Okay. Here’s racism promulgated by Hinduism:
In a hymn from the Purusasukta of the Rig Veda, a foundational Hindu scripture, there are four main categories or varnas of Hindu society — varnameans colour as well as class. The highest caste of Brahmin (priest) is born from mouth of the Supreme Deity Brahman, the Kshatriya (warrior) comes next being born from the deity’s arm, the Vaishya (businessman or trader) comes from the god’s stomach, and the Shudra (menial or servant) from the foot of the Creator.
The untouchable or Dalit is the ‘unborn’ emerging from outside the body of the Creator, with no physical link to the Supreme Being and almost a different species like an animal. The Manusmriti, another Hindu scripture, describes the untouchable as “polluted” and “unclean” from birth. He violates, by his very existence, the Brahmanical obsession with hygiene and is perpetually filthy, according to Dumont.
Concerning Islam, there’s Farrakhan’s “Nation of Islam”:
In the early 1900s, a few black leaders strived to help the recently-freed African slaves regain a sense of self-esteem and reclaim their heritage. Noble Drew Ali started a black nationalist community, the Moorish Science Temple, in New Jersey in 1913. After his death, some of his followers turned to Wallace Fard, who founded the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in Detroit in 1930. Fard was a mysterious figure who declared that Islam is the natural religion for Africans, but did not emphasize the orthodox teachings of the faith. Instead, he preached black nationalism, with a revisionist mythology explaining the historical oppression of the black people. Many of his teachings directly contradicted the true faith of Islam.
In 1934, Fard disappeared and Elijah Muhammed took over the leadership of the Nation of Islam. Fard became a “Savior” figure, and followers believed that he was Allah in the flesh on earth. The poverty and racism rampant in the urban northern states made his message about black superiority and “white devils” more widely accepted. His follower Malcolm X became a public figure during the 1960s, although he separated himself from the Nation of Islam before his death in 1965.
And in Buddhism, the religious/racial violence against Rohingya Muslims:
His name is Wirathu, he calls himself the “Burmese Bin Laden” and he is a Buddhist monk who is stoking religious hatred across Burma.
The saffron-robed 45-year-old regularly shares his hate-filled rants through DVD and social media, in which he warns against Muslims who “target innocent young Burmese girls and rape them”, and “indulge in cronyism”.
To ears untrained in the Burmese language, his sermons seem steady and calm — almost trance-like — with Wirathu rocking back and forth, eyes downcast. Translate his softly spoken words, however, and it becomes clear how his paranoia and fear, muddled with racist stereotypes and unfounded rumours, have helped to incite violence and spread misinformation in a nation still stumbling towards democracy.
In each case (as with Christianity), religion is not the cause of racism, but the excuse, the tool used by demagogues to spread fear. In each case, leaders used their religious influence to push their own racist dogma.
That, and you should be aware that “Christianity” often doesn’t involve whites at all. Look up the “Taiping Rebellion” in China, where an ethnic Chinese who claimed to be Jesus’ brother tried to spread his belief and it wound up costing 20 million lives. Few if any whites were involved.
As for myself, I am Christian, and the Church of which I am a member is less than 1% white. Since the expansion into Africa, there are more blacks than whites in the Iglesia ni Cristo (Church of Christ).
Concerning “racism invented race”, I’m sorry, and please take no offense at this, but that viewpoint is indefensible in the long view of history, going back thousands of years. The written evidence from Rome and the Middle East is sketchy at best, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But let’s extend our view to the east, with the ancient Chinese:
Racial discrimination by the ruling Han Chinese in imperial China has been documented in historical texts such as Yan Shigu’s commentary on the Book of Han, in which the Wusun people were called “barbarians who have green eyes and red hair” and compared to macaques.
In late imperial China, two of the nomad groups from the north, the Mongols and the Manchus, succeeded in establishing rule over the entire empire. Both the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) established by the Mongols and the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) by the Manchus claimed their legitimacy based on the Confucian tradition and ruled their empires mainly with the Chinese bureaucratic institutions. At the same time, however, both also took draconian measures of discrimination against the Han in order to safeguard their rule of the minority. People with different ethnic origins had different access to social and political resources. They were also charged taxes and corvee at different rates, and they were subjected to differential criminal codes. Conversely, the Confucian open approach to ethnic differences notwithstanding, both the Yuan and Qing dynasties were overthrown by campaigns of the Han under exactly the same rallying cry: “Drive out the Tartar devils and recover China (quzhu dalu, huifu Zhonghua)!
Racism is a part of the psychological makeup of all humanity, as is every other negative psychological trait. Racism is rooted in our fear of the different, of the other. It is found (if to varying degrees) in every race and every culture.
As I’ve agreed, in America and the Western nations, whites are the most racist and commit the worst racism. But racism is a problem found wherever humans reside, and at least in the Western nations (including America), many whites are learning about white privilege and are standing against racism. The same is true (though to much lesser extents) in China and historically very xenophobic Japan.
To put it another way, yes, most whites are racist. We’ve got a long, long way to go…but at least many of us are trying to walk that journey.
