The Origin of Racist Ideas

Being raised in the middle of the Bible belt where deeply racist ideas were common, I believed without question that black people were inferior to me. I was led to believe they were lazy and just above the category of animal. I graduated high school without ever having known a black person, but I was assured my mental capacities far exceeded those of all people with black skin. I think most of society assumes it was these attributes that allowed us to make slaves of black people. But every bit of this is a lie.

 Sentiment had to be cultivated to accept slavery. Gomes Eanes de Zurara is credited with writing the first “recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas...” with The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, in 1453. Not only was this the beginning of the demonization of black people, but before this, race did not even exist. It was invented for the same reason blacks were demonized — financial gain. The creation of race created a whole new power of control — the kind of control that produces financial wealth. “Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude.“ (Ibram X. Kendi: How Racism Relies on Arbitrary Hierarchies). That power was necessary to perpetrate and control the slave industry.

 During John Biewen’s podcast, The Invention of Race, he says, “The Portuguese writer (Gomes Eanes de Zurara — the very author of the first anti-black racist ideas), who, commissioned by the slave-trading leaders of his country, literally invented blackness, and therefore whiteness, in the 1450s, according to Kendi (historian), the Enlightenment scientist who first divided humanity into five ‘races’ and coined ‘Caucasian.’ John Punch, a black runaway indentured servant in 17th-century Virginia, whose capture and sentencing to lifelong servitude marked the first official sanctioning of chattel slavery, and the first time a black person was treated differently from a white person in the law, in colonial America.” You can’t feel pain if you don’t know what “no pain” feels like. You can see light because of darkness or shades thereof. That is how our world is made visible and/or knowable — because of contrasts. The moment blackness was invented, whiteness was born. You can’t have one without the other.

To be clear, black people were never inferior in any way. It was a lie deliberately concocted to leech the humanity out of our viewpoint of them and get us to view them as things. A stone is a thing. You kick it out of your way without the slightest thought for its feelings, its past or its hopes and dreams. To further convince us of the thingness of this people, it was also assumed them to be spiritually inferior, even to the extreme of saying they had no souls. That was the clincher — beings without souls are things or animals and it didn’t matter how we treated them. God does not care about them.

One big misconception about slavery is that the term “slavery” applies only to the black race. But up until the 1450s, most slaves were white. In fact, the very name slave comes from the term Slav, who where the preferred slaves before they learned to defend themselves better. Slavs were a northern people. They were white. As they became harder to subdue, slave traders looked to Africa.

 All seems to be forgotten about Netherland's role in the slave trade. The Dutch slave trade was one of the better organized, therefore, more profitable operations. It was centered in Amsterdam and the city province of Zeeland: Middelburg. The Company responsible for the slave trade became one of the world’s most successful trading companies “The Dutch West India Company” (Nederlandse Westindische Compagnie or WIC).

 The remnants of slavery are not easily apparent today in Amsterdam. The obscure history of the slave trade in the Netherlands is due, in part, to shame amongst the Dutch people, even more so because this ‘aspect’ brought Amsterdam much of the wealth still visible in those beautiful 17th and 18th-century luxury Canal Houses in Amsterdam. The Netherlands is no different than any other country — national history focuses on its heroes and victories, and prefers to leave out the unpleasant sides.

 However, this is changing with the intervention of NINsee (National Institute of Dutch slavery history and heritage). They have mapped and listed places around Amsterdam left by the slave trade, like the Royal Palace on the Dam, where the plantation owners united and became a guild called the Society of Surinam. This guild held their meetings at the West-India House, headquarters of the WIC. On NINsee’s list are the names and backgrounds of some of the cruelest slaveholders and slave merchants in the business, along with collected slave accounts and stories of slaves who came to Amsterdam with their owners to work in the Amsterdam household.

Although the Dutch took slave trade and slavery to a whole new mass-scale-level with black Africans, the use and trading of slaves of all races and genders were already common in Africa and the Middle East before the Europeans entered the scene. 

All of this stopped due to the official abolishment of slavery in the Netherlands in 1863, stemming from ‘Anti-slavery’ sentiments in the country.

Racism was invented for a very specific purpose, and like good little robots, we have adopted those racist ideas as our own, probably beyond the inventor’s wildest dream. We were forced into seeing all people of color as black, even though they represent as many different shades and colors as there could possibly be. We see all non-colored people (which really, there is no such thing) as white. But every soul standing, sitting or lying down is a mix. We miss all the subtleties and nuances by characterizing everything as either/or.

 There is a spiritual process that goes something like this: Before I consciously get set on a spiritual path, my ideas are pretty much characterized as black/white, good/bad. I see stark categories of people, things, events, etc. Then something happens that shakes me loose from my slumber and fills me with spiritual hunger. I begin to search and I find a thread. I follow this thread until I find the people who can help me. As I learn spiritual ideas and practices, life in many ways becomes more complicated. Instead of black/white macro categories, I begin to see the micro categories that make up the macro. I begin to see subtlety and nuances until the old categories no longer fit. And finally, I stop seeing my categories at all as real people come into view, or rather the uniqueness of persons. As long as you see life and people through your categories, you are not in touch with reality.

 We can see those subtleties at work in the way that today’s youth have ascribed their identities to way more categories than simply male/female or gay/straight. In the same vein, we need to realize that no one is simply “black” or “white” or any one race. We are all mixed. As Calvin Harris, H.W., M. (my instructor in a mentor’s workshop class) said, “We just need to call everyone ‘mixed.’” So, if it’s simplicity you want, what can be more simple than just one category to describe everyone — “Mixed” — or, how about “Human Being.”