Worse Than Stormfront

Alot of people wonder how it is that old Mac came to hold such extreme racist views. I’m not going to pretend that it all happened instantly but there was one thing that first got me thinking about the world in racial terms. It was this map of the world:

I first saw a map similar to the one above during a geography class in 4th year in secondary school. I was browsing through the geography book when I came across a chapter that dealt with global poverty. They made the point that the world could be divided into a prosperous northern half and an impoverished southern half. While on the surface it seemed to make sense - most of the poor countries in the world clearly are located in the southern hemisphere - when I looked at the map more closely I noticed something strange. The line seperating the northern and southern halves doesn’t run parallel to the equator. It seems to take a detour in order to take in Australia and New Zealand in the southern hemisphere. It then takes another detour to take in South Africa.

That’s when it suddenly dawned on me. This is not a map dividing the southern and northern parts of the globe, this is a map separating the countries populated by fair-skinned people from the countries populated by dark skinned people. The rich countries of the world are populated by fair-skinned people (East-Asians, Europeans and their descendants in the new world) while the poor countries are populated by the dark skinned people of Africa, Southern Asia, and South America. It seemed so obvious to me at the time that I was amazed that nobody had failed to point this out. Of course at that time I wasn’t aware of political correctness and the pressure that people are under not to point out the obvious facts of human development. But still, it got me thinking. I suppose I had always known that white countries tend to be richer than black countries but I hadn’t known enough about the world to know if this really was the case.

I was only 17 year old at the time and I had never even thought about the subject of race before. It was a year or two later when I first got access to the internet that I began to explore the issue in more detail. Like most young men who have unsupervised access to the internet the first thing I looked up were the racist, neo-nazi sites (actually it was the second thing I looked up) with all the Aryan white-power literature. The first night I was on the internet I found this page
http://www.davidduke.com/library/race/african101facts.html

After reading that there was no going back.

Anyway, that’s how old Mac became a racist. It was nothing personal. It’s not like I was attacked by one of them. In fact, all my personal dealings with people of colour have been positive, just as I would like to think that their dealings with me have been positive as well. My views on race are scientific rather than ethical. They’re related to matters of fact rather than matters of value. I don’t believe in discrimating against people on the basis of their colour and I’m opposed to any kind of mistreatment of people on account of their race or gender or religion or sexual orientation.

Now that I’ve shared an important formative influence on the development of my worldview maybe Aspergers or Wicknight might like to share with us how they came to hold their views. I’ll even post their comments in a separate post.