The origin of racism, a timeline of events

Racism runs deep. Sometimes, you have to look back to the past in order to understand the present. 

By Nicole Tolmachev

There was once a time of isolation

The world we live in today is a place of interconnection and interdependence, where everyone is in touch with everybody. You live in the US and want to spend your holidays in Korea? No problem! After a relatively short flight you’re there and are ready for action. Just bought a new t-shirt? Well then you can be 100% sure; that piece of cloth has seen more of the world and has travelled way more than the average human. But it wasn’t always like this.

Homo sapiens anatomically similar to us have been around for about 250,000 years. They, and therefore we as humanity, originated from East Africa. The homo sapiens experienced rapid population growth and had to leave Africa for new land. The first and so far greatest mass migration in human history took thousands of years and found its end about 13,000 to 16,000 years ago, when we finally reached and populated the Americas. From there on out humans started developing separately and independently forming the unique societies we know today. Check out this big history series if you want to know more about where humanity came from and where it possibly may go in the future.

Fun fact: Up until 8,000 to 10,000 years ago no white people existed! When we started conquering the world about 100,000 years ago all humans were African and melanin levels, which are responsible for our skin colour, were roughly the same. High melanin levels are important in very hot and sunny regions, because they help neutralise UV radiation, which is the primary cause of skin cancer. That’s the reason why a Brazilian will have darker skin than a Swedish person.

For the longest time the Native American people never knew that where was a French Empire across the ocean, and the French didn’t know Australia existed. The world was divided into the four world zones:

1. Afro – Eurasia which includes all of Europe’s, Asia’s and Africa’s landmass and offshore islands like Japan,
2. Australasia which consists of Australia, the islands of Papua New Guinea and other nearby islands in the pacific ocean,
3. the Pacific with its many island societies like Hawaii or New Zealand and
4. the Americas that include the American double continent and neighbouring islands like the Caribbean Islands.

These regions were all geographically, culturally and economically connected. As an example, let’s look at the Afro – Eurasian zone: Europe and Asia were connected via the Silk Road, a trading route so crucial to world history, that every one has heard of it at least a few times throughout their life. Another trade route, that was just as significant, but no one really talks about is the Indian Ocean Trade. Many empires like India, Ethiopia and China participated in it.

It wasn’t until about 500 years ago, that the world zones started connecting into the global web we know and live in today.

Modern racism is born

Before the world zones united there was already discrimination, but it wasn’t the same as what we call racism today. Approximately 500 years ago was the starting point of globalisation. That term does not only include economical and political aspects, but also cultural ones. The different nationalities and societies of the world started interacting and mixing – slowly at first – but with rapidly accelerating speed. Everyone is cautious of completely unknown things, some people more so than others, and so were people seeing a society completely foreign to them half a millennium ago. Taking that into account with the fact that the overwhelming majority of humanity was uneducated at the time it is logical, that prejudices and misconceptions arise out of which racist thoughts and ideas are born.

Systematic racism really started peaking with the rise of colonization. To the European empires like Britain the African continent was the perfect place to take on that ‘burden of white men’ and bring culture and civilization to the ‘savages’ living there. The same thought was what fuelled the conquistadors when they started their American conquest. The problem with their ‘noble’ intentions was that they were as racist as anything could be.

The nations that scrambled for Africa thought of it as underdeveloped, because some of the societies living there were still doing things they stopped doing centuries ago, like “hunter” – gathering or relying on oral tradition instead of writing. Back then the idea of civilizations evolving in predetermined stages was really popular, kind of like how Pokemon evolve. These stages were to the “hunter” – gathering, agriculture, urbanisation, trade economics, writing, etc and at the end of the evolution a civilized society like theirs would arise. The problem is, that while that thinking kind of works on European and most Asian societies (even if it is wrong at core, because societies evolve like living beings, constantly adapting to their surroundings), it just isn’t applicable on the African continent.

The cause is the climate. In Africa it is really unpredictable, especially the rainfalls. Around the equator vast rain forests are sometimes flooded and the soil loses its nutrients. Around 30° of of the equator are large deserts, in between are savannas, which at times don’t get sufficient rain fall and intermediate regions, that drift north and south every year. These aren’t good conditions for agriculture and building huge static empires like the ones in Europe or ancient south and central America.

There are exceptions though! The ancient empire of Aksum for example, that later became Ethiopia and we shouldn’t forget about Egypt, the oldest civilization, still existing today. These empires lie in river valleys of which there are a few all over Africa. Both Ethiopia and Egypt are near the Nile river that provides perfect conditions for agriculture due its very predictable flooding.

These and the other ancient empires of Africa like the Mali Empire or the Great Zimbabwe show, that when the Africans could settle down and build an empire, they did and made it fantastic. Sadly the Europeans ignored all that and instead focused their minds on the other societies, that couldn’t settle in one place. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t achieve great things. African medicine was really advanced at the time. They immunised themselves to small pox and performed successful c – sections for generations before the colonial powers arrived. The European empires were just too entitled to their own success to see all that, creating an economical system that left these great societies in ruin.

The fight against racism

Another horrific thing the colonialists did was establishing the slave trade. While Africans also had slaves, they, with only few exceptions, never had slave-based economies. Also there everyone could become a slave, no matter what background or ethnicity they had. Slaves were also treated differently; they were viewed as more of an extra pair of hands around the house and were used for small amounts of additional labour. In contrast the slaves in the Americas were treated as goods and were taken to plantations forcibly under the worst conditions imaginable. There, families were torn apart, women raped and all pushed to work themselves to death. In their homeland things weren’t looking any better as many men were pressured to work in mines under harsh conditions as their families were forcibly moved from what good farmlands they had and feared starvation every day of their lives.

After slavery was finally banned in the US on December 6, 1865 with the 13th Amendment, the African Americans still had a long and still ongoing fight before them. While they attained human and civil rights with the 14th and 15th Amendment by 1870, racism and segregation were still in the way of save and equal living. The former slave states in the south were the first that implemented segregation laws, also known as “Jim Crow” laws. They required to separate whites and people of colour in every situation possible: in public transport of all kinds, in schools, theatres, restaurants and any other establishment. At the end of the 19th century segregation became even more prominent in the south.

During World War 2 the current US president Roosevelt called for a fight for the “Four Freedoms”: the freedom of speech, worship, from want and fear. More than 3 million African Americans registered for war service and were ready for fight for these freedoms, although they themselves often didn’t have the luxury of experiencing them. The sad truth is, that even during the times of a great war, the black soldiers had to fight of racism, as per War Department policy the units had to be separated into white and black ones.

Even after the segregation of public schools was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court in 1954, the southern states of America did all they could to nullify that decision. Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas for instance did everything in his power to stop integration at public schools. When desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School was ordered by a federal court, he even called upon the Arkansas National Guard to stop nine black students to enter the facility. Although he was forced to call off the National Guard, white mobs delivered a standoff against the African American students. This scene was caught on television and after a local congressman and the mayor of the city called for stopping the violence, president Dwight D. Eisenhower summoned the state’s National Guard and 1,000 members of the US army Airborne division to impose integration at the school. Still Faubus rather closed all high schools of Little Rock instead of embracing desegregation. The federal court acted and the schools reopened soon after.

The March on Washington on August 28, 1963 was the largest protest of the capitol’s history. Roughly 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial and listened to several civil rights leader’s speeches. One of them was Martin Luther King Jr., a baptist preacher. He spoke of the many troubles and tribulations the black American population was facing. It was on that day he spoke his famous quote “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. His speech is now know as one of the most significant ones in American history.

Many protests and riots followed up until today and I could spend all day just listing all of them chronologically. But since this is an article about the origin of racism I would like to encourage you to research yourself and to check out the first article of our Understanding #BlackLivesMatter series here, which names some of the most recent protests and riots. If you are interested in a detailed account of Afro American history, you can check out this article.

A thought experiment

Another thing that I saved for last, but is crucial to understand when looking at why racism exists is how our brains function and process new info. To simplify that complex process let’s explain it like this: Our brain works with pictures and shelves. When you get a new piece of info – a word you just heard for the first time for example – you link it with a picture and your brain sorts it onto a shelve that fits it. Now when you are asked to think about this word later on, you have a thing, a situation or a person you associate it with. This often happens without you even noticing it.

Let’s try it out shall we? What country would you link this description to?

It’s home to many different ethnic groups, which were often at war with each other. These tribes all have different languages and even though there is a common one, not all can speak it, so they sometimes can’t understand each other. At some point in the country’s history it was reconstructed by several other nations, which made new internal borders for these ethnic groups.

Admit it, while reading you immediately thought of Africa, although it’s a giant continent, not a country. I actually was writing about Germany!

Now, the fact you thought about Africa doesn’t make you racist, but it goes to show how deeply some pictures and descriptions are buried in our minds. It also proves that our brains associate information, especially words, with images. These are shaped by what information we consume and what our surroundings teach us. When I first was confronted with this little thought experiment myself, I also thought of Africa first and then started to think what region our specific country I would link it to. So did all the other 15 participants of the workshop it was part of.

Please try considering this while educating yourself on the #BlackLivesMatter movement: Racism runs deep inside us, something we won’t be able to rid ourselves of. It is impossible, because it is everywhere: in the judicial systems of the countries we live in, in the heads of some politicians, police and military men, just as in the minds of normal citizens like you and me. Although for some it is full out racism, while for others they are just some minor misconceptions. It is easy to start believing a racist idea without even realizing, because of how our brains function. There is a way to prevent it though – rational and logical thinking.

That’s the reason why we should do anything at our power to educate ourselves! Like previously said, we can’t end racism, but we can minimise it by a great deal by not blindly believing, by trying to sort out prejudices and misconceptions we thought of as true, and most importantly by educating the people surrounding us.