The opening of my latest column at EveryJoe:
“Racist attitudes are a holdover from primitive times. There is still plenty of racism, but we have made progress in some parts of the world, as this Washington Post graphic of most and least racist nations shows.
“In much of Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, and a few other places, racism has retreated significantly. One hypothesis is that the least-racist cultures are those most influenced by the European Enlightenment of the 1700s. That was when, for the first time in history, individualist ideas successfully overturned the ingrained collectivisms that taught people to sort themselves and others primarily into groups based on sex, class, ethnicity, religion, and race.
“But even within the most progressive nations, there are unpleasant signs.
“In Europe, the cradle of Western civilization, the resurgence of neo-Nazism in Europe is discouraging.
“The same is true, in the United States, of the instantly-polarized debates over the significance of race in the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner.
“And even when growing up in nice, tolerant Canada, I recall seeing “Paki-stomper” t-shirts worn casually on the streets of Toronto after a wave of immigration brought a number of Pakistanis to Ontario …” [Read more here.]
Last week’s column: Good Monopoly, Bad Monopoly: When are Monopolies Actually a Problem?
Great article. I always think that the real issue with racists is never race, but deep-rooted, undealt-with, personal psychological issues. See for example Alice Miller’s exploration of Hitler’s psyche in ‘For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence’.
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Historically only the Enlightenment idea of individual (or natural) rights has proved powerful enough to transcend collective divisions such as race. As a political-legal idea it was transcendent because no matter what their tribe, ethnicity, race, class or creed every person was an individual. By making the individual rather than the group the focus of rights all were included. It was this idea, however imperfectly realized, that united peoples of every – often traditionally adversarial – tribe, ethnicity, race, class and creed to live and work together in relative peace and harmony in the Western democracies. The inscription on the seal of the United States reads, “E Pluribus Unum” – “Out of Many, One.” Keith Ellison, the Democrat from Minnesota who is US Congress’ first Muslim (who scandalized officials by taking the oath of office on a Qur’an once owned by Jefferson, to whose values and tolerance he paid tribute) said, “The US is founded on the idea that we’re all connected to a set of ideas, not a set of histories. For all our criticisms, the idea of America is an amazing thing – a society organized around a set of principles instead of around racial or cultural identity.”
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Nicely said, Ed.
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