America And Racial Intolerance
MIRZA IQBAL ASHRAF
ABSTRACT: Human beings impacted by geographical and environmental phenomena, different ways of life, beliefs, social systems, customs and traditions, gave birth to different cultures. This means culture is our racial heritage which is not a static phenomenon. It is an ongoing problem-solving process in response to environments and may have little or nothing to do with biological racial heritage per se. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of biological race, remains deeply ingrained—prominently in Western society—considering peoples of different colors, features, cultures, beliefs and ways of life as not from a common root, but are from divers racial roots. Throughout human history—more emphatically during the past 500 years—we have been taught by the intellectuals, politicians, statesmen, business and economic leaders that in modern times human racial biology reveals that certain races are biologically rather than morally and culturally better or inferior than others. These teachings have led to major injustices to Jews, Muslims, and non-Christians during the Spanish Inquisition; to blacks, Native Americans, and others during colonial times; to African Americans during slavery and reconstruction; to Jews and other Europeans during the reign of the Nazis in Germany; and to the groups from Latin America and the Middle East, and many others, during modern political times.
The Spanish Inquisition—which had its greater impact on the formation of the new found western world known America—has not been researched and discussed by the thinkers of social sciences. Spanish Inquisition did not focus on religion alone, but expanded to include ethnicity or race, introducing the notion of “impurity of blood.” It was about classes of people rather than just categories of belief. It was run by those in political power who ruled and defined religion, ideology, and race or ethnicity. Columbus’s voyage to America was at the peak of Inquisition in Spain. Thus, the conquistadores justified their maltreatment of Native Americans by declaring them as subhuman and incapable of having and understanding rational or abstract ideas and of running their own world. They were deemed morally incapable to become Christian. Thus, the inhuman conquest of America continued. Racial theories remained crucial in justifying the maltreatment of the local peoples. Terrorist atrocities were committed by the European settlers to wipe out the race of the aborigines of the newfound continent. . . . . To read full articl