What are the roots of racism?

The insurgent Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 changed attitudes and decolonised curriculums and city streets (Picture: Wikimedia Commons)

Racism is not natural or inevitable. According to Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, the ancient Greeks and Romans “knew nothing about race”.

“They had another standard—civilised and barbarian—and you could have white skin and be a barbarian and be black and civilised.”

Many prejudices thrived in pre-capitalist societies, but they were not based on ideas of racial difference. The Crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries were wars of conquest justified by religion.

There were crusades against “pagan” European countries and Islamic countries.

Racism is systematic discrimination against an entire group of people. Sometimes that group is associated with physical characteristics like skin colour.

But racism towards Irish and Jewish people has nothing to do with skin colour. Systematic racism emerged in the 17th century with the transatlantic slave trade.

European powers including Portugal, England and France began growing sugar and tobacco in the colonies.

These crops required an enormous amount of labour. At first plantation owners used indentured servants from Europe.

But high death rates meant that they had to look elsewhere for labour, and they looked to Africa.

Racism did not cause slavery. As historian Eric Williams explained, “Slavery was not born of racism—rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”

Enslaving human beings contradicted the great political ideals that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries—that all people were created equal and should have universal rights.

The pro-slavery lobby argued that enslaved people could be excluded from these rights because they were “not fully human”.

The “great minds” of science and philosophy were drafted to spread disgusting ideas of racial inferiority. In 1771, the celebrated philosopher David Hume wrote, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white. No ingenious manufacturers among them, no arts, no sciences.”

Pseudo-scientists identified distinct “races” and placed them in a hierarchy with whites at the top.

Colonialism intensified racism during the 19th century. Genocide, conquest and looting were justified by the idea that racially and culturally superior Western states were civilising the barbaric heathens.

Racism also led some poor white people to identify with their white rulers rather than their black neighbours.

Karl Marx approached racism through his experience of the hostility directed towards Irish people in the mid-19th century. He explained, “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life… The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money.

“This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class.”

Marx identified the conditions that allow racism to take hold. First, the ruling class constantly renews and pushes racist ideas. Second, racist ideas take root because workers are forced to compete.

Racism means black and Asian people lose out—in education, employment and the criminal justice system.

But white working class people do not benefit from racism. Studies in the United States found that the bigger the gap between black and white wages, the lower wages were for everyone. 

Some anti-racists have pursued a strategy based on getting black faces in high places. This failed to challenge racism—and Donald Trump has now shut that door.

Racism breaks down through the experience of living, working and loving. But the insurgent Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 shows that attitudes change when people resist racism and colonialism in the streets.

Racism destroys lives. But we have the power to push back and fight for a society free from all racism.