E. Scott Cracraft: White and European “supremacy” is a sign of real ignorance

Racism and “white nationalism” have experienced a huge growth in America in the last two years. Since Trump took office, cruel and ignorant ideas that used to be marginalized are becoming more mainstreamed and accepted. Of course, it raises the question: Are we, as a society, a reflection of Trump or is Trump a reflection of the mean, uncaring culture we are becoming?

Apparently, there are even people in the Lakes Region who still believe that whites or Europeans are somehow superior to other people. The interesting thing about racism and ideas of racial superiority is that they are not just wrong or unjust; from the standpoint of modern science, they are also extremely dumb and reveal a kind of willful ignorance on the part of those who endorse those ideas.

In the past, science, too, has been guilty of teaching that there are important genetic differences between so-called “races” of humankind. Modern biologists and anthropologists, however, consider the term “race” to be meaningless from a scientific standpoint. In other words, “race” is only important if you choose to make it important. Unfortunately, we have too many people who believe it matters.

Earlier theories about racial superiority or inferiority are now considered “pseudoscience” or in modern parlance, “junk science.” Genetic science has proven that there is very little genetic difference between modern humans.

We all descend from a small group of humans in Africa and everyone on the planet is at least to some degree related. For example, take this writer, a very fair skinned, easily sunburned Celtic “white” guy and put him next to the darkest person from Africa and our DNA is going to be 99.9 % or more the same.

Scientists today call those differences in skin color, eye shape, hair and the other things we think of as “racial” differences phenotypes. They are very small genetic differences that are evolutionary adaptations to different environment. When our ancestors left Africa, they were all probably darker in complexion. In the tropics, we need more melanin in our skin to protect us from ultra-violet rays.

As we moved out of Africa and into the Ice Age climates of northern Europe and Asia, we lightened up over thousands of years. Why? Because in those climates there was less sunlight and we needed to absorb more sunlight to make vitamin D so our bones would be stronger. Skin color is as simple as that.

One writer to The Sun says that God chose Europeans to “be leaders.” I know this man to be a Biblical literalist but never knew he uses scripture to justify European supremacy. It was an argument that many Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians used to use to justify racism in the past but it had pretty much died out. It really surprised this writer to find out that such theological views are still around!

That writer correctly states that there were cultures which, at times, were more advanced than European cultures. Still, Europeans did not come to dominate the world by divine design. Rather, they came to dominate the globe by by chance. They were just very lucky.

This writer recommends the book Germs, Guns, and Steel by Jared Diamond and the documentary based on it. Diamond explains that the reason Europeans came to dominate other cultures was a matter of geography and resources. They were more technologically advanced than many other cultures but that was a matter of their location and what they had available, not innate European “superiority.”

Starting in the late Neolithic, humans in the Middle East stopped being hunter-gatherers and started to farm and build permanent settlements that grew into towns and cities. They later learned to domesticate animals which provided them with such high-protein foods as meat and milk as well as hides and fur.

They were also growing such high-yield crops as wheat and barley and this led to an agricultural surplus. Now, not everyone had to be a food producer as is the case in foraging societies where you are “living hunt to hunt.” Some could specialize in learning how to work with metals or developing writing systems. A bit later, another civilization, based on rice cultivation, developed in China.

In Eurasia, or the “Old World,” food production was greatly improved by using domestic animals for labor (and fertilizer). The food surplus could serve those who worked full-time in various specialties. These hallmarks of “civilization” included metal working, writing and building water control projects to make agriculture more productive. This spread quickly to Europe.

Settled farming, specialization, and socially stratified civilizations, metallurgy, and even writing developed independently in the Americas but were not as “advanced” or widespread as in Eurasia. Native Americans lacked draft animals. At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the people of Peru were just entering the Bronze Age, but even without writing, they developed an advanced civilization.

The people of Central America did develop writing but in the New World, culture and technology did not travel as easily from South to North as it did from East to West in Eurasia. Due to domestic animals, Europeans had greater immunity to diseases such as smallpox which decimated as much as 90 percent of the Native American population.

As Professor Diamond points out, the Spanish conquistadors conquered the very advanced Inca empire because of chance. The Inca Empire was vast and well organized. However, it lacked the technologies which the Europeans had developed simply because of their location and the animals and other resources they had.

The population had already been decimated or weakened by European diseases which marched ahead of Francisco Pizzaro and his fellow conquistadors. The Spanish also had writing and so Pizzaro was able to learn from the writings of Hernan Cortez who had already conquered the Aztecs in Mexico and wrote how he did it.

The Spanish also had guns, steel weapons, metal armor and rode horses, all of which frightened the local population because they had never seen them before. They were not intellectually or in any other way superior to the native population.

Europe was simply lucky enough to “be in the right place at the right time.”

E. Scott Cracraft is a citizen, a taxpayer, a veteran, and resident of Gilford.