Joe Bardin – 

Translation from English – for the original article click here

Bigotaria seems to appear in every culture, so that it seems an essential element in the culture itself; You exalt yourself by attenuating someone else. Still, as an American, I think I have a particularly strong zeal that prefers whites over black citizens.

American racism has been despicable in its origins since the days of the slave trade in Africa, through its evolution through segregation and economic oppression, and in its persistence into the 21st century, through the malicious establishment of the criminal justice system, and the chilling bias of other systems including health care.

This seems to make no sense in particular. Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army General during the Civil War, noted in his autobiography that the vast majority of young people who fought and died for the Confederate had nothing to substantially gain from the existence of slavery, not even to richly owned slaves . And yet hundreds of thousands sacrificed their lives to defend this evil.

Today, blacks in the United States have proven the flaw of white supremacy through their excellence, despite the obstacles and prejudices they face. Just think of such a representation of the black community as the jazz of John Coltrane, the prose of Toni Morrison, the rhetorical skills of Barack Obama, the competitiveness of Michael Jordan, the soul of Aretha Franklin, the leadership of Colin Powell and so on.American culture would be barren without them, and yet the myth of black inferiority continues.

Genomic analysis shows that all racism is fundamentally illogical, that in fact, biologically, there is no such thing as race. The famous study at Stanford University, the genetic structure of human populations, found no evidence of the type of differentiated genetic identities, which are usually referred to as “race”.In fact, they found that the races of two people of European origin can have a genetic comparison more similar to someone of Asian origin than to each other.

What is the source of this baseless malice and what can be done about it?
Some blame the “whiteness” itself, as if there is a special hatred among people who look as if they come from European origin. But history and the present show that racism and discrimination are in no way limited to white people.In China, this is the Chinese majority that oppresses the hamsters.In India, the Hindu majority embraces increasingly anti-Muslim attitudes.In Muslim countries, Shi’ites suffer where the Sunnis dominate and vice versa.

To be honest, there is not a single reason for thinking that if blacks were the majority in the United States or if they started the Industrial Revolution in Africa, they would act on their own without withdrawal. As a Jew who played basketball on playgrounds in Washington, D.C., I experienced prejudices from black children firsthand. For that matter, there were Jews who only a few generations ago were excluded from the unbearable Holocaust towards Arabs in Israel.

The deeper you look at any society, the more granular it seems to become. Growing up in the United States, I was used to general anti-Jewish slurs being associated with the right to be cheap and cunning with money in a non-fuzzy way. But when I lived in Tel Aviv, I discovered a whole new layer of opinions held by Jews towards other Jews. The Jews of the Georgians were all hairy pimps, the Germans kidnapped perfectionists, the Persians cheap, Yemenite stonemasons, unprecedented Moroccans, and the world’s most renowned Polish Jews.

Mortality and the appearance of hatred

What can be done about such deep tendencies towards division and loathing? Liberals say the answer is in the reform systems. Conservatives say that it falls on individual responsibility. The current insistence calls for more education and dialogue are positive, but they rarely respond to the primary forces that are in the game. People seem to have an almost elementary need to say goodbye and hate. So where does this need come from?

—

The answer lies in the bitter truth of our own vacancy. We had to accept the unacceptable – our own forgetfulness – and the inevitable loss of every person we love. On some mental level we have managed to enchant ourselves to cope through a reverse life of imagination of one kind or another, but on one level or another we have very much had to swallow the reality of our physical irrelevance. We had to accept that we were throwing away and no amount of money, lover or success could change that.

If we ourselves are disposable, it is really not so difficult to treat others as garbage.In fact, for many it comes quite naturally.

In truth, our mortality is so bad that we seek to defame others after humiliating our own vacancy.This was once done in a rather transparent way through human sacrifice, made throughout the world, in which a person was chosen to be murdered in order to purify the sins of others.The same theme underlies Christian mythology, albeit through a more murky morality of guilt and betrayal.

Later, when the human sacrifice became taboo, the scapegoat it was done under the guise of justice.During pogroms, Jews were slaughtered for their alleged actions in society, and lynching of black Americans was always a punishment for an alleged offense. The Nazi extermination camps can be seen as the industrialization of the scapegoat on a continental scale.

Now, as a society, our scapegoat is becoming more sophisticated.We make minority groups a target for our loathing in order to feel some relief from the curse of our mortality.We put them to feel less sworn ourselves, if only for comparison.

This type of scapegoat is clearly evident in the infamous case of Central Park Five, in which five black and Latino teenagers were wrongly convicted of raping a white women’s runner in 1990. After spending between six to 13 years in prison, the serial rapist confessed to the crime, confirmed by DNA testimonies.Now the subject of the Netflix series,when they see us, the entire lawsuit has been invented in injustices, including forced confessions, by a system set to sacrifice these boys despite the philosophies in the case.

Racism offers a symbolic form of relief from the devaluation of mortality through the increased devaluation of the other.In this sense, the more a person can reduce someone who has separated from you, the more immediately his own deprivation is evident.As long as they face a certain death, no one is rich enough or strong enough to be above the need to assume someone else. In the end, everyone is reduced to nothing in death, but along the way, some can feel superior if they can recognize someone else who will humiliate him.

The idea of humiliating mortality after another seems entirely too much in the case of George Floyd.In the obscene rule chart in Minneapolis, filmed on video by the viewer, officer Derrick Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died, placing himselfrightabove death, at that moment, at the expense of Floyd’s life.

The obsolescence of racism

It is certainly true that many people in many cultures, despite their mortality, understand that there is no justification for placing other people below themselves based on some arbitrary criteria.However, no society is immune, especially when survival pressures are increased, just as no society has yet been immune to death.That is why education alone will never change the essence of bluntness and contempt.We will simply draw new lines of separation and humiliation.

What we need is to stop dying, to stop obliging to internalize our insignificance, to stop settling for fairy tales about freedom and not about the real thing – freedom of death.This will spur what could be called a religious experience about the value of human life, which mortality simply does not support.When we are no longer disposable, we become invaluable to all of us.

Immortality makes racism obsolete because there will no longer be self-rejection of medicines through the rejection of others. Much morethan tolerance, we will be able to feel the absolute preciousness of the human body, ours and that of others, so sharp, so naked, that we will not be able to abuse another, because the bruise for our person will be so blunt and painful.

When black slaves who were tied to a whipping position were mercilessly beaten, they and their loved ones did a thing called “fly away,” where they would fly in their minds to some better place where they were not subjected to the evils of the reality in which they lived.

In a way, mortality has caused us all to move away from the physicality of feeling.This numbness necessary for suffering, ours and those of others, is also what facilitates hatred and violence of all kinds.And that is whythe good peoplewho are called too often stand aside and do nothing.

Now, as we increasingly have the means to prolong human life, thereby increasing the value of human life, it is time for us to return in our bodies and become the connected feeling between human beings that we are supposed to be in a death-free society. When the bigotria has no purpose or relevance.If it seems too forward, too ambitious, just do a thought experiment on behalf of your company.Think of yourself and every person you know and every person you don’t know as immortal right now to help raise the value of human life above the abuse of bigness.This is the new world to which we must work.