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We weren’t always racist so when did we come up with it and how did it begin?

Saturday 27 June 2020

The Independent

 

The Magazine /
The Big Read

We weren’t always racist so when did we come up with it and how did it begin?

Racism is not written in stone, it’s not inevitable, it’s not an instinct, etched in our genes. It’s something we created and something that can be ended, writes Andy Martin

Othello welcomes Desdemona to Cyprus. The play is one of the earliest works of western literature to exploit racism
(Getty)

We weren’t always racists. We were always mean, murderous bastards, of course. Rape, slaughter, and slavery were once fairly normal and frequent. The plot of Taken has been rehearsed over and over again throughout history. Rousseau’s “noble savage” was a loner, self-sufficient, a hunter roaming about the woods having little contact with anyone else. But the point about the noble savage is that she did not exist. It’s a recent invention, a retrospective myth. The truly solo human just doesn’t survive for very long. We’ve always been tribal. We had to be if we wanted to stay alive. And the main problem for tribes was other tribes. Hell is other peoples, plural.

The Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic, tells of a beautiful young woman being abducted. The hero of the story, Rama, has to go kill a lot of bad guys to get her back again. Homer’s Iliad, composed around the same era, tells of Helen being taken by Paris to Troy and the Greeks launching a war against the Trojans to get her back again. The greatest fighter according to Homer is Achilles (played by Brad Pitt in the movie).

But it should be noted that Achilles refuses to fight for most of the epic poem on account of Agamemnon (who is on his side) taking possession of his woman Briseis, whom Achilles has already acquired elsewhere in a previous successful raid. For some odd reason, the phrase “rape and pillage” has come to be associated with Vikings. But they were only drawing on a tried-and-trusted tradition. The expectation was, in the event of defeat, that if you weren’t killed you were likely to be enslaved. As Fernand Braudel wrote in Civilization and Capitalis: “Slavery came in different guises in different societies.”

Neanderthal blood or DNA lives on in us (Shutterstock/Chettaprin P)

The thing about tribes, and the era that came to be known, rather absurdly, as “heroic”, was that tribes feared all other tribes. The flat-earth mentality saw the world in broadly horizontal terms. What we can do to others can be done to us. The important thing was to do it unto others first. It was, as in the Greek concept of games (chariot racing, wrestling, boxing) which arose at the same time, all about winners and losers. Surviving or not. The question of colour was fluid, not fixed. Homer could speak of the “wine-dark sea” (or “wine-faced”, literally) and expect to be understood. What colour your skin was barely registered on the radar. Martin Bernal, in Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, argued plausibly for a strong connection between Egypt, the Levant, and Greece. Linguistic evidence shows that there was trading and traffic and intercourse of all kinds between continents.

Not only were we not racists, we were not even specieist. Or not wholly. Prince Rama teams up with apes and bears. Did homo sapiens wipe out the Neanderthals? It’s easy to think so on the basis of our capacity for violence. But the evidence is that there were successful sexual liaisons too so that Neanderthal blood (or at least DNA) lives on in us. We probably didn’t go out of our way to extinguish Neanderthals any more than we were trying to extinguish anyone else who happened to get in our way.

Whiteness is a recent invention. It was only, post-Renaissance, as Europe expanded west into the new world and south into Africa that it even began to think of itself as white

So what is the origin of racism? There is a case for saying that racism begins with the Bible and other comparable sacred texts. The very concept of a “chosen people” (notably in the Book of Deuteronomy) implies that Egyptians, Philistines, Midianites and all those other infidels who have not been chosen are unworthy and deserving of plagues and other acts of God or man. But this still reflects (in the Pentateuch or what has become known as “the Old Testament”) an essentially tribal outlook, in which there are other gods and other rival societies grappling for power, striving to be winners and avoid the fate of the losers, as per Homer. There is still a rough sense of equivalence between tribes. Paradoxically, it is only the advent of Christianity, which is anti-tribal (since the kingdom of God is everywhere and nowhere), and systematically virtuous, that allows for organised morally-imbued violence on a mass scale. The Messiah may well save your soul, but the fate of your body is another matter.

The Crusades and the wars of religion and the rise of the Inquisition are all reflective of an increasingly vertical sense of history, on the axis of the Great Chain of Being, with higher and lower orders. The flat-earth, horizontal era was over. It had become necessary to be morally superior. Just as God stood in judgment of humankind, so, symmetrically, we had to stand in judgement of others who failed to live up to our standards. We had adopted a fully binary perspective on humanity: you were either in or you were out. Most people were out. A black-and-white approach to moral evaluation had been established in advance of any colour-scheme classification of humanity. The possibility of mass moral supremacy had already taken root. Henceforth massacres and mass rape and enslavement (as before) had acquired a moral justification. The heroic era had given way to the ethical, which sadly was less ethical than ever.

The Crusades reflect a vertical sense of history, when it had become necessary to be morally superior (Getty)

Whiteness is a recent invention. It was only, post-Renaissance, as Europe expanded west into the new world and south into Africa that it even began to think of itself as white, in contrast to darker pigmentations, and confused or infused lightness of skin tone with metaphysical concepts of purity. The Aryan myth is born not in Europe but in the Caribbean and in West Africa. Columbus and even more so the 16th-century Conquistadors that followed, supported by Catholic priests and accompanied by slaves, were probably the first armed racists. Henceforth, and especially in the 19th century, Christ and the Greeks and Romans were to be depicted as white guys. Henry Louis Gates recalls that an American congressman, John C Calhoun, once maintained that “the person of African descent would never be a full member of the human community, fit to be anything more than a slave, until one individual black person – just one – demonstrated mastery of the subtleties of Greek syntax… the very foundation of the complex fiction upon which white western culture had been founded.”

In a sense, racism was begotten of historical contingencies, born of navigational prowess. In our first tentative attempts at globalisation, we discovered and reported back about these other continents at the same time. They could all be generalised as “black”, the antithesis of the northerners who were colonising their lands. A historical coincidence allied to a deeply metaphorical disposition. It is not enough for us to perceive sense data, we have to send back bulletins and reports about our perceptions. Those statements shape our thinking. And our reportage is never purely objective, it is inevitably saturated with meaning (often self-interested). Contrary to the commonplace, “it is what it is”, it never just is: linguistically speaking, there is “denotation” (x exists) and there is “connotation” (x is not just x but also inherently evil or lazy or subhuman or “barbaric”).

Columbus was probably one of the first armed racists (Getty)

As EO Wilson points out in The Origins of Creativity, “we sense fewer than one thousandth of one per cent of the diversity of molecules and energy waves that constantly sweep around and through us… our photoreceptors detect no more than razor-thin slices of the electromagnetic spectrum.” But narrow or not, we seem to be determined to narrow it down still further. It is sometime in the course of these expeditions and discoveries and reportage that a series of perceptions about people became overlaid with the pre-existing network of moral theories. It was no longer about winners and losers. It was about one collection of people being morally superior, more godlike, than another. The concept of “race” (a 16th-century import from the Italian, razza) started to hinge on a question of colour and other physiological markers.

The works of Shakespeare are poised on the cusp of this transition. Romeo and Juliet, and possibly Anthony and Cleopatra, register tribalism (Capulets and Montagues, Romans and Egyptians) but work towards transcending it. On the other hand, Othello is one of the earliest works of western literature to exploit racism. Shakespeare has it both ways, reviling the madly racist Iago, and yet having the Moor succumbing to a stereotype and murdering his own wife “fall’n in the practise of a damned slave”, “as ignorant as dirt”). But the key thing is that he is easily manipulated, having lost the power of thinking for himself (“O fool! Fool! Fool!”). Perhaps Harold Bloom’s notion that Shakespeare can be credited with “the invention of the human”, owes something to this dramatisation of racism.

The development of the legal system, the rise of Puritanism, the scientific revolution and evolution of philosophy all conspired to buttress slavery

The Atlantic slave trade, which shipped millions of Africans to the Americas and simply killed millions more on the way, depended on a colour-coded taxonomy of humankind. It followed on from and was justified by the way in which Europe triangulated itself between America and Africa (the “three-cornered traffic” in Braudel’s phrase). Our map of the world was never just a map: it was a highly moralised diagram with white people standing over other occupants of the planet like a superego or (what they became) slave owners with rights of life and death over the other. In the dualistic spirit of Cartesianism, the world divided up into those endowed with higher consciousness and free-will and those who were nothing but matter. So we could pass laws in the US codifying the ownership of other people. It was mind over matter.

The development of the legal system, the rise of Puritanism, the scientific revolution, and the evolution of philosophy all conspired to buttress slavery. Wole Soyinka, the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature (in 1986), cites Hegel, Hume, Locke, Voltaire and Kant among “unabashed theorists of racial superiority and denigrators of African history and being.” If these others were devoid of souls and minds, had no more freedom of will than a hammer or a saucepan, then they were not even being enslaved. As Boris Johnson would go on to say, “Are we guilty of slavery? Pshaw.” These people must have effectively enslaved themselves. It was a classic Catch-22: if they were slaves it was because they deserved to be and ought to be; but, by the same token, no one was guilty of enslaving them in the first place.

A scene from ‘The Birth of a Nation’, a silent movie made in 1915, that sees America defined by the Ku Klux Klan (Youtube)

The fact of having more advanced technology was easily converted into some kind of racial destiny. This binary notion of the North riding on the back of the South became highly contagious. Like a moral and intellectual pandemic it spread and seeped into the cells of other conflicts, infiltrating our notion of East and West – reinforcing the delusions of Orientalism (brilliantly deconstructed by Edward Said) – morphing into apartheid in South Africa, and inspiring all the demented flights of Nazism. And no doubt facilitating the genocide of American Indians.

Under the terms of the British Navigation Acts of the 17th century, Africans were “goods” on a par with tobacco and sugar and cod. But the laws passed in Virginia and Massachussets also warn of the horrors of miscegenation and “association” and state that there is no crime if a slave should die in the course of “correction”. No one was guilty of murdering anyone any more than they were guilty of enslaving either. The same spirit permeates The Birth of A Nation, the 1915 silent movie by D W Griffiths that sees America as defined by the Ku Klux Klan (it was originally called The Clansman). This film is a thousand times more incendiary than the derisory depiction of maids in Gone with the Wind. The so-called Jim Crow laws in the United States weren’t just a prolongation of slavery by another name, they were the extrapolation of centuries-old ways of thinking.

Those brilliant Black Power-associated works of the sixties, like the essays of James Baldwin (who went into exile in Paris), Soledad Brother (George Jackson, shot trying to escape), and Soul on Ice (Eldridge Cleaver), presented a rousing but pessimistic take on racism in America. So too Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me, which sees no end in sight. “Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape,” he writes to his son. “Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that.” There is no I-have-a-dream rhetoric. The bleakness could hardly be more justified. As in Baldwin’s 1965 story, “Going to Meet the Man”, there are still sheriffs casually lynching (and stoning and castrating and immolating) people of colour as if they were at a picnic, or the contemporary equivalent, right in front of our eyes.

I am not going to naively suggest that there is a way out of the deep hole we have dug ourselves into. But in revisiting our own tangled history at least we can see that racism is something we came up with. It’s not written in stone, it’s not inevitable, it’s not an instinct, deeply etched in our genes. It’s something more like an intellectual virus. All it needs is a vaccine.

Andy Martin teaches at the University of Cambridge and is the author of ‘Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me’