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You've Got To Be Taught by Rick and Michele Tingling-Clemmens
Prelude
Race is clearly the lynchpin of the Bush regime. From his brother and party's conscious disenfranchisement of some white working class and the multitude of African-American voters who were artificially criminalized mainly in Florida and a number of other southern states, to his snubbing of the NAACP and its convention following his incendiary stance on affirmative action; has created the atmosphere that sends a loud and clear message that it doesn't matter if you are black or white, if you want to hate, 'bring it on'. This, of course, is grist for those who can take advantage of divide and conquer schemes, namely black and/or white nationalists.
These conditions were clear in my mind as I prepared for a talk at the Green Party National Convention (June 2004, Milwaukee, WI), and forced me to revisit the subject of racism and how best to shed some light to help all of my Green and other brothers and sisters, no matter their color, to fight off the enemies of class struggle whose only way of analysis is to see all problems as questions of race. Attempting to be the best historical and dialectical materialist possible, I felt that viewing this subject with a historical slant was the best preparation for giving truth to lies.
The new imperialism - globalization - is really a fight against independence and self-determination, obtaining housing, health care, jobs, and education; and the fight against exploitation is really a fight for economic emancipation and organized resistance to paying off debts to the IMF and the World Bank. It does look like the color question on an international scale but nationally, the white working class level of suffering does come close to that of people of color, especially when none of us in the new class have jobs.
The ruling class - the Republican Party and Democratic Leadership Council - gives new energy to their international and national programs by turning up the heat and increasing fascism by dividing by race. Racism is and must be institutionalized to work; we must redouble our efforts to fight it by attacking it wherever it shows its ugly face. We counter it by educating ourselves and others on how it became institutionalized. That is why one of South Pacific's most memorable songs, "You've Got to be Carefully Taught" is so on point for the following talk.
"You've got to be taught, to hate and fear; You've got to be taught,
from year to year;
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear, You've got to be carefully
taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid, Of people whose eyes are oddly made
Of people whose skin is a different shade; You've got to be carefully
taught.
You've got to be taught, before it's too late, Before you are six, or
seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully
taught."
-- From South Pacific, an operetta by Rodgers and Hammerstein
Racism is a non-science based on a maniacal notion of white supremacy. It has its birthplace in Europe during the 17th century, is supported by religion and institutionalized in America. It is sustained by and the bulwark of U.S. public policy. It is an idea that is taught to everyone in the U.S.A. - white, black, red, yellow and brown people.
The Invention of the Races
Anthropology professor and Author of the book The Origin and Evolution of the Idea of Race, Audrey Smedley, PhD, says that it was only about three or four hundred years ago that a new kind of race awareness was invented. "Before that, different populations recognized their diversity and interacted with one another. But they didn't establish any ordering system of racial classifications. That had never been done before."
For the first time, European experts of the day more or less officially decided that yes, they, themselves, were fair-skinned and round-eyed. And yes there were the broad-lipped, darker-skinned people of Africa; and the peoples of Asia, most of whom had light brown complexions, straight hair, and a[n epicanthic] fold over the eye. What they didn't know was that many of these external differences represent minor evolutionary changes. Skin color, for instance, is just an adaptation to climate - white in Europe to absorb ultraviolet radiation that helps make vitamin D, black in Africa for protection from the sun. Instead the Europeans took what they saw, and from that limited view, using a number of physical characteristics, they cut up the world populations into three major blocks: Caucasoid, loosely defined as "white"; Negroid, loosely defined as "black"; and Mongoloid, loosely defined as "Asian."
Their next intertwined steps were far grimmer. After arbitrarily separating people into races, the experts made a giant leap. They concluded that some races were born smarter or more talented or with a better way of life. They attributed this to differences in physical appearance. How members of a certain race behaved was fused with how they looked. This, in turn, opened the final door. People began making moral judgments regarding each race's worth.
Different populations could be ranked superior or inferior, good or bad. Those doing the ranking - the Europeans, who at that moment in history were into exploring and colonizing worldwide - decided that they themselves were a chosen people with a divine ordination from God. They ignored the fact that centuries earlier inhabitants of parts of Africa and the Middle East had far more advanced civilizations than Europe. They simply pressed on, deciding that the other races were in many ways savages, thus, justifying their exploitation of people of color, their land, resources and markets until today.
Savages, this theory went, were not fully human. They were shifty, barbaric. They lacked intellectual ability. They were incapable of being civilized. And, because they were fundamentally different from Europeans, it was all right to treat them in whatever way the Europeans pleased. They treated them brutally or benevolently, but always from a superior point a view.
"All this led into racism - that form of prejudice where you believe that other races are inferior to yours; and by the eighteenth century, race had become part of our social consciousness. It also had become one of the major factors defining a person's social identity," says Dr. Smedley, adding that even into the 1930s and 1940s, scientists were basing conclusions about what was going on in the different brains of the different races by measuring skull sizes. "Still today, this fusion of what seemed to be inherited physical characteristics with moral worth has persisted in being the unspoken element in the idea of race."
In conclusion, our beloved Green Party is but a microcosm of the greater capitalist society. Racism and sexism are part of this country's divide and conquer scheme necessary to maintain capitalism. We have a great opportunity to solve this 400-year-old problem by fighting for justice and the re-distribution of the wealth created by working people. In truth, there is only one race; it started near the equator 3.5 million years ago near Olduvai Gorge, in Africa; it is the human race. We are not only all Africans, we are all brothers and sisters.
June 25, 2004.