** WARNING: If you are easily offended/enraged by explorations of systemic racism and white privilege, stop reading now. **
I am an older white male, but in many respects, I no longer identify as “white.” It’s just too creepy and ugly … and carries a ton of depressing, horrendous baggage.
Nor do I identify as non-white, colored, Semitic, or any other race/creed/culture.
Despite the current genealogy craze, I identify as a human being and citizen of Planet Earth, first and foremost. Not a white human, just a … human. And I also try to see other people, no matter their color/creed/culture, first and foremost as fellow humans.
Yet, it seems I’m in a small minority of people who see human beings this way. All around the planet, many cultures and peoples still revere physical ‘whiteness’ as an indicator of purity or superiority — while darker skin tones are seen as inferior or somehow tainted. And the darker they are, the more inferior or tainted.
It amazes me that most of humanity is still there, still mired in racism.
This is true in much of Europe and America; it is true in Spain, Mexico, and most Spanish-speaking nations; and it’s even true in Japan, China, India, and parts of Africa. Reverence for ‘whiteness’ is part of many cultures and is found all across the globe. (Recall the pasty-white makeup of Japanese “geisha girls.”)
Yet this is an incredibly primitive, harmful way of thinking and judging others — and scarily, it’s also dead wrong. The real truth is much more … the opposite.
Look at the historical record. Pale or white-skinned people have generally not acted like angelic, pure, or superior beings. Over the past five centuries, (primarily) European whites have often been oppressive, cruel, short-sighted, and horribly inhumane. That’s the main reason some darker-skinned peoples and cultures started referring to whites as “white devils.”
Earning the pejorative nickname “white devils”
Seeing whites as “white devils” is perfectly understandable — if one looks at the development of modern civilization objectively.
For centuries, European whites were brutal conquerors and colonizers, and some of them — Vladimir Putin and Netanyahu, for example — still are today (though in modern times, whites mainly utilize corporations and economic control, not armies, to do their dirty work).
The Spanish conquistadors were among the most brutal and rapacious humans ever, and American settlers and their government and military committed ongoing genocide against the Native Americans and broke almost every treaty that they negotiated (in bad faith) with them.
Everywhere they went/invaded, the white Europeans wreaked havoc and tried to subjugate or kill off the native population(s). And many Europeans practiced slavery as well and supported a prosperous, thriving slave trade for centuries.
Not coincidentally, white Europeans also developed modern manipulative science and technology. They popularized the highly dangerous notion of “conquering nature” and perfected numerous ways to use and abuse the natural world and bend nature to their will.
Of course, there are also plenty of instances of Asian, African, and other “colored” peoples acting barbarically and brutally; Mao’s disastrous “Cultural Revolution,” Pol Pot and the Cambodian genocide, Sino-Japanese ethnic hatred and massacres, and the Rwandan genocide come to mind. Still, if one looks at the entirety of modern human history, whites stand out as the most consistent, cruel, and brutal oppressors and conquerors.
The million-dollar question
My question is: Why?Why are white folks often so oppressive, mean-spirited, and cruel?And I think I’ve arrived at some uncomfortable answers. [Note: These are my personal psychological and sociological musings, not scholarly excavations or fact-finding.]
One straightforward answer is that if whites are seen as “superior,” it stands to reason that their supposed superiority goes to their heads and they soon become overbearing and arrogant. They get “swelled heads” and start to believe they are destined to rule and control other “lesser” humans.
From there, of course, it’s just a small jump to imposing one’s own favored beliefs, religion, and/or culture on “lesser” beings, both to control them and also to “civilize” them (as the Catholic church has famously done, all over the world). Sadly, most attempts to “civilize” darker-skinned peoples were thinly veiled efforts to steal their land and use and abuse it — and them — for profit.
. . .
Then there’s the age-old moral and spiritual dichotomy of light vs. dark, and the supposed “battle” between forces of light and forces of darkness. In this dichotomized worldview, light, and thus whiteness, supposedly represent forces of good that are aligned with the divine and “God’s will” — while darkness and blackness are directly associated with demonic or anti-spiritual forces that oppose or undermine “God’s will.”
This simplistic, literally black-and-white approach to life is quite destructive — but, unfortunately, it’s also very compelling. It still holds much of humanity in its iron grip, despite its vast oversimplification of our reality.
Why? Well, what could be more basic, or more impactful, than the daily light/dark duality we witness every day — the endless march of light following darkness, and day following night following day?
Yet this dualistic aspect of our daily lives is a very poor metaphor — terrible, really — for our interactive, social experiences as human beings.
It inclines us to judge and misjudge our fellow humans — often by the color of their skin — and to substitute destructive, nonsensical ideas like “light/white equals good” and “dark/black equals bad” for more nuanced and accurate descriptions of our experiences.
We usually love the light and fear the darkness
Then we’ve got to add in another crucial factor: Overall, we love the light (literally!), since sunlight helps us see things clearly and enables most of our daily activities — while we often fear the night and darkness, since it obscures our physical surroundings, inhibits our vision and activities, and exposes us to possible threats and unseen dangers.
The bottom line here is that our physical reality of light/dark, and our semi-conscious feelings about each side of this duality, strongly impact our perceptions of life — and are usually projected onto our social lives and other human beings. This occurs almost automatically, despite the fact that this projection is way, way off base when it comes to people, and is often wildly inaccurate.
Put differently, we could say that “light” and “whiteness” have always had a massive, unfair psychological and social advantage, due to our most basic perceptions of our daily lives and reality on this planet. Simultaneously, “darkness” and “blackness” have gotten a bad rap (undeservedly) for eons and have often been feared, hated, and maligned.
And historically, white colonizers have usually taken total, despicable advantage of their intrinsic, wildly unfair “one-up” position.
Perhaps it really is that simple. Almost all of our racial color prejudices and ancient cultural hatreds may have resulted from … a deep, crucial misunderstanding based on mistaken inferences and projections, which in turn derive directly from our most basic experiences of day vs. night.
It’s absurdly simplistic. Plus, it’s deeply inaccurate and dangerous. It just needs to … stop.
Yet we humans — the vast majority, anyway — seem content to stay judgmental and either somewhat or very racist. Most of us blindly accept, or at least don’t challenge, the harmful social and emotional programming that we absorb growing up. Most of us don’t deeply examine the many prejudices and judgments we project on others, and instead act them out in the social world around us — with predictably horrendous results.
Racism. Bigotry. Slavery. Apartheid. Ethnic hatred. Mass murder. Genocide.
. . .
From Psychology Today:
The rise and dominance of the ‘white devils’
This brings me back to the ugly subject of “white devils.” Over the past 500 years or so — since the early Renaissance — white Europeans have engaged in a major expansionist drive, embarking on endless worldwide expeditions of exploitation, colonization, genocide, and cultural destruction/replacement.
If we consider only the Roman Catholic church, the Spanish empire, and the British empire, we can already see in these three powerful empires the bulk of the atrocities, genocide, brutal colonization, and cultural replacement that utterly destroyed many indigenous peoples and cultures in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia.
And these are just three of the most obvious, well-known perpetrator groups. There were many others. In modern times, we’ve seen the genocide of the Armenians, the Nazi genocide of the Jews and other “undesirables,” and the continued persecution, harassment, and murder of Black Americans — all at the hands of so-called “superior” whites and Christians.
. . .
Let me sum up: Our age-old fantasies linking “whiteness” with goodness and superiority are hopelessly misinformed, limited, and just plain wrong.
Judging by the historical record, there is no way that whiteness or pale skin should ever have been associated with goodness, superiority, or purity.
In many cases, the exact opposite is true. Many of the worst, most horrendous patterns and events of Western civilization, indeed world civilization as a whole, have been deliberately created and pursued by arrogant, entitled white people — whites who believe with all their hearts that they are truly superior and deserve to lord it over other “lesser” (darker-skinned) humans.
Their endless arrogance and deep cruelty have gradually earned whites a well-deserved, very bad reputation among many other cultures and peoples around the world. Yet in their blindness and arrogance, most white folks usually can’t see this at all, and are mystified and deeply offended that these “ignorant,” “uncivilized” others don’t appreciate their efforts or look up to them as they’re supposed to.
Of course, to these “inferior” races and cultures, white folks’ casual, willful blindness and racist arrogance just make matters worse — much worse — and keep reinforcing the image of many whites being “white devils.” White people’s perverse history of persecution, racism, colonialism, and cultural destruction can, indeed, make them seem actively demonic. Sadly, it’s earned many of them a lasting, repugnant reputation as “white devils.”
What a terrible, horrifying legacy. It’s what the current crop of rabid white supremacists probably think of as “the good old days.”
The deepest, healing choice
Here’s my prayer and heartfelt desire: The next time you witness someone singing the praises of white civilization, supporting “white supremacy,” expressing disdain for black or colored people, or acting in hateful and racist ways, please recall what I’ve laid bare here.
Recall the intensity and extent of their delusions of white superiority … and realize that they truly and deeply “know not what they do”, as Jesus often put it. They are, symbolically, deaf, dumb, and blind. Once you truly ‘get’ this truth, you can choose to forgive them in your heart for their willfulness and blindness, if you wish.
But then, do something else also: Don’t let the racism or cruelty just go by. Don’t turn your head and ignore or minimize it. That’s how the whole sickening, ugly mess keeps getting perpetuated.
Please do your part — whatever you can do — to help humanity move on and move forward. Do something to directly respond to what you’re seeing or hearing. Call it out. Help others who are in need or oppressed.
And please, please see — and help others see — the dangerous conceit of “white superiority” for the vast, excruciating lie and destructive sham that it is.
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This post was previously published on Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs.
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