#15 Understanding Colonialism: Race, Nation and Religion

This blog continues to examine race and the ideologies that stem from a belief in the existence of different human races, namely racism. In my last blog, I argued that racism has had many variants over the last 500 years. One key question to address is why the ideology of racism has lasted for so long, even though we now know there is only one human race. The answer this question is to understand the close connection between race, nationalism and religion in different times of history and in different geographical places.

Race and Christianity

If we are to grasp the essence and power of racism, we need also to understand the deep connection with nation and religion. Racism had, during the invasions of the Americas, been closely associated with both nation and Christianity. Church and state were all part of the overwhelming superiority of the invading Europeans, or so they assumed. As they had military superiority, the rest followed.

Racism had many consequences for the indigenous peoples of invaded lands. The various strands of Christianity fed into the colonial mindset from the last decades of the 18th century when missionaries followed the invaders. For the churches, these were their ‘civilising missions’, bringing what they thought was the best of their own culture. The literature is full of chaplains seeing their missions as bringing light to the darkness of the heathen.

Many of the invaded did not see it that way, viewing the Christian churches as an attempt to denigrate their cultures and ways of life. Christian schools taught their pupils that they had no history and should learn British or French history. How the Christian mission was understood varied from place to place. Very often the people at the bottom of society took up Christianity to improve their status. Or when a minority was given local powers to rule over a majority, they too took on the Christian faith to ingratiate themselves with the ruling classes.

The missionary movement from the end of the 18th century became global. The Europeans needed their missionaries as cultural ambassadors, which reinforced and justified their behaviour. In Ireland where the majority were Catholics, the Protestant missions were widely despised. In Africa, Catholic and Protestant missions competed for adherents. In China, part of the Treaty agreements was to allow missionaries to preach inland, which had previously been forbidden, as they had been in Japan.

The Defining Factor

From the European point of view, racism meant that any white person could feel superior to colonised people. Even white Irish people in the 19th and 20th centuries were seen by other whites in India as a class above the ‘natives’. In highly stratified societies like those in India, where ancient systems of kingship were maintained for a time by the colonising British, every white man felt superior, even to a native king.

In the earliest days of the Spanish invasion of the Americas, racist superiority had been mixed closely with religion. The indigenous peoples were seen as 'savages', so they could be killed without conscience. Over time, as European society itself altered, so the religious element within racial ideas declined. But the idea that different indigenous peoples were savages remained a constant. It was constructed that ‘savages’ were lesser people, who did not have feelings and desires like white people. They were thought to be less intelligent and by the middle of the 20th century were even bereft of their history. The earliest students in Africa in the 1950s who could move into secondary education were informed that they had no history of their own, and so were taught British history.

By the middle of the 19th century, racism took on a pseudo-scientific form. Charles Darwin’s great work on the origin of the species and one of its key concepts 'the survival of the fittest', offered new ideas that could be co-opted into thinking about race. The theory about the evolution of animals over millennia was corrupted and taken out of context by Europeans who assumed that the theory referred to themselves and that people of colour were less evolved.

Racism and violence

Racism dehumanised peoples and justified violence that became a regular part of the colonial era. Slavery, as we have seen, was particularly violent; people were burnt alive, castrated and tortured for the entertainment of white people. Such acts were commonplace when rioting or runaway slaves were captured, as slave owners were permitted to treat their property however they liked.

Less well known is the violence that erupted in non-slave societies during any period of tension. There were many risings throughout the colonies over these years. Punishments were meted outside of the law. Colonial societies were controlled through terror and this continued well into the 20th century. Evidence about the violence against the Kikuyu in Kenya in the 1950s during the Mau Mau rising had to be suppressed to avoid the shame of the British government. These major events may have been exceptional, but lesser incidents of violence were normal, with a white woman having a man of colour strung up for even suspected sexual attentions.

Racism and Skin Colour

It has often been assumed that the colour of a person’s skin was the defining factor around race. Skin colour was the superficial criteria of race. However, it is worth bearing in mind that in the 18th and 19th centuries,  light-skinned Jews were considered an inferior race. Stories of Jews being treated as if they were dark-skinned in the southern United States in the 1920s and 30s were also common. The actual distinction as far as Jewish people were concerned, of course, was one of religion. But that did not alter the reality for Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

There is also the case of the distinction made between Irish Protestants and Catholics. Local hatreds have been there as long as the two religious groups have lived side by side in Ireland, and intermarriage has been rare. Like marriages between black and white people, they have long been considered risqué, often with one set of parents refusing to attend the marriage ceremony. So the struggles in Ireland over the centuries can also be understood in racial terms to an extent.

American Racism

American racism has its own distinct characteristics

Perhaps not surprisingly, the USA developed a particular brand of racism that has endured and developed over several hundred years and it is best understood as originating in the particular conditions of the 17th century. Ideas of dominant groups often develop to justify what they wish to achieve, and American racism is a prime example. American racism needed to justify the annexation of land and the extinction of indigenous peoples.

Consider what happened: the Indigenous peoples of North America were exterminated, and imported Africans were enslaved. This was mass extinction, plunder, and annexation on a massive scale. Tens of millions of people died, and the land of a whole continent was stolen. This was land that was systematically depopulated and then repopulated over 250 years. Until very recently these crimes were almost forgotten, only now with the Black Lives Matter protests is the past coming to light.

The explanation of the  particular character of  American racism lies with the ideas that were internalised at the time and remain so even now. Some of the earliest people who arrived in the Americas were from the conflicts in the English Civil Wars between 1640 and 1660 when the king was beheaded. It was a struggle that was fought in religious terms between the Puritans Protestants and the Catholics. It was at this time that English Puritans travelled across the Atlantic Ocean in small sailing boats, and on arrival gave thanks to their God for save passage. From that point on they justified all that occurred, deciding they were a people chosen by God, arriving in a land of milk and honey. Only ‘Divine Providence’ had protected them on the sea journey.

Alongside such ideas came a new ethic of individualism and a puritan doctrine of predestination. If the Puritans had not been successful and of our heritage, we would have thought of them as a strange religious cult. They argued that they were part of a divine mission, chosen by God to create a new Jerusalem. Their preachers adhered to the old testament of the Christian Bible, self-identifying with the Hebrews of ancient Israel. And of course, like all cult followers to this day, they were destined for paradise in the afterlife. Out of this mishmash of ideology, the Puritans felt justified in the destruction of the native peoples and the stealing of the land, keeping their consciences free. From the settlers’/invaders’ perspective, both indigenous and enslaved peoples were the same: inferior and required solely as cheap or free labour.

There was one other idea that arose directly out of the baggage of ‘divine mission’; this was ‘manifest destiny’. The more ambitious settlers were able to broaden the notion that God had appointed the American settlers to civilise the new world. James Monroe and John Quincey-Adams are the two men who are supposed to have created the concept of manifest destiny in the early 19th century. Thereafter, the driving and powerful ideological cult of the Puritans sank deep into the psyche of the new American nation; a nation supposedly without any ‘history’. Yet the real history of death and destruction was so awful that it could not be told to schoolchildren. The words and ideas of the pioneers that had originated in preindustrial America - the racist assumptions, the wider purpose - all remained into the following centuries.

None of this explains why the American settlers fought a bitter civil war in the second half of the 19th century, nor how or why America was able to industrialise so rapidly alongside European industrialisation. All I have done here is discuss the various elements of a racialist ideology that the first settlers from Europe brought with them.

American racist ideology survived the civil war and it survived all the wars of the 20th century. The notion of ‘manifest destiny’ itself is still alive and well. Reference to America’s ‘civilising’ purpose has been writ large over foreign policy documents since the end of the Second World War. Some see manifest destiny written into the hidden message behind Donald Trump’s ‘making America great again’.

The longevity of American racist thinking can be seen throughout the history of the southern states. Even after the civil war, lynching (known as Jim Crow) continued throughout the 19th century as an intentional act to instil public terror. Slaves that ran away were hunted down and burnt at the stake. This also happened in India after the 1857 war when Sikhs and Muslims rose up together. The treatment of the men and women rounded up during Mau Mau rebellions in Kenya in the 20th century too was another form of lynching.

Europeans a Race Apart

The Europeans set themselves up as a race apart from, and superior to, the rest of humanity from the beginning of colonisation. Europeans lived apart, feeling no need to learn local languages or understand local cultures. All 'natives' were inferior, less human than the colonising rulers, and did not have the same legal rights. For those Europeans who were brought over as indentured labour that survived both the crossing and the period of the indenture were able to set themselves up later as superior to all local peoples. The poorest white could become a Lord in the colonies. When local people rose in revolt, Europeans felt able to justify extreme brutality that today seems extraordinary.

A map of the British Empire in 1921.

This map shows the French colonial empire from the 17th-20th century. The lightest blue shows France, the slightly darker blue shows France’s first colonial empire (after 1534) and the darkest blue shows the second colonial empire (after 1830).

Race a Flexible Tool

Theories of race over time have had no solid foundation. Race has always been a flexible idea used to divide peoples who might have otherwise lived peaceably for long periods with each other. In Ireland, the Catholics and Protestants were separated as if they were races. In Rwanda, the Belgians decided that the Hutu and Tutsi people were different races and ruled accordingly. In both cases, peoples who had lived together for very long times were divided by their conquerors.

Often in conquered Islands, peoples were divided. In Cyprus and Ceylon, one group was given authority over the other: in Cyprus, it was people of Greek origin over Turkish; in Ceylon, now Shri Lanka, it was the Tamils over the Sinhalese. Wherever Europeans conquered and ruled, they divided peoples according to differences that had always been present, but where people had co-existed peacefully. Once conquered by invading Europeans and by the Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries, people were divided and separated as never before. Often one group was given advantages over the others, or they were given authority, which was considered inappropriate and wrong. Deep fissures were created, always with disastrous results.

Racism in the 21st century is the mirror of our colonial past.

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Suggested Reading

Racism:

Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon 1978.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks, Grove Press 1952.
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Classics, 2001.
Zia Sardar, Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism, Pluto Press 1993.
Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, Verso 2016.

American racism is a subject on its own:

Paul Atwood, War and Empire: The American Way of Life, Pluto Press 2010.
Theodore W Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Verso 2012.
Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, Verso 2016.
Robin Blackburn, The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery, The International Socialist Review Issue 79.
Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Empire, Penguin 2013.

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