Origins of Racism: Colonialism

I’m on a roll. I read Walter Raleigh’s book "The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana" (1596) and have started "The Decades of the Newe World or West Indies” (1555) which was the most influential book in English in shaping English views of the New World during the 1500's. By today’s standards parts of it are racist, with descriptions of the native peoples as passive, lazy and uncivilized. It’s not hard to see where later attitudes came from. Nevertheless it is interesting to read as it reflects the expansive feeling that Britain had toward the Americas at that time. The book is almost entirely in black letter, the printed version of the manuscript hand used in books before printing but it actually isn’t that bad to read.

In my ongoing project to understand how we got to the point where we are now, this book is a landmark. It is important to understand the attitudes and assumptions that Europeans made in their approach to this hemisphere even if reading texts such as these can make me wince. Europeans saw their encounter with the Americas as a discovery because they didn't have a clue it was there. Columbus died convinced that he had actually encountered the outer islands of the eastern coast of Asia. It didn't matter that there were people in the way.

Obviously the Norse were here centuries before but by the time the Spanish were

exploring this region that had pretty much become forgotten.

For Europeans their encounter with the Americas was totally out of the blue, but their wonder soon turned into the desire to dominate people and extract resources for their own gain. In fact, Columbus' voyages were not high-minded expeditions to increase the knowledge about the world. They were expeditions to find the back door to Asia to get spices at wholesale prices.
 
However, the bonus, as the colonial powers saw it, was that they brought Christianity to the savages. So, even though they were enslaved, and worked to death, and killed by European diseases, they needed to be grateful for this. Hm.

Their blindness to the rights of the native peoples of the Americas to their own land and cultures caused a huge injustice which still reverberates in our hemisphere, and the origins of this injustice lie here.  I realize that reading older books like these may seem esoteric to some, but it isn't. Walter Raleigh came to South America at a time when the continent had been colonized by the Spanish and Portugese for a century. He describes the Guayana Region, now part of Venezuela, and makes lavish promises about how abundant gold is in the region. The colonial powers of Spain and Portugal were in South and Central America for one reason--money. They extracted immense amounts of silver, for one. The colonial system they set up lasted for centuries, and the effects still exist today. This region is the way it is because European empires made it that way. They committed cultural genocide, and literal genocide. You can draw a straight line between Raleigh's description of this region and Trump's immigration policy which discriminates against people fleeing from oppression in Central America.

So, what can be done? It's not possible to return to the past. I'm not planning to go to England because that's where my ancestors came from, any more than African Americans should be expected to go "back" to Africa because that's where their ancestors came from before they were forcibly removed. If they were to choose so, as W. E. B. Dubois did (he moved to Ghana where he died in 1963) that's fine, but to expect them to do so is just plain ignorant.

Having said that, don't think I haven't ruled out moving to England to escape the insanity here.

A start is to find a way to be hospitable to those coming from Central America not because they are looking for a free ride, but because they are fleeing politically unstable countries, some seemingly on the verge of anarchy. These countries have been through a lot, first as colonies, then suffering under the oppression of brutal dictatorships, and now being overrun by drug cartels and gangs of thugs. This is a mess our ancestors created, and innocent people are suffering for it. It's our creation, not theirs.