Rascism is the shadow of every civilization that contains the mixtures of various different so-called races. This mindset has been cursed heavily and at other side, worshipped badly. Rascism is the main key of the decline ofa great civilization. Rascism is actually a type of the 'ruler-ruled' system that has been the main idea of human civilization. But rascism leads to discrimination, humiliation, and at its worst rate, genocide.
What makes rascism so unique? It's very simple. Rascism is to judge someone based only on their skin colour. It is like you decide you decide whether a food is delicious or not only from its display. You don't care even the food is poisoned or contaminated, but you keep on your ideals that your eyes are the best judge. Well, people can have different way to choose food only after they are told about the potential harm to their health. However, if you trace the history of the world, human beings are usually adamant to wipe their rascist ideals. They know that irrational hatred towards someone that they probably never know is bad. It only causes the spirit to destroy to rise and cover their future. Nevertheless, they are still unwilling to change their mind. What happens with rascism?
Luckily, rascism has been seemingly eradicated from the modern world. As democracy is promoted through all the world by the power of Western, many more nations in the once colonialized continents lift up their head and dare to look at the Western's piercing eyes. They establish their own nation-states and build sovereign governments which are respected by the world.
The problem is most of the nation-state boundaries that abound right now were created by the Western colonializers. Those imperialists never asked the natives about the original boundaries and just marked the demarcation based on their resources hunger and protection against other tribes and more importantly, other imperialist powers. This simple lax territorial system confuses and causes conflicts now indirectly.
The imperialist didn't stop at the demarcation. They also migrated some natives to other continents then set up those natives' settlements there so they could serve their European masters as slaves, of course. What the Europeans colonialist mostly never thought about is the fact that they are heavily outnumbered by those 'coloured' races. They never calculated that sometime in the future their slaves would arise gradually but surely to resist imperialism as those races became more educated. Ironically, the Europeans had to give them education so they could work in the factories, which are the main machine of the capitalist imperialism.
The history fact proves this. Northern and Western African natives were brought by the British to America. Those Africans were laboured as slaves until the Civil War in 19th century. However, the sentiment didn't stop at that point. The European descendants in American had recruted those Africans as labours for centuries that they couldn't just agree to accept that both of them are equal just because of an idealist president. The cold war continued and culminated int he 1960s during the Civil Rights Movements. A number of activists, black and whites, from Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. to extremist Malcolm X remonstrated for the equality. After years of pressure and support, rascism gradually diminishes from America. The so-called blacks can now enter the government. One of them reigns as the incumbent Foreign Affair Minister and one of them are struggling for presidency election.
I don't want to talk about the equality of the races here. What catches my attention is how can some civilizations erase rascism from their land. I observe that rascism is a very complicated problem until nobody knows exactly now what causes it. It has been like a strong dogma taught to many people. Mostly the people adopt rascism like they adopt religious faith; in other words, they take it purely for their emotional ego needs and not for logical reasoning. Therefore, some so-called scientists and experts try to find the rationale theories of rascism. For me, it's like Aristotle concluded that woman is born because of errors during fertilization just because Aristotle himself was not a woman. More hillariously, even failed painter like Adolf Hitler could compose briliant lies of rascism into a powerful ideology that destroyed great nations in his era. This shows how powerful rascism is on men.
Thus, I think that it will be useful if we find what ends rascism as the clue to the source of rascism itself. In many countries, I see there are similarities. It happens when the nation has unifromed language, is democratic (dictatorial also will do but the stability will only occur on the skulls of the victimized people), and has most their people educated. USA, for example, applied the policy to mix the whites and the blacks' school into one school from the 1950s. When segregation is abolished, the impact is very certain for the future. The today ruling generations were once the children of the 1950s who went to the same school together. Education plays largely here. Those black and whites become friend and they no longer see the difference in their skin colours. They see through their characters, as what Martin Luther King once hoped. I cannot say that the equality in America has been perfect, that USA is indeed a very good example to follow. The friendship that is built from very young ages grow into the harmony.
Let us see another example in Asia, Singapore. When established as a trade port in the beginning of 19th century, there were only one majority race, the Malays. As the colony became richer, thanks to the opening of the ports in China after the cruel Opium Wars, more Europeans migrated to settle and rule in this small island. Profits came and Singapore developed quickly. The natives, the Malays, became the ruled. However, the British somehow thought the number of labourers were not enough, so they brought the Indians, mostly the Tamils in the Southern part of India, to work there. Indians had advantages for their number were big and they could easily be hired by the British. Besides the British's policy, other races flooded this small island. The Chinese, hoping to find better walfare after the sad Opium Wars in which their hatred royalty were shaken by the Western ships, migrated to trade. They soon became the majority of the Singapore society.
The British colonialist amended a system in which each race stayed in the distinct locations around the island based on their speciality and the potential profit that would come to the colonialist. The mixed eduaction was just a dream and each race stayed within their own community, spoke in their own local language and never got to know other races. Luckily, the British set up a mixed education system to the people as the industry grew rapidly. Those races were standarized in one language, English. Some of them studies abroad to Europe then became the main leaders of the nation when the Malay colonies became independent. These educated people who could speak in English thus could communicate with the rest of the world set up a civilization system which regards equality. Although there were many problems and sometimes bloodsheds, Singapore succesfully transitioned into a first world country. Racial harmony are guaranteed.
From those two examples, we can see that education plays very important part. Then, I can say that rascism is not natural; it is nurtured. I highly disapproved the views that assume that rascism is born, because that will be the same with the notion that some people are more equal than the others; in other words, some races are inferior to some particular other races. As i trace back the human history, I see that rascism of Europeans didn't start when colonialisation began. It had existed as far as Ancient Greece. Alexander the Great assumed that other civilizations beside the Greeks are barbarians. While Alexander had honourable ideas to join the different races in the world has he attempted to conquer the world, many Europeans though that other races were inferior to them. Therefore, rascism has existed even before the era of industry or revoultion of science. Then it must have started from the very early period of human history.
I hypothesize that the origin of rascism can be traced from basic human psychology. I adopt Maslow's theory of hierarchy of human needs for this hypothesis. I start with a newborn child. You can see that a newborn child is like an open-book, ready to be written and shaped. You can see that a newborn child mostly cries all the time while a more mature human being doesn't cry as much as the babies do. The babies are already human beings. They have their physical and emotional needs, but they don't know how to fullfill their needs. The closest people of a newborn baby are usually his parents or his close relatives. According to the genetic law, the child should inherit the genetic traits of his parents/relatives. Certainly the child's parents will have the similar skin colour as the child has.
The parents will be the first in the child's life to feed him, help him to sleep and amuse him. As this habit becomes routinity, the child develops a feeling of trust upon his parents. Assuming that his parents are the reliable source of his physical and emotional satisfaction, the child grades the parents as his allies, not enemies. The child, who still has limited thinking ability, will take his parents' physical appearance as the sign do the child can recognize who is trusworthy and who is not. And skin colour dominates the child's immature generalization because the skin colours dominate the parents' physical appearance.
As the child grows bigger, the child begins to receive tuition from his parents. This is the most crucial period of the child's views towards the other races. If the parents educate them to mix with other races and befriend them, rascism will most likely not grow. However, if the child stays only with the group of people that areof his race, he will never get to know the other races. The childish xenophobia and signature thinking will stay with them unconciously. So, when the child grows bigger and enters the society which contains different races, he will be reluctant to gather with other races because of their mindset. The one which impacts is the feeling of safety. Because the child has assesed which skin colour or facial charateristic can satisfy his physical and emotional needs, the child will automatically see at the other races with a feeling of fear. Fear that those other races will do harm on them. The child will see the other races as the 'other'. The other races are not same as himself, the child will think, because the other races never give me experience of physical and/or emotional satisfaction in the past. Thus how can they guarantee safety thus share a common identity with the child?
This is where nurture comes in. If the parents are rascist or skin-colour selective, the child's infant xenophobia will increase and become a fixed mindset. When the mindset is formed into a belief, which is basically an assurance of safety, and the mindset is adopted by a group of people, it becomes rascism. In the past, about thousand years ago, the different human races were seperated by geographical condition thus it made them highly improbable to meet each other and get together. The mindset is inherited through many generations until our generation now. However, nowadays rascism exist as the form of a political system, a mere ideology. But the basic is still the same, the instinct of safety that will ensure the individual's survival.
I think it is not logical to think that rascism must be true because of the natural selection due to human survival. To survive, human cannot live alone. Human is such an unique creature that he tends to socialize and express his emotional desire in the society that he creates. that is why human develops complicated system called language and civilization while other species don't. From that notion, human can only survive if there are other human begins, or at least, he has the impression that there are other human beings beside them. If the people of different races work together, it will be great for the society's advancement for there will be more ideas and perspectives to be used for the development. You can see from direct examples from the history and world today. The problem is how the relations among the different races are like. Is the raltion a ruler-ruled type like the slavery and racial discrimination in the USA in the past? Or is it a cooperation based on harmony and proper education like in the modern democratic nations? I think the second one is better, because there will be a stability. There will be more instances to do check-and balance if there are more people participating in the society's institutions and those people are given equal chance, which means all the races must participate.
From the genetic perspective, I think it is very odd to say that rascism is natural and right. The difference between a race and another race is only about 0.0000007% of human DNA. The biology also theorizes that the more variations, the better the community is because there will be more thoughts to work on the community's survival. Races are the type of variations of huamn beings. All races are the same species, Homo Sapiens. If all the varations of Homo Sapiens work together, the survival of the species will be more assured. From this point, I can conclude that even rascism is against the Darwinism sociology, which is heavily adopted by the modern people. And Hitler insisted in Mein Kampf that rascism is even in the Bible. What a pity!
From those points, we can summarize the basic origin of rascism. Rascism is like xenophobia, but it is more a structured system of mindset on the relations in a particular society. Rascism is a psychological phenomenon of human instinct, more accurately emotional. Rascism is not rational nor it is suitable to the science. Rascism is nurtured, not natural. Rascism can be eradicated from this earth if we all what causes it.
I hope my hypothesis is quite okay for you, since I think there are still many aspects that I haven't explored. If you have any more suggestions about this topic, please tell me. I really believe that to end rascism we must know the source of it, so I would love to know more.
I remember what inspires me to write this essay. It is a quotation from a movie called 'Mississipi Burning'. It goes like this:
They said it was all in the Bible.
But now I know, that hatred is not something you're born with.
You learn it. You accept it. You apply it.
And then you marry it.....