Question

Why are “race” and “racial superiority” dangerous myths?

Answer 1

Race:

The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering".Such "biological fact" is no longer considered to exist as developments in human evolutionary genetics showed that human genetic differences are nearly totally gradual.

Race superiority:

The idea of racial superiority was not a twentieth century invention. Conquerors of all ages had recourse to this con-venient theory, not only in order to excuse crimes committed against those whom they enslaved, but even more in order to set one group of subject peoples against another. “Divide et impera” (divide and rule) is the classical expression of this policy used so successfully by the Roman tyrants against the conquered tribes of northern Europe and Britain. How much more successful have been the descendants of those former sub-ject peoples, the English, French and German imperialist rul-ers of today, in “dividing and ruling”! For not only has the technique of empire-building been vastly simplified by modern scientific developments, but the population of the globe has increased so tremendously since the days of imperial Rome that, whereas the “world-conquering” Caesars dominated only scores of millions of colonials, the twentieth century cap-italist lords of the earth rule over nearly a billion people!

In his book, Heredity and Politics, the English biologist, J.B.S. Haldane writes,

“The earliest statement of that doctrine [racial superiority] known to me is found in the Book of Genesis where the curse on the children of Ham is related. It is worthy of note that if this attribution of priority is accurate, the doctrine of racial superiority is originally a Jewish doctrine, although it is now being used against the Jews in Central Europe.” (Op. cit., p.23.)

According to the Biblical story, Ham, the legendary ancestor of the Negro people, was condemned by the curse of his father, Noah, to be a “servant of servants” to his brothers, Sem and Japheth. It is interesting to note that anti-abolitionists in the United States found refuge in the “word of God” many centuries later. An entire volume, The Bible Defense of Slavery, was published in Kentucky in 1852 by one such figure, Josiah Priest, as an attempted justification for the continued enslavement of the Negro people.