Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the
resulting children inherit that status.
Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on
the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate
place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were,
literally, outcasts – in this strati ed society, they did not even occupy the lowest
rung. They became known as Untouchables. They had to live apart from all other
people and scrape together a living in humiliating and disgusting ways, such as
sifting through garbage dumps for scrap material. Even members of the lowest
caste avoided mingling with them, eating with them, touching them and certainly
marrying them. In modern India, matters of marriage and work are still heavily
in uenced by the caste system, despite all attempts by the democratic government
of India to break down such distinctions and convince Hindus that there is nothing
polluting in caste mixing.
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Purity in America
A similar vicious circle perpetuated the racial hierarchy in modern America. From
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the European conquerors imported
millions of African slaves to work the mines and plantations of America. They
chose to import slaves from Africa rather than from Europe or East Asia due to
three circumstantial factors. Firstly, Africa was closer, so it was cheaper to import
slaves from Senegal than from Vietnam.
Secondly, in Africa there already existed a well-developed slave trade (exporting
slaves mainly to the Middle East), whereas in Europe slavery was very rare. It was
obviously far easier to buy slaves in an existing market than to create a new one
from scratch.
Thirdly, and most importantly, American plantations in places such as Virginia,
Haiti and Brazil were plagued by malaria and yellow fever, which had originated
in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity
to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally defenceless and died in droves.
It was consequently wiser for a plantation owner to invest his money in an
African slave than in a European slave or indentured labourer. Paradoxically,
genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority:
precisely because Africans were tter in tropical climates than Europeans, they

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ended up as the slaves of European masters! Due to these circumstantial factors,
the burgeoning new societies of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of
white Europeans and a subjugated caste of black Africans.
But people don’t like to say that they keep slaves of a certain race or origin
simply because it’s economically expedient. Like the Aryan conquerors of India,
white Europeans in the Americas wanted to be seen not only as economically
successful but also as pious, just and objective. Religious and scienti c myths were
pressed into service to justify this division. Theologians argued that Africans
descend from Ham, son of Noah, saddled by his father with a curse that his
o spring would be slaves. Biologists argued that blacks are less intelligent than
whites and their moral sense less developed. Doctors alleged that blacks live in
filth and spread diseases – in other words, they are a source of pollution.
These myths struck a chord in American culture, and in Western culture
generally. They continued to exert their in uence long after the conditions that
created slavery had disappeared. In the early nineteenth century imperial Britain
outlawed slavery and stopped the Atlantic slave trade, and in the decades that
followed slavery was gradually outlawed throughout the American continent.
Notably, this was the rst and only time in history that slaveholding societies
voluntarily abolished slavery. But, even though the slaves were freed, the racist
myths that justi ed slavery persisted. Separation of the races was maintained by
racist legislation and social custom.
The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and e ect, a vicious circle.
Consider, for example, the southern United States immediately after the Civil War.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution outlawed slavery and
the Fourteenth Amendment mandated that citizenship and the equal protection of
the law could not be denied on the basis of race. However, two centuries of
slavery meant that most black families were far poorer and far less educated than
most white families. A black person born in Alabama in 1865 thus had much less
chance of getting a good education and a well-paid job than did his white
neighbours. His children, born in the 1880S and 1890s, started life with the same
disadvantage – they, too, were born to an uneducated, poor family.
But economic disadvantage was not the whole story. Alabama was also home to
many poor whites who lacked the opportunities available to their better-o racial
brothers and sisters. In addition, the Industrial Revolution and the waves of
immigration made the United States an extremely uid society, where rags could
quickly turn into riches. If money was all that mattered, the sharp divide between
the races should soon have blurred, not least through intermarriage.
But that did not happen. By 1865 whites, as well as many blacks, took it to be a
simple matter of fact that blacks were less intelligent, more violent and sexually
dissolute, lazier and less concerned about personal cleanliness than whites. They

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were thus the agents of violence, theft, rape and disease – in other words,
pollution. If a black Alabaman in 1895 miraculously managed to get a good
education and then applied for a respectable job such as a bank teller, his odds of
being accepted were far worse than those of an equally quali ed white candidate.
The stigma that labelled blacks as, by nature, unreliable, lazy and less intelligent
conspired against him.
You might think that people would gradually understand that these stigmas
were myth rather than fact and that blacks would be able, over time, to prove
themselves just as competent, law-abiding and clean as whites. In fact, the
opposite happened – these prejudices became more and more entrenched as time
went by. Since all the best jobs were held by whites, it became easier to believe
that blacks really are inferior. ‘Look,’ said the average white citizen, ‘blacks have
been free for generations, yet there are almost no black professors, lawyers,
doctors or even bank tellers. Isn’t that proof that blacks are simply less intelligent
and hard-working?’ Trapped in this vicious circle, blacks were not hired for white-
collar jobs because they were deemed unintelligent, and the proof of their
inferiority was the paucity of blacks in white-collar jobs.
The vicious circle did not stop there. As anti-black stigmas grew stronger, they
were translated into a system of ‘Jim Crow’ laws and norms that were meant to
safeguard the racial order. Blacks were forbidden to vote in elections, to study in
white schools, to buy in white stores, to eat in white restaurants, to sleep in white
hotels. The justi cation for all of this was that blacks were foul, slothful and
vicious, so whites had to be protected from them. Whites did not want to sleep in
the same hotel as blacks or to eat in the same restaurant, for fear of diseases. They
did not want their children learning in the same school as black children, for fear
of brutality and bad in uences. They did not want blacks voting in elections, since
blacks were ignorant and immoral. These fears were substantiated by scienti c
studies that ‘proved’ that blacks were indeed less educated, that various diseases
were more common among them, and that their crime rate was far higher (the
studies ignored the fact that these ‘facts’