Racism finds differences where none exist. We are not identical. Brothers and sisters are not identical. But the collective prejudice on the basis of race is a piece of flat earth pseudo-science that, incredibly, persists.
Creationists ignore the evidence because they want their cosmology to fit the narrative that the entire universe exists as a stage on which they are the climax. Racists ignore the evidence because they want the hierarchy with which they organise society to place them on top.
Think how easily these notions come to us. Sit in the middle of a crowded bar in the middle of a football match and list the collective attributes assigned to a disliked team: they are attributes of a disliked nation, original sins and gaps in the morality and the etiquette of the entire group that, in the logic of the mumbling football fan, explains and predicts their behaviour.
Racism also props up another convenient foundation myth. A people chosen by a god or by destiny lives on land promised to them. Territory is a legacy of a mythical golden age obtained, earned or conquered with the blood, sweat and tears of ancestors and handed down to the racist as privately as if it were property.
This is where the powerful, though by no means inevitable, relationship between nationalism and racism takes root. An imagined community relies on myths of distinction that allow complete strangers to recognise themselves as belonging to an exclusive group. Nowhere is the success of nationalism stronger than when people from competing backgrounds, disparate neighbourhoods, and conflicting interests go to war together and call themselves brothers.
And when they do that whoever is not a brother is an enemy denied the character and the heritage that entitles compatriots to live.
“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Not if the shedding of blood creates enough commonality to stop the dehumanisation necessary for hate and discrimination to thrive. Bored people trapped on a boat might dance to kill the hours. Young people might look for fashionable clothes, hats and glasses. An unemployed person might give up on their country and seek a job in a richer town. For people you recognise as humans this is normal and expected behaviour. For animals you think of as vermin, it is not.
There’s another link between nationalism and racism. They do not come naturally to people. If it is true that it is intuitive to feel obligations and solidarity to your kind, then polities should not extend outside your street. Nations are built on the premise that you can be persuaded to feel belonging to a group full of people you’ll never meet.
The operative phrase there, in the passive voice, is that you are persuaded. The actor is the State and its elites who need you to get over your familism and parochialism to adopt loyalty in the interests of a much larger group. That loyalty is not only needed in the extreme circumstance of having to go to war and risk your life for more than your parents or your children. It is also needed for your acquiesce to pay taxes, for example, to support the disadvantaged you do not know in your imagined community as a nation.
Acting to prevent the salvage of the thirsty and the drowning requires cruelty
Perhaps with good intentions, elites create the myth of the nation: they invent tradition, codify language and craft a history in order to create human connections that would not otherwise exist. Necessarily the connections that are created must exclude others. The imagined solidarity between a Corsican and a Parisian cannot be stretched to any solidarity between a Corsican and an Australian, say. If we all saw each other as equal citizens of the world, the mental borders around a nation fizzle out and the whole scheme collapses.
This is why nationalists are so obsessed with borders and with ‘defending’ them. And this is where racial prejudice is another tool in the hands of elites that seek to safeguard the integrity of the imagined community by justifying the exclusion of those outside it.
Discrimination between people, then, is institutionalised and racism is formalised as law. The simple rights to work, to move freely, to have a roof over one’s head without unreasonable fear of having it taken away – in other words, the right to pursue happiness – is withheld from ‘outsiders’.
The denial of citizenship, of equality, of inherent and inalienable rights, justifies all sorts of monstrous institutional violence. People’s propensity to crime, for the racist myth firmly believes there’s such a thing, is profiled by race. Enforcement is therefore focused on the racially undesirable, confirming the prejudice that inferiors are more violent with statistics that are a product of law enforcement that ignores the violence of the people who belong.
But it gets worse than random arrests, disproportionate sentencing and misled and misleading enforcement.
The denial of the right to pursue happiness takes us to formalised extremes that will be the stuff of incredulous histories in a hundred years’ time. Take the contemporary notion of ‘economic migrant’. It has come to describe scroungers, ineligible for sympathy, let alone rights, destined when caught to the Sisyphean futility of repatriation. The fact that we only live once – and there is no reason why anyone should accept their lot and live in poverty without trying to break out – is reserved to our own kind. Inferiors are meant to be poor.
The enthusiastic willingness to deny other humans the rights inherent to the human condition is, therefore, a logical extension of the artificial conjuring of nations and borders. Though property may not be theft, territory certainly is.
But there are times when these almost inevitable prejudices become collective acts of faith. When mainstream political ideas disintegrate under the weight of ennui, or from a dearth of quality leaders, or crushed by problems and circumstances too complex for anyone to solve: these are such times. The political emptiness is filled by populists who feed on prejudice like leeches.
The movement of people that started 400,000 years ago from Africa follows push and pull factors that are greater than any country’s policies and laws. As with the thawing of the ice age, global warming creates deserts that push people to lusher spaces. Climate is just one factor. Europe’s ability to grow its economy relies on labour that abounds in great excess in Africa. Economy is organic and no ecosystem lives with a vacuum.
Though pervasive, racial prejudice is not justified by the ease with which it comes to us. Nor does its institutionalisation and legalisation clean off our conscience. After all, those who object to abortion do not think laws that permit it make it right.
Racism relies on our egoism, our greed, our possessiveness of material things, our unbridled disgust of that which we do not recognise, our stubborn ignorance and the pride we feel in it. Indifference is insufficient. Acting to prevent the salvage of the thirsty and the drowning requires cruelty. And laws and states, governments and armies are capable of the same cruelty and evil that individuals are endowed with.
This is us. Now.