What accounts for white supremacy? There’s no scientific evidence to support it.
Believing the unsubstantiated
To read historian John Philip Jenkin’s tome “Mystics and Messiahs,” white supremacy is a deeply held belief system that says Caucasians are inherently better than other races and therefore should have a say over them. This credo has been coming up a lot, lately.
British politician's bombast
ArtNet News reports that a statue of Imperialist Cecil Rhodes, embedded in Oxford university’s façade, is an object of student disaffection, and they want it removed.
But school administers say it’s too expensive to take down.
Rhodes was a rabid racist
Meredith Martin quoted Rhodes in her 2009 book "Diamonds, Gold, and Wa" saying, "It must be brought home to them (blacks) that in future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in manual labor, and the sooner that is brought home to them the better." To that end, Rhodes, as Prime Minister of Cape Colony, ran blacks off their land.
What about Thomas Jefferson jingoism?
The BBC tags Oxford’s refusal to remove the Rhodes statue “a slap in the face” to the protesters, and “an act of institutional racism.” Reading the Rhodes story at Oxford has me wondering if the Thomas Jefferson statue at the University of Missouri should also come down.
Students in Missouri have been rallying for the removal of Jefferson’s statue since last year and with good reason. Here’s this founding father who held as self-evident that “all men are created equal” violating his own words by his bad behavior with his slaves.
Die-hard bigot even in death
The University of Missouri website acknowledges that Jefferson was a “cruel master,” who separated families as a way to discipline them, tagging blacks as “pests in society,” like “children incapable of taking care of themselves.” And when he died, he willed that only five of the blacks he owned could be freed.
The 700 or so remaining were to be put up for auction.
Founding father’s hypocrisy
Jefferson even went so far as to call black people “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.” But, like the statues of racist Rhodes at Oxford University, the University of Missouri has decided that the Jefferson statue stay where it is.
The stories of Jefferson’s hypocrisy were a likely cover for former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum who told an audience at a Young America’s Foundation event that Native Americans contributed nothing to America. Yahoo News reported him saying, “We birthed a nation from nothing.” I mean, there was nothing here.”
The Civil War that never ended
Santorum’s belief is held by white supremacists in politics like Rhodes and Jefferson, and by luminaries in literature. Rudyard Kipling famously said that it’s the white man’s job to civilize non-whites. He called the job “the white man’s burden.”
All of which may explain why a British royal (as yet unnamed), worried out loud about the skin color of half-black Meghan Markle’s baby. The racism story keeps on keeping on.
