Unpacking Racism — And Throwing Away the Suitcase — Part 1

Unpacking Racism — And Throwing Away the Suitcase — Part 1

Of all the “reasons” we human beings use to justify inflicting pain, suffering, and death on other human beings, the color of someone’s skin has to be the dumbest — for sure, a sign of a very sick mind.Is anyone with two grey cells to rub together seriously judging other people based on the amount of melanin in their epidermis! — In the 21st century?It sounds like those medieval Christians who used to fight over how many angels could stand on the head of a pin!Then this twisted mindset is given a name, “racism” — even though there are no human races on Planet Earth! There is only Homo sapiens!Normally, when something as absurd as this becomes so obvious, most people just let it go. Aha, the Earth goes around the sun, not the other way round. Got it. Moving right along.One thing is certain: no society that indulges in this melanin-based cruelty and violence can be considered civilized.We have even created a publishing boom about “racism.” It seems to be all anyone talks about. And there is no such thing as a “race.”The quantity of melanin in the skin has zilch to do with anything else on the planet, except vitamin D levels! This is the twenty-first century! Hello!When your neighbors come back from their summer holidays, all melanined up from their time in the sun, do you keep a special eye on them until their tan fades, just in case they do some bad stuff in the meantime?So, let’s do a little epidemiology, which we are all now so expert at with thanks to that other epidemic disease, covid-19. Where does this madness come from?It seems clear that babies are not born with any interest in melanin. They show nothing comparable to the kind of antagonism we see in older people against anyone who has crossed some skin-melanin-level threshold.If you look at a litter of Labrador puppies, black and yellow, does it look like they care about fur color? Nor do they care about the color of mum’s nipples. It is the milk they are after! Any more than do human toddlers have the slightest interest in the color of the other toddler’s skin. The color of their crayons maybe.So, this is clearly a belief instilled in younger people’s minds by older people: a brainwashing process.These children grow up infected with the melanin madness, which just reinforces the melanin-mad society. Which in turn supports the brainwashing — in an endless vicious cycle. So individual melanin madness creates institutional melanin madness which creates individual melanin madness, ad nauseam.Which is why it never goes away! — and won’t until we treat this disease more scientifically.The next point we need to consider is that this childhood brainwashing, or conditioning, is largely unconscious.In two ways:Firstly, almost all the people doing the brainwashing don’t realize what they are doing, and secondly, the children don’t realize they are being brainwashed.Whole cultural value systems are instilled into children without anybody acknowledging it. For example, almost all children brought up in France, grow up to believe they are French. They gave no idea that if the ambulance had dropped their mother off at the maternity hospital over the border in Germany, they could have ended up believing they are German. Or Christian, or Muslim, or Capitalist… or… or… or….Try explaining to some US-American Christian parent that Sunday School is brainwashing! — and hope they are not armed. Let alone explaining to them that the reason they can’t even begin to understand what you are talking about is because they were brainwashed by their parents in their turn.Of course, walking down the street it is not obvious who is French and who is German, or who is Christian and who is not, but you can see the melanin a mile away! Like yellow stars on Jewish clothing. Gender. Or obvious poverty….So, basically everyone brought up in a particular society is wandering around with all kinds of unconscious, programmed beliefs and prejudices in their heads based on the “values” of that society.And as anyone who has made a New Year’s resolution knows, the conscious mind can have all the greatest plans for the future, but it is what’s in the unconscious that really decides what’s going to happen. And, by definition, we don’t know what that is — it is unconscious!So, there is not much point in us discussing this. Because in essence that conversation is just your brainwashed mind talking to my brainwashed mind with each one of us trying to convince the other that what we don’t know about our unconscious mind is more factual than what the other doesn’t know about their unconscious mind.So, until we become more conscious of our own oppressive beliefs, ideologies, and behavior, the conversation cannot even begin.Of course, just because so much of this is under the radar, does not mean everyone is innocent! President Tomas Jefferson expresses what sounds to modern ears like the ranting of a very disturbed mind, even if he believed what he is saying to be true.In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” President Thomas Jefferson says about black-skinned people that they are “in reason much inferior” and “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” And that black-skinned males prefer white women “as uniformly as is the preference of the Orangootan [sic] for the black woman over those of his own species.”However, read on and it is clear that he knew full well that the treatment of black people — that was rationalized by these same kinds of beliefs — was despicable.As Noam Chomsky points out, “Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was, ‘The most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’ And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that ‘Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.’”Unconsciously bigoted, maybe — innocent, never.Chomsky continues, “Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams’s reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of ‘that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty… among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment.’”Jefferson’s Orangutan comment would fit nicely with the crudest of the “monkey chants” often heard at European soccer matches. Like the white supremacists in Charlottesville shouting the Nazi slogan, “Jews will not replace us.”Is it likely that those white supremacists or those football supporters are conscious enough to acknowledge that the treatment of black people has been “the most unremitting despotism”?So, the epidemiology allows us to take the first step in a scientific approach to this melanin madness and see that the primary cause is mass indoctrination, starting, critically, in people as young as possible.Secondly, we need to understand what “indoctrination” means. What is the mechanism here? What happens when we instill these beliefs into the unconscious, or conscious mind?It turns out that “the mind” — into which all this cultural conditioning is instilled in childhood — is not some neutral repository of information. The human mind has some very specific inherent qualities. One is that its operating system depends on comparison and contrast: Night and day, black and white, hot and cold, thick and thin, summer and winter, wet and dry….With comparison comes hierarchy: higher and lower, superior and inferior, better and worse, good and evil, heaven and hell, my people and other people….And in a flash, humanity is off to the races, all dressed up and ready to crap all over the other guy! Like well-trained robots.None of us escape. The rich, white-skinned man may attack his white-skinned wife, who may attack some poor, white-skinned male employee, who may attack some black-skinned fellow worker, who may attack his white-skinned female partner, who may attack her black-skinned maid, who may attack her kid out of tortured exasperation… who will probably grow up pretty disturbed by all this madness.Just imagine the delight on the face of the white males who run the show, laughing all the way, via the bank, to their seats of power. Happy in the knowledge that all the differently oppressed people seem so occupied fighting with each other that they can never combine their efforts and end the oppression. Can the 99% not displace the 1%? No, they never do. They just create another 1%.Divide and rule comes with the human mind’s built-in program of judging everything by its category and its place in the hierarchy.But isn’t the mind the most powerful and valuable part of who we are? Well, that is part of the conditioning. Not only is the mind conditioned with all the beliefs that the ruling ideology wants everyone to accept as true, but it also makes sure that included in the conditioning package is the “truth” that the human mind is God’s greatest gift to his favorite creation: man.The idea that the mind is our most wonderful attribute is just another myth we all got sold. Yes, the mind is a powerful mechanism on which most of our “technological advancement” has been based. Whoever that person was in Africa who first worked out how to cook a meal should be the world’s first posthumous Nobel Prize winner. The Peace Prize, the prize for Medicine, Physics, Chemistry… one of each! She did a lot of people a huge favor!So, on the one hand we have this wonderful mechanism that can create the miracles of our modern world, and at the same time also turns our air-conditioned paradise into a nightmare: white skinned people oppressing black skinned people, males oppressing females, strong people oppressing weak people, this ideology oppressing that ideology — whether secular or religious — the list is almost endless.Hence the really clever game that the mind has been trained to play is to assure us that the smartest thing we have is… wait for it: The mind!How could something so potentially creative also be so destructive?The origin of the human mind is an essential ingredient of our long hazardous past. Despite being fairly small, without big teeth or long claws, for millions of years we humans and our ancestors have somehow managed to make it through all those long dark nights, without fire, surrounded by wild animals. Not to mention the occasional ice age. In spite of the fear and the danger, we literally outsmarted much more powerful predators and survived.So, the mind evolved in response to conflict! Conflict is its basic essence.Now, we live in a totally different world but that mental operating system that got us here is still intact. Which is why today’s morning news looks like The Caveman Times, and that is almost certainly being unkind to cavemen!It is worse than that: The spears that helped us survive have now become nuclear-tipped missiles and the genius of discovering how to control fire and cook dinner has now become climate change. Our survival is back on the line again. The fear and the danger are back, and the conflict machine inside our heads may well spiral out of control.If that wasn’t enough, this is currently being exacerbated by the new technologies of social media, which amplify the mind — and all its conflicts. Five points for anger, one for a “like” — how Facebook’s formula fosters rage, misinformation, and profit!Part 2 — What Can Be Done to End the Insanity Called Racism?Unpacking Racism — And Throwing Away the Suitcase — Part 1 was originally published in OSHO Times on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.