Anti-racism

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Anti-racism, alternatively referred to as anti-white activism by pro-white critics, is a progressive and generally establishmentarian belief system that strives to find ways to prevent and counter racist actions and thoughts. According to the Anti-racism Digital Library,[1] "Anti-racism can be defined as some form of focused and sustained action, which includes inter-cultural, inter-faith, multi-lingual and inter-abled (i.e. differently abled) communities with the intent to change a system or an institutional policy, practice, or procedure which has racist effects."

Often claimed to be a part of Cultural Marxism, the systematic opposition to racism is practiced to an increasing extent by most left-wing and far-left politicians, and also by mainstream conservatives. The latter are sometimes condemned by opponents further to the right as "cuckservatives" for this reason, and may even be accused of preferring non-white races over their own. However, anti-racism may merely be a convenient form of virtue signalling.[2]

By its nature, anti-racism promotes the view that racism is both pernicious and pervasive, and that systemic, structural and individual changes in political, economic, and social life are required to dismantle and end it altogether. Anti-racism is often considered to be a major, if not the main, secular religion in the Western world. However, discussing this assertion can be problematic, as anti-racism is considered by its proponents to be self-evidently correct, and not open for interpretation like a religion.[3][4] Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include Black Lives Matter organizing and workplace "anti-racism".

Soviet stamp 1960

European origins

The European discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus did not occur until 1492. However, two Papal bulls announced several decades before that event were designed to help ward off increasing Muslim invasions into Europe, which they believed would have an effect on the New World.

When Islam presented a serious military threat to Italy and Central Europe during the mid-15th century around the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Pope Nicholas V tried to unite Christendom against them but failed. He then granted Portugal the right to subdue and even enslave Muslims whether white or any other race, pagans and other non-Christians in the papal bull Dum Diversas (1452). While this bull preceded the Atlantic slave trade by several decades, slavery and the slave trade were part of African societies and tribes which supplied the Arab world with slaves long before the arrival of the Europeans.

Increasingly, the Italian merchants from the wealthiest states in Italy, especially Genoa and Venice joined in the lucrative trade and some members sported exotic lackeys and few domestic or workshop slaves whereas before slavery was forbidden in Christendom and only formerly in Muslim Spain and Sicily and their buffer border marches were seen and legally allowed. Racial views of Superiority started developing and became more acute about these slaves, social views imported from the Court of Granada where they were highly stratified and classified.

The following year saw the Fall of Constantinople to Muslim conquerors of the ever-growing Turkish Ottoman Empire which left the pope as the undoubted contested leader of Christendom when the Eastern Orthodox Church leadership became under submission. Several decades later, European explorers and missionaries spread Christianity to the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Pope Alexander VI had awarded colonial rights over most of the newly discovered lands by the Iberian Kingdoms of Castile and Portugal. Under their patronato system, however, Royal authorities, not the Vatican, controlled as in Europe all clerical appointments in the new colonies. Thus, the 1455 Papal bull Romanus Pontifex granted the Portuguese all lands behind Cape Bojador "allowing to reduce pagans and other enemies of Christ to perpetual servitude." Later, the 1481 Papal bull Aeterni regis granted all lands south of the Canary Islands to the Portuguese Empire, while in May 1493, the Aragonese-born Pope Alexander VIdecreed in the Bull Inter caetera that all lands west of a meridian only 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands should belong to the Spanish Empire while new lands discovered east of that line would belong to Portugal. These arrangements were later confirmed in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

American origins

The European origins of racism spread to the Americas alongside the Europeans, but establishment views were questioned when applied to indigenous peoples. After the discovery of the New World many of the clergy sent to the New World, educated in the new Humane values of the Renaissance blooming but still new in Europe and not ratified by the Vatican, began to criticize Spain and their own Church's treatment and views of indigenous peoples and slaves.

In December 1511, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar, was the first man to openly rebuke the Spanish authorities and administrators of Hispaniola for their "cruelty and tyranny" in dealing with the American natives and those forced to labor as slaves. King Ferdinand enacted the Laws of Burgos and Valladolid in response. However enforcement was lax, and the New Laws of 1542 have to be made to take a stronger line. Because some people like Fray Bartolomé de las Casas questioned not only the Crown but the Papacy at the Valladolid Controversy whether the Indians were truly men who deserved baptism, Pope Paul III in the papal bull Veritas Ipsa or Sublimis Deus (1537) confirmed that the Indians and other races were deserving men, so long as they became baptized.[5][6] Afterward, their Christian conversion effort gained momentum along social rights, while leaving the same status recognition unanswered for Africans of Black Race, and legal social racism prevailed towards the Indians or Asians. However, by then the last schism of the Reformation had taken place in Europe in those few decades along political lines, and the different views on the Value of human lives of different races were not corrected in the lands of Northern Europe, which would join the Colonial race at the end of the century and over the next, as the Portuguese and Spanish Empires waned. It would take another century, with the influence of the French Empire at its height, and its consequent Enlightenment developed at the highest circles of its Court, to return these previously inconclusive issues to the forefront of the political discourse championed by many intellectual men since Rousseau. These issues gradually permeated to the lower social levels, where they were a reality lived by men and women of different races from the European racial majority.

Quaker initiatives

John Brown's blessing

Prior to the American Revolution, a small group of Quakers including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet successfully persuaded their fellow members of the Religious Society of Friends to free their slaves, divest from the slave trade, and create unified Quaker policies against slavery. This afforded their tiny religious denomination some moral authority to help begin the Abolitionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Woolman died of smallpox in England in 1775, shortly after crossing the Atlantic to bring his anti-slavery message to the Quakers of the British Isles.

During and after the American Revolution, Quaker ministrations and preachings against slavery began to spread beyond their movement. In 1783, 300 Quakers, chiefly from the London area, presented the British Parliament with their signatures on the first petition against the slave trade. In 1785, Englishman Thomas Clarkson, enrolled at Cambridge, and in the course of writing an essay in Latin (Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare (Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?), read the works of Benezet, and began a lifelong effort to outlaw the slave trade in England. In 1787, sympathizers formed the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a small non-denominational group that could lobby more successfully by incorporating Anglicans, who, unlike the Quakers, could lawfully sit in Parliament. The twelve founding members included nine Quakers, and three pioneering Anglicans: Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce – all evangelical Christians.

Later successes

Later successes in opposing racism were won by the abolitionist movement, both in England and the United States. Though many Abolitionists did not regard blacks or mulattos as equal to whites, they did in general believe in freedom and often even equality of treatment for all people. A few, like John Brown, went further. Brown was willing to die on behalf of, as he said, "millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments ..." Many black Abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, explicitly argued for the humanity of blacks and mulattoes, and for the equality of all people.

Prior to and during the American Civil War, racial egalitarianism in the North became much stronger and more generally disseminated. The success of black troops in the Union Army had a dramatic impact on Northern sentiment. The Emancipation Proclamation was a notable example of this shift in political attitudes, although it notably did not completely extinguish legal slavery in several states. After the war, the Reconstruction government passed the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution to guarantee the rights of blacks and mulattoes. Many ex-slaves had access to education for the first time. Blacks and mulattoes were also allowed to vote, which meant that negroes were elected to Congress in numbers not equaled until the Voting Rights Act and the Warren Court helped re-enfranchise black Americans.

Due to resistance in the South, however, and a general collapse of idealism in the North, Reconstruction ended, and gave way to the nadir of American race relations. The period from about 1890 to 1920 saw the re-establishment of Jim Crow laws. President Woodrow Wilson, who regarded Reconstruction as a disaster, segregated the federal government.[7] The Ku Klux Klan grew to its greatest peak of popularity and strength. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was a movie sensation.

In 1911 the First Universal Races Congress met in London, at which distinguished speakers from many countries for four days discussed race problems and ways to improve interracial relations.[8]

Scientific anti-racism

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Friedrich Tiedemann was one of the first people to attempt to contest racism scientifically. In 1836, using craniometric and brain measurements (taken by him from Europeans and black people from different parts of the world), he claimed to refute the belief of contemporary naturalists and anatomists that black people have smaller brains and are thus intellectually inferior to white people, saying it was scientifically unfounded and based merely on the prejudiced opinions of travelers and explorers.[9] The evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin claimed in 1871 that ‘[i]t may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant’ and that ‘[a]lthough the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points.’[10] Later research countered some of his claims, however.

At the start of the 20th century, the work of anthropologists trying to end the paradigms of cultural evolutionism and social Darwinism within social sciences—anthropologists like Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Pierre Clastres and Claude Lévi-Strauss—began the initiative to end all forms of racism in human sciences, and establish cultural relativism as the new dominant paradigm. As of the 2010s, mainstream scientists generally refuse to investigate whether different races have different cognitive capacities (though purely biochemical and some physical differences may be investigated). This field of study, known as human biodiversity research, is one of only a few scientific endeavors that are allegedly considered "taboo" in mainstream science. Even discussing whether there is existing evidence for such differences may lead to the researcher being sanctioned by academic institutions.

Racial equality: Paris 1919

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Japan first proposed articles dedicated to the elimination of racial discrimination to be added to the rules of the League of Nations. This was the first proposal concerning the international elimination of racial discrimination in the world.

Although the proposal received a majority (11 out of 16) of votes, the chairman, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, overturned it saying that important issues should be unanimously approved. Billy Hughes[11] and Joseph Cook vigorously opposed it as it undermined the White Australia policy.

Revival in the United States

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Opposition to racism revived in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Ashley Montagu argued for the equality of humans across races and cultures. Eleanor Roosevelt was a very visible advocate for minority rights during this period. Anti-capitalist organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World, which gained popularity during 1905–1926, were explicitly egalitarian.

A group of Democratic Party activists protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement affiliated with the party.

Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance and continuing into the 1960s, many negro writers argued forcefully against racism. During the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow laws were repealed in the South and blacks finally re-won the right to vote in Southern states. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an influential force, and his "I Have a Dream" speech is an exemplary condensation of his egalitarian ideology.

As previously homogenous Western countries have become increasingly heterogeneous, more extreme forms of anti-racism have seen a major resurgence in more recent years, particularly during and after the presidency of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017. After the end of the Occupy movement,[12] the "anti-racist" organization Black Lives Matter was created during Obama's presidency in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the extensive mainstream media coverage surrounding his death, which, possibly combined with other shootings that occurred in 2012, is said to have played a major part in triggering an ongoing cultural revolution sometimes described by its critics as the "Great Awokening", in which the political left in the United States and other Western countries started becoming increasingly militant. Following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, members of the movement rioted across the United States and other Western countries in the name of social justice, with a very high number of major corporations and public figures coming out in support of the organization.[13]

The influence of anti-racism on modern society

File:Crowd at Demonstration.jpg
Crowd rallying at a demonstration in Israel against manifestations of racism and discrimination.

Egalitarianism has been a catalyst for feminism, anti-war, and anti-imperialist movements. Henry David Thoreau's opposition to the Mexican–American War, for example, was based in part on his fear that the U.S. was using the war as an excuse to expand American slavery into new territories. Thoreau's response was chronicled in his famous essay "Civil Disobedience", which in turn helped ignite Gandhi's successful campaign against the British in India. Gandhi's example in turn inspired the American civil rights movement.

As James Loewen notes in Lies My Teacher Told Me: "Throughout the world, from Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements." In East Germany, revolutionary Iran, Tiananmen Square, and South Africa under apartheid, images, words, and tactics developed by human rights supporters have been used regularly and repeatedly.

Controversies

Many of these uses have been controversial. For example, the pro-life movement often draws connections between its goals and the goals of abolitionism. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe used anti-racist rhetoric to promote a land distribution scheme which resulted in widespread starvation. However, it has often been argued that Mugabe himself headed a racist government due to his blatant acts of hostility and oppression toward white Rhodesians (see Land reform in Zimbabwe).[14][15][16] Notably, an almost-identical fate has since occurred in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia (see South African farm attacks), though whether these attacks have been racially motivated or not has been heavily disputed by the black majority government.

Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white

A billboard in Harrison, Arkansas displaying the message "Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White", taken circa 2014.

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The phrase "Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white", coined by the late high-profile American white nationalist Robert Whitaker, refers to a view that organized anti-racism is only or predominately directed at white people. It has also commonly been associated with the topic of white genocide, which states that mass immigration, integration, miscegenation, low fertility rates and abortion are being promoted in predominantly white countries to deliberately turn them minority-white and hence cause white people to become extinct through forced assimilation.[17] This alleged "white genocide" is said to be mostly practiced through a post-World War II multi-decade demographic transition otherwise known as population replacement, which involves mass immigration from the Third World. The large migrant population transfers of the early 21st century are claimed by opponents to be part of this alleged process of white genocide. Allegedly, a major component is the trend of male immigration surplus, where so-called "surplus males" from countries that practice polygyny seek a better life, and hopefully a local spouse, in Western Europe or the United States. Feminists are said to support this form of immigration, as they believe it will increase their number of potential partners. The term itself has become increasingly problematic in recent years.

See also

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"Anti-racist" organizations and institutions

International

Europe

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North America

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Other

  • All Together Now (Australia)
  • EXIT White Power (Australia)
  • Fight Dem Back (Australia and New Zealand)
  • People's Front of Anti Racism (Japan)

References

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  2. Mark Judge (Jan 4, 2015) https://acculturated.com/virtue-signaling/
  3. Jim Harries | William Carey International Development Journal (Aug 18, 2017) http://www.wciujournal.org/journal/article/popular-approaches-to-anti-racism-are-influenced-by-secularism-and-are-self
  4. John McWhorter (Jul 27, 2015) https://www.thedailybeast.com/antiracism-our-flawed-new-religion
  5. Johansen, Bruce, The Native Peoples of North America, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2006, p. 110, quote: "In the Papal bull Sublimis deus (1537), Pope Paul III declared that Indians were to be regarded as fully human, and that their souls were as immortal as those of Europeans. This edict also outlawed slavery of Indians in any form ..."
  6. Koschorke, A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (2007), p. 290
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  9. Tiedemann, Friedrich. On the Brain of the Negro, compared with that of the european and the orang-outang. IN: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. VOL:126 (1836). http://laboratoriogene.info/Ciencia_Hoje/Tiedemann_1836.pdf.
  10. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Descent_of_Man_(Darwin)/Chapter_VII.
  11. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. https://redice.tv/news/how-the-media-shifted-blame-from-bankers-to-white-people-after-occupy
  13. https://cancelthiscompany.com/
  14. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. Sentamu urges Mugabe action Archived October 15, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  17. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/06/03/we-stand-for-racial-justice/

Further reading

External links