by J. Pharoah Doss, For New Pittsburgh Courier
Three scholars are often celebrated during Black History Month.
W.E.B. Dubois (1868–1963) was a founding member of the NAACP. Carter G. Woodson (1875–1962) pioneered Black History Month, and E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962) was the first Black president of the American Sociological Association.
Missing from that list is Howard University’s distinguished professor of antiquity, Frank Snowden Jr. (1911–2007). His scholarship examined the concept of race in the ancient world.
I’ll get back to him.
In 1995 an academic from the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank) published The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society. This book was released a year after two scholars from the American Enterprise Institute published the most radioactive book of the 20th century, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure. (This book’s radioactivity is only rivaled by a 1907 book called The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization.)
Critics insisted The Bell Curve was a White supremacist attempt to demonstrate that Black people were less intelligent than White people. Not only did the critics call The Bell Curve racist, but they also dismissed it as poorly researched and pseudo-scientific.
Now, when critics saw passages in The End of Racism that suggested racism no longer had the power to thwart Blacks or any other group in achieving their economic, political, and social aspirations, The End of Racism was dismissed as another poorly researched, insensitive book promoted by a racist think tank.
These critics were so eager to sound the racist alarm, they ignored the author’s central claim.
The author stated racism was a modern Western ideology developed in the late 1500s to explain large civilizational gaps between the West and other cultures. With that said, the author concluded, since racism had a beginning, it logically follows that racism can have an end.
However, this well-intended claim was condemned by a different set of critics. These critics insisted racism had always existed and was a permanent phenomenon in America. (These critics were reciting the consensus of another book published in 1995 called Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.)
Here’s where Frank Snowden Jr.’s scholarship matters.
After 15 years of research, Snowden published Blacks in Antiquity in 1970. The book covers the period between the third millennium BC and the sixth century AD. Through ancient sources, such as literature and art, Snowden discovered darker-skinned people of African ancestry not only inhabited the Greco-Roman world, they were not subjugated to what the modern world refers to as racism. Since the Greeks and Romans first encountered the Africans as soldiers and mercenaries, the stigma of inferiority was never attached to their skin color.
In Snowden’s 1983 book Before Color Prejudice, he explained why color prejudice didn’t develop during antiquity. Snowden stated Ethiopians did not astonish Greeks because of their blackness. Any fear based on physical appearance ceased in childhood. Fear is short-lived in children and doesn’t have a bearing on later attitudes. “Children can know all about racial differences but do not necessarily attach value judgments to them unless they are exposed to socializing forces characterized by overt racial consciousness/or hostility … Greek and Roman children lived in an atmosphere in which the Negroid type was well-known, but in which marked hostility to Blacks was not a characteristic of the society. Therefore, there was no reason for a child or even a parent to attach special significance to differences in color or to think that Blacks were fundamentally different.”
Apparently, the 1995 critics that insisted racism always existed were wrong, but their assumption that racism is a permanent phenomenon waiting to engulf future generations still dominates the 21st century to the detriment of the republic.
Last year, an author at the Garrison Institute wrote, “Almost every piece of work or literature that I’ve read on racism is built on one assumption: that it can’t end. But, if we all continue to say ‘racism is something that can never end in our generation, then who the hell ever gets to take responsibility for ending it?’”
That’s an easy answer—nobody—so we’ll have to settle for diversity, equity, and inclusion instead.