This is part four of the serious “Clarity in Our Use of the Term Racism.” The enslaving of people of color, the invasion and occupation of their lands, the use of weapons technology in the slaughtering, and in some cases exterminating of populations, and related acts by Europeans serve to feed their belief in their superiority as “whites.” In addition, these successes convinced them that they had the blessing and support of an all powerful divinity. Eventually, those European or Caucasian governmental, economic, and other institutions came to be dominated more by the secular than the religious. Alleged scientists and alleged intellectuals were entering the picture to validate “white superiority” as a truth and to convince the world that it was in everyone’s best interest to be under the leadership and domination of the “superior” European mind.
Now valid contributions to civilization takes us to the 1884 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica for some stark examples of European pseudoscience concerning the Negro. The following are exempted from these: “The Negro occupies, at the same time, the lowest position in the evolutionary scale. He has exceedingly thick cranium, enabling the Negro to butt with the head and resist blows which would inevitably break an ordinary European skull.” We can’t leave the “famous American thinker” Thomas Jefferson, out of the history of European theories and hypotheses about African people. Charles W. Ephraim’s The Pathology of Eurocentrism brings us this from the writings of Jefferson: “That the Blacks, whether originally a distinct place or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” It was with this notion of European superiority and its companion notion of African inferiority that representatives from more than a dozen nations of Europe met in Berlin Conference in 1884, and subsequently in Brussels, to divide Africa among themselves. Acting with utmost arrogance, they invented countries, made up names for countries, established boundaries between them, and set in motion the process by which to impose these “new realities” upon Africa’s people.
By the time of the Berlin and Brussels conferences, European nations running of an official slave system had pretty much ended, and their pretentious missions of bringing salvation and civilization to the so called infidel and savage peoples of Africa in the lands of the western hemisphere had come to take a back seat to the desires for greater and greater power and more and more wealth. A maturing capitalism was causing European heads of government, wealthy businessmen, financiers, etc, to see nations and their populations in terms of their value, or potential value, as consumer markets and/or sources of cheap labor, more so than mere loathsome enemies to be conquered. To put this another way, Europe, including United States, and other countries outside of Europe that were being ruled by Europeans, were saying to the rest of the world, “It’s not personal, it’s just business”.
But while this more pragmatic, expedient approach to gaining and maintaining domination in the world was replacing the more obviously gratuitous and barbaric violence, to some degree, the old ways were not abandoned. Europeans, military, and police forces in Africa and the Americas did not discontinue their use of violence; rather, the orders by which mass killings, assassinations, and other acts of violence were committed tended to be motivated by cold-blooded power and business considerations, more so than in hot, bloody cultural or religious zeal or hatred. Something else changed in some ways and remained the same in others, and that is what Europeans had established in the 1500s, maybe somewhat earlier, and had been steadily refining since then; namely European supremacist ideology and practice. To put it another way, white nationalism. This ideology holds that there are separate and distinct races of humans; that of these races, the Caucasian, or white European, is superior to the others; that the so called white race has a deity given right and destiny to rule the so called lower non white races; and that members of the white race have a right and obligation to establish and maintain systems and institutions by which Europeans may hold power over people of color and control and profit from their natural resources.
The “white only” and “colored only” signs are no longer in the United States. Africans in the country can sit in the front of the bus. We can no longer be legally prevented from voting because of the color of our skin. In South Africa, legal apartheid no longer exists. Our sisters and brothers there don’t have to carry passes to move from place to place, as they once did. In the many places in the world where Europeans or Caucasians exercise authority over African and/or other people of color, Europeans from this ideology, typically, is no longer overtly manifested in law, but continues to exist in practice. Likewise, while it is not considered socially, and in some cases legally accepted in the United States, for Europeans to be calling us ni$$as, overtly discriminating against us because of our skin color and so forth, Europeans [unclear] ideology remains deeply embedded in the psyches of Europeans.
It’s been put there and cultivated by the teachings, propaganda, indoctrination, the practices of U.S. institutions such as schools, churches, entertainment, news, media, etc. What so many of us fail to understand, to recognize, is that a person does not have to be, consciously, a European supremacist in order to be just that. He or she doesn’t have to dislike or hate us to be just that. We might ask ourselves if we really believe it had to be the case that Darren Wilson, consciously, wanted to kill African men in order for him to see an unarmed Michael Brown as a dangerous threat, a beast. This is his thought, like other Europeans have around 500 years worth of accumulated myths and images of European superiority and African inferiority in his head when he confronted Brown, and subsequently took his life. That was part four of the series “Clarity in Our Use of the Term Racism”, which appears in the Omaha Star newspaper. My name is Mondo. Full Name Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen We Langa.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
