There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. 'Good pride' represents our dignity and self-respect. 'Bad pride' is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance. John C. Maxwell
As I already stated, racism is not just a white and black issue because, in every society on the face of the earth, there are two major groups of people: those who feel they are superior and those who have been forcefully made to feel that they are inferior. This superiority is driven by fear and greed.
There is never any justification for taking advantage of other people, but for this to happen, people have to be reduced to something less than they actually are.
When people have been bombarded with a lie for a long time, they believe it. People will keep living this lie because their subconscious minds have been programmed by this faulty information. The subconscious mind cannot distinguish between what is true and what is false. The subconscious mind believes whatever information is fed into it and will use that information to determine the action each particular individual takes.
While racism has been amplified in societies like the United States of America where the arbitrary white/black divide has heightened this issue, we should not be distracted by the “intensity” of this problem globally.
Unfortunately, many have cast racism as something that exists strictly between the white and black races. This way of looking at the issue has not helped us to solve the problem, and it is the highest time that we try a new approach.
In the previous chapter, I tried to debunk the notion of different human races and established that we are all created in the image of God, and therefore, there is only one human race. In addition to the fact that there is only one human race, using color to classify humans is absurd and baseless. Society may insist on using this arbitrary classification scheme, but it is faulty and must be discarded.
If there is only one human race, then the term racism itself needs to be redefined or discarded altogether.
Conde (2017) defines racism as “the mistaken and gratuitous belief that the social construct of race is the primary factor in determining human characteristics and abilities, and that racial differences produce, again mistakenly and gratuitously, inherent superiority of a particular race.”[1]
As this definition clearly states racism is a social construct, then the belief in superiority is faulty as well.
This social construct is arbitrary and should be discarded because grouping humans in different races are based on skin color, which as we have already seen, is faulty.
The definition highlights the issue of superiority that is at the heart of ethnocentrism, and it is common among all the ethnic groups on every continent on the planet. When ethnocentrism is not checked, it spills into discrimination, mistreatment, and, at times, death.
Therefore, instead of isolating and treating the manifestation of “ethnocentrism gone amok” that exists between the white and black races, we should be looking at interactions within the entire human race because this broad division between white and black is artificial and unfounded.
Removing the white and black divide does not eliminate the discrimination, hate, and murder that occurs between different humans, regardless of their geographic location.
I started by looking at the first murder that occurred between two brothers from the same parents. You would have expected these two brothers to live in harmony, but something went wrong, and one of the brothers killed the other.
Remember that these two brothers had never heard the word racism and had no socio-economic division or any class distinction whatsoever. This did not prevent anger, fear, envy, and jealousy from driving one of them to murder the other.
Therefore, it will be naïve to invoke racism to be the root cause of what happened here. It seems there is something deeper at play here. When we dig a little deeper, we find out that the parents of these two brothers were living in a state of perfection until their disobedience brought in Sin, death, and destruction.
From that point to date, the human race has had a difficult time relating and living in harmony with each other because humankind is out of harmony with the Creator. Although we are can easily get distracted by the so-called manifestation of racism, the issue is deeper than that.
I have already established that race is a social construct, and it is not real. It is some sort of a camouflage that is used to cover up a deeper and more serious problem.
Nobody can say that “Racism caused me to discriminate against some other person, treat them badly, segregate them, enslave, lynch, and murder them with impunity.” Therefore, we must dig deeper and look for the root cause of all the hate, resentment, and wickedness that people express towards one another. How can anybody in their right minds pin slavery on their skin color?
The “blacks” were not enslaved because of their skin color. We must also factor in that other “blacks” in Africa caught and sold their brethren to the Europeans and Arabs. Yes, the Arabs were buying and selling Africans long before the Europeans jumped onto this profitable business that was fueled by greed and despicable evil.
Words are not adequate to describe this dark page in human history. While we may be tempted to place it above all other terrible events, we should not forget that human history is punctuated by such despicable acts that humans carried out against each other.
Therefore, we should resist the temptation of reducing such depths of depravity with racism because racism pales in comparison to what is hidden deep within the heart of man. All our attempts over the years to address the symptoms of this problem have not taken us far because abolishing racism will never possible if the root cause is not attacked.
A few thousand years ago, the prophet Jeremiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote the following chilling words:
“The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked;
Who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9 New King James Version (NKJV)
Let us go back to the two brothers and take a close look at Cain’s heart. God saw anger, bitterness, and resentment in his heart and warned him that if he did not do something, he was going to yield to sin. Cain decided to hide the wickedness in his heart from his brother. That is why when he invited his brother to come to the field with him, the unsuspecting brother showed up. If Abel could read his brother’s heart, he would have found out that his brother was planning to murder him. This would have prevented him from going.
Nobody can read the wickedness that is in people’s hearts. When Abel showed up, his brother Cain suddenly attacked and murdered him.
People may try to justify their mistreatment of other people under racism, but I am saying that racism is a toothless bulldog, it is a bogeyman that is being used to mask the wickedness in the hearts of mankind. There is no way a baseless, absurd, and unfounded social construct has the power to force people to commit heinous crimes against other people. It is time to stop blaming racism and start accepting that people are capable of doing terrible things to each other.
[1] Quotes & key text excerpts. (2017). In H. V. Conde, Human rights and the United States (3rd ed.). Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/greyhuman/quotes_andamp_key_text_excerpts/0?institutionId=951
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