Racism is Dead, Long Live Racism! Part IV

By Charles Quist-Adade, PhD.

Christianity, Eurocentrism and “Race”
The scriptures were also used to sanctify race bigotry and to justify slavery and social inequality. For example, the Bible’s story of Ham’s curse, it was suggested, told Christians that God had ordained Africans to be slaves of Europeans. According to that Biblical narration (see Genesis 9:18-27), once upon a time, Noah, a lover of wine, had had too much wine (people who are intoxicated sometimes do funny things) and went to bed naked. Ham, one of Noah’s three sons (the other two were Shem and Japheth) had entered his father’s room and saw his father’s nakedness. He burst out of the room, poking fun at his father to his brothers. His brothers did not take kindly to Ham’s behaviour. They covered their father with a cloth, (approaching him backwards.)

When Noah awoke and discovered Ham’s indiscretion, he supposedly cursed Canaan, Ham’s son (but curiously not Ham), saying he would be the servant of servants of his brothers. In turn, Noah praised Shem and blessed Japheth. By some absurd logic, Euro-Christians came to believe that Africans are descended from Ham.

Thus the “Hamitic curse” and the colour black came to be equated with punishment, evil and sin in Christendom. In the Middle Ages, the tripartite division of the world into Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as the Three Kings or Wise men who came to worship the Christ child, were based on that biblical logic. This quotation from Saint Simon, one of the founders of Western social thought, explains it all: “Know that Europeans are the sons of Abel, .Asia and Africa inhabited by descendants of Cain. See how bloodthirsty Africans are. Note the indolence of Asiatics.”

This colour symbolism in Christianity explains why the image of Jesus Christ, for example, is that of a blue-eyed European (‘White’) male, his Jewish origin obscured through a kind of artistic cosmetic surgery. Of course, this also explains why Satan or the anti-Christ is symbolized by the colour black. God created man in His image; Europeans created God in their image. This is not surprising. To paraphrase one sage: If horses could draw and you ask them to draw their god, that god would look like a horse. Two interrelated processes are at play here: a self-fulfilling prophecy and the social construction of reality. W.I. and Dorothy Thomas positing what is now known as the Thomas Theorem, declared that: “If men define situations as real, they become real in their consequences. Thus, the crucial issue is not so much the actual punishment meted out by God to Cain or by Noah to Ham, but rather it is the fact that later Christians came to understand such punishment in a specific way and to act on the basis of that understanding.

The colour symbolism and the imagery of Eurocentrism succeeded the colour symbolism and imagery of Christendom and passed over into European colonialism and slavery. The images of Africans and Blacks in the minds of Euro-Americans were built on several foundations, the most prominent of which are (1) the European slave trade, which saw the forced importation of millions of Africans as human cargo to the so-called New World for over three hundred years; (2) slave-master relationships in the plantations of the Americas; (3) colonial-and neo-colonial-subject relationships based on European colonization of the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America; and (4) majority-minority relationships as well as dominant-subordinate relationships stemming from White-Anglo-Saxon domination in both numerical terms and power-wise of the social, economic, ideological and political directions of multi-racial/poly-ethnic society.

According to Pieterse, in each of these relationships, Europeans constructed the images of non-European people in general, and of Africans/ “blacks” in particular, on the basis of selective perception, expedience, and second-hand information mingled with reconstructed biblical notions and folklore, along with a dash of ‘scientific’ ideas that were popular at the time. European views of Africans and their continent were formed over an extended period of time dating from antiquity. Thus contemporary Anglo-American views of Africans are a crystallization of images distilled from the travelogues and accounts of European explorers, Christian missionaries, and colonial (European) administrators. Added to these was imagery taken from popular ‘scientific’ literature, particularly fiction and yellow journalism. During the colonial period, H. Rider Haggard’s type of romantic popular tales, coupled with yellow journalism and pseudo-scientific reportage, painted the image of a “dark” continent inhabited by rude savages and godless heathens. The colonial remedy to this myth was the civilizing and proselytizing mission of the Christian West.

I hear you say, “So what? This happened long ago. We have come a long way from the H. Rider Haggard years and the times of Jim Crow racism.” My answer is that, yes, indeed, a great amount of water has passed under the bridge of time since the civil rights movement in North America and the wave of the independence movements in Africa and other parts of the African Diaspora. But the mere passage of time is not a proof that things have changed for the better in race relations between people of African descent and their former oppressors, enslavers and exploiters. Time, it is said, heals. However, in the case of racism, described by Montagu, as “man’s most dangerous myth” and Nkrumah as the “foulest invention by man,” time has only managed to help its more obvious and odious forms to mutate into less visible and less ‘reprehensible’ forms. Contemporary Euro-American society has only temporarily repressed bone-chilling forms of racist evil and aggression. Racism has ceased to be the avowed commitment of Southern white supremacists. It has gone beyond wearing hoods and burning crosses. Racism is now more complex, structural, systemic, subtle and insidious, making it an idea that has refused to die. In its insidious forms, racism has become an unconscious habit corrupting legions of “Whites,” including many well-meaning ones. But what is racism? What are the new forms of racism?

Racism is dead; long live Racism!?
Racism is defined as a set of ideas and ideals (ideology) that asserts or implies the superiority of one social group over another on the basis of biological or cultural characteristics, together with the institutionalized power to put these racialized beliefs into practice in a way that has the intent or effect of denying or excluding minority men and women.
Racism in North America and most of Western Europe today has ceased to be the overt, crude, ‘in-your-face’ form of racism of the past. The general consensus is that racism today is generally more subtle, subliminal, polite, sophisticated, and covert. It is termed “colorblind racism.” In Canada, some scholars even call it “democratic racism,” as if there could be anything democratic about racism.

Social scientists such as Michael Baton and William Julius Wilson, have for different reasons, declared racism to be dead. In his book, The Idea of Race, Baton contended since race has been proven to be biological myth, racism is dead. In other words, since the ideas that formed the bedrock of “scientific” racism that dominated the knowledge “industry” until the middle of the past century are now discredited, “racism is dead.” For his part, Wilson declared that there was a “declining significance of race” in the United States. The supporting evidence for his triumphant declaration was to be found in the improved living conditions of African Americans and the emergent “Black” middle class. Of course, both Baton’s racism is dead declaration and Wilson’s prophetic effusion about the declining significance of race were not only overly optimistic, they smacked of denial. They seemed to have been misled or pacified by the new, benign form of racism of the immediate post-Civil Rights era.
Baton and Wilson are not alone in this culture of optimism and wishful thinking. The benign, smiling face of racism today has made too many people of all complexions complacent. They compare what was then and what is now and console themselves with the usual refrain: “We have come a long way indeed” They take tokenism-the hiring of a handful of “Blacks” for window dressing by White employers, for example-as improved race relations. They take a few “Black” men and women cracking through the glass ceiling or the appointment of such figures as Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to powerful government positions and the success and fabulous wealth of African American entertainers and athletes-such as Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan-as clear indications of race relations having “improved vastly.”

The New Racisms: Racism in the 21st Century
The fact that racism has changed its appearance and form does not make it any better. Indeed, racism in its new garbs is even more insidious and treacherous. As it is said in Ghana, the snake under the grass is more dangerous than the snake on the tree, for you can see the snake on the tree and decide how to handle it-kill it or run away-but you cannot avoid the snake under the grass since it cannot be seen, and therefore bites you without your noticing it.

The next problem is that many people tend to think that one form of racism is better than another form or that racism in one country is better than in another. However, racism is racism. In all cases, lives are destroyed. People are harmed physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Racism in any form, quantity, or shape must not be tolerated.
It is wrong for victims of racism to think they can fight this malady alone. It takes two to tango, and, as the Ghanaian philosopher and educator Dr. Kwagyir Aggrey once said, it takes both the black and the white keys to produce harmonious music on the piano. The healing process of racism inflicted on society must involve both Whites and Blacks. Like a parasite, racism needs a vector or a host to thrive.

To heal society of the racism disease, both the parasite and the host must be treated. Racism is dialectical; it affects both the victimized and the victimizer. But both the victimized and the victimizer must not only know their proper roles; they must also be conscious of, and alert to, history and the changing realities of today. Both victims and victimizers must acknowledge that all humans harbor prejudices, and manifest them from time to time, and that prejudice whether backed by power (racism) or not (race prejudice) is destructive. It hurts, takes away bread from someone’s mouth, it offends, it destroys and it kills! All people whether dominant/majority or minority are capable, and do hurt people through their prejudices.

Therefore as Orbe notes, “before we tell others to get out of their boxes, we must be prepared to get out of our boxes first.” But this should not be interpreted as “distributive racism.” It is wrong to apportion blame to the victims of racism and the perpetrators of racism equally. We should be careful not to confuse race prejudice with racism. Prejudice and stereotyping are symptoms, manifestations of ongoing tug-of-war between groups over economic, political and social resources. While all people habour prejudices about other human groups and stereotype out-groups, not all people are in a position to discriminate on a systematic basis.