It’s often said that America’s original sin was the resort to slavery beginning 400 years ago in Virginia, but let’s face it — man’s original sin is racism or any other ideology that demonizes and devalues “the other.”
I recall a study that circulated at the time of the Polish joke. It discovered that there was nothing Polish about the jokes themselves. The same jokes about the inferiority of some “out” group circulated around the world. The Poles told them about the Russians, the French about the Germans, the Brazilians about the Argentinians.
The blatant embrace of racial animus by the incumbent president and its popularity with a broad segment of the population has revealed that the pleasant fiction of an ever less bigoted America was false. Beginning with the Civil Rights era, it became impolite to be as overtly racist as in the past. The N-word was out, but colorblindness was not in.
Yes, reforms gave minorities greater access to various opportunies, including in education, housing, and previously closed professions. Little by little black actors, authors, professors, executives, politicians entered the mainstream culminating in the election of 2008, but the illusion that systemic discrimination was vanishing was soon shattered.
The election of yet another Southern Strategy president who relied on bigotry to win, along with the many bloody injustices that spawned he Black Lives Matter movement, proved the poison of the original sin was still coursing through the American bloodstream.
The rise of Trump has not just revealed the persistence of the sin but has brought attention to its deep roots. The Catholic fathers of Georgetown have been forced to acknowledge the school was built on the backs of slaves, as were the University of Virginia, UNC-Chapel Hill and many other proud institutions.
There has been renewed attention to the pseudo-science of white racial superiority (and the imagined threats to it) contained in bestsellers like Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race” from 1916 and “The Rising Tide of Color” from 1920 by his acolyte Lothrop Stoddard. The latter was praised by another of America’s worst presidents, Warren G. Harding, for alerting the country to the fact that America’s “race problem” was only a part of a far larger problem, “the race issue that the whole world confronts.”
The “problem” was too many non-white people, and it was only a short step from that kind of thinking to the ovens of Auschwitz. Yet, one hundred years after Stoddard, we have another president promoting the same notion that people of color are inferior and should be kept out of America and go back where they came from. The fallacy of “white superiority” dies hard.
Of course, throughout history each tribe has tended to scorn the tribe next door as inferior. But the white supremacist notion has been particularly pernicious because of the accident of market capitalism, the industrial revolution and the advanced weapons they produced appearing where and when they did.
These developments empowered a colonial era in which pale Europeans believed they were superior to all the other people of the earth and set out to enslave or subjugate them, even finding justification in scripture. Didn’t God say he’d made man “according to Our likeness” and gave him “dominion over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth?” Obviously that meant that white men were the one’s made to rule and the others made to be ruled.
This worked for a good long time, complete with a slave trade and conquered peoples and exploited colonies, but for the last hundred years it’s been getting harder to cling to the delusion, especially since the arrival of genetic science that has discredited the racial fallacy, not to mention the rise of Asian societies who are beating us at our own capitalist, industrial, and even intellectual game winning gobs of Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and at the patent office.
The time is long overdue to face the reality of humanity. The portion of the human race that migrated out of Africa, turned left, and became palely pigmented is not superior genetically and has always been a minority.
Even in America, we only became a majority when the 50 million or so natives of Asiatic origin were reduced by 80% after Columbus arrived bringing disease, conquest and enslavement. Importing millions of slaves from Africa also diluted the pale majority, not to a mention any claims to moral superiority. After emancipation, more dilution was accepted due to the demand for cheap labor imported from Asia and similar unWASP environs.
By 2017, the United States was what the census unscientifically categorizes as just 61% “white,” 18% “hispanic,” 12% “black,” 7% Asian and Indian and 3% two or more of the above. Since the “non-white” numbers are growing faster than the “white,” as much by birthrate as by immigration, the days of a white minority America is not far off, no matter how many walls are erected. Luckily, America will remain 100% populated by homo sapiens.
Lest we despair, it is worth remembered that it already is and has always been a minority-white world. In 2010, Asians made up 55% of the world’s population, blacks 15%, Middle Easterners and non-white South and Central Americans 8% each and “white” just 16%.
The fraction of the human population once regarded as “The Great Race” by Madison Grant, his Nazi followers and other selective breeding fanatics and eugenicists might as well accept that it is just a product of evolution in one corner of the globe, and under the skin just like all the otherly pigmented people in Arica, Asia, Australian, the Arctic and the Pacific that share the earth with us. Get over it.
A few recent readings that bear on this subject are worth a look. “Old Hatreds” in the August 26 “The New Yorker,” the recent book on the cultural anthropologists who put the lie to racial supremacy orthodoxy, “Gods of the Upper Air” by Charles King, and “Carry Me Back” by Drew Gilpin Faust in the August “The Atlantic.”