We’ve been focusing a bit on white racism recently. I use the adjective “white” in contradiction of the PC-Left principle that racism = race + power and only whites have power, ergo, only whites can be racist. I think that racism can exist without power, though power amplifies & highlights the phenomena [1]. The genocides of whites against non-whites that characterized the period of Euro-white hegemony in the 19th and early 20th centuries are exceptional in human history in scale & and assocation with a scientific racial ideology. The expulsion & extermination of the Oryat Mongls in Dzungharia in the early 18th century by the Manchus (many of these people took refuge in Czarist Russia and are now the Kalmyk people in the lower Volga-Lenin was 1/4 Kalmyk as a point of trivia) for instance is reminiscent of the German extermination of the Herereo people. But because of the European advances in science & technology, coupled with the concomitant intellectual sophistication spawned by the Enlightenment, white xenophobia, which in character was originally little different than that of any other civilization, took on a life of its own [2]. To this day, white racism is held in particular opprobrium because of its past history. But as the modern age progresses, the lethal organizational power of the Westernized state and the technological lethality enabled by modern science spread, “genocide” is no longer a white monopoly. As Rwanda showed us, Western ideas & weapons are all that is needed to spark the fire of hatred and violence that seems a common feature of our species.
So, I would like to put the spot-light on a few non-white states that exist in a state of racial injustice, depending on how you define it…..
- China: Though officially a “People’s Democracy,” the Chinese state is a Han tool that in the past 50 years has committed acts of physical genocide against Tibetans. Additionally, the ideology of Han supremacy is condoned by the state in re-writing history so that Xinjiang & Tibet are considered parts of “historic China,” something that is patently false. Rather, the Manchu’s ruled these two regions under a separate dispensation from their Chinese territories, and for most of Chinese history these areas lay outside the Han sphere of influence. The demographic inundation of Xinjiang by Han is also a conscious government policy-making what was “Eastern Turkestan” an adjunct of the Han provinces.
- India: India has rejected equating casteism with racism, but everyone knows that there is a racial element to caste. India is also a very color conscious & Bollywood stars tend to reflect a considerable amount of selection bias (as “ogunsiron” would say, you only see “white people with tans” in the movies). Caste violence is also one of the many vices of modern Indian life. Of course, this bigotry is balanced by the “official” pronouncements of tolerance, Dalits have been Presidents of India, and quotas serve as a testament to the the band-aid tha the secular elite has attempted to put over a problem deeply-rooted in Indian society.
- Latin America: This is a special case, non-racial societies like Brazil or Mexico often exist as a de facto layer-cake, with “white” individuals on top, and “black” or “indigenous” ones at the bottom. Brazil’s income inequalities are legendary, but it masks the correspondence this inequality has with racial groupings. And as we all know, Mexico is no racial utopia, Vincente Fox et al. are not your typical field workers. One interesting point about some of the Latin American “white” elites is that they might be phenotypic whites that emerged out of centuries of hybridization, in other words, assortive mating of mixed-race individuals led to the pooling of white and non-white looking individuals into discrete population segments so that the racial division between their white fathers and non-white mothers was recapitulated due to the social forces that shaped the culture [3].
This is of course the tip of the iceberg, my point is that world-changing anti-racists need to start looking at the broad-picture, and be more realistic about human nature. They don’t help themselves in singling out whites, and European culture, which if anything is in many ways more self-reflective about bias & bigotry, and neglecting the injustice that is common & normal in much of the non-white world. European self-reflection on bigotry is of course partially a reaction to the excesses of racialism that played out during World War II-let’s hope that non-whites don’t need a similar reality-check to shock them out of complacency.
Addendum: I am going to respond a little to Peter’s mild lecture-I should not have used the term “de-humanized,” rather, I will use the term scientifically reduce. There was a period of engagement with the outside world post-1500 in concert with the rise of sophisticated philosophies of man that birthed what I call “scientific racism.” The ascertainment of other civilizations was not always negative, for instance, the Sinophilia of Leibniz was not exceptional in a period (early 18th century) when The Kangxi Emperor reigned over a polity greater than any European kindgom, he, a monarch that displayed the virtues of a benign & cultivated autocrat out of Plato’s The Republic. On the other hand, men like Voltaire expressed an empirically driven disdain for blacks arising from the European encounters with Africa. In fact, in the later polygenist vs. monogenist debates it was the religious reactionaries who initially kept the idea of common descent of humanity alive, though eventually Darwin et al. reintroducd monogenism into the scientific discourse and won the day.
My point in general is that an understanding and rationalization of human differences is ancient-after all, the Greeks and Arabs both considered their own clime & kind the most salubrious and well balanced, heaping mild disdain on both the peoples of the north and south. Of course, as history progressed, northern Europe caught up and surpassed the south, and the Aryanists of the 19th century had to formulate a rationale for the decline of Rome & Greece (race mixture). The Chinese had their own prejudices against foreigners, read the travels of their delegations to Cambodia for instance and you can taste the contempt, while the Indians considered outlanders “mlecchas,” unclean foreigners. The debates over the humanity of the native inhabitants of the New World upon first contact were precusors to later European attitudes and controversies.
But sometime around 1700 Europe had an incredible philosophical lift off, and eventually men like Kant took up the ideas of race in a manner that today would be termed scientific racism. They formulated, systemetized and studied the topic in great depth, and began to frame much of their conception of historical progress in the context of race. All civilizations have expressed a concern with ethnic & racial divisions-but the European fascination with tabulating and transforming into metrics (ie; cephalic index) was a peculiar outgrowth of their scientific culture that eventually led to a much more complex & coherent system of racial classification.
Many of these theories preceded methodologies & techniques necessary for their falsification, and early physical anthropology texts read much like imaginative fantasy-they convey little real information that isn’t already known, but spun fanciful yarns about racial migrations in pre-history. Eventually, as we know, physical anthropology became the hand-maid for one of the terrors of the 20th century. Those days are over, European scientific racism is gone, and in fact, a taboo has fallen over the whole topic in the mainstream. In contrast, minorities can freely speculate on race, only earning the ire of the Right, while the mainstream considers them harmless cranks. This is not a good trend that we should encourage, it gets to the heart of equal treatment of people, high & low, black & white, that is the hallmark of liberalism. Holding whites to higher standards does not ennoble anyone.
[1] Power is relative as well, not absolute, light-skinned “blacks” are often prejudiced against dark-skinned “blacks”.
[2] One of the reasons that Europeans created scientific racism was to justify the de-humanization of non-whites in the context of their progressive and rational world-view. Other civilizations might have committed genocide, but little justification or debate would be needed, because it would be taken for granted that there was a difference between The People and The Others.
[3] Here is an article the semi-famous paper on Brazil’s whites & blacks that indicates this possibility. The process is basically linkage disequilbrium in a given population, because it is very far from random mating as assumed in the Hardy-Weinberg context. For instance, if you have a community of white men and black women, their children should be “mixed” in appearence, but their grandchildren will probably reassort some genes in such a fashion that a minority will look rather white and black, though most will still remain “mixed” in appearence. If in each generation the “white” and “black” looking mixed-race individuals pair up, you will have a decline in the number of “mixed” individuals, because “white” and “black” looking individuals tend to have genes that won’t result in mixed individuals (homozygotes mating can’t result in heterozygotes, though it is obviously more complicated than that), and a certain fraction of the mixed individuals will have white and black looking children. If in each generation the white & black looking cihldren of mixed-race looking individuals join those of similar phenotype, the “pure” looking phenotypes will grow numerically until you have a population where everyone shares common mixed-racial heritage, but looks phenotypically distinct.
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