Victorian Racism and Today

     Victorian England was a land that attempted to spread its reach in the world, to influence other nations, to force their culture and beliefs on those they deemed less primitive. They were not the only ones to do this, but for the sake of this post, we'll look only at the writings from Englishmen on the topic of race.
     Most of us have seen it. The poster of an African American man on his knees in chains looking to the sky. The writing on it says "Am I not a man and your brother?" It was a call to end slavery. A cry out from those who saw slaves for who they really were: people. It begged for those who supported the cruel institution of slavery to look into their hearts and use the sympathy that man had been so graciously endowed with by God (as many believed). Its message was simple and its intention was to tug on the heart strings of those in support of slavery. It likely did that, yes; but, what it also did was attract negative attention from those so deeply set in their ways, those so cruel as to ignore their own humanity and the suffering of innocents. Those like William Makepeace Thackeray who wrote negatively about the image in his letters to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth in 1853. In his letter to her dated 13 February 1853, he wrote, "They are not my men and brethren, these strange people with retreating foreheads, with great obtruding lips and jaws: with capacities for thought, pleasure, endurance quite different to mine" (1023). Thackeray did not believe African Americans to be human. He likely believed they were more closely related to an ape than to a human and believed them to lack the ability and "capacities" for intelligence that white humans possessed. "But they don't seem to me to be the same as white men, any more than asses are the same animals as horses; I don't mean this disrespectfully, but simply that there is such a difference of colour, habits, conformation of brains, that we must acknowledge it" (1023). He looked down upon them because their culture and skin color were different. (His second name is a bit ironic, don't you think?)
     Now, Victorians did not have the scientific proof of the humanness of African Americans as we do today--though that certainly doesn't excuse their abusive behaviors. (They were not aware that race does not technically biologically exist; there is not enough genetic difference between a black man and a white man--or any other "race"--for the races to be looked at as though they are different species altogether.) Most people today look at racism as though it doesn't exist (likely because of the knowledge we hold today regarding the science of "race") or one will hear someone cry out in false despair that it has been reversed as of late and is instead now affecting them ("reverse racism"). They do not realize that while, yes, racism may be much much better than it used to be, it is still prevalent in today's society against the same peoples that it affected before. Even the melting pot that is The United States of America has not broken free from it's clutches. We read the writings of those from the Victorian Era with disgust. How could they write such things? How could they be so hateful and bigoted? We forget that it still happens today and that they didn't know. Knowing that information though, perhaps we should just look at their writings as an example of how not to be going forward.