Addicted to racism

Colonialism

To understand the nature of racism we need to take a short journey.

By the end of the Ice Age, 12,000 years ago, humans had migrated further than any other animal ever known. Many historians have hypothesised about the land bridge from South East Asia to Australia, from Korea to Japan and Alaska. The evolutionary process of man and his mastery of various forms of transportation and weaponry allowed for a greater penetration of these new frontiers.

Greed and desire spurred leaders and merchants to travel far from their homelands in search of untouched bounty. Merchants used the power of the empire to take from, or trade with, all parts of the world, spreading Christianity and Islam along the way.

During the 1440s Portuguese sailors began to bring African slaves back to Europe. Many millions of these enslaved warriors and their family members were shipped to Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean and North America. These stolen people were viewed as cheap labour to meet the requirements of rapidly expanding economies. Most were gathered from the 20 principal slave markets dotted along the western coastline from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south. Today it is estimated that around 40 million people in North and South America and the Caribbean are descended from those slaves.

Centuries later over a quarter of a million Melanesians and Micronesians were "black birded" to Australia and became known as “Kanakas” working in the oppressively hot and inhospitable sugar industry.

Before the First World War migrants seldom had to jump hurdles to get over national borders - people were free to travel throughout Europe and sometimes overseas without a passport. But as xenophobia and then war broke out, control of migrants was seen as essential to preserve the “true character” - or rather the Anglo Saxon Nordic features - of Western nations.

It is argued that many countries became opposed to an increase in the number and diversity of immigrants: some on openly racist grounds, such as Hitler’s Germany. In Britain, where 120,000 Jews settled between 1875 and 1914, Jewish migrants became the focus of racism marches which led to the restrictive Aliens Act of 1914.

Countries considered immigrant-friendly also succumbed to this pressure - the US banned Chinese and Japanese workers, and the racist Ku Klux Klan became popular promising to stamp out Catholics, Jews, Blacks and immigrants.

Migration slowed substantially during the years between the World Wars. After the war, rich countries fearing a stampede remained closed to migrants, despite human rights becoming an international issue.

At around this time Prime Minister John Curtin reinforced the White Australia policy stating:

… This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.

However after the mid-1950s governments realised that to spur economic growth they would need cheap workers. Many countries sought permanent immigrants to kick-start the economy. Australia in particular actively recruited European settlers and received over 2 million immigrants between 1945 and 1964. As governments became obsessed with economics, migrants became increasingly valued in terms of their monetary worth. Competition for jobs in the most developed countries increased after the 1970s and consequently immigration then declined.