The Roots of Racism - How the Fear of Death Makes Us Hate Other People

Racism has been around at least as long as we have had "civilization" - there is evidence of racism and even classism (an equally malevolent topic that I will write on later) in historical finds.   There is some dispute about the interpretive nature of archaeological finds, and admittedly the interpreted history that has been told to us is a product of colonialism and all that comes with that.   However, a great number of publications such as this one point to the fact that racism has been with us almost at least since we could remember remembering time.  And yet modern anthropology has already provided significant proof that race as a concept among humans does not exist, no more than does race exist among dolphins, or squirrels, or marmots.   We hold firmly to the tenets of science in other fields, so why does racism seem to be so embedded in the fabric of our modern culture?  Racism is so firmly implanted in our culture because we are a culture of death fear and avoidance. 

There are two experiences that unite every human being on the planet. Arguably other life forms, as well, but for the sake of this essay I'm focusing only on human primates.   These two experiences alone create for us all a sameness that cannot be overlooked or dismantled.   These shared experiences are birth and death.   We are human; ergo, we are born, and we die.  No one alive today came about by evading birth. No matter how unorthodox a birth, it is still a birth.    And no one alive today will avoid biomechanical death.   Its a fact more certain that the rising of our sun over the horizon at tomorrow's morning.   You can bank more on birth and death than you can any other fact of living.   All experience both.  It can be safely assumed that everyone everywhere is dying.  

This is part of what makes us human.   While there are species that have been identified as biologically immortal (they may live indefinitely), humans are not yet among them, and may never be.   Yet most cultures globally now exhibit a narrowing scope in their views of death and dying (likely due to colonialism), to the point where it is viewed as something to be avoided and feared.   Funerary customs in the west necessarily involve grief and sadness, and the funeral business as a whole is very profitable.  We have narrowed the experience of dying into such a small corridor that it serves as only a graph on economic spreadsheets now; we have lost our reverence for the act of passage that leads us beyond the veil.  

Racism is directly tied to our fear of dying. 

And since we refuse to accept dying as a part of living as a whole, we narrow it further - our unnatural segmentation into life as a three-part process, birth, life and then death, has snaked its way into other areas as well.  Now, we no longer just group lives into parts, but we group people into parts, too.   Western healthcare is so segmented now as to be completely ineffective; heart doctors, kidney doctors, bone doctors, you name it, we have it.   No one treats the whole human.    And then, further still, we segment groups - national borders are stern reminders that ownership of a certain land mass or region belongs to a certain group - and then further still, until certain groups are divided into categories that identify them by color!  These ludicrous attempts by us to compartmentalize and divide ourselves and our resource-limited world have driven us mad: we now suffer from cultural amnesia, and our collective memories - once told to us by storytellers of the old oral traditions - are now sacrificed to the gods of money and industry.  

Since death is an industry now, and not a part of the natural harmonies of life anymore, we fear it.   It is other - something out there that we must suffer, or tolerate, as part of an unsustainable system of living that we have adopted.   And this othering has folded itself over into our collective identities, until we are no longer able to see ourselves as part of a greater whole - we continue striving to be something, to acheive, or gain.  As if these were ends in and of themselves.  In our othering, we have assigned values to groups of people - even if we have done it unconsciously.  Out of harmoney as we are with our environments, we now turn the fingers on one another:  death is to be feared, but so are people who don't look/smell/think/act/interact like us.    They are outside - they are other.  And this is how we begin to label and view groups of people according to the color of their skin. 

Racism, then, is at the intersection with our fear of death and dying.   We view the finite world as the only concept knowable, and because we have subdivided it to near infinity, we collectively see ourselves in groups - they - we - us- them.   Our language even reflects this division.   And until we re-member ourselves, until we learn that death is only a milestone event and no more significant than changing one's stockings, until we learn that all life is one life, and there is no division, we will continue our othering as if it matters, as if it were important.  

It is my hope that by changing the way we view death, we can change how we view each other, too.