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The Origins of Racial Politics

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The Origins of Racial Politics

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The Origins of White Supremacist Theory

The concept of race has no biological credibility, it is a sociopolitical classification and nothing more. The concept of race has served no purpose other than to justify white colonialism and white supremacy. The age of colonialism was, coincidentally, about the time that the concept of race was born. The modern white supremacist disagrees, arguing that white supremacy has far more ancients roots.

The origins of white racism are not well defined although many white racialists try to make it seem so. Modern racists feel as though their hatred has some sort of pedigree and hence some sort of legitimacy if it can be shown to have existed in antiquity, i.e that they are merely carrying forward some great ancient truth. They usually start with those Ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle. From the website Ortus Memoria, comes the following concerning the racist content of Plato’s The Republic:

The following excerpt is from Plato’s The Republic, Book V, page 469.

First take slavery. Is it right that Greek states should sell Greeks into slavery? Ought they not rather to do all they can to stop this practice and substitute the custom of sparing their own race, for fear of falling into bondage to foreign nations?

That would be better, beyond all comparison.

They must not, then, hold any Greek in slavery themselves, and they should advise the rest of Greece not to do so.

Certainly. Then they would be more likely to keep their hands off one another and turn their energies against foreigners.


Page 470:

Is it not also reasonable to assert that the Greeks are a single people, all of the same kindred and alien to the outer world of foreigners?

Yes.

Then we shall speak of war when Greeks fight with foreigners, whom we may call their natural enemies. But Greeks are by nature friends of Greeks, and when they fight, it means Hellas is afflicted by dissension which ought to be called civil strife.


The website writes:

"Substitute 'Greeks' for 'whites' and this text reads like the most detestable white supremacist literature out there. Plato’s Greece and European Christendom are similar in other pertinent respects, too."

The problem is, of course, that there is no reason that we should substitute “Greeks” for “whites” since Greece’s enemies would be considered by modern white supremacists to be as white, if not whiter, than the Greeks themselves. The Persians, for example, are the people we today call the Iranians and this is a mere variation of the word “Aryan.” The Macedonians were also a white people who, like the Greeks, ran the gamut from blonde hair, light-colored eyes and fair skin to black hair, dark eyes and olive skin. Plato’s statements also let us know that Greeks frequently made slaves of one another. In the Greek world, when one nation or state defeated another in war, the conquered automatically became slaves whether that person be a servant or a highly educated professor, all were slaves. But they often continued in their various professions because the conquering nations recognized their humanity and their economic and social value. Slaves were frequently teachers and advisers to the kings who conquered their nations and were often given a certain degree of authority as a result. There were some thinkers as Aristotle who thought that some people were natural slaves but, as time went on, nations found other ways to deal with defeated nations other than slavery which tended to cause more problems than it solved.

The American system of slavery was race-based, barbaric and unsustainable. The Aristotelian idea that some people were natural slaves was applied to an entire race of people regardless of their natural abilities and inclinations. This was a tremendous waste of social progress and made slaves a completely helpless class that had to be cared for and had no way of taking care of themselves making them a drain on society that could ill afford it. Moreover, while the slavery of Ancient Greece recognized that a slave was a human being, the race-based slavery practiced in the American South denied all humanity to its slaves holding them to be no more than “a type of monkey.” Poor Southern whites fared little better (and would have been taken as slaves by the planters were it not for the black population). When this system of slavery came crashing to a fiery end, the white Southerners found themselves huddling in fear against poor black and white mobs that attacked their towns and robbed and vandalized them because they had very few skills which could be used to rebuild their society and so were reduced to sheer survival by any means necessary.

Another white racialist website, Occidental Observer, made the following points about the Republic:

· Inequality: the idea that men are created unequal is absolutely pervasive throughout The Republic and is foundational to its ethics. Plato asserts that individuals have inborn differences in physique, personality, and intelligence, in addition to differences due to upbringing.
· Heredity and eugenics: Plato notes that human differences are significantly heritable and so often refers to eugenic solutions to improve both society and elites, with explicit comparisons to animal breeding.
· Patriotism: Plato argues that patriotism is a good and compares it with love for one’s family.
· Greek racial/ethnic identity: Plato argues that “ties of blood and kinship” meant Greeks should not wage war on one another or enslave each other, reserving this for non-Greeks, and that their common identity should be cultivated through joint religious practices.

Again, none of these points automatically justify regarding the Ancient Greeks as white supremacist nor that such thinking is rooted in the very beginnings of white European culture. The inherent inequality of people was applied to individuals not to a race of people. The idea that these differences are heritable does not mean that this was to be applied to a race of people instead of individuals. Patriotism is certainly not the sole property of white supremacy. Greek identity expressed as “ties of blood and kinship” does not preclude the idea that someone of another race being considered family through intermarriage, for example. In short, the racists do a bad job of trying to prove that the modern theory of white supremacy and racialism was expressed to any degree in The Republic.

While the white racialist movement denies that the concept of race as they conceive of it is actually relatively new, the facts belie this claim. The word “race” comes the Middle French rassa from the Old Italian razza which is likely derived from the Old French haraz which a stud farm for horses. So the concept of race is rooted in acknowledging that there are different breeds of people in the same way that they are different breeds of horses. While we may agree that a Thoroughbred, an American Quarter Horse and a Clydesdale may be different breeds, they are nevertheless horses. We should express surprise were we to learn that an Appaloosa considers a Shetland pony to be an entirely different animal or a less evolved member of the Equus genus. Yet, White Supremacist Theory holds even more nonsensical criteria than that where a white person is not white if that person is Jewish and, not infrequently, regarded as not even being human. So White Supremacist Theory has moved away from the concept of race as merely a breed but rather that race is a god-given status complete with superior intellect, imagination, creativity, artistry and physical stature/appearance.

While some aspects of European white supremacy may go back to medieval times or before—particularly hatred of the Jews—modern White Supremacist Theory got its start in the 17th century. In fact one can see a direct connection between the White Supremacist Theory that took root at this time and that of Manifest Destiny that arose in the United States in the 19th century. Both are rooted in colonialist thinking.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant expressed racist ideas in the 18th century that certainly lent some impetus to 19th century scientific racism. In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant expressed the idea Africans and East Indians lacked drive and so lacked motivation and the mental capacity required to be fit to live in “northern climates” as anything other than “drifters.” Kant supported slavery saying that blacks can be made to work but could never motivate themselves to work. Similarly, Kant believed that the American Indian was a member of a “semi-race” that was stunted by migrating to different climates before he had acclimated himself to earlier ones. Hence, Kant mysteriously concludes, they are “incapable of any culture.”

Kant concludes:

“That their temperament has not become entirely adequate to any climate can also be inferred from the fact that it is hard to find any other reason why this race, which is too weak for hard labor and too indifferent for industrious work, and which is incapable of any culture even though there are enough examples and encouragement in the vicinity [namely, the example set by the European colonial settlers], stands far below even the Negro, who occupies the lowest of all other levels which we have mentioned as racial differences.”

Kant wrote in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764):

“The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color. The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible to human nature. A bird’s feather, a cow’s horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an object of veneration and of invocation in swearing oaths. The blacks are very vain but in the Negro’s way, and so talkative that they must be driven apart from each other with thrashings.”

Kant stated in his lectures during the 1780s that “Hindus” could be educated in the arts but not the sciences because they lack the capacity for abstract thought. He believed in four races: white, black, Kalmuck and Hindustani.

Adam Smith (1723-1790), Scotland’s moral philosopher and virtual inventor of political economy, was a huge influence on the development of capitalism. His classic work The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is considered by many economists worldwide to be the bible of capitalism. The book is based on the premise that humans are natural capitalists. Many, many moons ago, opined Smith, there was this tribal hunter-gatherer society that made tools, lived in hide-covered huts, etc. They made bows and arrows for hunting and warfare but one guy was so good at it that he began to make them for the entire tribe to use and eventually he did nothing else but make bows and arrows. In return, the rest of the tribe paid him in material goods and food. They tanned hides for their huts and for clothing but one guy got so good at it that he did it for his neighbors until he was doing nothing else because the demand for his services was so great and he too was paid with material goods and food. Each person found his niche and these societies grew into villages then towns and then cities. The currency went from food and material goods as hides and blankets to precious metals that could be carried around and those eventually were minted into coins and eventually concepts as credit and usury arose.

This idea of Smith’s became a story retold many times over the centuries and repeated in college classrooms as though it was true without question. It is still largely regarded as the basis of and justification for capitalism. Smith’s idea has a certain elegance but it has even more certain problems. No such primitive society has ever been observed to form. There are plenty of primitive societies in existence today that show no such signs of being natural capitalists. American Indians, for example, never showed the tiniest interest in precious metals and, in fact, were intrigued by shiny metals as tin but had little use for gold. Moreover, those people that lived on the border between the hunter-gatherer and modern civilization (such as people of the rain forests or the Aborigines of Australia and New Guinea) generally vacillate back and forth between the two lifestyles without trying to mix them. How and why the penchant for precious metals and the impulse to switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture originated remain a mystery.

Smith’s thesis is really a lot of poppycock. The true theme that Smith puts forth is one of racism, a justification that the white races of Europe were destined to take charge of the entire world. In Smith’s mind, capitalism is the natural or default state for any civilized people and only the Europeans demonstrate the capacity for it and for this reason were justified in colonizing the world. Outside the white races in Europe the rest of the world was full of superstition and barbarity.

Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations:

“Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced […] to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts. Among civilised and thriving nations, on the contrary […] the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.”

Although China showed unmistakable traits of high culture via art and literature as well as a recorded history of great antiquity far older than any in Europe, Smith did not see this as any reason to consider them equals:

“The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship.

“Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries. Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them. In all great towns several are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn their subsistence.”

In his opinion, Smith concludes that the dark and non-white peoples of the world are little more than barbarians and quite possibly sub-human as they can be shown historically not to have naturally engaged in commerce with other nations unlike the European races. Of course, the European version of engaging in commerce with nations populated with dark or otherwise non-white peoples was to colonize them whenever possible. To Smith, though, this was a natural development because the lesser races could never guide their own lives without the European showing them how.

Of the opening of Japan by Admiral Perry, Smith wrote of his feeling, no doubt echoed by many whites, that the non-white world was nothing more than a zoo. He wrote of his conclusion “that Japs are monkeys, and the women very badly made monkeys.” In a letter to John Hay, Smith referred to Japanese females as “wooden dolls” that were “badly made and can only cackle…” In a letter to Elizabeth Cameron, Smith wrote: “The Japanese women seem to me to be impossible. After careful inquiry I can hear of no other specimen of your sex, in any class of society, whom I ought to look upon as other than a curio. They are all badly made, awkward in movement, and suggestive of monkeys.”

Smith expressed a similar sentiment to Hay writing, “Dolls, monkeys, curios—there is simply no sex in Japan except as a scientific classification and that principle is the foundation of archaic society.” In several letters, Smith uses the same descriptions—“monkeys” and “badly made.” The latter is interesting because he does not say that Japanese women are badly formed but badly “made.” This indicates at least a subconscious belief on Smith’s part that the Japanese are not simply accidents of nature but deliberately crafted as a joke or otherwise in opposition to the white European by grotesquely upholding what to the European would be the worst traits as their best.

Then Smith drives the true core of his anti-Japanese rant home to Hay by stating, “Sex begins with the Aryan race.” By “sex,” Smith means true, robust and full differentiation between the sexes where men are unmistakably men and women are unmistakably women. This distinction, Smith feels, is lacking in the non-white races and most strongly in the Japanese. But why was Smith so strongly critical of the Japanese as opposed to, say, black Africans or Chinese? Most certainly, his attitude is due to the fact that the Japanese were not seen as the conquered or the colonized but as colonizers in their own right. They were perhaps the only non-white race of people in his world capable of defeating the Aryan man at least under some circumstances. So the Japanese are not merely unfortunate, less-evolved monkeys or the butt of a cruel joke of nature born as nothing more fit than to serve their white colonial masters but as a true cultural and racial adversary and wholly unnatural therefore deliberately fashioned (presumably by Satan or similar deity) to stand in opposition as the Other—the dark side opposed to the light of the Aryan race.
Last edited by DB Roy on Sun Jan 08, 2017 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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The Origins of Anthropology

The murky origins of anthropology are something that modern anthropologists would rather forget just as Hollywood filmmakers would like to forget the first blockbuster movie ever produced there (The Birth of a Nation) and for the same reason—both were overtly racist.

In 1852, the Comte de Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, a French aristocrat, had a book published called Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) which he dedicated to Germany’s King George V of Hanover (1819-1878), although George was also a member of the British royal family.

Count Joseph is known to history as Arthur de Gobineau, the founder of scientific racism. We would do well to note here that he was not a scientist of any type. He was an elitist and a Legitimist who despised French republicanism and longed for the return of the days of rule of the royals of the House of Bourbon. He admitted his “hatred for democracy, and its weapon the Revolution…”

In chapter XVI titled RECAPITULATION; THE RESPECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE THREE GREAT RACES; THE SUPERIORITY OF THE WHITE TYPE, AND, WITHIN THIS TYPE, OF THE ARYAN FAMILY, Gobineau writes:

“I have shown the unique place in the organic world occupied by the human species, the profound physical, as well as moral, differences separating it from all other kinds of living creatures. Considering it by itself, I have been able to distinguish, on physiological grounds alone, three great and clearly marked types, the black, the yellow, and the white. However uncertain the aims of physiology may be, however meagre its resources, however defective its methods, it can proceed thus far with absolute certainty. The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder. The animal character, that appears in the shape of the pelvis, is stamped on the negro from birth, and foreshadows his destiny. His intellect will always move within a very narrow circle. He is not however a mere brute, for behind his low receding brow, in the middle of his skull, we can see signs of a powerful energy, however crude its objects. If his mental faculties are dull or even non-existent, he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, which may be called terrible. Many of his senses, especially taste and smell, are developed to an extent unknown to the other two races.”

Gobineau resorts to the same argument for the black African that Adam Smith did with the Chinese:

“The very strength of his sensations is the most striking proof of his inferiority. All food is good in his eyes, nothing disgusts or repels him. What he desires is to eat, to eat furiously, and to excess; no carrion is too revolting to be swallowed by him.”

Gobineau characterizes the Mongoloid peoples thusly:

“The yellow race is the exact opposite of this type. The skull points forward, not backward. The forehead is wide and bony, often high and projecting. The shape of the face is triangular, the nose and chin showing none of the coarse protuberances that mark the negro. There is further a general proneness to obesity, which, though not confined to the yellow type, is found there more frequently than in the others. The yellow man has little physical energy, and is inclined to apathy; he commits none of the strange excesses so common among negroes. His desires are feeble, his will-power rather obstinate than violent; his longing for material pleasures, though constant, is kept within bounds. A rare glutton by nature, he shows far more discrimination in his choice of food. He tends to mediocrity in everything; he understands easily enough anything not too deep or sublime. He has a love of utility and a respect for order, and knows the value of a certain amount of freedom. He is practical, in the narrowest sense of the word. He does not dream or theorize; he invents little, but can appreciate and take over what is useful to him. His whole desire is to live in the easiest and most comfortable way possible. The yellow races are thus clearly superior to the black. Every founder of a civilization would wish the backbone of his society, his middle class, to consist of such men. But no civilized society could be created by them; they could not supply its nerve-force, or set in motion the springs of beauty and action.”

And the white race:

“We come now to the white peoples. These are gifted with reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence. They have a feeling for utility, but in a sense far wider and higher, more courageous and ideal, than the yellow races; a perseverance that takes account of obstacles and ultimately finds a means of overcoming them; a greater physical power, an extraordinary instinct for order, not merely as a guarantee of peace and tranquility, but as an indispensable means of self-preservation. At the same time, they have a remarkable, and even extreme, love of liberty, and are openly hostile to the formalism under which the Chinese are glad to vegetate, as well as to the strict despotism which is the only way of governing the negro. The deceased and decomposing carcass of an animal. Unpredictable and impulsive in nature. A greedy eater.

“The white races are, further, distinguished by an extraordinary attachment to life. They know better how to use it, and so, as it would seem, set a greater price on it; both in their own persons and those of others, they are more sparing of life. When they are cruel, they are conscious of their cruelty; it is very doubtful whether such a consciousness exists in the negro. At the same time, they have discovered reasons why they should surrender this busy life of theirs, that is so precious to them. The principal motive is honor, which under various names has played an enormous part in the ideas of the race from the beginning. I need hardly add that the word honor, together with all the civilizing influences connoted by it, is unknown to both the yellow and the black man.

“On the other hand, the immense superiority of the white peoples in the whole field of the intellect is balanced by an inferiority in the intensity of their sensations. In the world of the senses, the white man is far less gifted than the others, and so is less tempted and less absorbed by considerations of the body, although in physical structure he is far the most vigorous.”

As far as miscegenation goes, Gobineau seems to regard it as a mildly good thing in that mixture of white with black and yellow had the effect of raising the latter two to higher levels of civilization:

“It would be unjust to assert that every mixture is bad and harmful. If the three great types had remained strictly separate, the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands of the finest of the white races, and the yellow and black varieties would have crawled forever at the feet of the lowest of the whites. Such a state is so far ideal, since it has never been beheld in history; and we can imagine it only by recognizing the undisputed superiority of those groups of the white races which have remained the purest.

“It would not have been all gain. The superiority of the white race would have been clearly shown, but it would have been bought at the price of certain advantages which have followed the mixture of blood. Although these are far from counterbalancing the defects they have brought in their train, yet they are sometimes to be commended. Artistic genius, which is equally foreign to each of the three great types, arose only after, the intermarriage of white and black. Again, in the Malayan variety, a human family was produced from the yellow and black races that had more intelligence than either of its ancestors. Finally, from the union of white and yellow, certain intermediary peoples have sprung, who are superior to the purely Finnish tribes as well as to the negroes. The nature of humanity at the time of the human creation (that is, of Adam and Eve). Those inhabiting the Malayan Peninsula in Southeast Asia. I do not deny that these are good results. The world of art and great literature that comes from the mixture of blood, the improvement and ennoblement of inferior race—all these are wonders for which we must needs be thankful. The small have been raised. Unfortunately, the great have been lowered by the same process; and this is an evil that nothing can balance or repair. Since I am putting together the advantages of racial mixtures, I will also add that to them is due the refinement of manners and beliefs, and especially the tempering of passion and desire. But these are merely transitory benefits, and if I recognize that the mulatto, who may become a lawyer, a doctor, or a business man, is worth more than his negro grandfather, who was absolutely savage, and fit for nothing, I must also confess that the Brahmans of primitive India, the heroes of the Iliad and the Shahnameh, the warriors of Scandinavia—the glorious shades of noble races that have disappeared—give us a higher and more brilliant idea of humanity, and were more active, intelligent, and trusty instruments of civilization and grandeur than the peoples, hybrid a hundred times over, of the present day. And the blood even of these was no longer pure.”

Scientific racism is, of course, pseudoscientific and based on the earlier theories of 17th and 18th century European thinkers and scientists as Robert Boyle, the physicist and chemist for whom Boyle’s law is named after he expounded it in 1662. Boyle believed in monogeny, i.e. the different races sprang from the same source. Boyle believed that source to be Adam and Eve and believed they were white because he had read some case histories concerning albinos (although he could have as easily deduced that Adam and Eve were not white based on that same evidence).

François-Marie Arouet a.k.a. Voltaire was, on the other hand, a polygenist—he believed the different races sprang from different sources. In 1733, he wrote:

“The Negro race is a species of men different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds. The mucous membrane, or network, which Nature has spread between the muscles and the skin, is white in us and black or copper-colored in them.”

To further scientifically verify or disprove the validity of race, European scientists resorted to cephalometry and anthropometry—head measurement and body measurement. The readings were meticulously recorded in entry books and closely studied and compared with the measurements taken by other scientists of other subjects from other parts of the world. From these measurements even if they were only skeletal, they felt, one could determine the subject’s race and even his or her character traits.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) of Göttingen, Germany studied 60 skulls and decided in 1779 that there were five distinct races: Caucasian (white), Mongolian (Far Eastern and Central Asian), Malayan (brown, Southeast Asian and Pacific Inslands), Ethiopian (black African) and American (red or Indian). Blumenbach was a monogenist who believed the “degenerative process.” Adam and Eve, claimed Blumenbach came from Asia and, like Robert Boyle before him, he believed them to be Caucasian. Most ethnologists and naturalists of that period believed in the Asia Hypothesis which holds that the modern human race had its genesis in Asia. The descendants of Adam and Eve, Blumenbach felt, drifted from the Caucasian base due to environmental and dietary factors. Some descendants settled in hotter climates and so became dark, for example. All human beings, given the right conditions, could regain their original Caucasian characteristics.

What set Blumenbach apart from many of the other fledgling anthropologists of his day was his belief that the non-Caucasian were equals of Caucasians. He stated that he saw no evidence of inferiority neither in intellectual nor artistic capacity of non-whites compared to whites and he pointedly criticized the scientific racists who concluded the inferiority of the non-white races.

Ironically, though, Blumenbach’s work was appropriated and used by the scientific racists to put forth exactly what he opposed—racial inferiority arguments—even though he ranked whites as the most “beautiful” race.

Blumenbach probably derived his system of classification from the Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), whose Systema Naturae was published 1767. In this work, he identified five races: Americanus (American Indian), Europeanus (white), Asiaticus (Far Eastern), Afer (black African) and Monstrous (mythological people as satyrs, trogdolytes, hirsute and feral humans, giants and, no doubt, today’s Sasquatch if such a creature were known to Europeans then). Modern followers of Linnaeus insist he ranked his taxa based on culture rather than race. Indeed, Linnaeus based skin color on various humors (bodily fluids that early physicians believed were responsible for mood and character) that introduced various character traits that typified each race. Hence, Americanus was choleric (hot-tempered), stubborn and regulated by customs while Asiaticus was melancholic (depressed, moody), greedy, haughty and regulated by opinions. Afer was phlegmatic (stoic or passive), morally loose, careless, sly and regulated by will while Europeanus was sanguine (sturdy and cheery), gentle, inventive and regulated by customs.

Other ideas of race in Europe were manifold such as each race being divinely created for its specific geographic location (Charles White), that the human race was 600 years old and a person could change race in a single lifetime (Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon), that being black was the result of Negroidism—a type of skin disease akin to leprosy (Benjamin Rush). Christolph Meiners (1747-1810) of Germany believed that the races each had a separate origin (polygeny) and that whites were beautiful and the other races were ugly and that this degree of attractiveness was the defining characteristic of race. Meiners went so far as to claim that the Negro race possessed little to any feelings and were virtually impervious to pain giving as anecdotal evidence a tale of a black man being burned alive who sat and smoked a pipe nonchalantly as he burned to death. One had to wonder how many believed this for want of any other evidence.

After Darwin had his On the Origin of Species published in 1859, the race debate became as controversial as ever. Polygenists as Swiss-American zoologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) refused to accept either monogenism or evolution. Agassiz was a creationist who believed polygenism accounted not only for human life but all life on earth and that this was entirely dependent upon the will of God. Agassiz based much of his racial conclusion on the work of an American cohort, Samuel Morton (1799-1851) of Philadelphia, an anthropologist of some renown. Morton had measured some 600 skulls that had been sent to him and based his idea of race on cranial capacity—the higher the capacity, the more superior the race. His classification ran thusly: 1. Caucasian, 2. Mongolian, 3, Malay, 4. Native American and 5. Negro. Of course, Morton’s methods were entirely unscientific since he knew nothing of the skulls sent to him or where they had been collected. He did not know the body types of the skulls which would skew his results and he often relied on snap judgments rather than rigorous testing. But, to Agassiz, Morton’s work was gold. Since Agassiz held prestigious posts at American universities, he helped spread his racist ideas where certainly few white people would even think to question them.

The term “survival of the fittest” was coined by another reader of Darwin, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who actually conceived of the concept of evolution prior to Darwin. The term first appeared in Spencer’s 1864 work, Principles of Biology. He believed that all scientific explanations were confined to natural law and could never lie outside them. In other words, he was denying that miracles or any other divine intervention acted in the universe. Spencer furthermore believed that all natural laws were reducible to one—the law of evolution—and that its objective was progress. These two principles—the universality of natural law and the purpose natural law tending towards progress formed the basis of his synthetic philosophy which became popular in Europe at that time.

Spencer believed that everything from physical form to psychology to sociology and so on were all moving inexorably towards perfection. Spencer’s ideas were influenced by the ideas of Auguste Comte, positivism and Lamarckism. Spencer was, however, a social Darwinist and believed that the races should be kept separate or that the white race, at least, must not mix with the others. He favored such measures as the Chinese Exclusion Act of the United States but considered this attempt to curtail Chinese immigration a failure that allowed the mixture of Chinese and white characteristics that must necessarily produce “a bad hybrid” with “ a constitution which will not work properly” because the two bloodlines are not compatible. He also warned: “The same thing will happen if there should be any considerable mixture of European or American races with the Japanese.” This mode of thought was the rage among Europeans and white Americans and Spencer remains the only philosopher in history to sell a million copies of one of his works which certainly did nothing to quell the “Yellow Peril” mentality rampant in both Europe and the United States. Consequently, Spencer had an enormous influence on future sociologists and philosophers.
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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You're posting large amount of text without attribution or comment, not good. You shouldn't be jackin somebodyz wordz! (Disclaimer: Even if you wrote most of the above, you still quote heavily from other sources and it's very difficult to sort that out.) Best practice would be to quote small sections, include your own comments, and provide a link for those who want to read the whole thing. It's also good to name the author or publication in your quote plus the date it was written if the info is time sensitive. These are common courtesies on the inter-tubes...
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DB Roy
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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LanDroid wrote:You're posting large amount of text without attribution or comment, not good.
Completely untrue, of course.
You shouldn't be jackin somebodyz wordz! (Disclaimer: Even if you wrote most of the above, you ]still quote heavily from other sources and it's very difficult to sort that out.)
All the sources are named. And it doesn't take a genius to see where those excerpts end my commentary begins and vice-versa.
Best practice would be to quote small sections
That's what I did.
, include your own comments,
That's what i did.
and provide a link for those who want to read the whole thing.
Not necessary since I didn't use internet sources for the most part except for long cut-and-paste passages where you can look up any source online or in your own personal library for verification. It's enough to name those sources and that's I did. Do I have to give a link to The Wealth of Nations or do you think you could probably find a text on your own?

[quoteIt's also good to name the author or publication in your quote plus the date it was written if the info is time sensitive. These are common courtesies on the inter-tubes...[/quote]

I doubt the writings are de Gobineau or Spencer are time sensitive. As for naming the white supremacist websites I quoted from, I don't care who wrote it and I don't care if it's time sensitive or not (whatever that even means as applied here). It would add nothing useful to the discussion.
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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Well I'm not gonna go into a detailed "thing", but your approach was confusing to me. The very first line up top is underlined, indicating a published work somewhere. Maybe it was just the underline, but I couldn't tell who wrote it. If you quote something from a web site, provide a link. No I cannot find a quote from The Wealth of Nations, a 1200+ page book, without an exact citation. If you're quoting that work from a web page rather than the book, should probably link that. You quote a title and chapter from Gobineau - fair enough. I'm not trying to turn this into a scholarly site :P but you could have made it more clear - unfortunately my impression was you just copied entire web pages from somewhere else.
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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DB, I'm impressed that you can write such long pieces. You must be a fast writer. But I agree that it would be nice to have links to some of the sources.
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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LanDroid wrote:Well I'm not gonna go into a detailed "thing", but your approach was confusing to me. The very first line up top is underlined, indicating a published work somewhere.
I'm dividing my work into sections simply because writings are more readable in chunks than a long, undivided work. Admittedly, it serves no other purpose. If it were anyone else's work, I wouldn't have bothered to post it. Let's get one thing straight here: I don't copy and paste other people's work and try to pass it off as my own. If I copy and paste, it's because that way there is no chance of misquoting and it's much faster and I make sure whoever actually wrote the passage gets credit. I'm not an 18 year old in junior college.
Maybe it was just the underline, but I couldn't tell who wrote it.
Then I'll solve the mystery for you: ME! I would NEVER copy and paste someone else's work as my own. I wouldn't bother.
If you quote something from a web site, provide a link.
This is useless. The website is not important. It wasn't like I was quoting something scholarly, just one racist's idea and you can find it in ALL racists because they all believe it. It doesn't matter which website it was on but here it is:

https://ortusmemoria.wordpress.com/2010 ... nd-racism/

There it is but it's not helpful as I already quoted most of it anyway and it's authored by someone calling himself "Theophilus" who could anybody with no degree in anything (as I suspect). I know white supremacists like to say white supremacy is the default mentality of all white culture and history and they usually go back to Plato and it's garbage. I'm not going to give the other link. It isn't necessary. It's just somebody's belief and I have no need to lie about somebody else's belief.
No I cannot find a quote from The Wealth of Nations, a 1200+ page book, without an exact citation.
I can't help you, mine is on a pdf so I can cut and paste large swaths of it without fear of misquoting.
If you're quoting that work from a web page rather than the book, should probably link that.
Well, I didn't.
You quote a title and chapter from Gobineau - fair enough.
That was also a pdf.
I'm not trying to turn this into a scholarly site :P but you could have made it more clear - unfortunately my impression was you just copied entire web pages from somewhere else.
No, I did not. I would never do that.
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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I have always been impressed by the work of the late Stephen Jay Gould, whose "Mismeasure of Man" is part of his extensive work de-bunking the anthropological approach to White supremacy in the 19th and early 20th century. He did a very efficient job on the notions put forward by Christopher Jencks, in the 1960s, identifying genetics as the cause of differences in racial IQ performance, for example.

I am also impressed by Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" which spelled out compelling geographical reasons why Cortez was likely to be the victor in the first encounter between European and New World empires. There is no genetic superiority likely to be involved when strong geographical forces are likely to have been in play.

However, the race that really matters is the human race, and we have our hands completely full determining whether it will suicide itself (would that be suigenocide?) or learn to affirm other members of our race rather than finding excuses to exclude, oppress, exploit and torment them over some perception of in-group and out-group.

Lastly, I recommend the work on "scapegoating" by, e.g. Rene Girard, which identifies violence as a process with its own social dynamics (mimetics). Whenever you see someone identifying someone else as the villain (even Trump, even White Supremacists) you should also begin looking for the projection going on, and the resistance it builds up to careful thought and pro-active autonomy.
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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Harry Marks wrote:I am also impressed by Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" which spelled out compelling geographical reasons why Cortez was likely to be the victor in the first encounter between European and New World empires. There is no genetic superiority likely to be involved when strong geographical forces are likely to have been in play.
Indeed, and I'm not sure if Jared Diamond's argument is entirely evidence based, but he makes a convincing case nonetheless. The horse played an important role in one group having dominion over the other. And in the New World and in Europe, the ability to grow certain crops— Wheat, Rice, Corn, Sorghum—was crucial in success. Those geographical factors obviously do play a role and continue to do so.
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Re: The Origins of Racial Politics

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geo wrote:Those geographical factors obviously do play a role and continue to do so.
"Continue to do so" may be misleading. Ability to grow food will continue to matter to cultural achievement, but it is now less important than, say, ability to breed high-yielding varieties. Ability to manipulate genetic material may be less important than ability to foresee the social consequences of releasing that technology into society.

In fact the whole question of who to look to for insight into the future is just misplaced. Since at least Hiroshima, the whole domination paradigm that Jared Diamond was analyzing has simply become toxic.

The culture to admire and emulate would be the culture which best creates relationships between countries that lead to peaceful development and mutual problem-solving ability.

Putin is out there demonstrating the hurdles which will need to be surmounted. Anyone who thinks his "success" in the Crimea is a sign that we should emulate him needs to smoke some ganja to clear their head.
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