Racism: Ingrained Ignorance

You’d think after a while that  disparaging things said  about people  of African descent, will let up, but it never ends.

At what should have been the pinnacle of her career, Greek triple jumper Voula Papachristou was banished from the Olympic Games on Wednesday after making racist comments and expressing right-wing sentiments on Twitter.

“With so many Africans in Greece, at least the West Nile mosquitoes will have homemade food,” she wrote. (http://sports.yahoo.com/news/olympics–greek-triple-jumper-removed-from-olympic-team-after-making-racist-comments-on-twitter.html)

And, interestingly, even with all of the “marriage is between one man and one woman” drivel, a white church in Mississippi refused to allow a marriage between an African-American couple – one man and one woman – to be performed in the church, a church which, by the way, the couple had been attending for some time, but had not joined.

The unfortunate couple was informed the day before their wedding was to take place that it would not and could not happen, and the pastor of the church, also white, was warned that if he performed the ceremony in the church he would be fired. (http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t2#/video/us/2012/07/27/church-bans-black-couple-wedding.wlbt)
I sometimes wonder what God was thinking when He was creating people. Actually, I wonder what brain patterns God created that makes and has historically made people think and believe that only  people of either Nordic or Germanic descent are “worthy” races.

It’s like racism is part of the DNA of some people. In his book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to Create a Master Race,” author Edwin Black describes how the “science” of eugenics was brought to life not by a redneck hillbilly, but by Harvard and Ivy League-bred intellectuals, including Charles Davenport, and was supported by some of the most prestigious names in American history, including Andrew Carnegie.

Interestingly, according to the work funded by the Carnegie Institute, not even the Greek athlete would have been considered a person of “worthy” race; people from the Mediterranean region, from Asia as well as from Africa were considered inferior.

Early proponents of a “master race” theory were adamant about the “taint” being in the blood of non-white, non-Germanic people. Robert Fletcher, who was the president of the Anthropological Society of Washington wrote in 1891 that “germ plasm” ruled, that one criminal would breed another, that the “taint was in the blood,” and that the only way to handle the problem of inferior races amongst the superior was to quarantine them.

American eugenicists hoped to craft a super race, a master race, and so known and respected that, Black writes, Hitler and the Nazis referred to the work of the Americans in their quest to exterminate Jews.

The question that comes to me, over and over again, is “did the tendency of people all over the world to put down, to denigrate, people of African descent originate with American racism and its theories of white supremacy? Would not only America but the world be less racist had not America taken the reins of racism and pushed a theory of the validity of white supremacy?

Because the roots of racism are so deep, it is not surprising that the negative remarks, the negative opinions and misconceptions, and the outright racist slurs that people so blithely utter and throw around is not surprising, but it sure gets boring and bothersome to keep on having to face that kind of music, just because of where one’s ancestors came from.

I am not sorry Voula Papachristou doesn’t get to compete in the games she worked to get to her whole life. Her skin color did not give her license to write such an insensitive thing on Twitter. Some will scoff and say, “get over it. It was a joke.”

To her, maybe, and her friends. But the people who make disparaging comments about people of African descent, who draw lewd cartoons and write and disseminate crude racially charged emails are not comedians.  They are victims of a sick way of thinking…spawned, perhaps, by ancestors who were determined to create a master race.

Those same ancestors spawned people who will say that marriage is between one man and one woman, with a “gentleman’s agreement” that that holds ONLY if the man and woman are white. Their being the progeny of brain sick ancestors, fused with religious dribble, makes them think the way they think is the way God thinks.

Isn’t that …interesting? They are not harbingers of truth or of exciting scientific discovery.

They are the victims of ingrained ignorance.

A candid observation …