The Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, Koreans, Indians and many. many other cultures practiced slavery yet today the various cultures can live work, even visit one another, … but not in America. Will the two cultures, black and white ever resolve their differences, their hostilities?
From Britannica: Religion, which performed the multiple function of explanation, prediction, control, and communion, and seems to have been a particularly fruitful area for the creation of slave culture. Africans perceived all misfortunes, including enslavement, as the result of sorcery, and their religious practices and beliefs, which were often millennial, were formulated as a way of coping with it. Myalism was the first religious movement to appeal to all ethnic groups in Jamaica, Voodoo in Haiti was the product of African culture slightly refashioned on that island, and syncretic Afro-Christian religions and rituals appeared nearly everywhere throughout the New World. Slave religions usually had a supreme being and a host of lesser spirits brought from Africa, borrowed from the Amerindians, and created in response to local conditions. There were no firm boundaries between the secular and the sacred, which infused all things and activities. At least initially African slaves universally believed that posthumously they would return to their lands and rejoin their friends.
Slavery was the prototype of a relationship defined by domination and power. Sort of the same for Racism with the huge difference that people cannot be free of their physical attributes which also condition their attitudes towards “the other”.
Today, the term “scientific racism” may be used by some to refer to research seeming to scientifically justify racist ideology. Contemporary researchers and authors include the late Arthur Jensen (The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability); the late J. Philippe Rushton, president of the Pioneer Fund (Race, Evolution, and Behavior);the late Chris Brand (The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications); Richard Lynn (IQ and the Wealth of Nations); Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve); and Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance), among others. These authors themselves, while seeing their work as scientific, may dispute the term “racism” and may prefer terms such as “race realism” or “racialism”. But the essential question is: can the different races self-resolve the differences? Seemingly not.
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