Why are white people racist against black people?

Sadly, we cannot go back in history and determine where racism came from.  My own view is that racism is part of our human nature.  It is not something that has to exist, but it is something that comes from the way we are as people.  We should also note that it is not only whites who are racist.  I would argue that all people have the potential for racism in their human nature, but that white people have had the most power so their racism has hurt other people the most.

I believe that all people tend to separate the world into two groups.  There are people who are fundamentally like them and people who are not.  Our propensity to differentiate between these two types of people helps to cause much (if not all) of the conflict in the world.  We would not dream of taking things from people who are like us, but we would happily take from the “other.”  Therefore, we get along relatively well with our own kin, our own townspeople, or our own tribe.  But we fight with people from outside our group as we try to take their resources from them. 

Over the ages, people have gone to war for all sorts of reasons.  They have fought with people from other countries, from other religions, from other political ideologies, and from other ethnic groups.  All of these are conflicts between the people who we think of as “self” and the people we think of as “other.”  The conflict between Catholics and Protestants, Sunni and Shia, and Hutu and Tutsi show us that we do not need race to cause us to hate people who are the “other.”

However, race seems to be a really easy way to determine who is “other.”  If I am Catholic and I hate Protestants, I will have a hard time telling who my enemy is just by looking at them. The same is true if I am a capitalist and I hate communists.  But it is very easy to look at someone who is of another race and to say “that person is not like me.”  People of other races look different from us in ways that are obvious at the first glance and so we can easily classify them as “other,” as people we might potentially hate.

With white and black people in specific, from their first contact, white Europeans looked down on what they saw as inferior African technology. The Europeans could easily defeat the Africans in war and they had much more in the way of material goods due to their technology. This led Europeans to believe that Africans were not just different, but also inferior.

I believe that we humans are wired to separate the world into our group and outsiders.  We do this in many different ways, but race is a really easy way to differentiate between people. Racism, I would argue, comes about because of this innate tendency to prefer people “like us” and to dislike people who are not.