D says:
The doctrine of racism really gained ideological power with the rise of Imperialism. Race-based prejudice did not always exist. In fact, before Imperialism, although different nations may have harboured some prejudices towards one another, the big divider was class and gender. So, in the Middle Ages, a light-skinned aristocrat or member of the royalty in France would feel he or she has more in common with a dark-skinned African king than either would have with their "peasants." After Imperialism, when nations began military and economic domination of one another, then racism begins to take hold on public imaginations, even though it was largely propaganda, using pseudo-science to advance its real aims, the pursuit of power and profit. In this way, racism was an excuse used to justify economic, legal, and political domination. Hence, it appears even when all the people share the same skin tone (as was the case in Great Britain, where theories of the superiority of the English over the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh) were used to justify English domination over those groups.
By the 1950s, in a Post-World War II, the ideology of racism was under serious scrutiny, because the world just finished criticizing and defeating Hitler for his ungrounded theories about racial superiority, especially over the Jews and Roma (or gypsies) in Europe, but essentially in terms of the Germans over everyone else. Note, his motivation was also power and money, moving into Poland, in part because of their steel supplies.
America and England and other world powers just finished criticizing and beating the Fascists, so democracy could finally be attempted to be practiced in a truly equal form. Hence, after the second world war, you see Civil Rights and Independence movements the world over take shape with great success (compared to past attempts). Remember, in 1948, we get the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international document that Civil Rights leaders and colonized people the world over could cite to point out the genuine hypocrisy of nations who claimed to be democratic.
After the 1970s and into the 1980s, the world seems to shift again, moving away from politics and more into a capitalistic sense of leisure, where economy becomes very important. By the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vast majority of the world becomes "democratic" and capitalist. So, business, making money, and so on, become more important than social causes. (No wonder we have a contemporary obsession with "bling, bling." But, bling has also always been there. In the fifties, it was fast cars, gold rings, and cigars. Success is a basic part of the American dream, just that in the past, the success was more modest; now, success is grand and on display, in an almost insecure fashion).
To compare, in terms of differing socio-historical contexts, note the difference between African-Americans and Roma. After WWII, African-Americans could fight for their democratic rights, but because most of Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule, the Roma could not do that and achieve wide-scale social change. To this day, for instance, Roma (also known as gypsies, or people who arrived in Europe from India a thousand years ago) throughout many Eastern and Central European countries are essentially a segregated community. A thousand years (slavery, genocide, ostracization) and they are still segregated and face prejudices in several areas of life. However, instead of a Civil Rights movement like the 1960s in America, there is more of a "business" solution, where governments are trying to solve the problem by providing funding schools, integrating schools, and so on. And this has largely begun, because the European Union demands it. Socially, while many people believe in democratic values throughout Central and Eastern Europe, in practice, at least with the Roma community, it is far behind most of the world. Plus, some places, such as Bosnia, are still recovering from recent wars and so on.
This is getting far to long, but a historical and cross-cultural look at things may help explain how the times sometimes "make us." That, however, does not mean that we are simply victims of our time periods or environments. Rather, it should illustrate that an awareness of such forces in our own times is necessary to empower us to real change.
Answered 10 months, 2 weeks ago
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