Post 2: Region's role in race

In this post, I will be relating Aronson's text to current events

Context

  Hello again fellow readers! I've just read the next section of my book up to page 130. In this section, Aronson shifts into a more religious examination of how the idea of race evolved. So far he has walked through the history of feuding religions and how their differing beliefs lead to the ranking and dividing of people. I again found his story-esque approach extremely effective as it allows me to immerse myself in the history and follow the timeline of the invention of race. The main points from this section revolved around exactly what brought us to the idea of race, and I found the progression to be fascinating. 

Projection of the soul 

  The story starts with early Christian churches' depictions of "monstrous men" to teach the illiterate peasants of people who had sinned. These men had disturbing shapes and faces and animalistic features, taking this form because they had sinned. 

   "With the monstrous men, physical characteristics had become crucial. One pillar of what had become 'race' was in place" (Aronsonson P 73).

I found this to be especially interesting because as of today, we can see that a big part of the idea of race comes from physical appearance. We judge people using stereotypes of others who look the same way, we assume they different from us because of how they look. It was intriguing to me why we had come to care so much about how people look, and the appearance aspect seems to originate from old churches trying to depict sinners. Even more interesting is that they begun to associate one's physical appearance with the state of their soul, so ugly or different people could be judged as evil based on their appearance alone. Aronson also mentions that in a mistranslation of a Hebrew text into Latin, people thought that Moses had horns. When this was depicted in the churches, people interpreted it as Jews being devils.

Christianity vs other religions

   He also discusses how Christians came to believe their religion was superior to all others, including other variations of Christianity including Protestants and Catholics. Christians were extremely dedicated to cleansing the world of religions such as Jewish and Islam which they thought were inferior. Christians crusaded to eradicate other inferior religions. 

   "Heretics, Jews, Muslims, lepers, homosexuals: All of these had to removed, separated out, distinguished from the rest, converted, or executed" (Aronson p 85).

  This describes how Christians felt about those who were different from them. Christians in this period started an even further idea of "us vs them", they took it from "we're better than them" to "those who are inferior to us look this way, and it cannot be changed". This was a really important point made clear by the history of Christians' feuds with other religions. He discussed as well how the belief that dark-skinned people represented evil and sin came to be. I'm quite amused by this because it's so simple, yet had such dramatic effects. The gist of the story is that the bible was misread. It was misread, and it was thought that the son of Ham, Canaan, was cursed for being dark when he was actually cursed for gazing upon his father in the nude. It was never a matter of race or skin color, the idea of race was only just budding, but that's how it was read and so it was believed that God made dark-skinned people to be cursed to a life of inferiority. 

   I think It's crazy how one mistake could cause an entire religion to form this destructive view. I think it's a bit disturbing to see how people could be driven to such awful things as slaughtering and enslaving people in the name of their religion. It did seem to me as if they were almost using their religion as an excuse to hate and abuse people who were different or that didn't share the same beliefs. Of course, most of the information that caused these opinions to form was based on ancient texts that were frequently misinterpreted so I'm not sure all the blame can be put on the individuals. Nonetheless, it's frightening that religion could justify such horrific acts. I think it's also frightening how much power something can have when misinterpreted or misunderstood, based on someone's opinion, as seen with the example Aronson uses of the horned Jews. 

Modern examples

  This brings me to my modern connection to Aronson's work: the anti-Asian prejudice sweeping through America. It is widely believed that Covid-19 originated in a Chinese lab. As the pandemic continues, Americans have been developing hatred towards Asian Americans due to the belief that the disease came from their continent. According to an NBC news article, hate crimes targeting Asian people increased by about 150% in the last year (Yam). This article also states that a large contributing factor to this rise was former president Trump's remarks about the virus's origins, especially calling it the "China virus" (Yam). The following chart was used in the article to show the increase of Asian-targeted hate crimes from the beginning of the pandemic to 2020.

Si, Wen. "Asian-American-directed hate crimes increased in all but two among 

     some of the largest U.S. cities." NBC News, 9 Mar. 2021, www.nbcnews.com/ 

     news/asian-america/ 

     anti-asian-hate-crimes-increased-nearly-150-2020-mostly-n-n1260264. 

     Accessed 11 Mar. 2021. 

   

    This is very similar to what happened when Christians were exposed to damaging images of Jews. They were shown Jews with horns, which was not accurate information and was misunderstood. This caused them to believe Jews were evil and had to be eliminated. The Christians then went on to persecute and even kill Jews. In the modern-day example, Trump shares information that is not proven to be accurate: that Covid-19 came from China. As people learned and interpreted this information, they began to hate Asians because they became associated with the cause of the pandemic. Persecution and hate crimes against Asians then skyrocketed, similar to how the Christians treated Jews. 

My thoughts

  I think that from Aronson's book and current events, we can learn about the dangers of information spreading and how that contributes to prejudice. In Aronson's example, the ability to share information that wasn't accurate led to horrific actions against Jews. Physical features became important in determining the state of one's soul, people began judging others on appearance and associations which were formed on inaccurate information. This fuels prejudice, and in the modern era where information is so easily accessible and comes from countless different sources, it's even worse. When the idea that Covid came from China spread like wildfire through the U.S., we began to associate Asians with the cause of this whole mess just like Christians associated Jews with the devil. In both cases, it led to intense prejudices against people of different races or religions and had horrific results. Aronson seems to make a similar point in his book about how information can be spread to poison an entire population, about the previously mentioned Curse of Ham, and how it linked slavery to racism.

   "And these distorted views of enslaved people tainted everyone [...] they also passed along a justification for it, which they found in the bible" (Aronson p 99).

   I think this can teach us to be more aware of what information we process daily. We can't take anything for face value anymore, we need to critically analyze it and make a judgment for ourselves instead of letting other people's opinions rule us. It could also teach us that common beliefs, stereotypes and prejudices can be based on false information and should be examined closely. The blind belief of these kinds of ideas is what causes and deepens the issues like racism that we see today and in Aronson's accounts of the past. 

Thank you for taking the time to follow along with my thoughts on this book. See you next time!

Works Cited

Aronson, Marc. Race: A History Beyond Black and White. New York, Atheneum Books 

      for Young Readers, 2007. 

Yam, Kimmy. "Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, mostly in 

     N.Y. and L.A., new report says." NBC News, Mar. 2021, www.nbcnews.com/news/ 

     asian-america/ 

     anti-asian-hate-crimes-increased-nearly-150-2020-mostly-n-n1260264. 

     Accessed 11 Mar. 2021.