Racism is fundamentally wrong. As an ideology, it violates the dignity of human beings. Racism is rooted in the belief that one race is superior and another is inferior. While this is apparent from a cultural perspective, racial prejudice caused great atrocities, the most infamous being the Holocaust which resulted in the murder of six million Jews on orders of Adolf Hitler. Hitler misinterpreted Charles Darwin and wrongly applied the theory of evolution. The Nazis saw themselves as human gods and Jews were labeled as sub-humans. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, they implemented a policy of repression and intimidation to terrorize Jews.
Idolatry may have something to do with Nazi fanaticism. Heinrich Himmler and his henchmen even went to the Himalayas in the name of pseudo-science to prove the superiority of the Aryan race. The Nazis created pogroms, separating Jews from the general population. Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka ring horror. In these extermination camps, Adolf Eichmann transported two million Jews in Europe to gas chambers, in a program called
The Final Solution. The Holocaust was a result of Hitler’s hatred for the Jewish people.
Nazi SS commandos, composed of young men recruited by Himmler, led these systematic mass murders, all in the name of the state. SS officers were not docile individuals. They were men and women of letters – doctors, academics, economists, philosophers who convinced their fellow Germans that the Jews are the enemy of the state.
Joseph Goebbels, through state propaganda, controlled and manipulated the German population to believe that Jews caused their misery. In a totalitarian society, people worship false leaders, false gods, and false beliefs.
But the evil that is racism dates back to the slave trade. Natives in the African continent were hunted and captured like beasts, brought into the New World and sold to work in plantations in the Southern states of America. The American Civil War was rooted on a singular question – the right to own slaves, a thing that Abraham Lincoln wanted to abolish. That all men are born equal remains to be the most fundamental principle in political theory. Recently, the Netherlands has apologized for its role in the slave trade.
In 1905, US scientists started a eugenics program meant to create a perfect race. The science of eugenics was meant to correct infirmities in the human species by selecting the best breed. This was copied by the Nazis. The T4 program, approved by Hitler, sterilized thousands of couples. Parents surrendered 400,000 children with mental impairment or physical deformity only to be euthanized by Nazi doctors and nurses. Joseph Mengele, the physician known as the angel of death, performed horrendous experiments on innocent children.
In Kosovo, 8,000 Albanians were run over by tanks on orders of Slobodan Milosevic. In 1994, Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis in the Rwandan ethnic cleansing. More than 500,000 Rohingya people have been driven out of Myanmar, many of them, reports from Human Rights groups indicate, raped by the military and militiamen. Racism kills and as history has taught us, it has resulted to the suffering and deaths of millions of human beings.
Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi dedicated their lives against the subjugation of people. Racism has no place in this world. It wrongly privileges a people who see themselves as intellectually, culturally, and socially superior. Jesse Owens proved Hitler wrong in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Edmund Husserl were Jews who contributed so much to the advancement of human knowledge. Without their important contributions, human society will not be able to understand the underlying principles in the sciences and philosophy.
Racism is a plague that must be put to an end. It is pure evil. George Floyd’s death has since ignited a radical protest that intends to usher a social consciousness against racism. Racism is used to demean, degrade, and dehumanize the powerless. Human achievement sees no color in our skin. Reason knows no boundary. Human intelligence is not exclusive to any race or nation. No man has a right to deprive another of one’s moral worth. We are equal not only as humans. We are all equal in dignity as humans.
