Black Racism- the albatross that reduces justice to the influence of power and prejudice

Black Racism- the albatross that reduces justice to the influence of power and prejudice

Lyla Latif

In this blog, I set out to understand the origin and development of racism. This is not a comprehensive overview, but does touch on key aspects that I was able to discover from my research and dialogue with concerned individuals. This is the first part of a series of blogs that I will be writing  on as I understand and learn more about this destructive term that has over the years become an albatross that has reduced justice to the influence of power and prejudice.

BBC News, 27 May 2016

Let’s start by going back in time and look briefly into the history to understand how colour differences advanced racism as an ideology and how race itself was classified as part of a divisive social hierarchy.

My starting point is Aristotle. For Aristotle, the ancient Greeks were superior to all non Greeks. Similarly, the English Puritans who left England and set sail for America believed they were superior to the Native Americans, the African people and all other non Puritans. In his climate theory, Aristotle claimed that extreme hot or cold climate produced intellectually, morally and physically inferior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self government. This for him justified slaveholding practices by the Greeks. Humanity, said Aristotle, is divided into two: the masters and slaves, or, if one prefers it: the Greeks and the barbarians: those who have the right to command and those were born to obey. For Aristotle enslaved people were incapable of reasoning. The African for him represented burnt skin hence it justified their subjugation. Colour prejudice, hence, existed in the ancient world. This later laid down the foundation for race and racist ideologies.

In 1377, Aristotle’s disciple: the Tunisian Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah painted a very different picture of Africa from what was known of Ghana, Mali and Shonghay; empires that rivalled even European nations at that time in terms of size, wealth, power and scholarship. Instead Ibn Khaldun provided a different perspective of the Africa that lay below the Sahara. He wrote that the black people are as a rule submissive to slavery. He surmised that the black people have little of what is considered human and have attributes similar to dumb animals. This he said to justify slave trade. He also argued that such inferiority could be done away with if the African assimilated with the culture of people from the north: colder climates, since that would lead to their physical assimilation with the traits of people from the northern cooler climates, that is lighter skin, straight hair. Ibn Khaldun was clearly mimicking Aristotle. Climate theory thus, provides some explanation on the origins of racism. Skin colour determined social hierarchisation and cross racial economic relations as well as access to empowerment resources. If the black person was deemed intellectually, physically and morally inferior (Aristotle) and dumb (Khaldun) then in any economic ordering or relations, they were to be dominated and subordinated to their light skin superiors.

A second theory has also been advanced that explains the origin of racism. It is derived from Genesis 9:18–27: that the black people were the progeny of Ham, the son of Noah, cursed by Noah to be black and enslaved. Arguably, such religious backed thinking justified slavery by the Portuguese and English imperialists and influenced European thought about attributing to the black people traits associated with vice, hyper-sexuality and servitude. As a climate theorist, Ibn Khaldun rejected this curse theory. The curse theory, however, laid down the foundations for racist notions of black genetic inferiority.

This inferiority supposition was played out in western literature from Elder Pliny's work on A Summary on the Antiquities and Wonders of the World to Shakespeare's Othello, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, to their unfair depiction in narrative reports and photographs. Years later, it also justified the Tuskegee experiment on untreated syphilis in the African American male. Historical claims based on climate and curse theory have provided some understanding on the issue of racism. The idea of a superiority over another based on colour. I would recommend New York Times best selling author Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped From The Beginning as a reference guide to read more on the origins of racism.

Let's now move to the Scramble for Africa.

Picture taken by Author in 2018 (at the Nelson Mandela Museum)

With the scramble for Africa came the climax of Western imperialism based on ideological and institutional constructs that advanced racism. The ideology based on Enlightenment presupposed that Europeans were qualified to rule over the others and institutional power concentration shaped decision making and power relations in favour of European colonial masters where the law was used as a tool to advance European settler interests and ensure black subjugation through segregation and controlled labour. Such ideology and institutional power was implemented through forced and arbitrary border demarcations, imposition of a selective governance model based on extraction and subjugation, discriminatory stratification of society, punitive taxation and associating everything African to primitivism.

These power constructs were embedded in the old racist ideas that the slavery of the black people was natural, normal and holy. By this time the western European had begun to see the slave not as white, but black (previously eastern Europeans- Slavic communities, were sold to western Europeans as slaves). The British colonialists saw the black people as a people of beastly living, without God, law, religions, or common wealth. This reinforced the view that they were inferior and needed saving. Colonialism, therefore, represented more than the destruction of the black people’s culture, identity, scholarship, knowledge, resources and economic access. It entrenched in black people the notion that as a race they were inferior and if they were to be given any serious consideration, they must assimilate as English men and women. They must think, act and do as their colonial masters. And by doing so, they would integrate into the white society but at the bottom of the white social hierarchisation. As the lower bottom they would continue in servitude serving in white farms and households, their access to education would be restricted to low cadre jobs and their residence continued within segregated quarters (for a case study narrative of this read George Ndege's Health, State and Society in Kenya).

As colonial contact with the black people matured over the years, and they were involved in governance, climate and curse theory began to make no sense. Race began to be construed through power relations. With the clamour for independence, subjugation took a different form- power imbalances. Liberalism, arguably, represented implicit structural control of the post-colonial black economy and society. It resulted in a hegemonic economic order dominated by the white race, and also advanced inequalities between economies (as well as gender, class and cultures). Let’s understand this from the Kenyan perspective. Formal political independence for Kenya from British colonial rule was achieved in 1963. Yet upon its departure, the British colonial administration did not leave behind a fully-fledged and viable nation. State building was neither the original intention nor the primary objective of the colonial power. Theirs was simply that of creating an administrative framework conducive to peace, obedience, order and government. Instead the administrative framework so established provided the justification for economic exploitation and political domination of the newly independent Kenyan State. Relatedly, the formulation of a written constitution, negotiated at Lancaster House in England, as a pre-condition for the independence of Kenya thwarted and stunned the country’s real development from using its indigenous roots, directed by its own local needs. Thus, even after independence, the Kenyan economy continued to be controlled and directed by its former colonial ruler. Being the outpost, as it was, of international monopoly capitalism, the Kenyan economy could not help but respond to the demands of the established international market. In other words, power vested offshore with the race that deemed itself superior.

Thus, independence meant the ability to make laws within the country but not the power to change the structure of the economy or the pattern of trade with the outside world nor the power relations between the black and white race. This liberal capitalist model sold to the independent black nation and later forced upon through structural adjustment plans had the effect of ensuring that the British colonial legacy of hegemonic power relations remained intact and buttressed from re-organisation. The black people remained at the receiving end - due to their white imagined intellectual, physical and moral inferiority. This subsequently eroded the confidence of the ruled in the behaviour of the Kenyan State in adopting foreign models of governance. It set precedent that we would borrow from the practices of the former colonial masters as we negotiate our social contract and model our economy. We would do as England does. We would even apply their laws, give preference to their education curricula and their scholarship. The black people were, therefore, conditioned to believe in being inferior because their access to knowledge, resources and power both at domestic and transnational levels were controlled. Such control continues to manifest in the language used to describe race relations. This I will briefly consider in my next blog ('Language plays a key role in reinforcing racist perspectives').