Racism: In Historical Context

Racism: In Historical Context

Racism can be traced back to Western Europe, the heartland of the ideology of the superiority of the White man over the other races. One of the earliest prominent racist advocate was the Frenchman Gobineau, who thought that the superior human ought to have a white skin color, blue eyes and white hair. He taught that people of color were inferior. The German "philosopher" Hegel claimed that Africa, the Black continent, didn't have any history at all. Kant, the other great German "philosopher," suggested that Blacks represent the degeneration of human kind. That is why he assigns or parcels them out a lower rung in his anthropological stargazing. Adolph Hitler, jealous, angry, envious, and repudiated famously refused to hand over the Gold medal to the great U.S. athlete Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, because he had publicly mortified the Nazi regime by outperforming German athletes. In his book, "My Fight" Hitler wrote that humans with blue eyes, white skin and hair, were superior to others and were masters. All these racists never offered any objective evidence for their assertions. These claims have never been substantiated; they are mot based on facts, historical scholarship, or values. Rather, they are merely grounded on wishful thinking, figments of imagination, and trumped up stories, in most cases to justify and rationale plunder, enslavement, colonization, and privilege.

African-American News 4/27/08 11:38 PM