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April 13, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:20
THE PERMANENCE OF RACISM? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep310
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Alright, today, a special episode.
I'm going to talk about...
The question of is racism permanent?
In a sense, that's the central premise of critical race theory, the permanence of racism.
And I'm going to argue that if racism is permanent and will always exist, well, it must always have existed in the past.
Well, but did it?
Drawing on my own work on race, which goes back a quarter century, going back to my book, The End of Racism.
Look at this, kind of a massive tome here.
600 pages, 2,000 footnotes.
I'm going to make the startling case that racism is not permanent.
It had an historical beginning.
I'm going to tell you exactly what that beginning was.
I'm going to spell it out, and then I'm going to conclude by showing what the end of racism will look like in Western society.
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Is racism permanent?
Is it something that is going to last forever?
Is it something that is in some way embedded either in human nature or in Western culture or in, well, the genetic makeup of white people?
These are all questions raised by critical race theory, which supplies dogmatic answers to these questions, but without any kind of supporting examination or investigation.
So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to turn the assumption of critical race theory, the permanence of racism, into a question.
We know that the CRT guys believe racism to be permanent, in part because if you take one of the gurus of CRT, this is Derek Bell, the Harvard legal scholar, and his kind of pioneering work, which is called Faces at the Bottom of the Well.
What's the subtitle of that book?
The permanence of racism.
And there you go.
And all the sort of nostrums of critical race theory that you can't really atone for racism.
Exactly why? Because it's permanent.
It's not going away.
So there's nothing to atone for.
And that this is a kind of incurable ill which calls for perpetual villainization of whites and perpetual victimization of minorities, particularly blacks.
All of this, I think, needs to be scrutinized and needs to be scrutinized with some level of intellectual probing and depth.
That's what I hope to do in this special episode.
So let me begin by looking at where racism comes from.
Well, one idea worth considering is that racism is universal.
It's part of human nature.
It exists all over the world.
It's always existed. There's some form of racism everywhere.
And that's the universality possibility.
Here's a second possibility.
Racism arises out of slavery.
So the notion here is that racism isn't necessarily universal.
People don't automatically come up with the idea of dividing people by race or establishing racial superiority or inferiority.
That racism is a kind of handmaiden of slavery.
And when you have slavery, it creates in the masters a desire to say, we're on top and you're at the bottom.
We're better than you are. And so racism becomes a necessary kind of adjunct to slavery as a form of exploitation and oppression.
A third possibility, racism is a kind of feature, a pathology of Western and of white culture.
And the people who argue this will make observations like, hey, have you noticed that in the English language, terms associated with black are generally negative?
Think of things like blackmail or blackball or blackmass, blacklist, blackmagic, blackmarket, blacksheep.
All of that suggests something wicked or disgraceful, corrupt, negative.
But white is generally associated with purity and beauty.
And one of the left-wing writers, Paula Rothenberg, argues that, look, even if you take the concept of a white lie, which is negative, but a white lie means kind of a small lie, a trivial lie.
So the whitening of a lie is kind of the minimization of the lie.
So all of this is a way of...
Attributing racism here to not only the culture, but the very language of Western culture.
Now, I'm going to look at all this in some depth, but I want to give you in advance my conclusion.
I want to give you the argument I'm going to be making over the next, well, the next 40 minutes or so.
I'm going to argue that racism is not universal.
It's not part of the human condition.
In fact, racism hasn't always even existed in the West.
If you look at the ancient world, you won't find racism.
I will argue a single example of racism anywhere in the West or in the world prior to the modern era.
I'm going to argue that racism in that sense is modern and developed in the West for reasons that I'll talk about.
I'm going to show that racism is not part of the English language and terms like black male and black sheep have nothing to do with racism. I'm going to insist that racism did have an historical beginning. It's a modern and a western ideology.
You can find hints of it in other cultures but it developed not because of slavery.
In fact, it developed in the west prior to slavery. Now it was of course reinforced by slavery which is to say that slavery made racism stronger by giving racism a certain made racism a sort of rationalization for slavery but but racism wasn't caused by slavery.
In fact, racism was really caused when the white man, in the modern era, for the first time, began to encounter what the white man himself called primitive culture.
In other words, cultures that were seen as dramatically backward compared to the state of Western culture at the time.
And by at the time here, we mean between about the 17th and the 19th centuries.
So, the modern We're an era.
And what does racism do?
It provides a kind of explanation, a kind of coherent account, if you will, of huge civilizational differences between Western culture on the one hand and so-called primitive cultures on the other.
Differences that, at least according to the Europeans, could not be accounted for by environmental or cultural differences and were therefore attributed to nature itself, to natural differences.
Before we dive into all this, I want to begin by just talking about what racism is.
What is it? What's the definition of racism?
Well, racism is an ideology of intellectual or moral superiority based upon the biological characteristic of race.
Now, there's a lot in there, and we need to tease out the features of that definition.
First of all, to believe racism To be a racist, you must first believe that human beings can be biologically distinguished on the basis of race.
If you don't believe that you can do that, then racism becomes kind of meaningless because you can't tell the difference.
You have to be able to observe and notice some inherent differences among people.
Number two, you have to rank those differences.
If you notice a bunch of differences, but they don't mean anything to you, there's no racism.
You have to rank them in terms of superiority and inferiority.
And third, you have to hold those rankings to be biological or innate.
If you don't hold them to be biological, if you think that they're cultural and mutable and changeable, then you don't have racism at all.
So with that definition of racism, let's now probe the question, did racism have a beginning?
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You've got to use promo code DINESH. We find in the modern era a belief in racism, in racial superiority, that is upheld not just by slave owners and by yahoos and by people who are, in a sense, You can say full of prejudice, but you can find racism at the highest levels of Western civilization.
You find it in David Hume in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant, also in the 18th century, and then in the 19th century in Hegel.
And I picked these three figures because they are three of the most eminent philosophers of the modern era.
And here is David Hume.
I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all the other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites.
And then he goes on to say, there was never any civilized nation of any other complexion than white.
No ingenious manufacturers among them, no arts, no sciences, such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countries and ages if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men.
Now, I'll come back to this, but we see in here some of the seeds of how racism came to be not only invented, but widely believed and believed by highly intelligent people like the philosopher Hume.
We find similar remarks by Kant and Hegel, which I won't quote.
But I want to begin by looking at this question of whether or not racism is somehow universal.
Now, if you look at accounts from all over the world, accounts from China, India, the Greeks, the Muslims, the Zulus, you find that they are very conscious of differences, particularly of color.
They're very aware that people are white and they're black and they're light or they're dark or they're somewhere in the middle.
And in fact, particularly in ancient times, you have rather kind of vivid and somewhat candid descriptions that sometimes seem kind of insulting.
And so when you hear these, you go, wow, that's racism.
But you have to look a little more carefully to realize that, no, that's actually not racism.
There is an awareness of color differences, but something else is going on.
In fact, I'll go on to argue that something else is not racism, but...
Ethnocentrism. And ethnocentrism is nothing more than every culture regarding itself as the center of the universe and looking, in a sense, suspiciously or askance at all the other cultures.
And we find this ethnocentrism to be not only in sort of advanced and highly developed cultures, we find it even in the most simple and primitive cultures as well.
Let's consider for a moment the Indian caste system.
Is it racist?
Now, again, the caste system on the face of it has some obvious similarities with racism.
It's hierarchical.
It's hereditary.
The lower castes are stigmatized as inferior.
There are prohibitions on social contact.
And so you've got these inbuilt distinctions, and that's a feature of racism.
But here's the problem. All the members of all these castes, the Brahmins at the top, the Kshatriyas in the middle, the Vashiyas in the middle, the Untouchables at the bottom, they all belong to the same race.
They're all, you may say, Asian, Indian.
They all belong to the same.
You can't automatically distinguish them on the basis of color.
There might be some slight differences, but they're all different.
As Indian people generally are members of the same racial group.
If you look at the Chinese, you look at the Zulus, you find that you've got this ethnocentric tendency to make your own group primary and everybody else secondary.
Here, by the way, is an ancient writer from Iraq.
His name is Saeed al-Andalusi.
Andalus here meaning from Andalusia or the Muslim part of Spain.
And this guy's commenting about Iraq.
And here's what he says, the people of Iraq have sound minds, commendable passions, balanced natures, high proficiency in every art, well-proportioned limbs, well-compounded humors, and a pale brown color which is the most apt and proper color.
He goes on to say, he goes on to argue that the Europeans are kind of pale and it's almost like the sun didn't really reach them and so they're pallid and they're a little disgusting.
And then he goes on to say that the Ethiopians and the blacks are sort of overdone by the sun.
And then he concludes, and this is his concluding line, the Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust, but pleasantly between the two.
So here's a guy who thinks that the Iraqis have the best color and the best pretty much everything.
And this is ethnocentrism.
So tribalism, ethnocentrism, this is a universal tendency.
But notice that typically it's not based on race.
It is equally directed at all the other races that are kind of lumped in together.
And even the violence that has occurred in history due to ethnocentrism, different tribes and groups fighting each other, these conflicts have not been racial.
I mean, think about the conflicts between the Serbs and the Croatians.
Between the Sikhs and the Hindus, the Basque and the Spanish, the Protestant and the Catholic, the English and the Irish, the Turk and the Armenian.
Yeah, these are tribal conflicts, but many of these people fighting on two different sides belong to the same race.
That's the key point.
In the American Civil War, which was for the most part a white man's war, it was the same race fighting on both sides of the conflict.
The Hundred Years' War in Europe, the same thing.
And So this establishes a critical difference between racism and ethnocentrism.
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Did racism arise out of slavery?
In other words, I think I've shown that racism is not something that is universal.
To say that is to confuse race and tribe or racism and ethnocentrism.
So, a second theory we want to examine, and here it is from the left-wing writer Basil Davidson, who says that race contempt crept in when free men could justify their material interests by the scorn that they had for slaves.
So, racism here is said to be a rationalization of slavery.
Other writers, Salman Rushdie, Lerone Benedict sort of echoed this.
But it is actually quite wrong.
As I mentioned, racism did fortify slavery.
It did actually rationalize slavery, but it developed long before slavery.
It developed, in fact, in the modern era before slavery.
Certainly before the transatlantic slave trade.
That's really what I mean. Slavery itself is extremely ancient.
But here's the key point.
In ancient slavery, the difference between the master and the slave had nothing to do with race.
You find this well established in Orlando Patterson's book, Slavery and Social Death.
He points out that slaves typically belong to the same race.
In fact, one tribe would conquer another tribe.
And this happened all over the world.
One group of Chinese would conquer another group of Chinese, enslave them.
One group of Africans would conquer another group of Africans and enslave them.
So slavery is a universal institution, but it is detached from race.
And typically in ancient India, China, and Europe, and Africa, the slaves and the slave owners belong to the same race.
This was not always true.
The Romans, for example, had white slaves, brown slaves, black slaves.
But again, you can see they're indiscriminate in whom they're willing to enslave.
And so there is no racial criterion of only the whites are enslaving only the blacks or anything like that.
In fact, the term slave in its origin comes from the term Slav and refers to the Eastern Europeans who were known who were slaves, many of them in Europe.
Now, when we go to the ancient world, ancient Greece and Rome, we find that you have, as I said earlier, a kind of acknowledgement of race and even an assertion of Greek and Roman superiority.
But this is not racism.
The Greeks, in fact, make a distinction between the Greek, who is the civilized one, and the barbarian, who is said to be kind of speaking a kind of incomprehensible tongue, you know, bar, bar, bar, that's kind of what it sounds like, and that's the origin of the term barbarian.
But the Greeks regarded the Northern Europeans, who were white, as barbarians.
And they also regarded the darker people to the south of Greece as barbarians.
And they had equal contempt for both.
So you see right here that the Greeks are not being racist.
They are basically saying, we're the best.
And everybody else has not gotten as far.
In knowledge, in learning, in sophistication, in philosophy, in theater, and so on as we have.
And by and large, in that sense, the Greeks were, in that respect, correct.
The scholar Frank Snowden, who's an expert on ancient Greece, says that the Greeks were ethnocentric, but they were, in fact, not racist.
Then we turn to the Christians, and you find that you have important differences, say, between Christian and Jew, or between the Christian and the non-believer, the infidel, if you will.
But notice that that's a religious distinction, not a racial one.
In fact, It's very clear if you go to the early Christian, the early Christian fathers.
Origen, for example, one of the fathers of the early church, he says that human souls are originally black like the Ethiopians.
But he means all human souls.
He doesn't mean the souls of black people.
And then he says all souls can be brightened through the light of God's grace.
So again, you can easily jump on this and say, oh, wait a minute!
But you're projecting your own racial biases onto Origen.
For Origen, this has nothing to do with race whatsoever.
The dividing line is between the saved and the unsaved.
And similarly, anti-Semitism, as it developed in the ancient world, or in the early Christian world, was not based upon race.
It became secularized later.
And for Hitler and for others, it took on a secular connotation.
But originally, the Christians were basically, they drew a religious line between themselves.
And the Jews.
By and large, in the ancient world where there were differences that were noticed and commented on, and as I say, the ancients were kind of blunt in doing this, they blamed it on the climate.
They thought that racial differences are due to temperature and the sun and the heat and cold of different places in the world.
Here's Ibn Khaldun, the great Muslim traveler of the Middle Ages and writer, travel writer of the Middle Ages.
And here's Ibn Khaldun talking about blacks in southern Africa.
Khaldun, by the way, is writing from his own observation.
We have seen that the Negroes are in general characterized by great levity, excitability, and great emotionalism.
Wow, this is really interesting because this is what we would think of as a sort of 20th century or 19th century stereotype of blacks.
But here is this exact stereotype observed by a Muslim writer writing in the Middle Ages.
Here's Khaldun continuing.
He says that blacks are found eager to dance whenever they hear a melody.
Wow! So Khaldun, again, writing a thousand years ago, is talking about the cultural attributes that he observes in blacks.
But here's the interesting thing.
He doesn't blame it on any kind of intrinsic or biological tendency at all.
In fact, he blames it entirely on the climate, the heat of the sun.
In fact, Khaldun says, hey, listen, when I sit in my hot bath, I feel like singing.
So in other words, Khaldun's point is that the heat of the sun produces cultural traits in people that can be attributed not to intrinsic qualities, but to environment.
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Let me sum up what I've tried to show thus far.
Racism is not universal.
Ethnocentrism is, but not racism.
Number two, racism isn't merely a rationalization for slavery.
It did perform that function, but it precedes the modern transatlantic slave trade.
Third, while ancient people noticed differences that are based upon skin color or based upon biology, they tended to attribute those and also differences in behavior to cultural and climatic factors.
It's not to sort of intrinsic or biological factors.
So this notion that differences between human groups are rooted in differences of nature or biology, this is a modern idea.
In fact, race itself is a modern idea.
The term race, which we use so freely today, in fact, you can't get away from it.
It didn't come into general use until the 18th century.
The term race seems to have derived from an Arabic word, ras, which kind of means beginning.
And yet, race doesn't become a biological category until adorned with the respectability of science, by the way, until really into the 19th century.
Before that, you found that people would use sometimes the word race, but they would use it in a very colloquial or casual way, not necessarily referring to a racial group itself.
And this kind of broad usage of race, by the way, continues well into the 20th century.
Sometimes race is used to denote nationality, sometimes religion, sometimes ethnicity, and sometimes the species itself.
People will talk about the German race or the Tamil race, the Celtic race, the Jewish race, the human race, or in some cases a race of animals, a race of birds.
Race here, you can see, is being used so promiscuously that it tends to lose its specific meaning.
But its specific meaning develops very clearly in the modern era, and we're going to talk about why that is.
Now... I want to introduce the concept here of the civilization gap.
And the civilization gap is what happens in the modern era when for the first time people begin to do exploration.
Europeans begin to do exploration around the world, but other people too.
The Chinese do exploration.
The Arabs do exploration.
They discover parts of the world previously unknown to them.
And so you have an interesting phenomenon, a kind of culture shock.
The culture shock is produced not simply by the fact that people are different.
Wow, they do this over here.
We do it that way over there.
But it's also because they find large differences in the perceived level of human development.
And so you have cultures that have taken inventions for granted, that they go to some other place and they go, oh, wow, those people don't even know how to fish.
Oh wow, those people don't even know how to count.
And so suddenly you have this idea that certain people are more developed, more advanced than others, and there is a search for explanations for why this is so.
So let's track this process of not just the existence of a civilization gap, but the discovery of it and the attempts to make sense of it.
Starting in the late Middle Ages, you have some of these cultures, advanced cultures in the world that have technology.
And by technology, I mean they're able to build boats that can cross the big oceans.
And they can go find other people who were previously unfamiliar and try to...
Well, typically, they're going to look for stuff that benefits them.
They're looking for things that they can trade or things that they can capture or, in some cases, things that they can steal.
So the Chinese arrive on the coast of Africa several times between the 11th and the 15th centuries.
In fact, there were pioneering explorations conducted by this guy, a Chinese eunuch named Cheng Ho.
This is during the Ming Dynasty between about 1405 and 1433.
And a bunch of Chinese travelers, we have their writings.
They discover Africa from the Chinese point of view.
Obviously, they don't discover it in the sense that Africa obviously existed before that.
But you can find in their writings a kind of derogatory tone toward the Africans.
Now, again, the Chinese are derogatory toward anyone who is not Chinese.
But I just want to pay attention to what the Chinese are saying.
Here's a Chinese geographer of the early 19th century, Zhu Zhu, and he's talking about black Africans.
And he goes, it seems to me that these Chinese We're good to go.
And they are behind.
And so you have this interesting phenomenon of cultures that are coexisting in a particular point of time being located on different points of time developmentally.
It's almost like we would do today, where you might find two guys who are both 19 years old, but one guy says to the other, well, cognitively, you're 14 years old.
So, even though we're the same chronological age, we're not the same developmental age.
And I guess what's going on here is the Chinese writer is applying that exact same logic to cultures.
And he goes on to say about the Africans, quote, they were unable to develop a civilization by themselves.
What he's basically implying is we, the Chinese, are able to develop a civilization and they are not.
Now this again is not racism, but you can begin to see how racial explanations begin to creep in to provide a kind of justification for these differences in civilizational development.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code BALANCE. It is difficult for us today to appreciate the sense of shock with which people who traveled from places like India and China and the Arab world, when they encountered people who are very different, they really didn't know what to make of them.
We live today, of course, in a globalized world.
Many people have traveled to many countries.
Also, many people from other cultures have been educated in the West, and so there's common language, and everyone's using the same technology.
So we've become a little blurred in our senses to the sort of sharpness of human differences.
But if you flashback 500 years or so to the early modern era, you have a whole different picture.
If you look at the early...
Expectations, but even early travel accounts of what early travelers, Portuguese sailors, for example, believed in wild men who live in trees.
They believed in trumpet-blowing apes.
There were people who, Sir John Mandeville says that if you go out far away from the shores of Europe, you're going to find dog-headed men.
You're going to find natives whose testicles fall down to the ground.
Columbus talks about looking for people who are born with And so you've got this sort of sense that we don't know what's in the world out there.
Who's to say you can't find a human being with a tail or with two heads?
And so the world had not been really fully explored and navigated.
So this is the first impression that people have of people who are completely different.
Now, we need to note that in the ancient world, there were many important civilizations and civilizations that were sort of littered all over the world.
You had some important and powerful tribes in Africa.
You had the Inca and the Mayas in the Americas.
You had ancient China, which was a refined and sophisticated, perhaps the most sophisticated civilization in the ancient world.
You had multiple Muslim civilizations, civilizations that came out of places like Syria, Damascus, Baghdad, now in Iraq, Constantinople, the Mughal Empire in India.
You had Indian civilization, which was based on the ancient texts and based upon the Bhagavad Gita.
And so you had this sort of diversity of important cultures in the ancient world.
But then something very remarkable happens, which is that Western culture begins to advance far ahead of everybody else.
Advance in what? In learning, in wealth, and in power.
And in military might, which goes along with wealth and goes along with the development of technological power.
And suddenly this one civilization finds that it can overpower pretty much any other civilization.
In fact, it can overpower all the other civilizations in the world put together.
And this happens because of a series of developments within Europe.
The Renaissance, yes, the Reformation to a lesser degree, but certainly the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
And so suddenly this relatively backwater civilization, the civilization of Europe, kind of comes to the forefront in terms of, as I say, its ability to explore the rest of the world and in the power, including military power, that are at its disposal.
Obviously, we also see within Europe rising standard of living.
Suddenly, the Europeans are living longer than everybody else.
Suddenly, the Europeans have all kinds of technological devices at their disposal.
They have means of transportation.
They obviously have means of warfare.
They have now lower death rates, lower infant mortality.
And Europe becomes a self-conscious culture that is undergoing rapid change.
So these Europeans at this particular time in history begin to sort of, for the first time, encounter the rest of the world.
And so consider, for example, the Portuguese who are now arriving on the shores of Black Africa.
And the Portuguese, first of all, noticed that we have arrived over here and you have not arrived over there.
In other words, you didn't have the ships and the boats to come over to where we are.
We had the ships and the boats to come to where you are.
Same, obviously, recognition would have come to Columbus, would have come to the early Spanish conquistadors.
It was, hey listen, it's no accident that we, the Spanish, have arrived on the shores of the Americas.
No American Indian tribe would have the knowledge or the technology or the ability to sail the other way and show up, for example, in one of the ports in Europe.
The Portuguese also realized we've got the three-mass ship.
We've got the compass. We've got the quadrant.
We've got the astrolabe.
We've got navigational charts.
We've got a pretty good knowledge of the winds and the currents and the stars and the latitudes.
We know that the Earth is not flat.
We have maps. We have 100 universities.
We have hundreds of printing presses, thousands of books.
We have body armor and gunpowder.
We have a whole sophisticated system of economic exchange.
We have checks. We have bills of exchange.
We have insurance. We have double-entry bookkeeping.
We have mechanical clocks.
We have ways of grinding grain and crushing ore and mashing pulp for paper.
We know how to saw lumber and marble.
We can pump water. We've built Gothic cathedrals.
So what I'm getting at is you have European explorers who have at their knowledge this sort of sophisticated, rapidly developing culture and what happens is that almost by historical accident they are finding, not just in Africa, they find this in Tasmania, they find this in the Asian islands, they also find this in the Americas, some of what to them appear to be the most primitive people in the world. And the Europeans are like, what? How can people of such
different levels of civilizational development coexist in the world at the same time?
There's got to be an explanation for this.
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For more information, call 855-565-5519 or visit StandWithIsraelTour.com Racism really arose when a highly developed, highly self-conscious, modernizing Western civilization encountered some of what they perceived to be the most backward and primitive cultures in the world.
The Western explorers came across cultures where Essentially, people believed in the miraculousness of ordinary life.
You could converse with a rock.
Daily life is controlled by ancestral spirits.
Dancing and shouting makes it rain.
Diseases can be cured by wearing a kind of armband or a mask.
Women can give birth to animals, and so on.
Robert Hughes, in his book The Fatal Shore, describes what happens when the...
Europeans first arrived and discovered the Aborigines in Australia.
I'm now quoting Robert Hughes.
The Aborigines had no property, no money, no farming, no houses, no clothes, no pottery, no metal.
They saved nothing.
They lived entirely in the present.
And this is how Robert Hughes describes the marriage customs of the Aborigines.
One common form of courtship was for a man to fix his eye on some female of a tribe at enmity with his own, stupefy her with blows on her head, back, and neck.
So essentially a sort of form of rape.
Now, you have to sort of discount these accounts because perhaps they are in part driven by a certain kind of ethnocentric hostility or prejudice toward other cultures, but you can't discount them completely.
They're obviously rooted in some kind of actual description.
Anthropologist Robert Edgerton, a modern-day anthropologist who has done work in Tasmania and in some of the Asian cultures, he talks about how even in the modern era, women are foraging for food, they're prying shellfish off of rocks, they're digging up roots, they're clubbing possums and seals to death.
The Tasmanians travel virtually naked except for kangaroo skins.
And Robert Edgerton writes, in the entire Tasmanian inventory of manufactured goods came to no more than two dozen items.
So over thousands of years, the Tasmanians had invented basically less than 24 things.
And they didn't even know how to fish.
They didn't know how to build a boat.
And so what you have here is you have Western civilization at the time when it's developing rapidly, encountering places in the Americas and in Africa, where, let's say, basic inventions that occurred in the West thousands of years prior have not even arrived.
I want to mention three.
The wheel, the plow, and riding.
And so, for example, In large parts of black Africa, they hadn't invented the wheel.
So you have to pull heavy blocks by dragging them on the ground.
You can't even roll them.
In pre-Columbian America, in the Americas, there were no wheels.
The wheel was brought ultimately by the West.
No community in the Americas or in black Africa had heard of the plow before the Europeans introduced it into both those places.
And similarly, writing.
Now, the Mayans had developed a kind of calendar that was pretty sophisticated, but by and large, writing was largely unknown in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
This is, by the way, admitted by the African philosopher Kwasi Wiradu.
I'm quoting him now.
He goes,"...the lack of writing..." In Africa is a definite handicap in the preservation and enhancement of a philosophical tradition.
So what Beredu is basically saying is, listen, we didn't have philosophy in Africa.
Why? Because to have philosophy, you have to be able to preserve ideas.
One guy's got to write something down, another guy comes along and then refutes it or provides a counterpoint.
I mean, think about it. Even in the West, we'd never know about Socrates.
If Plato didn't write down what Socrates, Socrates himself wrote nothing.
By the way, Jesus himself wrote nothing.
It was the other writers that put down Jesus' words, and that's really why we have them.
So, this is the concept of the civilization gap.
And by the way, it's not only acknowledged in Europe, it's actually acknowledged all over other cultures as well.
And today, African writers talk about it, and some of them actually think it was a good thing.
Here is the Martinican Scholar Aime Cesare, he says, and he actually was kind of one of these black power guys in the West Indies, and he writes, quote, hurrah for those who never invented anything, who never explored anything, who never discovered anything.
He's basically championing the, well, we would call it ignorance.
Of the Africans.
But he's saying that's great. It's actually fantastic.
He's essentially arguing a kind of Rousseauistic argument that civilization's bad.
Civilization corrupts you.
You're better off in the state of nature.
You're better off not having invented anything.
And so the point I want to make here is that there is an acknowledgement here of a developmental difference.
Now, again, in my view, this developmental difference is not due to any intrinsic qualities that That becomes the racist explanation.
And the racist explanation, in my view, is wrong.
But here I'm trying to show how it developed in the first place.
And the reason it developed in the first place is as an attempt to explain large differences of development between peoples that was attributed not to culture, but attributed to biology itself.
In this last segment, I'll go back to what I said earlier when I mentioned the philosopher David Hume.
And here's David Hume considering what he calls the environmental explanation for human differences.
And David Hume argues that the environmental explanation doesn't make sense.
He says that, look, there have been backward and low people all over the world.
And there have been backward and low people in Europe.
And he goes, and yet they have been able to come up.
They've been able to better their condition.
And so he says the idea that somebody is starting out behind and therefore must stay behind because of oppression or because of slavery, he goes, that's complete nonsense.
He goes, let's look, for example, at all the people who were slaves in the Roman Empire.
Yeah, they were slaves then, but are they slaves now?
Are they uneducated now?
Are they living in sort of hovels and terrible conditions now?
Do they go, oh, the reason we're in terrible shape now is because of what happened to us 5,000 years ago?
Hume goes, that's nonsense.
They've obviously been able to overcome that historical disadvantage.
They've obviously become competitive with people all around the world.
And he goes, but that is not the case.
This is Hume talking in Africa.
He says that what happens in Black Africa is that this is a place that is not only backward now, and when I say now, he's talking about the 18th century, but has always been backward.
And so his argument is that what's the reason for this?
There is no development, and he says this has to be because these people are essentially backward by nature.
Immanuel Kant kind of making the same point, quote, among the whites, this is Kant writing, people constantly rise up from the lowest rabble and acquire esteem through their superior gifts.
So just as individuals can overcome their circumstances, Kant's point is groups can too.
And therefore, this idea of blaming your backwardness on your circumstances is not entirely convincing.
Now, the classic exposition, and I would say the inventor of modern racism is It was a French writer named Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, actually an acquaintance of Tocqueville, who wrote a book called The Inequality of Human Races, published, by the way, 1853.
He sends a copy to Tocqueville.
Tocqueville is kind of offended.
Not that Tocqueville disputes the book, but Tocqueville is offended by the moral implications of claiming that particular groups are inherently superior and inferior.
Tocqueville thinks that this will Fortify the pride of the groups that think they're better and will perpetually humiliate the groups that are seen as lesser.
But let's look at what Gobino is talking about.
Basically, Gobino says that there are people who attribute racial differences to climate and to environment.
And Gobino goes, that doesn't really work.
Quote, In spite of wind and rain, cold and heat, sterility and fruitfulness, the world has seen barbarism and civilization flourishing everywhere on the same soil.
So Goveno is basically saying that if environmentalism is true, why have some places that have rich natural resources nevertheless failed to produce a civilization?
And why are there places that have very poor natural resources nevertheless managed to develop very sophisticated cultures?
This is Gobino. So the brain of a Huron, he's talking about a Huron Indian.
So the brain of a Huron Indian contains in an undeveloped form an intellect which is absolutely the same as an Englishman or Frenchman.
And then says Gobino, why then in the course of the ages has he not invented printing or steam power?
This is Govano continuing.
Nowhere is the soil more fertile, the climate more mild than in certain parts of America.
There's an abundance of great rivers, the gulfs, the bays, the harbors.
They're large, deep, magnificent, innumerable.
Precious metals can be dug out almost at the surface of the ground.
And he goes, if America has all these natural gifts, how come the American Indians haven't really come very far?
He goes, where's the American Indian version of Caesar or Newton or Charlemagne or Homer?
And this is Gobineau arguing, I would call it the racist thesis.
What he says is that the only real civilization, the only rapidly modernizing civilization is coming from Europe, is coming from the white man.
Now, he does notice that other civilizations are able to catch up.
I think he's thinking here particularly of Asian cultures.
But he goes, those cultures aren't inventors.
They're basically imitators.
He says that civilization is something more than mere mimicry.
It involves being able to do stuff on your own and come up with things on your own.
And his argument is that no other culture is able to produce this kind of civilization.
I'll close with this. He goes, I will wait long for the work to be finished.
I merely ask that it may be begun, but it has never been begun.
It has never even been attempted.
And now my conclusion, which is this, that it's actually very important for us to recover the origin of racism because it shows us that racism had a beginning in space and time.
Racism actually began with the assertion of Western cultural superiority, which was then asserted to be biological or intrinsic.
And I draw from this a kind of consoling or even optimistic conclusion.
And that is that there is no historical warrant for the extreme pessimism which says racism has always existed and therefore racism will always exist.
Even though it's kind of painful to listen to what people in ancient times or at least in early modern times had to say about each other, it is profoundly consoling to know that racism had a beginning because it then becomes possible to envision its end.
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