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But Puritans believed they were superior to Native Americans, the African people, and even Anglicans—that is, all non-Puritans.
concocted a climate theory to justify Greek superiority, saying that extreme hot or cold climates produced intellectually, physically, and morally inferior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self-government.
All of this was in the interest of normalizing Greek slaveholding practices and Greece’s rule over the western Mediterranean. Aristotle situated the Greeks, in their supreme, intermediate climate, as the most beautifully endowed superior rulers and enslavers of the world.
St. Paul introduced, in the first century, a three-tiered hierarchy of slave relations—heavenly master (top), earthly master (middle), enslaved (bottom).
All in all, ethnic and religious and color prejudice existed in the ancient world.
“The deity gave liberty to all men, and nature created no one a slave,” wrote Alkidamas, Aristotle’s rival in Athens.
St. Augustine, an African church father in the fourth and fifth centuries, maintained that “whoever is born anywhere as a human being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange he may appear to our senses in bodily form or colour or motion or utterance, or in any faculty, part or quality of his nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that such an individual is descended from the one man who was first created.”
The eugenics movement created believers, not evidence.
The Wilson administration joined with England and Australia in rejecting Japan’s proposal that the League’s charter confess a commitment to the equality of all peoples.
To Wilson’s racist Americans, there was nothing more dangerous than a self-respecting Black person with antiracist expectations of immediate equality, rather than the gradual equality of assimilationists or the permanent inequality of segregationists.
“It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved by neither argument nor fact.”
More likely, he and his light-skinned peers felt their color privilege was threatened by discussions of colorism and color equality, not unlike Whites who felt their racial privilege threatened by discussions of racism and racial equality.
The Niggerati was quite possibly the first known fully antiracist intellectual and artistic group in American history. Its members rejected class racism, cultural racism, historical racism, gender racism, and even queer racism, as some members were homosexual or bisexual.
“In setting the hall-mark of his color upon him, his individuality is in a sense submerged, and instead of a mere thief, robber, or murderer, he becomes a representative of his race.”
In the summer of 1928, the Sixth Congress of the Soviet Comintern declared that “the Party must come out openly and unreservedly for the right of Negroes to national self-determination in the southern states, where the Negroes form a majority of the population.”13
America could never have a truthful history “until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,”
From Du Bois, historians now term these rewards the “wages of whiteness”: they were the privileges that would accrue to Whites through application of racist ideas and segregation.
Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham confessed in 1932 that his earlier findings about IQ tests determining genetic Black inferiority were “without foundation” (although the use of Brigham’s SAT test only expanded).
The more antiracist W. E. B. Du Bois became, the more he realized that trying to persuade powerful racists was a waste of time, and the more certain he felt that Black people must rely on each other.
Just like in the old days before Roosevelt, segregationists were given the power to locally administer and racially discriminate the relief coming from these federal programs. And segregationists made sure that farmers and domestics—Blacks’ primary vocations—were excluded from the laws’ new job benefits, like minimum wage, social security, unemployment insurance, and unionizing rights.
“This is fable,” Du Bois thundered in the April 1934 Crisis. “I once believed it
passionately. It may become true in 250 or 1,000 years. Now it is not true.”
Almost everyone still believed that different skin colors actually meant something more than different skin colors.
“Racism is an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another,” she wrote in Race: Science and Politics (1940).
As assimilationists took the helm of racial thought, their racist ideas became God’s law, nature’s law, scientific law, just like segregationist ideas over the past century. Assimilationists degraded and dismissed the behaviors of African people and somehow projected the idea that they were not racist, since they did not root those behaviors in biology, did not deem them perpetual, spoke of historical and environmental causes, and argued that Blacks were capable of being civilized and developed.
In the same way that Tarzan became the primary medium through which Americans learned about Africa, Gone with the Wind became the primary medium through which they learned about slavery. The only problem was that, in both cases, the depictions were woefully incorrect.
