The ‘Roots’ of Racism by Malachi Doyle

 ‘Race theory’ was a collection of writings, cartoons and forms of entertainment which gained popularity with the Political Right in Europe in the late 1700s and 1800s, which built its pseudo-science, adaptating amongst others, Charles Darwin’s theory of Human Evolution (1858). It painted a view of Humanity as divided up into more and less ‘advanced’ ‘races’, which was and is often used since to justify a particular group of people’s belief in ‘racial superiority’ and ‘racial inferiority’. Such a view still persists amongst certain Far Right Political Organisations today. Without such a view 6,000,000 Jews would not have been exterminated by Hitler’s Nazi Party during the Second World War (1939-1945).

‘Race theory’ was used to Justify the Atlantic Slave Trade (1500s – 1900s) in which European Countries and Companies stole people from Africa at gunpoint to work as unpaid and severely tortured labourers and domestic workers in the Americas and other parts of the world. Race Theory served to justify such inhumane and brutal exploitation of millions by suggesting that somehow non-European people were less intelligent and did not understand or feel pain and humiliation.

In Australia, such a ‘theory’ created a view of Indigenous Peoples in a similar ‘inferior’ light and was used to justify the systematic dispossession and delegitimization of Indigenous people’s laws, customs and ownership of the land in the British Government’s definition of First Contact Australia in 1788 as ‘Terra Nullius” (Latin: “the land of no one”).

‘Race Theory’ finally achieved its admission into the Canon of European literature with the Publishing of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899) where racist pseudo-science was received as High Literature by English Departments throughout the British colonies. It is still taught today in some schools in Victoria. In the novel, the protagonist-narrator Charles Marlow talks of his first meetings with Africans (Congolese) in the late 1800s as if these people were ‘incomprehensible’ and capable of not much more than ‘animal noises’. He wrote as if in the late 1800s it was the first time in History that a European had made contact with a sub-Saharan African. This despite the fact that Europe had received Ambassadors from sub-Saharan Africa from more than 500 years earlier, or the fact that Major Ancient Greek Philosophers such as Aristotle (no less) had cited references to Ghanaian scholars, and that Pythagoras is believed to have studied for more than 20 years in Africa, well before the time of Christ.

Conrad’s fanciful story is the kind of nonsense that normally circulated in populist tabloid newspapers of the day. The terrible fact for non-European and ‘Black’ people in general was and is that Conrad despite his disingenuousness was a master of literary style, which meant that his Ahistorical and completely implausible story became taken seriously by ‘serious readers of literature’ all over the globe.

Conrad was not the first nor the last person to hold baseless views of ‘racial superiority/inferiority’. Writers in the service of the Slave Trade wrote hundreds of essays trumpeting unScientific and unsubstantiated ‘drivel’ for centuries, holding back progress for ‘People of Colour’ and Indigenous Peoples through the world. The human cost was extreme and continues today wherever minorities are disadvantaged socially, politically, financially, legally and in acts of submission and violence committed against their bodies and characters. Even after Two World Wars in which up to 65,000,000 people were killed and the resultant signing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which all UN member countries signed, including Australia, European Nations and the USA – countries which had been made rich by racist policies.

‘Race Theory’ is nothing more than irrational hatred of someone who looks different from oneself. It has caused countless Genocides throughout the globe, and no continent has been spared. It’s hatred of what it deems to be ‘Other’ knows no bounds. The 2019 Christchurch Mosque Massacre of Moslem Worshippers in New Zealand, was carried out by a deranged Sociopath who believed in ‘Race Theory’. The man was Australian born. Surely, now is the time to put an end to this madness and bury ‘Race Theory’ once and for all. That we might all live as one, in Respect, Unity and Universal Humanity.

 

Bibliography:

‘Africa’s Tarnished Name’ – by Chinua Achebe (this edition 2018, Penguin, UK).

‘Heart of Darkness’ – Joseph Conrad (1899, this edition 2008, Penguin, UK).

‘On the Origin of the Species’ – by Charles Darwin (1859, John Murray, UK).

‘Transatlantic slave trade’ (updated 2020) by Thomas Lewis in Encyclopedia Britannica retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade

‘Race’ by Audrey Smedley in Encyclopedia Britannica (2020) retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human

‘An African Origin of Philosophy: Myth or Reality?’ by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante (2004, City Press).

‘Holocaust - European history’ by Michael Berenbaum in Encyclopedia Britannica (updated 2020) retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/event/Holocaust

‘United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)’ retrieved from https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

‘World War I Vs World War II’ retrieved from www.diffen.com