a failing that was sometimes explained by interbreeding with "non-Hamites". So, in the mid-20th century the German scholar Carl Meinhof (1857-1944) claimed that the "Bantu race" was formed by a merger of Hamitic and "Negro races". The 'Hottentots' (Nama or Khoi) were formed by the merger of Hamitic and Bushmen ("San) races" — both being termed nowadays as Khoisan peoples). The term "Hamitic" is nowadays obsolete.

Racism spread throughout the "New World" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Whitecapping which started in Indiana in the late 19th century soon spread throughout all of North America, causing many African laborers to flee from the land they worked on.

Whiteness as property
In an article entitled Whiteness as Property, Cheryl I. Harris discusses both the construction of race (historically in America) and the emergence of whiteness as property. She argues that both the subordination of Africans/Blacks and Native Americans, the former for appropriation of labor the latter for appropriation of land, were results of (or tied to) the racialized conceptions of property implemented by force and ratified by law (Crenshaw et.al,1995).
Harris argues that the origins of property rights are rooted in oppression and racial domination. The wealth of the nation gained by Black labor occurred because of the opinion that Blacks were to be treated as objects of property. It was not the interaction of race alone that operated to systematically oppress Blacks and Native Americans, but the "interaction between conceptions of race and property which played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination" (Crenshaw et. al, 1995).
Harris later goes on to state that ideas of 'white identity' and the myths and ideologies of racial hierarchy/racial stratification were intrinsically tied to the development and expansion of the system of chattel slavery. Both the political and economic interests, which defended the enslavement of Blacks was extremely different from that of indentured servitude, and by the 1660s Black skin was sign of recognizable slavery by law. Racial identity was merged with not only legal status, but social status, as "black identity" was marked with enslavement, whereas "white identity" was marked as free (not a slave, regardless of indentured servitude it was not transferable to offspring by law...the tension between property and humanity is reflected in the use of black women's bodies as simply a means to increase one's property). Black and White became polar constructs, which is important to remember when understanding the social construction of race (Crenshaw et. al, 1995).

Racial theories were also used to legitimate the imperialist conquest include the creation of the "Hamitic" ethno-linguistic group during the European exploration of Africa.

Racism has plagued humanity for thousands of years, and it has especially shown its ugly head during the last few centuries. Think of the myriads of Blacks carried from Africa and sold into slavery in the New World.

It should also be noted, that during the 19th century West European colonial powers were involved in the suppression of the Arab slave trade in Africa, as well as in suppression of the slave trade in West Africa.

To justify the “slave trade” its supporters dehumanised the African race, used as slaves, hence they were called "Black cattle". This led to Africans being thought of as an inferior race, the consequences of which can still be seen in acts of racism today.

Initially the colonial settlers did not distinguish between work that should be done by whites, blacks or Indians. Labour was not demarcated by racial divides. The sugar plantation and the arrival of large numbers of African slaves into the colonies soon changed that however, work came to be divided on racial grounds: only blacks should undertake certain work. Slaves in the Americas were unlike slaves in most previous slave societies, for they were characterised by colour. They were black slaves. In the process, it came to be assumed, in the mind of slave owners (later in the conventions of local society, subsequently in law and legal systems), that slave work could only be done by black people. Conversely, here was work which white people should not undertake. The slave plantations of the Americas brought into being a new language and mentality of race which was utterly unique and which was to survive the death of slavery itself. Racism had been born.

Perhaps the most important claim of the abolition movement on behalf of the slave was the simple question: 'Am I not a man and a brother?' The simplicity of that assertion disguises a fundamental issue. Atlantic slavery had hinged on the denial of this claim.

The Atlantic slave trade was the beginning of a process which denied humanity to its millions of victims.

The slave became a non-person: a chattel, a thing, an object to be bequeathed and inherited, sold and bought. Moreover the slave was black; a person transmuted into a object of loathing by white society. All slave societies devised complex legal and social conventions for maintaining the separation, the uniqueness of blacks, by limiting their access to the law, to property, to certain relationships with white people. At times, whites went to bizarre lengths to maintain these racial hierarchies (and to ensure that whites remained on top). The end results were legal codes and local conventions which secured black humanity a permanent and inherited place at the bottom of the social heap. Nor was this simply a matter of legal practice. Whites everywhere across the Americas internalised this hierarchy, believing in and living out as daily reality the racialism of slavery.
Even the oft-repeated abolitionist phrase 'Am I not a man and a brother?' failed to dislodge the widespread allegiance to this racialised view of mankind. In the short term, however, the millions of ex-slaves who secured their freedom in the Americas in the 19th century were heirs to to an intellectual and political worldview which consigned them, at best, to the bottom of local society; at worst, it cast them beyond the pale of humanity completely. It was a process made worse, in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, by the emergence of new social and natural sciences which devised racial categories of mankind to the great disadvantage of blacks, and indeed other races, everywhere. A consequence of this was the development of the Atlantean theory (the concept of a superior race descended from the civilisation supposedly responsible for building the lost city of Atlantis and other wonders of the ancient world) which fed the minds of the Nazis and gave reason to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Slavery was thus the critical force in the racialising of the western world in the years after the European invasions of the Americas. The legacy of those ideas lived on - and continues - long after slavery in the Americas itself had ended. Hence what seems at first glance to be a relatively simple historical story - the slave trade - forms the core of a complex historical process whose ramifications continue to reverberate throughout the modern world.

Racist  Darwinians

Present-day Darwinians, for the most part, do not want to be identified with racism; so it is no wonder that some of Darwin's statements touching on this area receive little attention. He spoke of the "gorilla" and the "negro" [sic] as occupying evolutionary positions between the "Baboon" and the "civilized races of man" ("Caucasian"); viz:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro [sic] or Australian and the gorilla.
Later in the same volume, Darwin wrote:
It has often been said . . . that man can resist with impunity the greatest diversities of climate and other changes; but this is true only of the civilized races. Man in his wild condition seems to be in this respect almost as susceptible as his nearest allies, the anthropoid apes, which have never yet survived long, when removed from their native country.
Referring to On the Origin of Species, by Darwin, Harvard University's Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory." He cites various sources to support his thesis, but two names which do not appear in his section entitled "Racism" are the names of Edwin G. Conklin and Henry Fairfield Osborn.
It is important to recognize that these two men were writing before Hitler's brand of evolution unfolded itself on the European continent. Some of the language of both Conklin and Osborn is reminiscent of Darwin, if not also of Hitler. It is important to keep in mind who these men were. Conklin was Professor of Biology at Princeton University from 1908 to 1933. He was also President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1936 (the year of Hitler's Berlin Olympics). He wrote:
Comparison of any modern race with the Neanderthal or Heidelberg types shows that all have changed, but probably the negroid races more closely resemble the original stock than the white or yellow races. Every consideration should lead those who believe in the superiority of the white race to strive to preserve its purity and to establish and maintain the segregation of the races, for the longer this is maintained, the greater the preponderance of the white race will be.
Henry Fairfield Osborn was a professor of biology and zoology at Columbia University. For twenty-five years (1908-1933), he was President of the American Museum of Natural History's Board of Trustees. Osborn wrote:
The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolians, as may be proved by an examination not only of the brain, of the hair, of the bodily characteristics . . . but of the instincts, the intelligence. The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old-youth of the species Homo Sapiens.
In a book dedicated to John T. Scopes (the evolutionist teacher made famous by the Scopes "monkey trial"), Osborn wrote:
The ethical principle inherent in evolution is that only the best has a right to survive. . . .
In this book, Osborn said that he was summing up an article he had written for the New York Times (2/26/22). One could speculate that Hitler, himself, might in some way have had access to this teaching prior to his writing of Mein Kampf, so similar does this last statement sound to much of what he believed and wrote.
It is easy to believe that Hitler had such an interest in the boxing match between Joe Louis and the German, Max Schmeling, (6/19/36). It "was rife with political and racial overtones. . . ." Less than a year prior, Paul Gallico, writer for the New York Daily News, wrote:
Louis, the magnificent animal . . . He eats. He sleeps. He fights. . . . Is he all instinct, all animal? Or have a hundred million years left a fold upon his brain? I see in this colored man something so cold, so hard, so cruel that I wonder as to his bravery. Courage in the animal is desperation. Courage in the human is something incalculable and divine.

In April of 1986, The Pennsylvania Gazette (University of Pennsylvania) published an article featuring a skull labeled "NEGRO/LUNATIC." The caption under the photograph read, "'Scientific' racism: Skulls like these, housed in the University Museum, were once used to 'prove' white supremacy."
The National Geographic Society, in November of 1985, set before the public a display of "4,000,000 years of bipedalism" in its magazine. Nine "hominids," strongly suggestive of evolutionary development, are drawn--from Australopithecus-afarensis (a "Lucy" type), through modern Homo sapiens. The first five in the sequence had a darker skin tone; the last four, lighter. The editors acknowledged that the skin color is speculative, but, in the March 1986 issue of National Geographic ("Members Forum"), they said the following:
Since the three H. sapiens variations depicted were based on fossil evidence in Europe, Mr. Matternes gave them a lighter tone.
But this seems to be misleading, since the last four in the sequence have the lighter skin tones and the fourth from the end was based on evidence from Kenya, Africa! Could this be an example of a subtle form of racism still affecting the public today?

During the Age of Enlightenment
While modern racism has an essentialist and biological conception of race, racist or xenophobic opinions have been shared by some authors, from the Antiquity to the Age of Enlightenment. However, this early form of racism did not conceive of "race" as a biological concept — as biology itself did not exist as such —, but as the accidental effect of climate on physical traits. With the Age of Discovery, the diversity of mankind became an important topic of research, leading to debates concerning monogenism and polygenism, respectively endorsing the unique origin of mankind (coherent with the Genesis Biblical account) and the multiple origins of mankind. Pierre de Maupertuis (1698-1759), for example, reconcilied the Biblical account with the present diversity of "races" in his Essai de philosophie morale (1749, Essay on Moral Philosophy), explaining "racial" differences by climatic factors. He thus explained the colour of Negroes by the inheritance of acquired characteristics, claiming white was the original colour of mankind. He also highlighted the spiritual strength of Africans seized as slaves, pointing out how, like the Ancient Stoic philosophers, they prefer to die rather than to survive to capture. Arguments on the influence of climate found additional weight with Buffon's Histoire naturelle in the middle of the 18th century, and his thesis on the unity of mankind was taken back by Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie in the article Humaine, espèce (Human, Specie). According to Ann Thomson, although Buffon did establish a "clear hierarchy [...] between the beautiful white civilised races of the temperate zone and those savages who have degenerated in more extreme climates, his emphasis on the unity of the human race and his distinction between humans and other animals were extremely influential." The abolitionists thus used his arguments to show that Africans were not naturally inferior, and could be improved by different treatment and different climate.

The abbé Demanet (1767) thus claimed that a Portuguese colony in Africa had became black after several generations, due to the effect of climate— a story which was given wide creedence by abolitionists, quoted for example by Cabanis (1757-1808), Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), etc. The abolitionist Physiocrat abbé Pierre-Joseph-André Roubaud also alleged that Black Africans would change skin colour if they lived in different climatic conditions. According to Ann Thomson...

“What emerges from these examples is the overwhelming desire to insist on the unity of the human race by emphasizing the effect of the climate and other environmental causes, but not necessarily to claim the equality of all humans; for the existence of a hierarchy is not systematically denied but, on the contrary, frequently accepted [exceptions quoted by Thomson includes James Dunbar and the abbé Grégoire.]. This of course was to have long-lasting effects in the Nineteenth Century, when the arguments about climate were countered and the hierarchy was seen to be permanent, as the differences between humans were innate. ”

Moral factors were also considered to influence physical and psychical traits. Henceforth, the American abolitionist Anthony Benezet stated, in the Historical Account of Guinea (1772), that Africans in Africa were a sociable, virtuous and intelligent people; but that their servile condition in Amercia explained their "degeneration" and adoption of the vices of Europeans.

Racism Continued- Institutional racism

Institutional racism (also known as structural racism, state racism or systemic racism) is racial discrimination by governments, corporations, educational institutions or other large organizations with the power to influence the lives of many individuals. Stokely Carmichael is credited for coining the phrase institutional racism in the late 1960s. He defined the term as "the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin".

Maulana Karenga argued that racism constituted the destruction of culture, language, religion and human possibility, and that the effects of racism were:

the morally monstrous destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples.

Economics and racism

Historical economic or social disparity is alleged to be a form of discrimination which is caused by past racism and historical reasons, affecting the present generation through deficits in the formal education and kinds of preparation in the parents' generation, and, through primarily unconscious racist attitudes and actions on members of the general population. (e.g. A member of race Y, Mary, has her opportunities adversely affected (directly and/or indirectly) by the mistreatment of her ancestors of race Y.)

The common hypothesis embraced by classical economists is that competition in a capitalist economy decreases the impact of discrimination. The thinking behind the hypothesis is that discrimination imposes a cost on the employer, and thus a profit-driven employer will avoid racist hiring policies.

"Scientific" racism

The modern biological definition of race developed in the 19th century with scientific racist theories. The term "scientific racism" refers to the use of faulty science to justify and support racist beliefs, which goes back to at least the early 18th century, though it gained most of its influence in the mid-19th century, during the New Imperialism period. Also known as academic racism, such theories first needed to overcome the Church's resistance to positivists accounts of history, and its support of monogenism, that is that all human beings were originated from the same ancestors, in accordance with creationist accounts of history.

These racist theories put forth on scientific hypothesis were combined with unilineal theories of social progress which postulated the superiority of the European civilization over the rest of the world. Furthermore, they frequently made use of the social Darwinism discourse, which postulated the "survival of the fittest" idea, a term coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864. Charles Darwin himself may have supported such accounts of history in The Descent of Man (1871). See his quote below in the 'Academic' Racism against Africans section. At the end of the 19th century, they intertwined themselves with eugenics discourses of "degeneration of the race" and "blood heredity." Henceforth, scientific racist discourses could be defined as the combination of polygenism, unilinealism, social darwinism and eugenism. They found their scientific legitimacy on physical anthropology, anthropometry, craniometry, phrenology, physiognomy and others now discredited disciplines in order to formulate racist prejudices.

Before being disqualified in the 20th century by the American school of cultural anthropology (Franz Boas, etc.), the British school of social anthropology (Bronisław Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, etc.), the French school of ethnology (Claude Lévi-Strauss, etc.), as well as the discovery of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, such sciences, in particular anthropometry, were used to deduce behaviours and psychological characteristics from outward, physical appearances. The neo-Darwinian synthesis, first developed in the 1930s, eventually led to a gene-centered view of evolution in the 1960s, which seemed at first to be sufficient proof of the inanity of the "scientific racist" theories of the 19th centuries, which based their conception of evolution on "races", a concept which first appeared to lose any sense at the genetic level. However, the modern resurgence of racist theories, in particular those related to the race and intelligence controversy, seems to show that genetics could also be used for ideological, racist purposes.

Auguste Comte's positivist ideology of necessary social progress as a consequence of scientific progress lead many Europeans to believe in the inherent superiority of the "White Race" over non-whites.

'Academic' racism
In relation to African people, so-called 'academic' racism was formed during times of slavery and colonialism, in order to remove any form of noble claim from the victims of these systems. Owen 'Alik Shahadah comments on this racism by stating,

Historically Africans are made to sway like leaves on the wind, impervious and indifferent to any form of civilization, a people absent from scientific discovery, philosophy or the higher arts. We are left to believe that almost nothing can come out of Africa , other than raw material Misleading imagery to suggest that "Negroes" ranked between whites and chimpanzees.
From Nott and Gliddon's Indigenous races of the earth (1857) Charles Darwin stated,

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,16 will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."

Scottish philosopher and economist David Hume said

I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or in speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences”.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant stated: "The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.

In the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel declared that "Africa is no historical part of the world." Hegel further claimed that blacks had no "sense of personality; their spirit sleeps, remains sunk in itself, makes no advance, and thus parallels the compact, undifferentiated mass of the African continent" (On Blackness Without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany, Boston: C.W. Hall, 1982, p. 94). This view that Africa had no history was repeated by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, as late as 1963.

Otto Weininger, author of Geschlecht und Charakter, believed that African Negroids naturally partake in criminality and the granting of equal rights in the West to blacks was a tragic blunder: "A genius has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of imprudence" (Sex and Character, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1906, p. 302).

The German conservative-revolutionary Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, criticized what he perceived as the culturally degrading influence of Africans in modern Western culture: in The Hour of Decision Spengler denounced "the 'happy ending' of an empty existence, the boredom of which has brought to jazz music and Negro dancing to perform the Death March for a great Culture" (The Hour of Decision, pp. 227-228).

During the Nazi era German scientists rearranged academia to support claims of a grand Aryan agent behind the splendors of all human civilizations, including India and Ancient Egypt.

Declarations against racial discrimination

Racial discrimination contradicts the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen issued during the French Revolution and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed after World War II, which all postulate equality between all human beings.

In 1950, UNESCO suggested in The Race Question —a statement signed by 21 scholars such as Ashley Montagu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, Julian Huxley, etc. — to "drop the term race altogether and instead speak of ethnic groups". The statement condemned scientific racism theories which had played a role in the Holocaust. It aimed both at debunking scientific racist theories, by popularizing modern knowledge concerning "the race question," and morally condemned racism as contrary to the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its assumption of equal rights for all. Along with Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), The Race Question influenced the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka".

The United Nations uses the definition of racial discrimination laid out in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted in 1966:

...any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.(Part 1 of Article 1 of the U.N. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination)

In 2000, the European Union explicitly banned racism along with many other forms of social discrimination:

Article 21 of the charter prohibits discrimination on any ground such as race, color, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, disability, age or sexual orientation and also discrimination on the grounds of nationality.

 

 

SEE ALSO:	Anti- racism | Big brother in racism | Immigration  | Islam in France  | Obama- my lesson  | Racism in Medicine  | Tech racism cited | The passing of the Great Race | The story of Britain and America  | The white Men's Burden     | White Supremacy |
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Created by:	Salauddine Mohammed Faruque on July 25,2007, last updated on 20.07.2008