As we reported on 5th June, people all over the world are currently demonstrating against racism shouting “Black Lives Matter!”. This movement started with a disturbing video showing the Afro-American George Floyd, who was killed by the US police some weeks ago. The incident provoked an inquiry into institutional racism in the police force. Yet this is only one of many tragic incidences which have been caused by racial discrimination.
But how did it all start?
The “proto-racism”
The first ideologic opinions on differences between the so-called “races” can already be found in Greek and Latin documents of the ancient world. And although they cannot really be regarded as racist since being different did not automatically result in being persecuted in ancient Rome and Greece, many principles of modern racist thinking date back to this period, which is why antique theories on the differences between races are often referred to as proto racism.
This categorisation was largely motivated by physical attributes. For example, red-haired persons were associated with slavery because the Thracians, a nation that was enslaved by the Greeks, had red hair. In a number of comedy texts slaves were named ‘redheads’, following this stereotype.
Yet, it was not primarily the physical aspects which led to some kind of xenophobia in ancient Greece, but rather the view that most of the ‘barbarians’ (people who did not come from Greece) had a primitive political system, which was not as advanced as the Athenian democracy. Thus ‘races’ as such played a secondary role.
Racism in the Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, racism was also expressed in religiously motivated antisemitism, which manifested itself in pogroms against the Jews. In literary texts though we can find references on xenophobia against black people, for example in the “Rolandslied”.
Racism in the Modern Age
With the discovery of America in 1492, racist ideologies which were concerned with differences in physical attributes, boomed. When the Europeans conquered America, genocides of the indigenous population and enslavements of Africans, who were meant to work on the plantations of the colonial powers, followed. This was the start of racism against Afro-American people. The supporters of this system even postulated scientific reasons why slavery should be allowed, when religious and philosophic arguments had started to fall apart. For example, they claimed that black people had smaller brains or a different blood colour.
This ideology was so controversial that it (among many other reasons) led to civil war between the Northern and the Southern States in the 1860s. The Northern States won and slavery was forbidden in the US by law, yet racism had not been defeated. During the following decades, racial segregation in the USA was omnipresent and the laws which enabled this form of discrimination existed until the 1960s. It was then that Martin Luther King started his campaign and made his famous speech “I have a dream…”.
Racism never ended though and is still one of the biggest problems we have to deal with today. People who are different, in whatever way, are still discriminated against, and unless we fight together against such ideologies we will not live in a world where everyone is “born free and equal in dignity and rights”.
by Hohensinner Johannes, 5dk
English School Newspaper 