On Racism and Bigotry

On Racism and Bigotry 

Arjun Janah: I am a person whose skin happens to be brown and who also grew up in a country [India] that was very different from this country [the U.S.A.]--but was just as troubled and divided, for at least several thousand years, as this country has been for several hundred. However, despite the gross inequities, injustices and violence of the past and the present, and despite the existence of the debased mass cultures that are as typical of civilization as are its achievements and refinements, it was also a place where the many subcultures were still as interwoven and the humans still as essentially alike at core as they are here.

Liberals/progressives and others believe that racism, bigotry and many other things they view as evils are the results of cultural conditioning. To a great degree, they are right. But these would not arise and continue if they also did not find some innate bases within us, on which they could root themselves and grow. So, like everything else in humans and other social animals, they are, I believe, the results of both biology and culture. Children may be born innocent, but they contain within them the instinctive natures that express themselves in many ways as they grow. Cultures can encourage some tendencies and discourage others, but the tendencies themselves exist within us.

If so, they must exist for reasons having to do with survival--as all innate things do, forged as they were in the fires of our past eons on this planet. So we have a propensity for violence as well as instincts that guard against that; we have capacities for callousness and empathy, for cruelty and compassion, for exclusion and inclusion, for selfishness and altruism, etc.

Clearly, the persistence of these instincts must mean that they were needed for survival. But they exist within us in a balance that varies between individuals and between cultures. Also, certain instincts prevail over others, depending on the context and the "other" in the interaction. So we, along with Timur the Lame, Winston Churchill and Shaka Zulu, might behave in one way with regard to a family member, close human or animal friend, or a fellow member of our "tribal" elite--and quite differently with others.

All of this might seem abstruse and irrelevant in the current circumstances in this country and in many other places.

So Matt is of course right. It is a matter of necessity--of collective survival--that, in a multi-ethnic country, we unite to resist attempts at creating or deepening ethnic divides and at scapegoating ethnic groups for our real or imagined woes. This was so in the subcontinent, where we paid a very heavy price for not being able to do this in the 1940's, and are still paying that price. But the background to this, however cynically exploited by the British Empire, goes back many thousands of years, to at least the violent advent of the racist Aryas--along with the Muslim conquests and the excesses of monotheist zealotry that occurred much later.

And this horror has manifested itself in every continent, in almost every country, throughout history, including of course in this country, from its inception in twin genocides. This terror had stalked Europe, from which we draw our main strengths as well as frailties, for many violent centuries. Most of Europe's major nation states were born out of prolonged and violent ethnic cleansing--initially primarily on sectarian, religious grounds.

In Western Europe, Protestants and Catholics were set against each other. The hundred years' war has had its violent repercussions into our lifetimes, as we witnessed in Ireland. Although the drivers of most such conflicts are almost invariably economic and exploitative in nature, ethnic divisions, however superficial, are what most humans easily latch on to, rarely bothering to see beyond these.

So what occurred in Europe in the 1930's and 1940's had its precedents. Jews, specifically, were targeted, not only in pogroms, but through the organized and violent "ethnic cleansing" of entire regions.

Notable among these was the displacement, mostly into the mainly Muslim countries of North Africa and West Asia, of the Sephardim. This occurred around the time of Columbus, following the expulsion of the Moors from Andalusia. The Catholic Church played a prominent role in this and other persecutions.

The echoes of this and other great displacements and massacres will continue to reverberate for us and for those who follow us.

Yet even the descendants of those most adversely affected by such things are often unaware of the tragedies. The dead cannot speak. The memories and even the cultures of their surviving descendants are erased. We are taught the histories written by those who prevailed.

We need to be cognizant that the greatest such massacre, bi-continental in scope, occurred right where we live, and not in the distant past--and was repeated in Australia.

The colonial atrocities in Africa, such as that carried out by Emperor Leopold of Belgium in the Congo, exceeded, in sheer numbers, what occurred to Jews and others under the Nazis and what befell the Armenians and others during and after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire--horrific as these two genocidal massacres were.

But it would be totally wrongheaded to think that Europeans are to blame for all the misery and death that humans have wrought upon one another. The fairly recent dominance of Europe gave it an outsize role in this. Our awareness of its history make some of us cognizant of the attendant horrors.

But human nature, with its angelic and demonic sides, has been basically the same over time and across the races, cultures, kingdoms and empires. The history of almost every "nation" on Earth is steeped in blood and suffering, inflicted and borne in varying degrees. Empires have advanced in violence and have also retreated or collapsed in violence.

What is more, such things have never stopped. One has only to look at the subcontinent in the 1940's, Indonesia in the 1960's, Rwanda subsequently, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and what is brewing and occurring in the subcontinent and in Myanmar even now--just to cite a few examples of ethnic violence on grand scales.

As for other acts of massive violence, carried out by state military forces raining fire on humans from land, sea and air, with millions perishing and many more wishing that they too had died--can we even begin to list such actions, even if we start from after the end of the second world war? We in this country had a good time watching M.A.S.H., on TV in the 1970's, with most of us oblivious to its setting and the horrific events that had occurred there, only two decades in the past.

Yet humans have still gone about their business, and genes and memes have flowed across the boundaries that were drawn, blurred and redrawn.

This was so in the subcontinent, despite all the strictures of caste and divisions of religion, and so also it has been here, in South Africa and elsewhere where attempts were made, as in ancient India, to separate people by ethnicity and to establish ethnic hierarchies. Humans like to have sex, they fall in love, and they learn from each other.

But one must recognize that there are things that drive these divisions, and that there are real grievances and insecurities to which demagogues and bigots may appeal--along with imagined ones.
 
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2017 August 14th, Mon.
Brooklyn, New York