All societies have discriminated against people based on gender, race, class, religion, nationality, tribe, and language, in one form or another. In this maze, some people act against their own self-interest by accepting the norms and ideas of those at the pinnacle of a race-class structure. In modern times—modern is, of course, a relative term—this Alpha pyramid has been white, and male dominated and anchored by class (wealth) position, so that discrimination by the wealthy is directed against poor and middle-class whites as well. However, race and class have been married for centuries. Racism became the justification for slavery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. After ancient slavery ended, skin color was nonetheless used to maintain what I would call a race-class matrix.
It is important to understand that slavery is ancient, but slavery based on skin color is not. One must study the Moorish conquest of Spain and parts of Europe in their seven-hundred-year occupation, and the scientific racism of Carl Linnaeus and Johann Blumenbach in the eighteenth century, before any solid understanding of the concept of race can be comprehended. One must trace the origin of racism and how ancient slavery (the word slave originated from the word Slav, relating to Slavic people who were once enslaved) morphed from people being made prisoners in wars and being captives because of religion or culture, into being based on the color of a person’s skin so as to create racist institutions and neurologically imprint the image of the superiority of so-called white skin and Western European ancestry (Eastern Europeans of a darker hue were often excluded from the calculation.). One should explore the false concept of superior races and geographic reasons for development in the northern hemisphere as opposed to southern latitudes. Climate, crops, metal, germs, animals, and geographic orientations of the continents provides a great amount of discovery to completely dispel the false concept of racial supremacy and the misapplication of the often-repeated phrase “survival of the fittest.” [AP1]
The world is underpinned with false narratives as it developed within legal, educational, and traditional structures. Because educational institutions have sought to ignore this problem, it still haunts us today. Fortunately, over the course of many centuries, people have fought against injustice to produce a better life. We were all born into this racist global system that discriminates in one form or another and depends on a false rendition of the historical record. We are never just individuals making things happen on our own. We can either choose to go along with the situation we were born into or labor to make it better.
It is a sorrowful commentary that many people often just blindly go along with the way things are without conscious thought. Our life span is short, and we will never be here again. This is precisely the reason why we should do the best we can for ourselves and humanity. We can go along with the racism which buttresses social and political institutions, built up with misguided hero worship and race supremacy, or join those who have determined that this life and our society can do better by word and deed. I advocate that social and political institutions must change to service the needs of all people. Many sociologists, political thinkers, and psychologists, some of whom never read the classic work of Frantz Fanon (1961), The Wretched of the Earth, have been academically denied as to how rebellion is formed within a society that is unjust. One should spend more time in activities that better us all.
