The Antiquated Rendition of the Human Story and its Part in Modern Racism
The Age of Enlightenment was a period of intellectual liberation for which we all owe a great debt. It was now not just possible but encouraged to question and unpick traditional beliefs. The period also saw a resurgence not just in the value placed on history but the ways in which it was interpreted to influence the European sense of self. However, this now antiquated interpretation of large parts of the human story continues to influence how we view the world around us; what schools teach, and our sense of national identity. This was an era that sought to claim that Europe was solely responsibility for all advanced thought and achievement. I want to know why we continue to accept and propagate the conclusions of these thinkers today.
Enlightenment thinking has had a profound effect on our modern concept of privilege. By immortalising Europe as the sole source for good, its influence divides our modern multicultural society. I have grown up in exceptional privilege. I have parents still married who brought me up to question my surroundings. I grew up assuming I would attend university and since have done. As a white male, if I wish to voice an opinion as I am doing now it is very rare for me to be denied an audience. We are still the audience to the principles of the ruling classes of the 16th and 17th centuries. This is not to say that education has not diversified since the enlightenment but the underlying focus on European dominance of intellect and power can still be seen as casting a clear shadow over modern outlooks on the world.
I distinctly remember hearing from my secondary school teacher that Africa does not have the natural resources to develop as the Western world has done. This coming from a state school with an Ofsted outstanding rating. I’m not going to list the reasons why she was so wrong, but it is worth considering how this kind of statement reinforces the perception of Africa as having always been poverty stricken. This image is created for us by how we present the human story; what we include and exclude from the narrative.
To illustrate how Enlightenment thinkers filtered history, I’ll start with one of their favourites; the Roman Empire. Rome and its eventual decline were heavily romanticised by the Imperialist classes of the Enlightenment. If you ask most people what they thought of the Roman Empire, they would likely think of a similarly colonialist, slave owning and racially divided order that characterised the Empires of Britain and other European powers. This is no accident. The concept of ‘fall’ is generally contested. It would be better described as centuries of gradual decline of population and military vigour. The image painted by later Imperialists is of a tragic invasion of the city by their own concept of ‘barbarian’. Karl Briullov, a Russian painter depicts the scene of the sack in 455 AD. The invaders were from a Christian Germanic tribe called the Vandals originating from Poland and Germany. However, the audience are presented with tribal images of black Africans brawling with pearlescent white women, Middle Eastern looking warriors wearing head scarfs and the destruction of Christian symbols with a white bishop overlooking the scene. This kind of painting reinforces the idea that the atrocities committed by Enlightenment Imperialists were justified by an historical precedent of white supremacy. You wouldn’t expect such comparisons for the stories of Augustus, the first emperor who came to power having listed the majority of the Roman aristocracy on a public order for their murder. White on white murder isn’t barbarous just as today, a white terrorist is mentally ill.
This extends also to the perception of slavery throughout history. Due to the involvement of the enlightenment imperialists in the slave trade, we picture slavery throughout history to fit the same mould. Considering Rome as a similarly slave driving, and segregated peoples is not entirely unfounded, but it is misleading to compare it with the Atlantic Slave Trade. A Roman slave was rarely there to toil the land. Farming was considered the most noble occupation a Roman could pursue. A Roman slave could be a highly skilled attendant to a wealthy family. They were not deemed sub-human based on their skin colour and some could hope for freedom within their lifetime. One of the solutions to Rome’s population problem was the enfranchisement of slaves. Augustus even limited the total number that any one noble may enfranchise to one hundred. A freedman could attend public duties and most striking of all, their children would be full Roman citizens and could run for high office.
If we use a typical British school as an example and we assume that no one at this school has the privilege of parents who would have engaging answers to their children’s questions, we might begin to see how problems may arise. If a black child goes through primary and secondary school, how might the history of the global BAME community be presented to them? They might be told about a frail yet defiant old lady who refused to sit at the back of the bus and became a hero for the civil rights movement, preaching non-violent resolutions. It is unlikely they would be told that Rosa Parks was in fact just 42, was not the first to have taken this action and knew perfectly well she was risking her life. She was married to a fellow civil rights activist and together would host events at their home. She remarks in her autobiography that there would be so many guns on the table that she forgot to offer her guests coffee. So acute was the risk to their lives by their activism that her husband slept with a shotgun next to him every night.
This child might also be greeted with a history of the Atlantic slave trade. At my school, we spent almost an entire term of history lessons at the ages of 13 watching the 1970’s series ‘Roots’. This show depicted tribal Africans in mud huts being abducted from their home and shipped to America. Our teachers’ failure to add any further background lead to a boy in my class being referred to as ‘Kunta Kinte’, the leading slave in the series. Whilst most would doubtless be taught of the atrocities of the slave trade, they might be told that it took brave politicians such as William Wilberforce to stand up for justice. It is unlikely they would be taught in any meaningful detail about the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804. This became the only slave revolution in history that lead to the liberated slaves establishing their own government. This is particularly remarkable considering it was not just the French army present but the allied Polish, the Spanish and the British. Some record the uprising as against the whites on the island but in fact the liberated slaves only targeted the French, even accepting the defected Polish forces surrender. Most fascinatingly of all, when violence ceased it was declared that there would be only one race recognised which would be black, which included the troops of colonising global empires.
Twenty years before the Haitian revolution, French enlightenment writer Guillaume Raynal warned, “the Africans only want a chief, sufficiently courageous, to lead them on to vengeance and slaughter”. This view is certainly not reflected in the Haitian revolution. I would argue this is a far more accurate conclusion for the French revolution which happened simultaneously; a topic our student is more likely to be told about. The French Revolution replaced a monarchy with a new unelected authoritarian regime. The Reign of Terror condemned 17,000 of Raynals fellow countrymen to death. The National Assembly of France stripped Raynal of his property when he called for an end to the revolution via a constitutional monarchy. The bloodthirsty revolutionaries of France used enlightenment principles to rationalise their slaughter, yet no writer would condemn ‘the French’ as being driven solely by ‘vengeance and slaughter’. Blackness was the cause of violence in Haiti according to Reynal, not French imperialism.
Our schooling systems across the Western world are teaching this falsehood that Africa in particular has no history outside of Ancient Egypt and if it does it is tribal and primitive. What might we present to combat this? Perhaps rather than Henry VIII’s sex life, we might examine the Malian Empire; the wealthiest state on earth in the 14th century, ruled by Mansa Musa who may have been the richest man ever to have lived and who sent 200 ships across the Atlantic, 150 years before Christopher Columbus.
Ivan Van Sertima wrote a book called ‘They Came Before Columbus’, detailing the evidence of African voyages to the Americas well before the explorer that we are all taught about. He details the accounts of thirteen witnesses including Columbus who talk about seeing Africans when they got to America. Columbus himself talks about the indigenous people of Haiti giving him some spears which they claimed to have traded with black people that had come from the south east. When they are examined back in Spain, it is concluded they are the same as the spears they were trading with Guinea. Due to the Eurocentric bias entrenched by the age of enlightenment, we glorify a man as ‘discovering’ a land where people had lived and traded with the outside world for centuries.
For a black child going through this system, they have been presented with the very real story of a civil struggle and are told that this battle was won in the 20th century and here are the people who made it happen. They are then greeted in the real world by the everyday racism embedded in our culture such as our news outlets presenting blackness as the cause of violence in the inner city or black violence and racial slurs on the radio being normalised. How might that make them view themselves within the culture of blackness that they are designated by the world around them? If we look conversely to a white child going through that system, there is no instance where there will not be a white innovator or hero presented as a role model. Nor will there be a time when whiteness is presented as the driving factor to any problem past or present. In 2014, YouGov found that 44% of Brits were proud of the British Empire. We live in an intellectual hangover from the Age of Enlightenment. People fear and hate what they don’t understand, at a time now where hatred feels like a prominent theme of our political landscape, there is no better time to reconsider what we as a society truly value.
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant is to this day considered one of the greatest philosophers of all time. His motto of enlightenment is to “have courage to use your own reason”. This is a principal that ought to be accessible to all. We control courage by empowering everyone to believe in their own prosperity.