EMERGENT RACISM IN AMERICA. WHY NOW?
In the wake of the tragic Charlottesville march by white supremacists last August, The Guardian observed: "In America, bias, hate and racism move from the margins to the mainstream."
I don’t have a lot of evidence to back it up, other than life experience; however, my observation is that deep down, every human is hard-wired with Darwinian instincts, including the willingness to kill anyone who threatens our survival, and to characterize “others” as mortal enemies when our survival is threatened. Since the dawn of history, such characterization has helped us override our natural reluctance to kill our fellow humans, thus clearing the way in times of famine to plunder their food and, incidentally, enslave surviving women and children. These barbarous acts are made more palatable by monsterizing the “others,” differentiating them from “us” by attributes such as appearance, ideology, affiliation, culture/language and territory.
Race is the most obvious attribute providing xenophobic differentiation by appearance, but as experiments have shown, virtually any physical attribute – color of eyes, for instance – is enough to separate people with attributes in common into antagonistic groups when competition for survival is at issue. Religion is frequently used as the ideological basis for differentiation, but political ideology (e.g. communism vs. capitalism, monarchy vs. democracy) seems just as effective as religion in dividing populations into mutually antagonistic groups. So are affiliations, culture, language, national origin.
The point is, darkness lurks deep inside all of us, often at the subconscious level, suppressed and moderated by “civilization.” However, put anyone under sufficient stress, threatening not just physical survival, but also survival of such intangibles as self-esteem, power, wealth or belief systems, and the primal darkness rises from the depths and takes control of our behavior. William Goldman, in “Lord of the Flies,” made that point. Hobbes used it to justify government (i.e. “Leviathan”).
One of the tragedies of war is the institutional conditioning of generations of young men to access the soul-corroding darkness within to survive the threats of combat. Therein lies the source of cognitive dissonance at the root of PTSD in warriors returning to “civilization.”
The racism, and its accompanying fear and anger, emerging in the U.S., and elsewhere in the world where populism is surging, I believe to be an innate response to stress large segments of the population have experienced in the wake of decades of wage stagnation, job insecurity and financial trauma attributable to Reaganomics and job obsolescence wrought by technical innovation. The same pattern of behavior emerged in Germany after World War I for similar reasons.
The ruling classes are generally responsible for such stress, but through adept messaging, manage to misdirect the population’s anger and discontent away from themselves and on to “others,” – Muslims, Mexicans, Blacks, Asians, who are readily defined as “other” by race, religion, ideology, culture, language, territory.
Trump has harnessed this emergent racism, fear and anger for political gain, coinciding with waves of immigrant refugees fleeing from Third World economic and social stresses. Hence "The Wall," Muslim travel bans, the soft line on Charlottesville marchers, the yearning for more white Norwegian immigrants instead of those from (expletive) countries in Africa and Central America.
The solution is not to eliminate the “other,” but rather to ease the stress provoking such destructive instinctive responses – a topic for another occasion.