Rambling about racism

I've been listening to a lot of history lectures lately and what's struck me most significantly is how thoroughly and completely racist everyone was before this century. While the U.S. lives with a large amount of racial tension due to the fact that they recently (historically speaking) built an economic empire on the backs of minority forced/coerced labor racism was by no mean created or even practiced most intensely in the U.S. Throughout history ethnics groups have labeled themselves as “chosen” or genetically superior, mostly based on who became urbanized the fastest and most intensely. I'm sure the first farmers considered themselves superior to the surrounding nomads, as the Egyptians considered themselves superior to the Hebrews, as the Romans to the Germanic tribes, as the Arab Muslims to the Africans, as the Chinese to their surrounding cultures, as the Europeans to the Native Americans. Until the ideals of racial equality really coalesced in this century it was simply considered a given that different races were capable of different things. Various ethnicities have been considered “governing races.” In the 19^th century Europe kept the Ottoman Empire propped up when a challenge to it's rule came from Egypt because they considered the Ottomans a governing race while the Egyptians were seen as incapable of self-governance. A few hundreds of years before the Arabs had considered the Turks (who later became the ruling Ottomans) barbarians. A good demonstration of the fact that economic and military circumstances dictate a race's “superiority” more than any genetic factor.

Similar factors show up when you compare the civilizations of 13^th century Europe and the Americas. Technology and culture was on a similar level in both places, but Europe learned to create and organize massive overseas expeditions when the Church compelled it to go on crusade. These skills along with Islam's political and economic control of the mid-east lead it to the New World, where the diseases it had grown with pastoralization and intense urbanization decimated the native societies, often long before Europe even came into recorded contact with them. When Europeans finally did encounter the natives most of them had been killed by disease, leaving their civilizations in ruins and affirming the Europeans sense of racial superiority.

So I guess the first question is why humans are so ready to resort to racial explanations for different groups situations in the world rather than examining the whole picture and discovering the many diverse circumstances that place a people at their station in life. My theory is simply that it's the easiest way of doing things. Human beings gain most of their information about their surroundings from their eyes, and race is immediately discernible by visual inspection. Combine that with the need to impose order and systems on our surrounding and its a small leap to categorizing people by their physical appearance. Stereotypes are another tool in this system, assigning behaviors to appearances and allowing for even less inspection and analysis.

So what changed to allow the current prevailing view (in the West at least) that all races are equal, and that socio-economic status determines a person's capabilities much more so than the ethnicity they are born into? It seems obvious its that great panacea, Information. As people became increasing exposed to other groups because of ease of communication and transportation the basis of racism has crumbled. The main barrier to it's complete disintegration now seems to be economic. Immigration is fought against more because of a view that other ethnicities are stealing jobs rather than a belief that one group is inferior, both groups not realizing that this conflict within their class keeps them distracted from the fact that they've been pushed into the conflict by the upper economic classes, who's lives are much more different from theirs than they are from each other.

How will this change in the future? As the races blend it will become increasingly difficult to categorize people by their color and facial features. It seems unlikely, however, that people will stop categorizing and stereotyping. Religion has acted as an adequate substitute in many places, but even those distinctions are fading. It seems to me that the final remaining distinction between people will be economic, though you can bet that the upper classes will do everything in their power to make this revelation come slowly to the masses. The real question is whether this distinction can be smoothed and eliminated peacefully or through violence.