History: Racism

Hand in hand with the development of African slavery and colonialism came the development of racism, which was used to justify them. We have already seen this in the account quoted earlier from Franz Fanon. Another particularly vivid description is that of Malcolm X (1964) in his Autobiography:

"Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world's black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation. I saw how since the sixteenth century, the so-called "Christian trader" white man began to ply the seas in his lust for Asian and African empires, and plunder, and power . . "

". . First, always "religiously," he branded "heathen" and "pagan" labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations. The stage thus set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons of war.

I read how, entering India - half a billion deeply religious brown people - the British white man, by 1759, through promises, trickery and manipulations, controlled much of India through Great Britain's East India Company . . In 1857, some of the desperate people of India finally mutinied - and, excepting the African slave trade, nowhere has history recorded any more unnecessary bestial and ruthless human carnage than the British suppression of the non-white Indian people.

Over 115 million African blacks - close to the 1930's population of the United States - were murdered or enslaved during the slave trade. And I read how when the slave market was glutted, the cannibalistic white powers of Europe then carved up, as their colonies, the richest areas of the black continent . . "

"I read . . how the white man raped China at a time when China was trusting and helpless. Those original white "Christian traders" sent into China millions of pounds of opium. By 1839, so many of the Chinese were addicts that China's desperate government destroyed twenty thousand chests of opium. The first Opium War was promptly declared by the white man. Imagine! Declaring war upon someone who objects to being narcotized. The Chinese were severely beaten, with Chinese-invented gunpowder.

The Treaty of Nanking made China pay the British white man for the destroyed opium; forced open China's major ports to British trade; forced China to abandon Hong Kong; fixed China's import tariffs so low that cheap British articles soon flooded in, maiming China's industrial development."

Racism did not disappear with the abolition of slavery and the liberation of European colonies. It has remained an important feature of capitalist exploitation, by which non-white workers are paid lower wages than white workers, splitting labor solidarity and providing higher profits from exploitation. The most extreme example was that of South African Apartheid, but less extreme racism characterizes capitalist countries around the world. According to economist Victor Perlo (1996), the profits gained directly in the United States from the wage differential between white workers and workers of color grew from $56 billion in 1947 to $197 billion in 1992 (figures corrected for inflation). Perlo estimates that the profits gained indirectly by keeping down the wages of white workers, were even greater.

Racism is used to justify internal interventions that would not otherwise be carried out against those belonging to the dominant racial groups of the state. Perhaps the most extreme example of this were the forced labor camps and extermination camps of the Nazis that were justified by the official racism of the regime. But similar racist justifications are used for internal interventions by most of the "civilized" countries. For example, racist assumptions were involved in the internal interventions in the United States against African-American slaves, the genocide of Native Americans, the confinement of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II, the suppression of urban revolts in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, and, most recently, the arrests and detentions of Hispanic immigrants. It is unlikely that any of these interventions would have been undertaken against white, Anglo-Saxon Americans.

Racism is used by the state and its media to justify its enemy images and its wars and preparations for war. During World War II, the enemy Japanese and Germans were called "gooks" and "krauts" and portrayed as sub-human. At the present time, Arabs and South Asians are the victims of racist portrayals in the Western media and educational systems.

Racism is similarly used by the state and its media and by political demagogues to portray immigrants from the South, whether Arab and African in Europe or Central and South Americans in the U.S., as inferior and potential enemies, blaming them for the unemployment and declining social services created by the policies of capitalist enterprises and the state.

The racism of internal interventions is supported by the teaching of racism by the mass media and educational systems, including the most elite educational systems, and by churches and other religious organizations. For example, growing up in the American South, I was taught by my Sunday School Superintendent at Church School that it was written in the Bible that the "niggers were born to be slaves." Later, teaching in an elite American university, I found that my colleague in the psychology department was teaching a course to claim that the intelligence of African-Americans is genetically lower than the intelligence of those descended from European immigrants. In fact, it was the psychology department at the most elite American University, Harvard, that was most renowned for its claims of genetic inferiority of African-Americans.

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