There is Still a Color Line
Racism resembles a devil, century-old, roaming and rambling in a believed-to-be civilized world. When enraged, it wreaks havoc, and is quick to scare the wits out of you. Its traces are found utterly everywhere, even in countries constantly babbling of equality and liberty. The United States is a typical example. Even though many of its self-dubbed titles—supreme democracy, liberty and inspiration, to name some—might make it seem otherwise, deep down there, America is still oftentimes stricken by the racism devil.
Paper can never conceal fire; likewise, a vulnerable façade of coexistence can’t bury the acuteness of racial discrimination. In the United States, approximately 47% of all prisoners were black-skinned.  In a country where black population constitutes a puny 12.9%, such comparison is in every sense dreadful. For all we know, after anti-racism laws have existed for more than one decade, racial biases still remain unremedied. To look at the historical causes of racism, I would like to attempt from two aspects, the color despise and legacy of black slavery.
It all started with a sick worship of “whiteness”. For English people in the Victorian age, white color was endowed with a particular denotation, signifying beautify. A contemporary poem likened the fair, white skin of Victoria to lilies and the delicate whale bones. On and on, whiteness continued to pick up more meanings, sincerity, friendliness, wisdom, and courage, until it became the equivalence of everything good.
While white became the blessed color, black became the cursed. Even prior to the slave trade, the color black was distasteful to the whites. A 1600 Oxford English Dictionary’s entry of black went like this, "Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul. Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister. Foul, iniquitous, atrocious, horribly wicked. Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc." Now that even the lexicographers, the ruling elites of England, interpreted blackness in such a blatantly prejudicial way, it isn’t hard to imagine what attitude that the commoners adopted.
Therefore, it came not as a surprise that, when the Africans, as black as they could be, ma
de themselves visible to the whites, disasters loomed. A people shuttling through the forests, gulping the games alive, exposing their private parts, worshipping evil spirits, the blacks immediately became the filthiest beings the whites could imagine. Given time, the aversion to the blacks picked up intensity. As a result, on the mere base of skin color, human beings were classified and ranked, whites at the top, blacks the bottom. And when the early English arrived North America, such “skin bias”, which was to initiate a history of discrimination, was also exported.
If the despise towards blackness has foreshadowed racial discrimination, then for the miserable blacks, the institutionalized slavery must have reinforced it. Throughout the continuous subjugation of the blacks, the ill-gotten superiority of the whites grew into an addiction; in order to satisfy an addicted population, the whites in power resorted to legislation. Cannibalism began.
After the second half of 17th century, laws were passed to enslave the blacks, reducing them to production tools. The whites used to accuse the blacks of being barbarian, and no
w they were damaging the blacks in a no-less-barbarian way. By 1709, large slave markets had become a commonplace in Wall Street, and before the first gunshot rent the air of Lexington, black slaves had amounted to approximately 500,000, 1/7 of the total colonial population. The blacks were so harshly pressed, toiling and moiling in the plantations, that their lives were consumed within 30 years, wiping out a considerable amount of African population.
An institution is most horrible when, even abolished, its legacy remains permeating. Black slavery in the United States was all too typical a case. The abolition of slave trade in 1865 confiscated the Americans’ rights to enslave, but not their minds. Cases of racial discrimination still persists, overt or covert. During the Reconstruction, most Southern freemen were unfree, denied of voting rights. In 1920, when the 19th amendment was newly passed, as Kathryn Kish Sklar noted in her Women and Power in American History, that in order to vote, black women had to pay 300 dollars and read the federal constitution from start to finish, while white women needed not to bother. In education, working, and many other aspects of life, racism instances are found in abundance, evidencing an intermi
nable nightmare that the blacks still cannot wake up from.
Racial discrimination has been, even to this day, yoking and fettering the blacks. To “solve” it, or at least to abate its acuteness, some understanding of its historical origin is necessary. The two aspects provided above, though superficial, might at least offer some clues. We must acknowledge that racism is a far-reaching issue, defying any once-for-all worshippingpanaceas. No one can foresee when racism would disappear, or maybe it will never disappear, but still, it is a worthy battle to fight.