The Man Who Gave Birth To Modern Racism

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Racism and colourism is a very big problem around the world right now, and no matter if we admit it or not but we all are a part of the racist community to some extent because we have been fed racism since we are born.

But we are not discussing that today instead we will be discussing how racism was born? Why do we have different skin colours? And who actually gave birth to racism?

 

Who Actually Gave Birth To Modern Racism?

In the early 1800s, one of America’s most prominent scientist Samuel Morton concluded from his collection of skulls that people can be divided into 5 races.

Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, American, Ethiopian

And according to him, these races have distinct characteristics. 

He claimed that White was the most intelligent and top of the ranks, East Asian and Mongolian were also smart but one step below the White, South-East Asian being the third followed by Native American and finally, Blacks were at the very bottom.

As of today, Samuel Morten is known as the father of modern racism, because a lot of the horrible actions of the past century were justified by his theory.

Even though his “One race is better than the other” soon got debunked by the Darwins theory of evolution and later the DNA itself, his “Ideas” are still alive and are still gets admired as “ideals”.

But Why Do We Have Different Skin Colours Then? And Why Are Some People Black, Some White And Some Brown?

When the early humans started colonising the world, while a lot of them decided to stay at comfortable locations, others have to escape out to different parts of the planet for food water and survival.

As we know, excessive exposer to the sunlight can tan your skin and can make your skin look darker for a while but in the early ages, the excessive exposer to sunlight damaged the DNA and changed the pigmentation pattern of the skin that has been followed till now and forever, some with more of the whiter skin pigments and some with darker skin pigments.

Fun fact:

The skin’s brown pigment also knows as melanin, is triggered by the UV radiation (Basically the excess exposer to the sun ) and is actually a natural sunscreen for you that saves you from the sun and those not so good sunburns.

The point being, the colour of your skin is basically you DNA’s way of saying “don’t worry, I’ll protect you in your natural habitat”.

Why Are We Racist?

If we want to discuss the fact that why are we racist about black and white or dark and bright, we have to go back to our roots and consider some factors on which our life depends and those are one of the major factors that programmed our minds to stay away from the dark and close to the bright.

P.S.The following statements are the personal opinions of the author and do not intend to hurt anyone’s sentiments.

1)    Survival: In survival, darkness is considered as the worst enemy and brightness is considered as a good friend.

2) Mythology: When it comes to mythology, darkness and negativity are always considered as a part of the same family in almost every religion.

3) Practicality: Even in our modern life being dark is seen as not being clean, in our tv ads in our movies you name it… and that’s one of the biggest reason, we have been fed this one ideology of “if you’re not bright you are bad”

These opinions may not be the real answer to our question but they definitely are a part of it.

Racism and colourism are one of the most dangerous and hard to take out of our brain element of our life, but we can always start by taking baby steps ourselves, Mahatma Gandhi once said: “Be the change you want to see in the word”.

 

Thanks for reading.