Photo Credit: Werner Ustorf via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Race has always been an ambiguous concept. Racial identity is held to desperately by the socially insecure and the psychologically anxious, who turn their ignorance and confusion into fear, which then becomes hate. Then there are those who consciously exploit the fears and confusion of others to encourage them to hate by denigrating and dehumanizing vulnerable social outsiders they scapegoat in order to divert the people’s attention from their corruption, plunder, and power.
Debunking Racialized Imaginaries Makes little Difference
We humans have an affinity for defining all sorts of things. As Jeremy Lent outlined in his masterful books on human consciousness and meaning, The Patterning Instinct, and The Web of Meaning, we classify just about everything we perceive or encounter in life. As Lent demonstrates, the assignation of meaning not only has a fascinating and important history, but it is far more complex than we might imagine.
Of course, that capacity is a wonderful capability, which has led to many useful ideas and tools as well. But it has led us down many disastrous paths as well. The crossroads of human history, where diverse groups met in their travels, produced not only trade, but creative innovations via cultural comparison. However, where competition became conflict, racializing the putative characteristics of other groups contributed to the dehumanization of “the other,” allowing the easy rise of hatred and ultimately violence.
Once dehumanization becomes the core of the negation of others, it is very resistant to change, or even reconsideration. Evidence has no bearing. I will always remember the young Southern Georgia ‘cracker,’ who had been a bootlegger until caught and told it will be either jail or the military. He chose the latter. But in lengthy barracks conversations, his stories of bootlegging adventures included references to his best friend, a Black teenager. When I asked how he could hold such derogatory opinions of the very nature of Black folks while extoling the virtues of his Black best friend, he simply insisted, “That’s different!” No logic or evidence could change his self-contradictory framing of reality.
Fear and Loathing Are the Name of Their Game
The deep grace displayed in the hospitality of native peoples all over the world offers a striking contrast to the fear and loathing of others by alienated modern people. In my experience, from Mexican villagers to pueblo natives in “Indian Country” of the American Southwest, to peasant olive oil producers in rural Italy, to the natives of a village at the edge of the North Sea in Holland, and elsewhere, all exhibit an empathetic outlook toward strangers, of a kind not found among ‘moderns.’
Even my Black and Brown friends in South Central LA, whose lives had been largely excluded from the industrial-consumer complex by both institutional practices and cultural racism, had that same welcoming outlook in direct personal contacts with ‘outsiders’ when separated from any institutional affiliations. Why? Because the natural human condition is to feel affiliation and empathy with other human beings. Fear and loathing of others is not the natural human condition.
All the people I’ve met in those diverse locations and others, whose lives involve mostly face-to-face relationships within the communities where they live, have exhibited a welcoming spirit much harder to find among ‘moderns,’ whether rich or poor, whose lives center on relations within large institutions.
Every authoritarian or fascist regime in history and today, promotes quite the opposite outlook. Others, whether defined by race, national origin, sexual orientation, etc., etc., are to be suspected of all manner of evil intent and are assumed to be afflicted by disease and duplicitous character. That is how autocrats manipulate the people they need to control in order to rule. Fear and loathing are the most powerful tools of the narcissistic sociopaths who would take over all our lives in order to extract any and every thing or process of value from society and its environment, whatever the cost. Power is the only thing they value.
The Dark Europeans, Out of Africa, and Into America
The archeological, paleontological, and genetic evidence is clear. All human groups evolved and migrated out of Africa. They headed in diverse directions at various paces and times. Differences in skin color evolved in relation to latitude over great lengths of time due to the need for both protection from UV light and absorption of vitamin D to ward off diverse illnesses. Such superficial variations in human appearance tell us very little about the human condition, other than where their ancestors lived. DNA testing of ancient human gnomes demonstrated that Europeans were dark skinned until about 3000 years ago.
Franz Boas may have been the earliest anthropologist to dismiss race as a meaningful concept. He concluded in his 1909 study of immigrant groups, that race is a social construct, not a biological fact. British-American anthropologist, Ashley Montague in his influential 1942 book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, argued that “ethnic group” far better described differing cultural variations among human groups than the arbitrary construct, race. We can review the long history of debunking the myths of racism, from the earliest reports of the role of racism in history. But that would take up a huge amount of space.
The sadly amusing part, in relation to the racism of contemporary white nationalists is that until quite late in human history, all Europeans were rather dark skinned. After all, Europe was mostly uninhabited until nearly the time of the Roman Empires.
Separation or Solidarity
Even the earliest anthropologists and social scientists such as Fiske, Drummond, and Kropotkin “agreed that solidarity is a basic fact of evolution, but believed further that solidarity is a thoroughly natural phenomenon, a logical outgrowth of natural evolution itself.” (Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860-1915. 1945, p.84). Nevertheless, the role of Social Darwinism as an intellectual excuse for American racism and imperialism, the early effects of which Hofstadter outlined, continues its impact to the present days.
The brilliant Journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ and her colleagues created the monumental retelling of the American story, in the award winning The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021), which reframes American history, putting the facts of slavery and its legacy at the center of a new national narrative, to replace the persistent white-nationalist imaginaries of the American national self-identification. Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize winning, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) illuminates how the hidden processes of caste and its rigid hierarchy of ranking individuals and groups in America continues to shape people’s lives and even the nation’s fate, and not in a good way. Yet, the dominant white-nationalist images of separation and dehumanization grow stronger, expressed more openly in the dominant political narrative, the purveyors of which also control the major communication media.
Other recent and contemporary researchers have confirmed the essential roles of cooperation and compassion in the effectiveness of human groups and societies throughout history. Yet, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of the essential role of cooperation and inclusion in social life, the forces of separation, fear, and hatred continue spreading their propaganda to enhance their autocratic attempts to achieve an authoritarian regime to rule over divided populations. Riane Eisler offers an antidote in the caring economy, in her book, The Real Wealth of Nations (2007), which proposes a culture of partnering to replace the current culture of domination.
Never mind that fascist regimes never ended well in history, and that today their ascendance will only worsen the exploding multi-crises of climate, ecology, and societal as well as economic destabilization. If we allow these trends continue, we will have little hope for the rise of a realistic complex set of actions capable of addressing the gravest predicaments humanity has ever faced.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 