Breaking Racism's Bad Habit

IN THE ANCIENT WORLD slavery was an accepted social norm, much like employment is today. During the early industrial revolution, when small scale, independent craftsmen were replaced with mass production in factories, hourly wage earning was widely considered "wage slavery", forced labor for lack of alternatives, and factory work a form of imprisonment. Violent protests and strikes were common, until corporate coercive power beat down the labor movement, and eventually societal attitudes changed, and hourly wage work came to be widely accepted, as it is today. In the ancient world, there are few recorded instances of uprisings against slavery. The Roman slave Spartacus was one. The bible condones slavery, as apparently did Jesus, who never uttered a single word against it, though he was doubtless well aware of its existence. The most notorious slave revolt was precipitated by the Hebrew nation, led by Moses, against Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus.The lord, who generally rarely if ever lifted a finger to free anyone, was persistent in his attempts to convince the Pharoah to do the job, until finally persistence and plagues paid off, and Ramses caved, but only at the expense of losing his mobile infantry to drowning. To be the lord's chosen people has benefits.Although slavery is both an ancient and modern phenomenon, racism, surprisingly, is entirely modern, having been invented in the middle of the fifteenth century by Portuguese business people to justify the enslavement of Africans. The idea of enslaving Africans, and that it was justified because of their "inferior" skin color, rapidly caught on throughout Catholic Europe, which justified it because slavery was evidently mostly condoned by God. they knew it was wrong, however; hence, their need to justify it by inventing a justification. But before the fifteenth century, no mention of people being inferior because of skin color can be found in the entire body of human literature. In the pre Civil War American south, justifying slavery on account of racism was always secondary to justifying it as a Christian value, biblical, a way to bring to gospel of Christ to people who would otherwise have lived their lives in spiritual ignorance. If all this teaches anything, it is this: that religion does not always teach good moral values, that it can be and often is used for destructive, malign purposes, and that racism is a learned habit, a fabrication of the human mind, and that although old bad habits are hard to break, they can be broken. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to break the habit of racism.