osewalrus

Spun this off from a debate in a subthread of one of my FB posts. It's long enough that it is worth posting here, but too controversial to give broad exposure on FB.

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Well, this subthread is interesting, so I'll allow for the time being.

To interject a bit. I would say that it is true on the one hand that many peoples and nations had an "us/them" distinction that often translated into regarding the other as barbarians or subhuman. Earl Hartman Rightly points out the genocide by the modern Japanese of the Ainu over several centuries after the formation of the first Japanese rice kingdoms until the Shogunate. But what distinguished this to some degree from what I believe Daniel B. Holzman-Tweed is describing as uniquely European racism is that most historical systems prior to the European system contained relatively few (if any) gradations between "us" and "them," or much theory of evolution that distinguished based on race. (there is a strong argument for the Japanese being something of an exception here.)

Yes, the Romans basically stomped on anything "not Roman" and regarded the barbarian tribes as brutes for subjugation, whereas the more "civilized" Greeks or Middle Eastern or Asian cultures were treated somewhat differently. But the marker wasn't skin color. Roman-ness was something one could acquire. A African who served in the Legion under Cesare or Titus was just another legionnaire. Similarly, while the Talmud and Midrash go on at considerable length about the various qualities of the nations of the world based on their descent from Noah's children or Abraham's children or relatives, this is not about skin color (the efforts of 18th Century and 19th Century Christians (and some Jews) to justify African slavery as the "curse of Ham" ignores just about every relevant piece of the text or tradition. The point of that story is that Ham's sone Canaan, from whom the Canaanites are descended, is cursed. Ham is explicitly not cursed (having been blessed by God with everybody else in the previous chapter) and his other children, particularly Mitzraim (aka Egypt) are not mentioned as cursed.)

It is arguable that European racism represented a significant shift from traditional racism by combining the us/them distinction with emerging ideas of scientific taxonomy and evolution, with economic incentive -- and as an unintended consequence of the enlightenment. The initial conquests by Europeans going into the "age of discovery" created a pattern of subjugation and built an economy on slave labor mingled with trade. This was pretty par for the course in the 16th Century. Little would have distinguished the Spanish slaughter of the Incas from the Mongol slaughter of Chinese peasants or the Japanese invasion and slave taking in Korea. Europeans had some notion of "Christendom" as distinct (and superior to) other religious groups and polities. But there wasn't much in this view distinguishing the pagan Lithuanians from the Islamic Panim. The rule of war was utter destruction and enslavement. (The word "slave" is, in fact, related to the word "slav," from the slave taking during the invasion and Christenization of central Europe in the 12th and 13th Centuries).

But as the Enlightenment took hold, the simple us/them mentality which treated everyone outside the circle of trust as subhumans fit only for slaughter or slavery became increasingly uncomfortable and difficult to maintain. John Locke, for example, held slavery incompatible with the rights of man, as no man could be deemed to have consented to the complete abnegation of his personal rights. But this growing concept of universal rights and dignity inherent in human beings regardless of religion or nationality was inherently incompatible with the economic system that had firmly taken root by the 17th century. Most people tend to focus on the U.S. wrt to slavery. But in global terms this was a side market. Long before slavery became entrenched as the bulwark of the Southern economy and enshrined as the "peculiar institution," it dominated the new world economies of the Caribbean and South and Central America. Sugar production in particular depended entirely on horribly cruel slave labor, with African slave populations sometimes outnumbering European white populations by 10-1 or more. To extend the ideas of the Enlightenment to their natural conclusion would have completely devastated the European economies. (It is no coincidence that Wilberforce and his efforts to ban the slave trade in England become increasingly successful as England shifted from a mercantile economy to an industrial economy, which made the labor of local white working class people far more important to the economy than slave labor in other parts of the Empire).

What saved the conscience of the Enlightenment Europeans was the bastardization of science to justify the continued treatment of slaves as slaves. As slaves were primarily African, this meant degrading Africans -- and their descendants -- to a subhuman status. The rising tide of Enlightenment science informed these efforts and encouraged a new phenomena. Racism would no longer be a simple us/them, or a matter of religion/cultural belief in the innate superiority of one's own religion or nation-state equivalent. Racism was now a matter of "science," with racial characteristics associated with the enslaved being the marks of "inferiority" and racial characteristics associated with the conquerors/oppressors as signs of superiority. Whereas the African Legionnaire was inherently superior in Roman society to the Celtic barbarian by virtue of Romanization, the African could never be fully assimilated into European society because "science" maintained that races (as marked by their distinct characteristics and features, such as skin color or nose shape or eye folds) were *inherently* distinct and followed a "natural" and scientific progression from barely above apes to the apex of humanity (white Europeans, especially white Western Europeans).

This new form of racism was informed over time by additional trends. One was the rise of evolutionary theory and taxonomy. If the animal world could be classified into species and subspecies with some being "more" or "less" evolved, so could the human world. The other trend was the rise of Empire and the disparate treatment of varying "races" globally. Arabs and other "Orientals" were "mysterious" and sometimes "cruel" in the 17th Century and even into the 18th Century. By the 19th Century, with the technological superiority of Europeans (and Americans) firmly established, these peoples become not merely a different and exotic other, but an inferior other needing to be ruled by the superior colonial masters.

There were exceptions, I should note. In the early 20th Century, Japan become the "good pupil" Asiatics which gave them fairly equal status with Europeans (particularly after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905) and the "right" (reaffirmed by the League of Nations) to be imperialist overlords over Korea and other Asiatic or Pacific Islander peoples. But this was, to use the cliche, the exception that reenforced the rule. By learning to be good little Westerners (and for the most part avoiding any colonial degradations for reasons too complicated to get into here), Japanese became honorary Europeans. Even the ultimate racists of the early 20th Century, Nazis and the United States, regarded Japan as white for all intents and purposes (this changed in WWII, where Japanese people were recast as "monkeys").

So, to conclude a very long-winded peroration, there is a valid argument that our modern concepts of racism -- complete with the idea that there is a taxonomy of human "races" that have distinct visual characteristics indicative of things such as mental capability or temperament, is a European/white invention, with the concept of "whiteness" as representing the apex of human evolution and superiority.

In this sense, "whiteness" cannot be taken to simply be a one-to-one correspondence with modern European descendants. This ignores the racism of Latin America, for example. Again, Americans (and Europeans) tend to think of themselves as the center of all narratives (as Earl pointed out). Visit Brazil, or Mexico, or any other Central or South American country and you will see native people with a wide range of skin color and distinctions between indigenous tribal people and the multicultural melange that makes up the bulk of the population. You will find plenty of darker skinned Brazilians who will tell you that the idea of "whiteness" is alive in Brazil, and not simply applying to Americans or Europeans.

By contrast, there are other forms of discrimination that we know put under the umbrella of "racism" that are not related to skin color or whiteness as so constructed. Discrimination based on sexual orientation, for example, is now classed as racism despite the fact that you can find people of different sexual orientation or fluid gender of any "race." Discrimination between rival tribes is rampant in Africa, but does not easily fall into the category of "race" as it potentially does for "ethnicity."

We should not (IMO) view these forms of discrimination as any less troublesome or pernicious than European racism. It does not matter to Uighurs or Hutus or ethnic Koreans in Japan or untouchables in India that the discrimination they suffer is not "race" discrimination. Similarly, it is counterproductive (IMO at least) to view European creation of the most widespread system of discrimination as original sin marking all white skinned people as inherently irredeemable or possessed of a uniquely "racial" capacity for prejudice and cruelty. But history and the specifics of discrimination do matter if we ever hope to eliminate this social disease. It is important to understand that the origins and consequences of. European-style racism are different, and thus reenforced by different stimuli, than more traditional us/them discrimination.