Defining Racial Hierarchy:
Like us you may have heard the words racial hierarchy be used in discussions recently on racial equality.
But what is it?
Put simply it is the idea that there is an existing order which naturally places one race above another in their “genetic, moral, and intellectual capacity as human beings”. [1]
It will come as no surprise then that the exploration of racial hierarchies leads directly into ideas of white supremacy.
Before we get into the topic, we ask you this, what do you think of when you hear the phrase “White Supremacist”?
….
My (Nathan’s) first thought was the kind of Neo-Nazis you would find in a Louis Theroux documentary, residing in some tiny town in the deep south of America where their views are on the periphery of society and hold no power. But it is sadly not that the ideas and legacies of white supremacy are only stewing amongst a tiny modern minority; in reality it’s affects continue to be far more insidious even at the center of our society today, even if (in some cases) they are not as overtly displayed as they were 60 years ago.
There are moments in history that are far easier to write about than fully empathize with. Numbers on a page can never truly convey the mass loss of life our world has seen time and time again. The atrocities of the Atlantic Slave Trade are no exception and it is far easier to write that millions of Africans were enslaved than to really imagine what it was like for every human being, adults and children alike, that were torn from their homes and their families. They were enslaved, starved, whipped, raped, tortured, brutalized, and ultimately stripped of all humanity (aside from what they could reclaim for themselves).
How could any of this be morally justified for centuries?
Fundamental to the answer is white supremacy. The idea that white Europeans were naturally superior beings to the “other”: those “dark skinned” indigenous peoples. According to western imperial philosophy and thought, nonwhite peoples were scientifically inferior, less human and therefore deserving of subjugation.
But how was this idea codified on a mass scale into western thought?
Scotland and Enlightenment
The enlightenment period is looked back on as a pinnacle moment in human history for the development of human rights. Paradoxically, however, it was during the 18th Century that Western thinkers also laid the bedrock for modern ideas of a racial hierarchy.
Scotland often celebrates enlightened thinkers such as David Hume. He is one of Scotland’s most famous philosophers who produced many works and his statue stands proudly on our capitals high street, where his big toe is bronzed through passers by rubbing it for luck.
Though not the focal part of Hume’s discussions his own words helped to lay the foundations of an ideology that still views the use of a humans ethnic/religious/genetic makeup as an important factor in their abilities to succeed on a human level compared to one another. Conveniently for those making the rules, that the “luck of the draw” fell in favor of their own race. European whites sat top of the natural order of race.
Hume himself wrote in his “Essay of National Characters”
“I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.”
A logic that is rather simply disproved through any knowledge of civilizations like Ancient Egypt, China and Mesopotamia, who were unquestionably more “advanced” than the mighty British Isles at the time. Indeed, even into the Late Middle Ages, the Bennin Empire in West Africa constructed a wall larger than that of China and the kingdoms India were considered to be far more wealthy and prosperous than anywhere in Europe, according to travelers from our own Western shores.
This mindset which Hume and many other contemporary western Philosophers and leaders took also is based in the false assumption that to be more technologically advanced is a superior way of existing. A false assumption which is still widespread today. The fact that Ancient Eastern logic and meditative practices are widespread in the western world to calm our busy technology filled lives is therefore highly ironic. So too is the inspiration many environmental activists take from “uncivilized” nomadic peoples who live sustainably and far more closely with nature than we do in our own “civilized” states.
Archibald Alison
Fast forward a century and the success of the codification of racial hierarchies in Scotland is clear. Blackwood magazine (a staunchly conservative Edinburgh based magazine) gave the Scot, Archibald Alison, (who often wrote for them), an obituary praising his life’s work and legacies. Ones which included his important role as Sheriff of Lanarkshire
Considering the upbringing of Alison, it is unsurprising that he turned out to be anything other than a staunch defender of the slave trade and in turn provide strong opposition to the idea of emancipation. His father raised Archibald and his brothers reading works such as The Wealth of Nations.
It was the ideas of white supremacy that were codified a century prior that we see in books such as Wealth of Nations which argued there were sub species of human and thus some were naturally superior. These justified Alison’s arguments in favor of slavery. Alison deemed enslaved Africans “savages” and argued that “Nature never intended that men in this stage of society should be free”
Alison’s conceptions of racial hierarchy were by no means original to him, with Anglo-Saxon white English and Scots at the top of the pile.
“To the Anglo-Saxon race” he said “is destined the sceptre of the globe”
During the American Civil War Alison stuck to his guns, “The experiment of emancipation in the British West India Islands, …. has dispelled the pleasing illusion, so dear to republicans of every age, that all men are equal by nature. So far from being so, they are enormously unequal.”
His attack on equality on the grounds of race clearly failed to recognize the likes of James Mcune Smith: the first African American to earn a medical degree. He also graduated top of his class at the University of Glasgow. Just as he must have missed the enthralling oral skills of the freed slave Frederick Douglass in either of his Scottish tours.
Abolitionists may have succeeded eventually in outlawing the institution of slavery under the British flag, but efforts to dispel ideas of racial difference and in turn racial hierarchy were few and far between.
Historian Catherine Hall has concluded that “It was men such as Alison who not only defended slavery but crafted visions of racial hierarchy after emancipation that influenced generations”
It is also important to remember that those who advocated for the abolition of slavery were not always opposed to notions of racial hierarchy. Many believed that to own a slave was a sin in the eyes of god, however that did not mean that non white people deserved or were even capable of the same lives as whites.
Clearly the entire premise of colonialism needed the concept of white supremacy as justification, to view their actions as some form of global moral mission rather than a process of wealth accumulation through the means of invasion, theft and attempted genocide of cultures which were all of course “inferior”.
Racial Hierarchy and the impact on the 20th century:
Whether we like it or not these systems have been overtly used and supported in our society within living memory.
Historically speaking, three of the most overtly racially justified systems of oppression all existed in the 20th Century: Jim Crow America, Nazi Germany and the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
As most reading will know Hitler explicitly argued the superiority of the Arian race but his ideas of racial hierarchy were grounded in a tradition of white European superiority. In fact it is understood that the Nazi Nuremburg Laws were inspired by Jim Crow America.[2]
And whilst the Second World War raged on, Churchill pulled no punches in conveying his sentiment to all Indians – “I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion”. With a genuine desire to be as sympathetic to the context of “his time” as possible we must ask not only how someone could so hypocritically fight fascism whilst simultaneously holding such disregard for fellow human beings, and more importantly how this could and still does go often unchallenged. The simple answer was that just like Archibald Alison and so many others Winston Churchill believed in the racial hierarchies that had been developed. Is it any wonder he showed no remorse for the 3 million dead Indians of the Bengali Famine? Of course not, he did not think of them as equal, in fact he barely thought of them as people at all, closer to beasts after all given his use of the term savages to describe them.
We do not say this out of an assumption, his belief in a racial hierarchy is far better seen in his own words:
‘I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’ [3]
The apartheid regime in south Africa was formulated with the help and support of Churchill and the British government and received financial support in the form of trade even as recently as Margaret Thatcher’s government. To assume then that these overt systems of racial oppression all within the last Century have had no affect on the way our societies are set up is to completely disregard the dangerous legacies of ideologies within living memory.
Why does it matter today?
In my teenage years I (Nathan) remember hearing the phrase “if it ain’t white it ain’t right” and found myself simply laughing at how ludicrous the statement was, even saying it mockingly aloud in my best impression of the American racist who had spluttered such nonsense. But the insidious legacy of white supremacy sadly leaves me with a more personally upsetting reflection.
At the time I heard it, I mocked its ridiculousness and I told myself that only the Neo-Nazis in Louis Theroux’s documentaries think like that. But now on reflection I see just how much the concept of the phrase had shaped my own identity.
I said in our mission statement that I found myself often rejecting my Brownness growing up. And in rejection of Brownness I guess I was essentially trying to be whiter, clearly part of me believed that white was right. That is by no means to say I thought being non-white was “wrong”; more that I clearly associated whiteness as being better. You see discussion of the legacies of white supremacy is not an accusation at all white people, it is an attempt to discuss how our racial history has shaped everyone in our society today.
Author of bestseller ‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’ Renni-Eddo Lodge tells of the time she asked her mother aged four, when she would become white. Why? Because everyone good in her shows and books was white and she believed she was a good person.
The insidious and painful developments that have come as a result of years of enforcing racial hierarchies are not hard to find around the world.
By 2025 it is predicted the globally popular skin lightening cream industry will be worth roughly $13.7 Billion.
In 2011 the World Health Organisation released statistics which showed that 40% of African women bleached their skin. This figure varied between countries and was as high as 77% of African women in Nigeria. Much of the bleaching is done by injection of dangerous and unchecked chemicals with many studies warning of the dangers. Put simply these women are willing to inject dangerous substances into their bodies in order to become less black.
The psychology of skin lightening and bleaching reveals just how damaging legacies of white supremacy can be.
We are by no means suggesting everyone is deliberately white supremacist, we are simply trying to highlight that the society we live in today has not cast off the shackles of the past, a past which codified racial hierarchies to morally justify racism and oppression for centuries. A legacy which can be seen in recent atrocious regimes. They are not old news; they are uncomfortably recent and to pretend that these institutions have left no legacy on society prevents us from making progress. The negative and often violent reaction of many to the Black Lives Matter’s movement is but one example of these ideas practically manifesting in our society.
This article cannot do justice to the enormity of this topic and it’s complicated and ongoing legacies. As always, we would recommend reflection and education on the matters we have explored. What we do know is that Scots, like many other white Europeans, were influential in the codification and perpetuation of a racial hierarchy which morally justified racist regimes for centuries. These regimes highlight the very worst of human history and we must understand how they could ever have happened in order to prevent them happening again.
Sources
Garrett & Sebastiani, ‘David Hume on Race’
Catherine Hall in ‘Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past’
Akala, ‘Natives’
Reni Eddo-Lodge, ‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-skin-lightening-products-market
https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/april-2019-july-2019/paying-high-price-skin-bleaching
[1] Akala, ‘Natives’ p. 165
[2] Akala, ‘Natives’ p. 59
[3] Churchill to the Palestine Royal Commision in 1937
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