Race and Racism

 From a Course viewpoint there is no such thing as race. There are no Black people. There are no White people. There are no Brown people. There are no Yellow people. There are no different races of any kind.

Different color physical bodies are the illusions we see here in the world of time and they are not real. Only God and His Spiritual Children exist.

That is the truth, as it exists in the unseen eternal Spiritual world. This chapter is not about the real world. It is rather a brief history about race and racism as they have occurred here in the physical world.

For my straightforward definition of racism I have utilized information from Wikipedia, the free Internet encyclopedia.

Racism, by its simplest definition, is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and those racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. People with racist beliefs might hate certain groups of people according to their racial groups. In the case of institutional racism, certain racial groups may be denied rights or benefits, or get preferential treatment. Racial discrimination typically points out taxonomic differences between different groups of people, even though anybody can be racialised, independently of their somatic differences. According to the United Nations conventions, there is no distinction between the term racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination.

In the interest of being brief I will only cover racism as it happened in the United States between the White people and the Indians and the Black people, who were imported as slaves. The basic philosophy was because we were superior to the Indians and the Blacks we were entitled to exterminate the Indians and use their land as we saw fit, and we were entitled to free labor from the Black people.

This attitude was summed up by the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1857, which was that slaves and their descendants could never be citizens of the United States.

As for the Indians General Philip Sheridan summed it all up perfectly when he told Comanche chief Toch-a-way at a large conference held at Fort Cobb in 1869 “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” That later became the quaint old saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

An idea related to racism is the idea of “racial purity.” We have had many organizations and people such as the KKK and Adolf Hitler promoting that idea. 

Racial purity has never been accomplished anytime, anywhere. In spite of our proclaimed racial superiority to the Blacks and Indians the three races were very well mixed throughout our history for any number of reasons. The first and foremost reason was women had even lower status than slaves and were thought of only as property of men. A second reason was that Indian women were made available to White men when there was a shortage of available women for whatever reason. White women were often taken as prisoners by Indians during warfare and were integrated into the tribe. 

And now we get to the Deep South. The White people in the Deep South of that time were probably among the most sexually repressed people that ever existed. White Women were put on a pedestal. Daughters of the White plantation owners were to be protected and stay virginal until marriage to a proper man from a good family. The only problem with putting your wife on a pedestal is your sex life usually suffers. If you had a teen-age son he couldn’t have sexual relations with the White girls because their virginity was being protected. But that wasn’t a problem if you were a wealthy plantation owner because you had an unlimited supply of young Black women. And if a pregnancy occurred that wasn’t a problem either, because you just had another slave for sale, or for your plantation. That was the main reason the White and Black races were mixed. It’s also unrealistic to think that there weren’t White women who had sexual relations with their slaves, although that was a somewhat risky undertaking.

After World War 2 we occupied Japan and Germany. Our history of intermarriage with the Japanese and German women is very well documented. In the end Adolf Hitler accomplished nothing.

In summarizing the mixing of the races throughout history I can only think that with few exceptions the process of love and having children is not under the control of the rational part of our mind. We just do what we do because we do it.

In summarizing this chapter I want to touch on a general principal that relates to racism. That principal is life crowds out life. 

In the human realm life crowds out life in the sense that our ghettos and less desirable areas are expanding at a greater rate than our best areas.

In general we live with the illusion that as long as we reside in the United States it doesn’t matter if the masses starve in other parts of the world. We feel that it doesn’t really affect our quality of life. In the United States those of us who can, live in exclusive suburbs, separate from the perceived lower classes. Once again we feel that it doesn’t affect our quality of life.

This is not true at all and here’s why. The middle class White people average about two or less children per family. The thinking is they have to provide the best for their children and that’s expensive. The lower income people in the United States and the third world population do not think this way. They reproduce themselves at a much higher rate. As a result of this the ghettos of the United States and the slums of the third world are expanding at a much faster rate while the better areas are shrinking. Eventually the ghettos and the third world slums will crowd out the better areas and the quality of life for everyone will suffer. The rich people in Shanghai breath the same polluted air the peasants do.

That’s the general problem. Of course that’s a gross oversimplification, but never the less accurate. A related problem is that as the world becomes overpopulated we’re trying to make everyone in the third world into versions of the American consumer. The result of this is many of the city streets that used to be filled with bicycles and rickshaws are now filled with cars polluting the air. It’s really absurd when you think about it because the bicycles and rickshaws moved fasted than the cars that now clutter their streets do.

At the present time the world leaders are debating what to do about the greenhouse effect and the rising world temperatures. That’s all they are doing. There is no effective action being taken. My feeling is it’s probably too late for the Polar Bears. The ice caps will melt within twenty-five years and they will perish. We should follow them into extinction within one hundred and seventy five years or so.

For that scenario to be avoided the worlds best minds have to start working together now and create a sustainable economy instead of a growing one. Actually they needed to start fifty years ago, but better late than never. Having said that it remains to be seen if anyone will do it. I’m not optimistic but there’s still hope. 

The last thing I want to touch on here is racism in the sense that it relates to our stewardship over nature and the animals of the world. In general the human race has exterminated whole species of animals for any reason and no reason at all, a prime example of this being the Buffalo. The Elephants in Africa are fast approaching extinction, because their tusks are valuable for ivory. The Polar Bears habitat is being melted because everyone in the world has to drive a car. 

Although the above isn’t a great deal of concern to most people it should be. The reason is that when it becomes impossible for our fellow creatures to live on this planet it will become impossible for us too.

RR-ESM