For millennia, when the only source of work was human labor, populations waged wars against each-other and the winners constrained the losers to working for them. Egyptians had slaves; Romans had slaves; Greeks had slaves; Jews had slaves; Arabs had slaves; Aztecs had slaves; the Kingdom of Kongo had slaves…. In Europe, where religious hypocrisy forbade slavery, agricultural workers were called the “serfs of the soil,” and the soil belonged to the aristocracy.
The industrial revolution made slavery redundant: Machines could perform the work of humans. The important issue at this time was to have cheap labor to accompany the work of the machines: extract coal and iron, build factories and roads, and so forth. The British aristocracy violated ancient agreements with farmers and compelled them to join factories where they were maintained in a precarious state: with low wages, without education, without medical care, etc.
Although slavery had been formally abolished, the conditions of the former slaves did not improve much, and the ideology that they were inferior remained enrooted in popular wisdom. Then, as now, crimes were committed by people in poverty. Alcoholism, prostitution, and drug abuse are still more frequent in poor communities, and this contributes to perpetuating the false concept of racial inferiority in today’s popular discourse.
If Critical Race Theory were to be taught in school, children would, at the least, learn what is written above. They might even learn that, for once, science and Christianity agree on something: Science maintains that all humans are equal since they can interbreed, and Christianity maintains that humans are all equal because they are all the children of God.
Paolo Giacomoni