Racism, the dark side of our collective consciousness

We are living one of the most difficult moments in recent human history.  We have learned much in the last seven thousand five hundred years since the inception of the first signs of civilization in our society. 

Man has roamed this planet for thousands of years, but only recently has he developed the ability to socialize in communities. Communities became city-states, then kingdoms, empires and finally republics. 

We started out form a nucleus of a few modern humans somewhere in the savannas and forests of the region now known as Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania.  At least 100 thousand years ago there was a small group of humans living in that region.   They ate seeds and fruits, hunted small animals or ate the animal carcasses abandoned by other predators. 

There were other so called archaic humans living in other parts of Africa, Europe and Asia at the same time, however, they were very different from us.  More than 1 million archaic humans might have lived in the Old World, while the population of modern humans at that time was only a few thousand.  Archaic humans have been extinct for thousands of years, having left behind no decedents, even though they lived on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years.

Each one of the six billion five hundred million inhabitants of the world today is a descendant of that small group that lived in eastern Africa in a distant past.  That group was often on the edge of extinction, but was able to overcome difficulties and grow and over the last 100 thousand years spread to northern Africa, entering Europe, Asia and finally the Americas.  

Modern man diversified into the “races” and “ethnic groups” we know today.  It is a history of greatness and of overcoming difficulties.  Over time these ethnic groups have mixed and acquired the current characteristics and particularities that give us the strength we have today.  Whether White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, African or Caucasian, we all descend from the same root.  

For many these labels are important, reflecting their social identity and defining the way they express themselves in modern society.  These people still think that human groups have significant biological differences, and that skin color variations, facial structures and body shape reflect differences in character and intelligence. 

Even people from the same group but from different social classes tend to believe that genetics plays a role in their differences.  They believe that aggression, creativity and even religious tendencies cannot be learned and that they are part of our genetic makeup.      

But genetics contradicts this belief.  Human groups are much too close genetically to justify significant differences.  Recent studies show that cultural differences between these groups have no biological origin.  Such differences stem from these individuals’ experiences within their groups. 

With the experience of thousands of years and thousands of mistakes in our short but rich history, today we can reflect upon the reason a modern human group survived while archaic humans became extinct. 

No doubt our ancestors knew how to overcome crisis and differences in order to allow the species to continue its development.  We have made many mistakes, judged, condemned and killed people from other groups simply because we disagreed with them. Whether the disagreement was for religious, ethnic or skin color differences does not matter.  We developed one of the worst defects of our collective consciousness: prejudice. It brought along arrogance and conceit, leading man to commit the greatest atrocities against humanity.

Were we so blind that we could not see where we were headed?  There is no doubt that we are headed for the collapse of modern society.  We survived many obstacles, overcame thousands of disputes, crisis and wars, but we may have gone too far in our selfishness and greed. 

I hope we can reorganize ourselves as the single human group that we are and create a society that ensures equal rights for all and respects our differences without discrimination or rejection.  Only then will we become a sustainable society that will continue its successful journey on this planet for thousands of years to come.

Source: “A História da Humanidade” (The History of Humanity), by Steve Olson, published by Campus