Considering "Race: The Power of Illusion"

Aristotle argued in De anima that humans are born into an original state of mental blankness, emphasizing “those faculties of the mind or soul that, having been only potential or inactive before receiving ideas from the senses, respond to the ideas by an intellectual process and convert them into knowledge (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2016).” The English empiricist, John Locke (credited with inspiring the American Founding Fathers) built upon this idea with his “tabula rasa” concept, stating that knowledge was purely experiential despite an inherent “awareness of one’s own ideas, sensations, emotions, and so on... as a means of exploiting the materials given by experience as well as a limited realm of a priori (non-experiential) knowledge... (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2016).” Locke essentially believed that the only in-born knowledge a person had was an awareness as to how to exploit the information translated to one through their senses in order to perpetuate life and manipulate the world around them. This is referred to as a constructionist approach to identity. 

Essentialist approaches to identity assert that identity stems from our biological nature. All beings are imbibed with an inherent will to live, and live well for whatever that means to them. This is definitely informed by our biology and environment, however, social scientists have generally come to understand that as far as humans are concerned, there is some combination of what is more commonly known as nature (essentialist) and nurture (constructionist). As Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper, A Theory of Human Motivation outlines, healthy human beings have specific needs, both primitive and social that must be satisfied in order to find fulfillment. These needs are arranged in a hierarchy, with physiological and safety needs being foundational to human wellness and social or ego needs being less fundamental, but still integral (Burton 2012). It is by no mistake that human beings (or more specifically, homo sapiens) have social needs, as we belong to the primate species group (O’Neil). Primates are known for being social animals, traveling in large groups. This is not an uncommon practice amongst animals, as traveling in groups can provide a certain level of protection as well as means for acquiring sustenance and childcare (O’Neil). It is within our nature to form social groups for our own well-being, despite the potential downfalls of large groups potentially attracting the attention of predators and depleting an area's natural resources.

Through the harnessing of fire power, homo sapiens have found themselves able to dominate the ecosystem for better or worse (and so far, it looks like worse). For this reason, we have found ourselves in a place of privilege that has allowed us the luxury of leisure. We have been able to manifest technologies other animals, including our primate relatives have thus far been unable to. We have been able to evolve our nature as social animals by departing from the rest of the animal kingdom and founding ever more complex and nuanced forms of society and socialization.

Socialization is the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community in which there exists shared customs, laws, and organizations. In my personal framework, which is informed by a holistic approach to comprehending the structures in which we exist on a micro, meso, macro, and meta level, socialization is the layering of human-constructed characteristics and ways of being upon a person’s conception of Self. Our interactions with those around us form our understandings of who we are in the context of the whole, molded less by our geographical environment and much more by our social environment. 

Systems, institutions, and other people are agents of maintaining the social order through the encouraging of normative behavior and punishing of nonconforming behavior. These agents of socialization include but are not limited to educational institutions (schools), religious institutions, mass media, the professional world, and even our families.  Prior to our indoctrination into society through the institution of education, where we are generally taught a manipulated version of history that subconsciously enforces the inequitable status quo prevalent in modern societies, our families instill in us their own value systems. This is a way of propagating social norms specific to our individual cultures. Through socialization, the system is able to reproduce itself without it having to actively do so.

This becomes problematic as we have progressively forgotten, with the social conception of race and the process of globalization that it is our Earthly environment that has informed our biological development, as is pointed out in the documentary, Race: The Power of Illusion. Anthropologists and biologists have been able to prove that phenotypic differences in human beings is not indicative of any innate superiority should it exist (which it does not), but rather very simply the result of an individual's interaction with its environment. One authority in the documentary notes that the complexion of someone in a Northern Europe’s skin differs from that of someone from the tropics because different forms and concentrations of melanin are needed to interact with the different levels of sun exposure present in these very different environments. Race, then is not a biological fact-- it is solely a social fact.

The salience of race comes into being in 1619 with the first Africans arriving as slaves in Virginia. It is Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder and father of many mixed race children, who initially declares that Africans are inferior in race and mind to whites. America’s third president uses the practice of “othering” to dehumanize Africans, justifying his paradoxical ownership of slaves and proclamations regarding equality and freedom by “writing them out of the human family”. Prior to this, the colonizers “were more likely to distinguish between Christians and heathens before people of color versus white”. The process of ingraining the shift into racially white versus Black was an insidious process that began with the subtle shifting of perception using language. People began to use the term “white” instead of “Christian” or “Englishman”, emphasizing appearance over ideology . This oppression of Blacks led to new rights for lower class Europeans, elevating them into a higher class that originally failed to exist. These newfound privileges encouraged poor whites to identify with white supremacy, a wholly new and overall savage credo.

With Jefferson’s abhorrent thought system as a basis for racial bigotry, Blacks social standing in the world descended into an unlivable class. Instead of being seen as human, Black people were considered biological machinery, living capital to be exploited for labor. This would be the basis for the contemptibly ill-conceived death machine that is known as capitalism, and the foundation of all of America’s political and economic power. To further drive his madness, Jefferson calls upon the hallmark of modernism that is science, demanding not “are they inferior” but “what makes them inferior”. This cements the idea of innate subservience and builds a case to further other the Black person in society.

While Jefferson violently loathed Blacks from his upbringing around slaves and his awareness of his own obvious bourgeoisie hypocrisy surely driven by greed, he felt very differently towards Native Americans. Despite their “savage” culture, Native Americans were equal to Europeans according to Jefferson. It was his opinion that they were only brown because of their exposure to the sun and that they could be civilized and socialized into whiteness by beating and breeding their indigenous culture out of them. The Native protection of their own land is what made whites paint them as savages. As Natives were not seen as necessary to the propagation of capital, the only issue Jefferson and his cronies took with them was the protection of their own land. They did not need to be brutalized to the extent of Black people, simply (in the words of Hillary Rodham Clinton) brought to heel. With Jefferson’s opinions becoming social facts, war with Native Americans focused on the usurping of their sovereignty of their land, dissolution of their heritage, and indoctrination into whiteness. It was more an ideological genocide than a geneological one-- at first. The demonization of their culture served as the eradication of the Native American so that white people had grounds to steal their land, and this remains true today. 

The publishing of “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling in 1899 created a moral high ground for racialized imperialist evangelicalism, encouraging white people to support their nations in going forth to “civilize” everyone across the planet, spreading their diseased mentalities. This began in the Philippines, where propaganda was used to portray them in the same social underclass as Blacks and Native Americans. The 1904 World’s Fair featured people on display in the same manner as animals in zoos, with labels such as “The Savages”. 

At this time, immigrants from other nations were flooding American shores, looking for the “golden door” to promise land of opportunity and freedom from oppression memorialized in Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus”-- the poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty. As the documentary points out, immigrants at this time were “seen as promiscuous, lazy, or stupid” as they joined the lower classes of Americans. It was commonly believed that Eastern European immigrants would denigrate society genetically. The psuedo-science developed out of Jefferson’s call to action further marginalized people by differentiating against non Anglo-Saxon’s or “Nordics”. The Caucasian classification broke down to between 35-45 races! Immigrants were “not fully white but when compared to … Blacks or Asians, their whiteness became more salient”.

“The New Colossus” has been just as contextually misappropriated as the 1908 play, The Melting Pot, which promised that “God would melt down the races of Europe into a single pure essence out of which he would mold Americans”. The play did not call for diversity, but ideological homogeneity that subsisted upon the racism that is ingrained in American tradition. In as much, Lazarus’s call to the nations of the world to “Give [America] your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” was a farce. As Walt Hunter points out in a cultural article published in the Atlantic, “in 1883, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first federal law that limited immigration from a particular group. Though set to last for 10 years, various extensions and additions made the law permanent until 1943. The year after Lazarus’s poem was read, the European countries met in Berlin to divide up the African continent into colonies. ‘The New Colossus’ stands at the intersection of U.S. immigration policy and European colonialism, well before the physical Statue of Liberty was dedicated. The liberal sentiments of Lazarus’s sonnet cannot be separated from these developments in geopolitics and capitalism (Hunter 2018).”

As the scholarly essay, The Criminalization of Immigrants as a Racial Project by Doris Marie Provine and Roxanne Lynn Doty outlines, “in contemporary times, while race is widely perceived to lack an empirical basis, it persists as a salient feature of individual, as well as group, identity, and as a significant, though often invisible, principle underlying the social and political order.” Now that the seeds of racism have effectively been planted and fostered through physical and social violence, legislature, as well as institutional and cultural indoctrination, their abuses take form in a much more nebulous and covert fashion. While Jim Crow laws segregating and oppressing Black people may no longer exist and white people are no longer the only immigrants allowed to become naturalized citizens, the old ways of excluding people of color and immigrants are still alive and well. 

“Neo-racism, whose dominant theme is the insurmountability of cultural differences, has also been quite prominent in various works on immigration by writers both academic and popular (The Criminalization of Immigrants as a Racial Project).” The standing of those white people of the middle, working, and poor classes is precarious at best, hierarchically supported solely through the racial oppression of non-white people and immigrants. That strata of American is mainly comprised of people who, just a few generations ago were immigrants themselves. The memory of their own exclusion haunting them may well be just the thing that encourages them to believe the divisive rhetoric of those such as “Peter Brimelow, who argues in Alien Nation that today’s immigrants are ‘from completely different and arguably incompatible cultural traditions’ (Brimlow, 1995, p. 25) (Provine & Doty 2011).” 

These fears and insecurities of people who naturally reject being on the bottom of society’s totem pole are preyed upon by the global elite, who continue to shift public opinion of their racist policies using dehumanizing rhetoric, criminalizing and perpetually othering people of color around the world, even on land that is rightfully theirs as is the case of Mexican immigrants in the United States. The history of the United States to exploit and oppress Native Americans in order to claim their land is nothing new, so the doctrines of “the  late Samuel Huntington who has asserted that migration poses a threat to ‘the cultural integrity’ of European countries and that Mexican migration into the United States, ‘looms as a unique and disturbing challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country’” is wholly unsurprising (Provine & Doty 2011).

By feeding into a vicious cycle of panic, loathing, and abuse in regards to anyone not fitting the “stereotypes of ‘American’ [being] White, Christian, and northern European”, lawmakers are able to enact legal violence against people attempting to escape the devastation wrought by the colonialist and imperialist actions of the Industrial North (Provine & Doty 2011). This includes “(a) The hardening of the border between the United States and Mexico that began in the 1990s; (b) Federal devolution of enforcement authority to local levels without effective over- sight; (c) ICE initiatives to enhance interior and border enforcement,” practices that “reinforce each other, helping to transform migrants from Mexico and its neighbors from the unthreatening reserve labor force they were once perceived to be, to a dangerous quasi-criminal element embedded in American society (Provine & Doty 2011).”

We see that the framing of poor immigrants (primarily Central American) is a repeat of the same racist practices that created a barbaric identity for the societal “other”, allowing for a racial undercaste to be created so that those in it could be exploited for capital, creating a labor pool that could go ignored by the every day person’s moral compass. It was not un-Christian then to enslave Blacks because they weren’t actually human. Today, “in the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt… Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service-- are suddenly legal (Alexander 2010).” By encouraging through disgust and disdain for Latin Americans through media indoctrination, the rest of the “civilized” world is taught to see that it is their inability to assimilate that is the problem, not the fact that their lives are being actively sabotaged by white political powers. Only those that can afford to be the ideal immigrant-- rich and able to go through the arduous and absurdly expensive legal citizenship process-- are deemed acceptable, but even then, they must leave their old ways behind in exchange for American values. This form of erasure is as American as apple pie, dating all the way back to the birth of this nation.

Identity is not a universal fact, merely a social one. As experts in the documentary point out, biological race does not exist, only sociological and ideological race do. Genetic markers mean nothing unless they symbolize some material effect on one’s interactions with the world. Racial identity is merely a projection, a reproduction of the perverted philosophies of sociopathic plutocrats. This relatively new belief system goes against rudimentary principles of nature just as the hetero-patriarchal, capitalist society it supports. Bearing this in mind, the absurdity of stratifying a social order along the lines of identities rooted in now arbitrary characteristics such as race, gender, sexuality, etc. is inescapable, and surprisingly brutish for a people so certain of their superiority. For the emancipation of humankind from the shackles of its industrial demise it is necessary to raise awareness of the reality of the scientifically unsound, irrational nature of such concepts as racism and xenophobia so that there may be mass transcendence of them, elevating us collectively into a more harmonious iteration of human existence upon the planet Earth.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. NEW JIM CROW: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. NEW PRESS, 2010.

Burton, Neel. “Our Hierarchy of Needs.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 23 May 2012, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201205/our-hierarchy-needs.

Hunter, Walt. “The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 17 Jan. 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-story-behind-the-poem-on-the-statue-of-liberty/550553/.

Lazarus, Emma. “The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/the-new-colossus.

McLeod, Saul. “Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.” Simply Psychology, Simply Psychology, 21 May 2018, https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html.

O'Neil, Dennis. “Primate Behavior: Social Structure.” Primate Behavior: Social Structure, Palomar College, https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/behavior/behave_2.htm.

O'Neil, Dennis. “The Primates: Overview.” The Primates: Overview, Palomar College, https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/primate/prim_1.htm.

Provine, Doris Marie, and Roxanne Lynn Doty. “The Criminalization of Immigrants as a Racial Project.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, vol. 27, no. 3, 2011, pp. 261–277., doi:10.1177/1043986211412559.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Tabula Rasa.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 6 Nov. 2016, https://www.britannica.com/topic/tabula-rasa.

Modern Language Association 8th edition formatting by CitationMachine.net.