It was easy to recognize ‘them’ when they belonged to an entirely different culture, but how is it done when ‘they’ belong to our own culture? The language, the customs, the appearance of the internal ‘them’ is not strange or unfamiliar, so the crude labelling and lumping is more difficult. But it can still be done. One sub-group may not look strange or unfamiliar to another sub-group, but it does look different, and that is often enough.
The different classes, the different occupations, the different age-groups, they all have their own characteristic ways of talking, dressing and behaving. Each sub-group develops its own accents or its own slang. The style of clothing also differs strikingly, and when hostilities break out between sub-groups, or are about to break out (a valuable clue), dressing habits become more aggressively and flamboyantly distinctive. In some ways they begin to resemble uniforms. In the event of a full-scale civil war, of course, they actually become uniforms, but even in lesser disputes the appearance of pseudo-military devices, such as arm-bands, badges and even crests and emblems, become a typical feature. In aggressive secret societies they proliferate.
These and other similar devices quickly serve to strengthen the sub-group identity and at the same time make it easier for other groups inside the super-tribe to recognize and lump together the individuals concerned as ‘them’. But these are all temporary devices. The badges can be taken off when the trouble is over. The badge-wearers can quickly blend back into the main population. Even the most violent animosities can subside and be forgotten. An entirely different situation exists, however, when a sub-group possesses distinctive physical characteristics. If it happens to exhibit, say, dark skin or yellow skin, fuzzy hair or slant eyes, then these are badges that cannot be taken off, no matter how peaceful their owners. If they are in a minority in a supertribe they are automatically looked upon as a sub-group behaving as an active ‘them’. Even if they are a passive ‘them’ it seems to make no difference. Countless hair-straightening sessions and countless eye-skin-fold operations fail to get the message across, the message that says, ‘We are not deliberately, aggressively setting ourselves apart.’ There are too many conspicuous physical clues left.
Rationally, the rest of the super-tribe knows perfectly well that these physical ‘badges’ have not been put there on purpose, but the response is not a rational one. It is a deep-seated in-group reaction, and when pent-up aggression seeks a target, the physical badge-wearers are there, literally ready-made to take the scapegoat role.
A vicious circle soon develops. If the physical badge-wearers are treated, through no fault of their own, as a hostile sub-group, they will all too soon begin to behave like one. Sociologists have called this a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. Let me illustrate what happens, using an imaginary example. These are the stages:
Look at that green-haired man hitting a child.
That green-haired man is vicious.
All green-haired men are vicious.
Green-haired men will attack anyone.
There’s another green-haired man—hit him before he hits you. (The green-haired man, who has done nothing to provoke aggression, hits back to defend himself.)
There you are—that proves it: green-haired men are vicious.
Hit all green-haired men.
This progression of violence sounds ridiculous when expressed in such an elementary manner. It is, of course, ridiculous, but nevertheless it represents a very real way of thinking. Even a dimwit can spot the fallacies in the seven deadly stages of mounting group prejudice that I have listed, but this does not stop them becoming a reality.
After the green-haired men have been hit for no reason for long enough, they do, rather naturally, become vicious. The original false prophecy has fulfilled itself and become a true prophecy.
This is the simple story of how the out-group becomes a hated entity. There are two morals to this tale: do not have green hair; but if you do, make sure you are known personally to people who do not have green hair, so that they will realize that you are not actually vicious. The point is that if the original man seen hitting a child had had no special features potentially setting him apart, he would have been judged as an individual, and there would have been no damaging generalization. Once the harm has been done, however, the only possible hope of preventing a further spread of in-group hostility must be founded on personal interchange and knowledge of the other green-haired individuals as individuals. If this does not happen, then the intergroup hostility will harden and the green-haired individuals — even those who are excessively non-violent— will feel the need to club together, even live together, and defend one another. Once this has occurred, then real violence is just around the comer. Less and less contact will take place between members of the two groups and they will soon be acting as if they belonged to two different tribes. The greenhaired people will soon start to proclaim that they are proud of their green hair, when in reality it never had the slightest significance for them before it became singled out as a special signal.
The quality of the green-hair signal that made it so potent was its visibility. It had nothing to do with true personality.
It was merely an accidental label. No out-group has ever been formed, for example, of people who belong to blood group O, despite the fact that, like skin colour or hair pattern, it is a distinct and genetically controlled factor. The reason is simple enough— you cannot tell who is group O, simply by looking at them. So, if a known group O man hits a child, it is difficult to extend antagonism towards him to other group O people.
This sounds so obvious, and yet it is the whole basis of the irrational in-group/out-group hatreds we usually refer to as ‘racial intolerance’. For many it is hard to grasp that, in reality, this phenomenon has nothing whatsoever to do with significant racial differences in personality, intelligence, or emotional make-up (which have never been proved to exist), but only with insignificant and nowadays meaningless differences in superficial racial ‘badges’. A white child or a yellow child, reared in a black super-tribe and given equal opportunities, would undoubtedly do as well and behave in the same way as the black children. The reverse is also true. If this does not appear to be so, then it is simply the result of the fact that they probably would not be given equal opportunities. To understand this we must take a brief look at the way the different races came into being in the first place.
To start with, the word ‘race’ is unfortunate. It has been abused too often. We speak of the human race, the white race and the British race, meaning respectively the human species, the white sub-species and the British super-tribe. In zoology, a species is a population of animals that breed freely amongst themselves, but cannot or do not breed with other populations. A species tends to split into a number of distinguishable sub-species as it spreads over a wider and wider geographical range. If these sub-species are artificially mixed up, they still breed freely with one another and can blend back into one overall type, but normally this does not happen. Climatic and other differences influence the colour, shape and size of the different sub-species in their various natural regions. A group living in a cold region, for example, may become heavier and stockier; another, inhabiting a forest region, may evolve a spotted coat that camouflages it in the dappled light. The physical differences help to tune the sub-species in to their environments so that each one is better off in its own particular area. Where the regions meet there is no hard line between the sub-species; they merge gradually into one another. If, as time goes on, they become increasingly different from one another, they may eventually cease to inter-breed at the borders of their range and a sharp dividing line develops. If later they spread and overlap they will no longer mix. They will have become true species.
The human species, as it began to spread out over the globe, started to form distinctive sub-species, just like any other animal. Three of these, the (white) Caucasoid group, the (black) Negroid group and the (yellow) Mongoloid group, have been highly successful. Two of them
have not, and exist today as only remnant groups, shadows of their former selves. They are the Australoids—the Australian Aborigines and their relatives — and the Capoids — the southern African bushmen. These two sub-species once covered a much wider range (the bushmen at one time owning most of Africa), but they have since been exterminated in all but limited areas. A recent survey of the relative sizes of these five sub-species estimated their present world populations as follows:
Caucasoid: 1,757 million
Mongoloid: 1,171 million
Negroid: 216 million
Australoid: 13 million
Capoid: 126 thousand
Of the total world population of just over 3,000 million human animals, this gives the white sub-species the lead with over 55 per cent, the yellow sub-species close on their heels with 37 per cent, and the Negroid sub-species nearly 7 per cent. The two remnant groups together make up less than 1/2 per cent of the total.
These figures are inevitably approximations, but they give some idea of the general picture. They cannot be precise because, as I explained earlier, the characteristic of a sub-species is that it blends into its neighbours at the places where their ranges meet. An additional complication has arisen in the case of the human species as a result of the increased efficiency of transportation. There has been an enormous amount of migration and shifting about of subspecific populations, so that in many regions complex mixtures have arisen and a further blending process has taken place. This has occurred despite the formation of in-group/out-group antagonisms and bloodshed because, of course, the different sub-species can still inter-breed fully and efficiently.
Had the different human sub-species remained geographically separated for a longer period of time they might well have split up into distinct species, each physically adapted to its special climatic and environmental conditions. That was the way things were going. But man’s increasingly efficient technical control over his physical environment, coupled with his great mobility, has made nonsense of this particular evolutionary trend. Cold climates have been subdued by everything from clothing and log fires to central heating; hot environments have been tamed by refrigeration and air-conditioning. The fact, for instance, that a Negro has more cooling sweat glands than a Caucasoid, is rapidly ceasing to have any adaptive meaning.
In time it is inevitable that the sub-species differences, the ‘racial characters’, will blend completely and disappear altogether. Our distant successors will stare in wonder at the old photographs of their extraordinary ancestors. Unfortunately this will take a very long time indeed, because of the irrational misuse of these characters as badges for mutual hostility. The only hope of rapidly speeding up this valuable and ultimately inevitable process of re-mixing would be international obedience to a new law forbidding interbreeding with a member of your own sub-species. Since this is pure fantasy, the solution we must rely on is an increasingly rational approach to what has hitherto been an immensely emotional subject. That this will come easily can soon be refuted by a brief study of the incredible extremes of irrationality that have prevailed on so many occasions. It will suffice to select only one example: the repercussions of the Negro slave trade to America.
Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries a grand total of nearly fifteen million Negroes were captured in Africa and shipped as slaves to the Americas. There was nothing new about slavery, but the scale of the operation and the fact that it was carried out by super-tribes professing the Christian faith made it exceptional. It required a special attitude of mind — one that could only stem from a reaction to the physical differences between the sub-species involved. It could only be done if the African Negroes were looked upon as virtually a new form of domestic animal.
It had not begun like this. The first travellers to penetrate black Africa were astonished by the grandeur and organization of the Negro empire. There were great cities, scholarship and learning, complex administration and considerable wealth. Even today, for many people, this is hard to believe. There is so little evidence of it left, and the propaganda picture of the naked, indolent, murderous savage persists all too well. The glory of the Benin bronzes is easily overlooked. The early reports of Negro civilization have been comfortably hidden away and forgotten.
Let us take just one glimpse at an ancient Negro city in West Africa, as it was seen over three and a half centuries ago by an early Dutch traveller. He wrote:
The town seemeth to be very great; when you enter into it, you go into a great broad street ... seven or eight times broader than Warmoes street in Amsterdam ... you see many streets on the sides thereof, which also go right forth ... The houses in the town stand in good order one close and even with the other, as the houses in Holland stand ... The King’s Court is very great, within it having many great four-square plains, which round about them have galleries... I was so far within the court that I passed over four such great plains, and wherever I looked, still I saw gates upon gates to go into other places ...
Hardly a crude mud-hut village. Nor could the inhabitants of these ancient West African civilizations be described as ferocious, spear-waving savages. As early as the middle of the fourteenth century a sophisticated visitor remarked on the ease of travel and the reliable availability of food and good lodgings for the night. He commented: ‘There is complete security in their country. Neither traveller nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.’
After the early travellers, the later contacts rapidly turned to commercial exploitation. As the ‘savages’ were attacked, pillaged, subdued and exported, their civilization crumbled. The remnants of their shattered world began to fit the picture of a barbarous, disorganized race. Reports were more frequent now and they left no doubt as to the inferior nature of the Negroid culture. The fact that this cultural inferiority had been initially caused by white brutality and greed was conveniently overlooked. Instead, the Christian conscience found it easier to accept the idea that the black skin (and the other physical differences) represented outward signs of mental inferiorities. It was then a simple matter to argue that the culture was inferior because the Negroes were mentally inferior, and for no other reason. If this was so, then the exploitation did not appear to involve degradation because the ‘breed’ was already inherently degraded. As the ‘proof’ rolled in that the Negroes were little better than animals, the Christian conscience could relax.
The Darwinian theory of evolution had not yet arrived on the scene. There were two Christian attitudes towards the existence of Negroid humans: the monogenist and the polygenist. The monogenists believed that all types of men had sprung from the same original source, but that Negroes had long ago undergone a gross physical and moral decline, so that slavery was a proper role for them. Writing in the middle of the last century, an American priest put the position very clearly:
The Negro is a striking variety, and at present permanent, as the numerous varieties of domestic animals. The Negro will remain what he is, unless his form is altered by intermixture, the simple idea of which is revolting; his intelligence is greatly inferior to that of the Caucasians, and he is consequently, from all we know of him, incapable of governing himself. He has been placed under our protection. The vindication of slavery is contained in the scriptures ... It determines the duties of masters and slaves ... we can effectively defend our institutions from the word of God.
With these words he taunted the early Christian reformers. How dare they go against the Bible?
This statement, coming several centuries after the start of the exploitation, makes it clear just how completely the original knowledge of the ancient civilization of the African Negroes had been suppressed. If it had not been suppressed, then the ‘incapable of governing himself’ lie would have been exposed and the whole argument, the whole justification, would have fallen to the ground.
Opposing the monogenists were the polygenists. They believed that each ‘race’ had been created separately, each with its own special
properties, its strengths and its weaknesses. Some polygenists believed that there were as many as fifteen different species of man inhabiting the world. They put in a good word for the Negro:
The polygenist doctrine assigns to the inferior races of humanity a more honourable place than in the opposite doctrine. To be inferior to another man either in intelligence, vigour, or beauty, is not a humiliating condition. On the contrary, one might be ashamed to have undergone a physical or moral degradation, to have descended the scale of beings, and to have lost rank in creation.
This too was written in the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite the difference in attitude, the polygenists’ approach still automatically accepts the idea of racial inferiorities. Either way the Negroes lost out.
Even after the American slaves were given their official freedom, the old attitudes still persisted in one form or another. Had the Negroes not been saddled with their physical out-group ‘badges’, they would have been rapidly assimilated into their new super-tribe. But their appearance set them apart and the old prejudices were able to persist. The original lie— that their culture had always been inferior and that therefore they were inferior — still lurked at the back of white minds. It biased their behaviour and continued to aggravate relations. It influenced even the most intelligent and otherwise enlightened men. It continued to create black resentment, a resentment that was now backed by official social freedom. The outcome was inevitable. Since his inferiority was only a myth, invented by distorting history, the American Negro naturally failed to continue to behave as if he were inferior, once the chains had been removed. He began to rebel. He demanded actual equality as well as official equality.
The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal Page 13
