Racism and Terrorism: Aftermath of 9/11

© 2010 Emmanuel M. Ekwo. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 8/12/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-4748-5 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-4746-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-4747-8 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010910961

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Contents

Chapter One       Racism: Meaning and Origin

Chapter Two       Racism in the Greco – Roman Period

Chapter Three       Slavery and the Bible

Chapter Four       The History of Racism

Chapter Five       Explaining the Race Prejudice in the United States

Chapter Six       Racism in Contemporary Times

Chapter Seven       The Case for Affirmative Action

Chapter Eight       Racism: The Final Frontier

Chapter Nine       IDENTITY: Our God Given Solution to the Problem of Racism

Chapter Ten       Terrorism: The other Side of Racism

Chapter Eleven       The Elusive Definition of Terrorism

Chapter Twelve       Attack on America – Terrorism 9/11

Chapter Thirteen       Global War on Terror: The Way Forward

Endnotes

Dedication

To my wife and our children

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to our founding fathers who made great sacrifice that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Other Books by Emmanuel M. Ekwo

Perilous Times: Worldliness in the Church

The Christian and the World

Homosexuality: Explaining the Zeitgeist

The author is available for counseling, speaking engagements, family and group prayers, plus other evangelistic outreaches anywhere in the world. And for additional copies of this book, please, contact the publisher:

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Bloomington, IN 47403

1.888.519.5121

Or you can contact the author via e-mail ekwos@msn.com or ekwos@yahoo.com

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

- In Congress, July 4, 1776

Chapter One

Racism: Meaning and Origin

When asked by a roving reporter for Radio Kwezi what their definition of racism was, most delegates to the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) organized by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa revealed confusion. As Rev. Kjell Olsen, the General Secretary of Christians For Truth, observed: The very word Racism has been abused and because of the confusion as to its definition, all sorts of wild allegations have been twisted to mean racism. Until recently, ‘racism’ meant the unfair discrimination against peoples based on their skin color or other hereditary qualities … Unfortunately, the organizers (and most of the participants) of the WCAR have tried to equate all sorts of unjust treatment of different people groups … even when race plays no role … this linguistic confusion about the very definition of race is a major contributor to the grudge fest in Durban.¹

There is no question that the word racism, just like terrorism, has different meaning to different people. One man’s racist is another man’s nationalist.

However, dictionary.com, the free online dictionary, defines racism as: a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement … hatred or intolerance of another race or other races …²

While, the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines racism as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority or inferiority of a particular racial group, and that it is also the prejudice based on such a belief.³

The Macquarie Dictionary defines racism as: the belief that human races have distinctive characteristics which determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule or dominate others. Or, on the opposite side, racism can be described as the belief that a certain race or races portray undesirable characteristics. In the case of institutional racism, certain racial groups may be denied rights or benefits, or receive preferential treatment. Racial discrimination typically points out taxonomic differences between different groups of people, although anyone may be discriminated against on an ethnic or cultural basis, independently of their somatic differences. According to the United Nations conventions, there is no distinction between the term racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination. Although the term racism usually denotes race-based prejudice, violence, dislike, discrimination, or oppression, the term can also have varying and contested definitions. Racialism is a relative term, sometimes intended to avoid these negative meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racism is a belief or ideology that all members of each racial group possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially to distinguish it as being either superior or inferior to another racial group or racial groups.

Debates over the origins of racism often suffer from a lack of clarity over the term. Many use the term racism to refer to more general phenomena, such as xenophobia and ethnocentrism, although scholars attempt to clearly distinguish those phenomena from racism as an ideology or from scientific racism, which has little to do with ordinary xenophobia. Other people conflict recent forms of racism with earlier forms of ethnic and national conflicts. In most cases, ethno-national conflict seems to owe itself to conflict over land and strategic resources. In some cases ethnicity and nationalism were harnessed to rally combatants in wars between great religious empires (for example, the Muslim Turks and the Catholic Austro-Hungarians). Basil Davidson insists in his documentary, Africa: Different but Equal, that racism, in fact, only just recently surfaced—as late as the 1800s, due to the need for a justification for slavery in the Americas.

According to Charles V. Hamilton and Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) it (racism) is the predication of decisions & policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group (ethnicity) and maintaining control over that group. Some sociologists have defined racism as a system of group privilege. In Portraits of White Racism, David Wellman defined racism as culturally sanctioned beliefs, which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated position of racial minorities.⁴ Sociologists Noël A. Cazenave and Darlene Alvarez Maddern defined racism as …a highly organized system of ‘race’-based group privilege that operates at every level of society and is held together by a sophisticated ideology of color/’race’ supremacy. Sellers and Shelton (2003) found that a relationship between racial discrimination and emotional distress was moderated by racial ideology and public regard beliefs. That is, racial centrality appears to promote the degree of discrimination African American young adults perceive whereas racial ideology may buffer the detrimental emotional effects of that discrimination. Racist systems include, but cannot be reduced to, racial bigotry.⁵

More recently, Joe R. Feagin has articulated a comprehensive theory of racial oppression in the United States in his book Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (Routledge, 2006). Feagin examines how major institutions have been built upon racial oppression which was not an accident of history, but was created intentionally by white Americans. In Feagin’s view, white Americans labored hard to create a system of racial oppression in the 17th century and have worked diligently to maintain the system ever since. While Feagin acknowledges that changes have occurred in this racist system over the centuries, he contends that key and fundamental elements have been reproduced over nearly four centuries, and that U.S. institutions today reflect the racialized hierarchy created in the 17th century. Today, as in the past, racial oppression is not just a surface-level feature of this society, but rather pervades, permeates, and interconnects all major social groups, networks, and institutions across the society. Feagin’s definition stands in sharp contrast to psychological definitions that assume racism is an attitude or an irrational form of bigotry that exists apart from the organization of social structure.

Barbara Trepagnier, In her book, Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide (2006), shows that virtually all whites hold some negative stereotypes and assumptions about African Americans and other racial–ethnic minorities, what she calls silent racism. Trepagnier demonstrates how the negative stereotypes and assumptions of whites reproduce institutional racism, also known as systemic racism. She argues that the oppositional categories commonly used to think about racism—Racist and Not Racist—hide silent racism and other insidious forms such as color-blind racism. Replacing the outdated categories with a continuum labeled More Racist and Less Racist would expose these subtle forms of racism that are more closely linked to racial injustice than outright bigotry is. Color-blind racism as developed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality (2003) refers to the claim by some whites that racism is no longer an issue since passage of the 1960s civil rights legislation. According to Bonilla-Silva, color-blind racism is an attempt to maintain white privilege without appearing racist.

Let’s suppose there is a racism continuum among whites, from those who virulently hate people of color and refrain from doing violence to them only out of fear of getting caught to those who are deeply mortified and hurt by the thought that anyone would conceive of hurting a human being because of the color of his or her skin, or land of origin or anything for that matter. Now let’s suppose that the haters live in a world in which they can be secure in the knowledge that white people hold and will continue to hold almost all of the top spots in government and industry and let’s suppose the non-haters live there too. Today’s white people are lucky in that they benefit from the extraordinary effort that has gone into maintaining white supremacy in this country without having to do any of the actual dirty work. One need not be personally racist to enjoy the benefits of institutional racism.

The modern biological definition of race developed in the 19th century with scientific racist theories. The term scientific racism refers to the use of science to justify and support racist beliefs, which go back to at least the early 18th century, though it gained most of its influence in the mid 19th century, during the New Imperialism period. Also known as academic racism, such theories first needed to overcome the Church’s resistance to positivist accounts of history, and its support of monogenism, that is that all human beings were originated from the same ancestors, in accordance with creationist accounts of history. These racist theories put forth on scientific hypothesis were combined with unilineal theories of social progress which postulated the superiority of the European civilization over the rest of the world. Furthermore, they frequently made use of the idea of survival of the fittest, a term coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864, associated with ideas of competition which were named social Darwinism in the 1940s. Charles Darwin himself opposed the idea of rigid racial differences in The Descent of Man (1871) in which he argued that humans were all of one species, sharing common descent. He recognized racial differences as varieties of humanity, and emphasized the close similarities between people of all races in mental faculties, tastes, dispositions and habits, while still contrasting the culture of the lowest savages with European civilization.⁶

The Ideology of Racism

The concept that discrimination can be based on race presupposes the existence of race itself. However, the United States Government’s Human Genome Project has announced that the most complete mapping of human DNA to date indicates that there is no distinct genetic basis to racial types. Based on this evidence, racial characteristics logically cannot exist either, such as group differences in eye color or human hair color. According to the Human Genome Project, skin color does exist as a matter of science. So, that which is commonly referred to as racism could be more scientifically referred to as skin color-aroused discrimination. The term skin color aroused discrimination has the benefit that it is based on verifiable science, is not based on disproved notions of science, and does not perpetuate a false belief in the disproved concept of biological race.⁷

As an ideology, racism existed during the 19th century as scientific racism, which attempted to provide a racial classification of humanity.⁸ Although such racist ideologies have been widely discredited after World War II and the Holocaust, racism and racial discrimination have remained widespread all over the world. Some examples of this in present day are statistics including, but not limited to, the ratio of black men in prison to free black men versus other races, physical abilities and mental ability statistics, and other data gathered by scientific groups. While these statistics are accurate, and can show trends, it’s inappropriate in most countries to assume that because a particular race has a high crime or low literacy rate, that the entire race of people automatically are criminals or unintelligent. Works such as Arthur de Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) may be considered as one of the first theorizations of this new racism, founded on an essentialist notion of race, which opposed the former racial discourse, of Boulainvilliers for example, which saw in races a fundamentally historical reality which changed over time. Gobineau thus attempted to frame racism within the terms of biological differences among humans, giving it the legitimacy of biology. He was one of the first theorists to postulate polygenism, stating that there were, at the origins of the world, various discrete races.

The first theory of eugenics was developed in 1869 by Francis Galton (1822-1911), who used the then popular concept of degeneration. He applied statistics to study human differences and the alleged inheritance of intelligence, foreshadowing future uses of intelligence testing by the anthropometry school. Such theories were vividly described by the writer Émile Zola (1840-1902), who started publishing in 1871 a twenty-novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, where he linked heredity to behavior. Thus, Zola described the high-born Rougons as those involved in politics (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon) and medicine (Le Docteur Pascal) and the low-born Macquarts as those fatally falling into alcoholism (L’Assommoir), prostitution (Nana), and homicide (La Bête humaine).

W.E.B DuBois, in making the difference between races, argued that it is not race that we think about, but culture: …a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life.⁹ Late nineteenth century nationalists were the first to embrace contemporary discourses on race, ethnicity and survival of the fittest to shape new nationalist doctrines. Ultimately, race came to represent not only the most important traits of the human body, but was also regarded as decisively shaping the character and personality of the nation.¹⁰ According to this view, culture is the physical manifestation created by ethnic groupings, as such fully determined by racial characteristics. Culture and race became considered intertwined and dependent upon each other, sometimes even to the extent of including nationality or language to the set of definition. Pureness of race tended to be related to rather superficial characteristics that were easily addressed and advertised, such as blondness. Racial qualities tended to be related to nationality and language rather