Racism is Mental Illness
If there is one thing I have accomplished in this lifetime, it is that I have removed all vestiges of racism from my system.
As with everything else, this has to be seen in context. My context is South Africa.
As far as Europe’s history of slavery is concerned, it appears to have it’s origins in an extremely confused interpretation of Noah’s ‘curse of Ham’, amongst several other old testament passages. Although the apparent confusion may well have been intentional, if one considers that slavery has been essentially ‘normal’ for thousands of years. It has always been about power and greed. The colour of slaves was and is immaterial, apart from the fact that lighter skinned slaves sell for more.
It became convenient for European slavers to use the bible to justify the enslavement of Africans simply because it was easier, cheaper and more profitable. This was exacerbated by delusions of innate supremacy, caused by ancient Greece, then ancient Rome, then followed to a large extent throughout Europe by the so-called ‘Vikings’ – Germanic tribes mostly from Scandinavia who became extremely strong, ruthless and bloodthirsty because of having to survive harsh environments, and because of fighting each other for generations.
These tribes colonized most of Europe. Furthermore, I believe it is their war loving and ‘will to power’ genes that drove much of the European empires. The history of humanity for the last 8000 years at least, is the history of war.
As mentioned earlier, the mass enslavement of Africans by Europeans was driven by Capitalism, in one way or another. Cape Town was established as a way station in 1652 by The Dutch East India Company, a Dutch business dedicated to ‘trade, exploration, and colonization’. Successful enough to create the first ever bourse in Amsterdam. They took slaves and/or convicts from 7 of their colonies or outposts, mostly from Asia.
To add to the confusion caused by misapplication of religious dogma, some of the slaves or convicts were Muslim. Their Arabic word for non-believer was ‘kaffir’. This 'mutated' into a mere derogatory term for black Africans.
The first ancestor carrying my family name arrived at the Cape in 1763. A German mercenary working for The Dutch East India Company.
Because of ongoing wars in Europe, the (by then) Cape Colony passed into the hands of the English, then back to the Dutch, then back to the English. The English continued their long standing pattern of world domination, by conquering anybody who stood in their way, including the Xhosas and the Zulus and the Afrikaners. The latter of whom were the descendants of mostly the original Dutch, German and French settlers.
This included the banning of intermarriage between races, about which the Dutch were much more relaxed. Many Afrikaners resented the English, and when the English banned slavery, they trekked out of the Cape, eventually to establish their own republics in the north-west of what is now South Africa.
So, much strife and fear and hatred between the black tribes, the Afrikaner and the English, for some 243 years. When the mostly Afrikaner politicians established ‘apartheid’ in 1948, they merely entrenched what was already happening.
This is the culture I was born into. We were ‘indoctrinated by [Christian] nationalist education systems, conscripted into armies [and] turned into a rootless urban proletariat.’ And: ‘How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.’ Difficult for those brainwashed thus to begin to perceive the links in their chains.
Racism is part of the colonization of the mind that both the oppressor and the oppressed suffer from. Neither can function fully without the other. The roots go deep. This is why racism remains a serious problem in the world. And this is why I maintain that ‘racism is mental illness’, or at least a ‘pathological bias’ that requires treatment similar to other 'extreme prejudices.'
https://keepingpet.com/great-dane-chihuahua-mix/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#Classic_era_2 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/the-germanic-tribes/ http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/viking-dna-08885.html https://www.worldsfirststockexchange.com/ https://medium.com/@johnwelford15/the-origins-of-the-cape-colony-south-africadb8a0b73f196 https://theconversation.com/what-genetic-analysis-reveals-about-the-ancestry-of-southafricas-afrikaners-133242 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_in_South_Africa https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/early-cape-slave-trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_(racial_term)#Etymology https://neilkakkar.com/sapiens.html https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ps.55.12.1343