For all the loathing many white Americans may feel toward the rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright, and the anger and bitterness expressed by others, we should be aware that the divide was started centuries earlier, and not at all by the people who then pretty much all lived in sub-Saharan Africa.
That much is so apparent that it is beyond cliché. The question that interests me is why the timeline is measured in centuries. Why not millennia?
Search the scriptures, search the pagan writings of Romans and Greeks. We do find ethnic hatred. The 137th Psalm speaks of smashing infants against rocks. But we find only occasional acknowledgement of race, as in Jeremiah’s brief mention of the skin color of Ethiopians.
Romans, having advanced beyond the rest of the world in the art of transporting water, granted themselves superiority for their cleanliness. Barbarians were inferior, largely because they were to be considered dirty. Their tribal organization was considered primitive, and in a crude form of early national Darwinism, outliers were thought somewhat lower because of their lack of military might. Not much enlightenment, but not much racism.
So there was a lot of ethnic consciousness, us-versus-them chauvinism. The raving racists we have seen in the last few hundred years seem strangely absent from what was otherwise a primitive ancient world.
Why?
Here is one thought. Over thousands of years, it gradually came to folks that one person owning another was wrong. Certainly, not everyone shared that view. But over time, folks came to feel odd about people being property.
One reaction to the realization that human beings are not to be owned was opposition to slavery. The 1600s saw the first whispering In England that grew to the abolitionist movement.
The opposite, and the more common, reaction was to color code humanity. It was okay to enslave the not-quite-human, easily identifiable people who could be found and captured in Africa. It was okay to own people who were —well— not really people.
We now live with the cultural after-effects. The rationalization survived the need for the rationalization. So Pat Buchanan, who says slavery had some wonderful benefits, and Rush Limbaugh, who is Rush, are with us still.
But racism seems not ingrained in human nature itself. Therein lies hope.
Your turn.