A Changing Era in Race Relations

I spent the last week in Washington D.C. at the annual NADOHE Conference for Chief Diversity Officers working on college campuses across the nation.  NADOHE stands for the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.  After the conference, I spent seven hours touring the new Museum of African American History and Culture, the newest of the Smithsonian museums located on the mall. Both events were eye-opening experiences that got me thinking.I’ve long held the view that human beings are tribal, meaning that for purposes of survival, we tend to favor those who are most like ourselves. Our primal brains have maintained an “us and them” mentality, allowing us to kill, steal from, or oppress members of competing tribes over scarce resources. The history of mankind is a story of perpetual warfare, conquest, genocide, and oppression. In many ways, we humans have evolved in our rational thinking, but that thinking competes with our primal instincts.  In fact, the espoused idea that all men are created equal was a rational precept that our founding fathers couldn’t manage to live up to themselves because they had an economic incentive to exploit the labor of Africans and to steal the lands of its previous occupants. Did I mention that some humans are also a bit greedy for wealth and power and so use their wits to manipulate members of their tribe to believe that “them” are a threat to “us” for their own personal gain?

It is widely known that white people did not invent slavery. Slavery was a normal way of life throughout the entire world and it was not based on race; it was based on conquest. As far as I know from my reading, the agricultural revolution produced systems of social class that included slavery.  The work of farming and building required a lot of manual labor and it soon became a matter of the strong exploiting the labor of the conquered or less fortunate. No one questioned the actual humanity or intelligence of conquered groups and movement from slavery up the social ladder was possible through romance, smarts, talent, and luck.

But that changed with the discovery of the new world (the Americas).   Europeans, heavily armed, enslaved indigenous  people in the Americas who survived the new diseases introduced into the population or the wars over land. As the demand for sugar and rum and the work of building a new nation grew, so did the need for slave labor.  It just so happened that the people most invested in the Americas were white and their desire for slaves insatiable.

Europeans who had been trading for slaves in northwestern African since the Portuguese began the trade 1440s, now demanded African slaves in unprecedented numbers to work in the Americas.  The trade peaked in the 1780s with British slavers leading the way.  They collaborated with coastal African communities, who greedy for wealth, met the demand for slaves by raiding the villages of unwitting African tribes and selling them.  The eventual dehumanization of the Africans eventually became the sustaining rationale for a new brand of slavery that lasted some 400 years in the U.S.

However, the abolition of slavery (yes, it took a war in the U.S.) is testament to the fact that we as humans can evolve in our thinking about the humanity of others and the morality of slavery itself. Yes, there are still slaves in the world, but human trafficking and slave labor is frowned upon and slavery is no longer officially condoned. What we are left with however, is the aftermath of an economic motive that perpetuated slavery and the tribal mindset that continues to  exploit outsiders with less power.

The American ideal of equality is yet to be realized.  The historical structures built by laws, violence, and money that were utilized in the exploitation of African Americans and then used to limit their economic prospects and those of women and other minorities is still being dismantled.  The Civil Rights Movement pulled us out of Jim Crow and as the collective voices of women and minorities grows louder, demanding diversity, inclusion and equity, the inevitable pushback among fearful tribal whites became apparent with the election of Donald Trump with his backward looking tribal slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

The new task of social justice activists is to reach out to our fearful white brothers and sisters to help them envision a new tribe, the “human tribe”.  We have to convince them that together we can work toward the America that our founders could only write about:  a country where men who are created equal can actually live as equals.