[My two books on Darwin are
available at online vendors. The 800 page tome is Darwin’s Racism: The Definitive Case. The 200 page condensation is A Short but Full Book on Darwin’s Racism.]
In my big book on Darwin, I
emphasized that racism is not primarily a belief system. It is an action system
aimed at making a targeted group feel inferior and then taking everything else
from them or denying them everything. Verbal pronouncements, such as “They are
inferior”, are very much a part of that action system. “They are inferior” is
not a belief, it is an action intended to create feelings of inferiority. But
that is not what I would point out as the most essential thing about racism.
There is something else about racism that is very pernicious and survives every
attempt to defeat it. It continues even when racists lose a battle here and
there, and it follows from being an action system. It is simply this: to lay
the blame on the allegedly inferior group for everything that goes wrong in their attempts to better their lot.
One of the biggest battles that
racists lost was the emancipation of slaves. But that did not even put a dent
in racism. There was a lot of talk on the part of liberals about how slavery
had debased blacks and how they were not ready for freedom. If emancipation was
to succeed, former slaves would have to be lifted up, and if this did not
happen, blacks would continue to live debased lives. But the onus was almost
always put on blacks. People gave very little thought to the obstacles that
whites were throwing in the way of blacks. Those obstacles were mainly in the
form of laws denying them rights (such as the right to vote). This also included
white rioting. When blacks did manage to pull themselves up by their own
bootstraps, they were only a white riot away from being pulled down again, as
whites attacked and destroyed black businesses.
The interesting thing is that
most liberals totally admitted that white people had denigrated slaves and
deteriorated the lives of black people in the first place through slavery, but
if black lives did not improve after emancipation, that was their own fault.
Whites were not to blame for the failures of blacks and for keeping them down
through harsh laws and the denial of civil rights. Even though the initial
degradation was the fault of whites, the continuing degradation was the fault
of blacks for not improving themselves.
The same was done to Indians.
Indians would have to learn the white man’s ways, if their lives were to get
any better. The deprivation they were continually subjected to by whites was
not the problem. What racism did was to shift the conversation always onto the
shoulders of blacks and Indians, so that no one paid attention to how whites
manipulated the system to serve themselves alone. Only a handful of
humanitarians objected to this mischievous misrepresentation of the facts.
In 1796, when Judge St. George
Tucker of Virginia published and submitted his gradual emancipation plan to the
legislature of his state, he made it clear that the ultimate goal was to get
rid of all blacks from Virginia. He knew emancipation in the northern states
had not worked out to the benefit of slaves who were still subjected to an
onerous system of what he called civil slavery. His emancipation plan specifically
called for civil slavery in the hope that this would be so bad that blacks
would voluntarily remove themselves from Virginia. Tucker was by no means a
liberal, despite his abolition plan. Integration of blacks into society was the
last thing he wanted.
But Tucker made two interesting
observations. One was the usual one that slaves had been forced to lead debased
lives and thus were not ready for freedom. The other was a little more unusual.
He noted that slavery had made whites were unfit for equality. The practice of
slavery had made white people arrogant and unable to treat blacks fairly. But
while Tucker thought former slaves would need uplifting to prepare them for
freedom, he made no suggestion that whites needed any education to accept the
equality of blacks.
Darwin fits this pattern to a T.
His inquiries into the lives of savages always take the form of “what’s wrong
with them?” When Darwin looks into the causes of what he believes is the
inevitable extermination of savages tribes throughout the world (the darker
skinned people), he lays it all on the inferiorities or inadequacies of Native
peoples. His favorite cause of extermination is the infertility of Native
women. He never asks himself if white people are doing anything to keep the
birth rate down. Lessened fertility is a fault in savages. They are
biologically inferior. Darwin always stresses biology. Even what he regards as
the inferior morality of savages is an issue of biological inheritance for him.
Nature made them that way.
Compare, or contrast, Darwin to a
contemporary, Herman Merivale whose lectures on colonization were published in
the 1840s and republished in the 1860s. Merivale too wrote about the causes of
extermination of savages, but his concern was to understand the causes so that
extermination could be prevented. Behind his inquiry are the questions “What is
wrong with us?” and “Why are we doing this to them?” Darwin shows no concern to
stop the extermination. His investigation into its causes serves to promote the
inevitability of it. He was always on the lookout for deficiencies in Native
peoples. Merivale and Darwin were worlds apart, though they were writing about
the same subject.
When Darwin accepts the adage
“Never, never trust an Indian,” it prevents him from seeing this any other way.
He read another contemporary author who pointed out that subjugated people will
resort to lies and deception as a survival tactic; in other words, they are not
inherently untrustworthy, it is just what they do from time to time to defeat
what the conqueror is doing to them. This had no impact on Darwin—which is
ironic when you consider that Darwin was the supposed expert on survival. Darwin’s
essential racism was that he was looking for what is wrong in dark skinned
people to explain their failure to adjust to European colonialism. Injustice
was never the issue for him. He could never see that imperialism had made white
people unfit for equality and humane treatment of the Other.
© 2018 Leon Zitzer
