Frankenstein
TLDR: Europeans conceptions of Race fuels a lot of the anxieties we see in modern white society as white supremacy is on the way to the hospital and to its death bed.
There is a huge problem in modern perceptions that I have noticed. Racism as a concept and the definition of it is heavily whitewashed.
Race and Racism is simply unnatural to the human experience despite what most in the modern world would like you to believe. The modern view is that humans of the past were just as racist as people are now when that’s simply not the case. Racism can lead to discrimination but discrimination does not equal racism. When people view history from modern lens, the ideas of race is at play when these people were all about their own cultures. For the cultures who did discriminate or were prejudice or xenophobic against others, it was never racialized. Most civilized people viewed “others” as uncivilized or barbarians.
People will have to realize, racism is an European construction from the 1500s. The concepts of race has its origins in scientific racism. The Europeans created a frankstien, a social technology that would help them unite against the others. Do you guys know about yellow peril? The fear Europeans had of the threat of the East? The Mongols were invading from the East and the Moors from the South. Europeans were not United under some conceptual notion of race yet or nationality but they were united under the same religion.
They created a sort of Frankstein with the conceptualization of race, to differentiate themselves, not from “themselves or cultures that followed the same religion” but from those who didn’t.
The misconception that racism is natural is apart of the collective blame shift and moral blindness that perpetuates these ideas.
Racism is simply an ideology, a belief system, a paradigm. It doesn’t have to include hate.
Race+ism
Historical definitions before the whitewashing of the post-civil rights movements.
*racism (n.)
by 1928, in common use from 1935, originally in a European context, “racial supremacy as a doctrine, the theory that human characteristics and abilities are determined by race;” see racist, and compare the various senses in race (n.2) and racialism. Applied to American social systems from late 1930s.
1932 (as an adjective from 1938), from race (n.2) + -ist. Racism (q.v.) is in use by 1928, originally in the context of fascist theories, and common from 1936. These words replaced earlier racialism (1882) and racialist (1910), both often used early 20c. in a British or South African context. There are isolated uses of racism from c. 1900.
This meaning of Nationalism in no sense implies any consent to the doctrine of Racism, which holds that unity of racial origin is the main principle of unity for civil society and that the members of each ethnical branch should properly aim at grouping themselves together into so many national States. Although it is desirable that strongly-felt national aspirations, which often depend on community of race, should be satisfied, as far as this may be compatible with justice, Racism or the Principle of Racial Self determination, as it has been called in recent years is a materialistic illusion contrary to natural law and destructive of civilisation. [James Strachey Barnes, “The Universal Aspects of Fascism,” London, 1928]
Returning recently from a six months’ visit to Europe, the Rev. John LaFarge, noted Catholic writer, warned at a dinner given in his honor that the destructive forces of “racism” are increasing in the United States, and that they could cause irreparable harm among the American people if immediate steps are not taken to combat them.
Father LaFarge said that American racism is directed principally against Negroes, Jews, and foreigners. He described it as “the pale but venomous cousin” of Nazi racism. Like its Nazi counterpart, he added, it has erected impassable barriers between extensive regions and large groups of people, has formed its own myths and moulded its own social institutions, and above all has come consistently into conflict with Christian teachings. [Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life, vol. XVII, No. 2, Feb. 1939]
