Slavery and the origins of racism.

European powers began carving up the New World between them, African slaves were not part of their calculations. When we think of slavery today, we think of it primarily from the point of view of its relationship to racism.

Slavery and the origins of racism

by Lance Selfa

IT IS commonly assumed that racism is as old as human society itself. As long as human beings have been around, the argument goes, they have always hated or feared people of a different nation or skin color. In other words, racism is just part of human nature.

Representative John L. Dawson, a member of Congress after the Civil War, insisted that racial prejudice was “implanted by Providence for wise purposes.” Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin, a contemporary of Dawson’s, claimed that an “instinct of our nature” impelled us to sort people into racial categories and to recognize the natural supremacy of whites when compared to people with darker skins.1 More than a century later, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray produced The Bell Curve, an 800-page statistics-laden tome that purported to prove innate racial differences in intelligence. Today’s racists might don the mantel of science to justify their prejudices, but they are no less crude or mistaken than their 19th century forebears.

If racism is part of human nature, then socialists have a real challenge on their hands. If racism is hard-wired into human biology, then we should despair of workers ever overcoming the divisions between them to fight for a socialist society free of racial inequality. Fortunately, racism isn’t part of human nature. The best evidence for this assertion is the fact that racism has not always existed.