|
Anonymous (Investigator 111, 2006 November)
BRIEF HISTORY OF RACISM Classified with orang-utangs, hunted as vermin and kidnapped for slavery. Was such treatment of Black Africans right? The book The Race War says, "At the start of the slave trading era in the early days of the sixteenth century, Africa was on the whole culturally no more backward – or advanced – than Europe…" (Segal 1967) Despite approximate cultural equality, many Europeans regarded Negroes as semi human. This was a by-product of the slave trade since it gave European slave traders a rationale to blunt their conscience. The orthodox,
biblical,
European view in
the 16th century was that all people worldwide had a common
origin: God created
man, a
single pair, at a finite
time in the not-very-distant past. Scientific versions of this belief
in
a single creation came to be known as 'monogenesis'. (Baxter
& Sansom
1972, p. 135)
However, many European intellectuals adopted "polygenesis" – the idea that God created several inferior races prior to Adam and Eve and Africans descended from one such inferior race. One popular book on this theme was Prae Adamitae (1655) by Isaac La-Peyrere. Polygenesis
was
attractive
to 18th-century
philosophers seeking to give a systematic explanation of the world: Both Voltaire
and
Rousseau suggested that
Negroes were naturally inferior to Europeans in their mental ability.
David
Hume argued that, "There never was a civilized nation of any other
complexion
than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or
speculation.
No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences… Such a
uniform
and constant difference could not have happened, in so many countries
and
ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these
breeds
of men." (Baxter & Sansom, pp 135-136)
A popular book that gave polygenesis an apparent scientific basis was History of Jamaica (1774) by Edward Long. Long called Africans "brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, treacherous, bloody, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious people" with "a covering of wool, like a bestial fleece, instead of hair" and inferior in "faculties of mind". He claimed that Europeans and Negroes belonged to different species. Some writers
classed
Negroes with orang-utangs
and chimps: As early as
1713
naturalists began looking
for a 'missing link' between men and apes and speculated on the
possibility
that Hottentots and orang-outangs might be side by side in the 'scale
of
life,' separated only by the fact that orang-outangs could not speak.
(Baxter
& Sansom, p. 136)
Referring to the Bushmen of South West Africa, The Weekend Australian Magazine said: In Cape
Province, until
the 1870s the British
hunting fraternity found them more exotic quarry than fox. A Bushman
died
in the Primate section of London Zoo at the turn of this century and
the
last permit to shoot Bushmen as vermin was issued in British
Bechuanaland
(Botswana) as recently as 1953. (Dec. 19-20, 1987, p. 4)
Racial prejudice against Black Africans continues widely today. For example, The White Man’s Bible of the "Church of the Creator" (founded in 1973) claims: "We of the Church Of The Creator believe he [the black African] does not deserve the "human" classification…" (p. 167) And, more
generally,
racial prejudice against
dark-skinned people still occurs worldwide. For example: NOUMEA:–Three
New
Caledonians have been
charged with inciting murder and racial hatred after allegedly
producing
a musical tape urging European-born settlers in the French Pacific
territory
to "exterminate" the indigenous Melanesian Kanaks. (The Advertiser,
September
7, 1988, p. 7)
The Bible mentions the African nations of Egypt, Ethiopia and Libya and includes them with humans, not with beasts. The Old Testament mentions Ethiopians some twenty times. Moses married one. (Numbers 12:1) Another rescued the prophet Jeremiah and also put his "trust in God". (Jeremiah 38:7-13; 39:15-18) Skin color was so irrelevant the Bible mentions it but twice. Jeremiah 13:23 asks, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin?" And the girl in The Song of Solomon calls herself "dark" or "black". (1:5) In the New Testament Jesus commanded his followers to make "disciples of all nations", and Acts Chapter 8 records how the first Ethiopian was converted. (Acts 8) The Bible
further declares
that all people
have a common ancestor, the "mother of all". (Genesis 3:20) Acts 17:26
says: And he [God]
made from
one, every nation
of men to live on all the face of the earth…
If true, it follows that all humans are in basic ways the same. Racism and the sort of nationalism that assumes an innate national superiority would be based on false assumptions. Scientific proof of humanity's common origin came with DNA analysis in the 20th century. Negroes and Europeans are of one and the same human race. The genetic variation within any supposed race is greater than the variation between supposed races. In other words the supposed "races" are just that – "supposed". Bamshed &
Olson (2003)
expressed it: The outward
signs on
which most definitions
of race are based – such as skin color and hair texture – are dictated
by a
handful of genes. But the other genes of two people of the same "race"
can be very different. Conversely, two people of different "races" can
share more genetic similarity than two individuals of the same race.
Slave traders and scientists who lumped beasts and Negroes in one category were mistaken. The race myth is an example of people rejecting the Bible and being proved wrong. This has happened in many other areas of study from "A" for astronomy to "Z" for zoology. From such accumulating evidence we can rationally infer that, "Every word of God proves true." (Proverbs 30:5) In 1990 the Parliament of South Africa repealed the Groups Areas and Land Acts (laws that prescribed where various "races" may live and work) and the Population Registration Act which classified South Africans according to race. The Bible,
however,
opposed such distinctions
1,900 years earlier: Here, there
cannot be
Greek and Jew, circumcised
and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is
all, and in all. (Colossians 3:11)
REFERENCES Bamshed, M. J. and Olson, S. E. Does Race Exist, Scientific American, December 2003, pp 50-57. Baxter, P & Sansom, B (editors) 1972 Race, Penguin. Segal, R 1967 The Race War, Penguin, p. 46. |