When I was a boy I had an aunt who had been a Baptist missionary in, what was then, the Belgium Congo and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This gives you a clue that this was the 1950’s and Africa was still largely in the hands of European countries. She and her husband were captured and managed to escape prison and return to England. I remember her telling me once, that ‘black people are not as intelligent as white people’. Fortunately I had never seen a black person at that age. But it was one of many ‘white lies’ I have heard.
I use this anecdote to show how the morality of generations evolve and change. After the second world war and the fight against fascism, opinions of others based on their race, religion, disability, sexuality were liberalised. The Nazis and to some extent Victorians, believed in eugenics and the creation of a ‘master race’ – completely opposite of what today we call ‘respect for diversity’.
My own skin colour I will not reveal here, as it changes with my exposure to the sun and is therefore of little relevance, and my race is – human.
The permission to abuse another human being, on account of their perceived inferiority must go back to ancient Sumer, Abyssinia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Throughout the Middle East and the Classical world, people were either royal, free or slaves. This was a ‘perfectly normal’ set up and no doubt solved the problem of what to do with prisoners from conquered lands, as well as deciding who was going to do the washing up.
A Chain Gang in Ancient Rome
When Europe adopted Greek and Roman classicism in the Renaissance they stole and copied statues of gods and Emperors; more as decorative pieces of sculpture, rather than because they admired the shameful behaviour of minor gods and Emperors.
But this model undoubtedly had an effect on the human consciences. How else could slavery have remained legal until the eighteenth century? When Europe was exploiting the West Indies and needed slave labour, Africa was convenient for it’s ships to pick up more slaves, and yes, sometimes from Africans ready to sell their enemies.
In those times much of the riches of the Western cultures came from the sweat, blood and tears of slaves. We know this, so – have we changed?
I personally think that we have, but not totally. I see people from all over the world living and working in European cities. There are high achievers and low achievers in any society, depending on how you measure ‘achievement’. But more importantly, people all over the world today are better fed, more likely to survive birth, and more likely to be educated and have access to health care. There are obviously exceptions to all of these but I am describing a trend. There are graphs produced by physicians and social scientists like the late Swedish academic Hans Rosling, that tell us this.
There is room for everyone on the planet according to the Professor
But the devil is, as always, in the detail. Racism endures in the minds of people of all races. There is a saying ‘birds of a feather stick together’ and as a description of human social behaviour, this remains largely, true.
The European collective unconscious has a lot of skeletons in it’s museum vaults and these continue to rattle to the present day.
Clearly, national institutions continue to exert power that is prejudicial towards it’s citizens on account of race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability – despite the introduction of many laws, certainly in Europe, to correct this.
Personally I do not think new laws change societies of themselves, there has to be more. Even after the late Martin Luther King Jnr. gave his inspirational speeches in the 1960’s; sixty years later there are still statues of slave traders in European cities and military bases in the southern states of the USA named after confederate generals.
Head of Martin Luther King Junior in MLK Park, Buffalo, New York State
Whilst it is correct to record and preserve the facts of history and heritage, much of what our forefathers thought was ‘acceptable’ is nothing to be proud of today. Museums and history books must be trusted and treasured so that they enable future generations to learn from the past. This will, at best, inspire an imperative to practice compassion towards one another today, because we got it wrong in past.
Therefore it is clearly the responsibility of those with the power to do so, to make regular assessments of local and national institutions and weed out any ‘honouring’ of the past, of which we should be ashamed, without hiding truth.
The African Americans and many allies, are presently leading the charge against their prejudicial treatment, but the lesson has global implications.
There is not a single human being on the planet including myself, who would not benefit from keeping a constant check on personal behaviours towards others that reveals some irrational prejudice, and immediately correct it.
Some argue that doing nothing is also acting with prejudice and perhaps they are right. Laws can be broken by act or omission, so can our personal integrity. The saying goes something like; ‘evil thrives when the good guys do nothing’.
And it is a fact that people of all colours, creed, tribe and what ever distinction you choose, have done nothing for a very long time. The history of post colonial Africa contains many shameful periods of genocide.
For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1997 and 2003, five million people were killed. If you read an article in the Guardian Newspaper website entitled ‘Wars Will Never Stop’ it quotes a young fighter who was dying in hospital of his shocking injuries from a local skirmish with a rival faction of his rebel group;
“I was just a foot soldier so I don’t really know why we were fighting,” he said. “There are lots of reasons I think …. I don’t think the wars here will ever stop. They will probably get worse.”
The question has to be asked, where were the protests of outrage from people of African heritage in their adopted countries all over the world?
Who did nothing when 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda in just one hundred days in 1994?
Rwandan Genocide
We all have to be careful that they are not being stirred up and manipulated for political reasons. In Rwanda the principle tool for the stirring up of hatred was the public radio.
All societies have to guard against the publication of false information or the abscence of true information. For instance, it is curious that the size of the problem of ‘deaths in police custody’ is not published, despite a law in the United States of America requiring them to be so. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 went into effect in December 2014, but official figures have never been made public. The reason is either that these figures will prompt national outrage and shame, or lead to a conclusion that the problem is much smaller than it is being made to seem.
Clearly, one death is too many, but national figures covering 500,000,000 people have to be published openly, especially when feelings are running high as they are now.
The core problem is contained in the hearts of those who nurture hatred towards other human beings, for whatever reason. It does not matter if the hatred is black against black or white against black or black against white or white against white. The issue, in my view, is not an identification with a race or class, or creed, but the level of willingness of each human being to allow their love for all of humanity, to rise above everything else.
‘Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.’ Dr. Martin Luther King Junior
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