Patterns of Racism as an effect of Knowledge Systems

             Reducing the 'other' to an image of inhumanity and evil is common to many of the major atrocities. The effort to dehumanize their victims is fairly standard procedure of conquerors, as can be seen in the epithets used by Martin Luther, the sainted racist of Protestantism, about the Jews, whom he calls "a plague, a pestilence, thoroughly evil", "tricky serpents" and "mad dogs". He also recommends killing them, burning their places of worship or sending them into exile.[1] Columbus'  opinion of the native Americans is similar and I have already quoted Oviedo's racist comments against the Native Americans he murdered. Colonel John Chivington, who brutally murdered and dismembered some 600 Cheyenne called the Indians lice and Indian children "nits", and justified killing the children because "nits make lice". [2] Himmler referred to the extermination of the Jews as "the same thing as delousing" and called the Jews "useless eaters".[3] Himmler's attitude to the Jews is virtually identical to the effort to exterminate the Native Americans in the name of Manifest Destiny. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and many others advocated total extermination.  Hitler also advocated extermination, but as Stannard notes, Jefferson's words advocating genocide have been "conveniently lost to most historians".[4] It doesn't serve the myth of American beneficence to point out the similarity between Hitlerian and Jeffersonian genocidal motivations.  The Indians were habitually described by U.S. Presidents, the Press and business leaders as "dogs", "wolves", "pigs, "baboons" "gorillas" and similar or worse names.

              The Native Americans were thought inferior creatures, as were the Jews in Germany, Africans or the subjects of the British Empire. Consider the words of an Oxford scholar about the people in the colonies. They are merely a 

specimen of raw material. Their very ugliness and stupidity furnish just the point. It is because there are people like this in the world that there is an Imperial Britain. This sort of creature has to be ruled, so we rule him, for his good and our own.[5]

            In any case, to return to the origins of Hindu racism, the development of the four major castes, which are divided into many sub castes, developed slowly. The castes, (castes= varna=color) are as follows: the Brahmins (priests-heads of state), Kshatriyas (Warriors-ruling families), Vaisyas (merchants and traders), Shrudras (workers) and Chandala (homeless/untouchable/outcastes).[6] Caste grew out of the victory of conquest, class. economic, professional and religious differences. The Portuguese word 'casta' is the origin of our word and means "pure race", and appears to be a word that grew up in response to the Portuguese conquests in the 16th century. This is not surprising since the European world of the Conquest period, like India centuries earlier is a class and caste ridden society that justified its economic brutality by war and religion.[7] In any case, the Portuguese and Spanish recognized their own system of social inequality as a caste system, and used this word to describe what they saw in India. Thus the European interest in the Hindu caste system probably has its origin in the period of the conquest of native peoples by Europeans. The relation of caste to conquest and the 'Empire of the Intellect' would appear to be fundamental: the 'purity' of knowledge appears to be fundamentally related to the 'purity' of race or class.

            This prejudice that favors and creates castes or classes on the basis of intellectual supremacy  appears to be enshrined, for instance, in the assumed supremacy of "pure research" and theory over the life of activity, poverty or work. The roots of this are no doubt in the distinction made in many traditional cultures between contemplation and action.  Contemplation is supposed to be a superior form of being, while action is inferior and only justified by conformity to a system of knowledge. As the Brahmins were the Guardians of the disinterested truths of Hinduism, today's scientists are the purveyors of scientific truth, conceived of as ahistorical and apolitical, as if science, like god, had no history. Self reflective consciousness, be it that of the Christian saint or the scientific or theoretical mathematician, is supposed to be a superior occupation. Thomas Kuhn notes, for instance that the Brahmanical or elite nature of modern theoretical scientists makes them see ordinary experiment and research as "hack work to be restricted to engineers and technicians"[8]  The belief that theoretical science is somehow superior to applied science enshrines old religious and elite prejudices going back to Augustine and Plato. But it is clear enough from modern history that Nazi science, Soviet science and capitalist science have all been driven by historical factors which conditioned research and directed "truth".  There is no real difference between theory and practice or contemplative truth and action. A system of knowledge dictates programs of action. Knowledge is a means to greater power. What is marvelous about the some thinkers that come after the Enlightenment, is that they begin to question this relation of knowledge and power. Tom Paine, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, Chomsky and others begin to separate knowledge and power and to look on science as something that ought to be done ethically.

            In any case, the Hindu caste system had only two outlets. The first was to be born a Chandala or outcaste, which virtually guaranteed suffering, poverty or death. Or one could become a sunyasin,  or a Hamsa, a wandering monk, priest or casteless saint. This was a rare possibility and represented the exception that proved the rule. The Hamsa was one above caste, not below it like the Chandala, and as such he was a living symbol of the Hindu knowledge system, and like Christian saints or monks, acted as a kind of advertisement, or living symbol, for the religious-cultural system as a whole. The Hamsa represents the knowledge system at its height, and is pictured in Hindu art as showered with benefits of heavenly rewards; gold, fruit, flowers or women (asparas). The Chandala represents the victim of the caste system, not its benefits, and is largely hidden from view in Hindu culture, suffering in silent and brutal degradation. Hinduism as a system of knowledge/power is bounded by these extremes, the saint advertising the benefits of compliance with the cultural norm, and the Chandala demonstrating the cruelty and inequity of the cultural norm. The nature of power is defined by this economy of benefits/punishments, and the system of knowledge, here it is Hinduism, is the cultural expression of the political, economic and social system.

             In this context the god concept in the Hindu system can be seen to function as a vehicle of ideological conformity. The concern with 'purity' of knowledge is presented as a concern with disinterested truth, when in actuality the disinterested truth is anything but neutral. It results in persistent inequity and violation of basic rights, justified by the complex apparatus of the 'Hindu World Machine' as some have called the complex and fantastic cosmological mechanism of Hindu metaphysics, with its complex of gods, epochs and castes.

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