Ethnocentrism Even in the Most Democratic of Essay

Ethnocentrism

Even in the most democratic of the Western capitalist nations, equal rights were not extended to all individuals until fairly recent times. Racism and ethnocentrism were built into the world political and economic system, and authoritarian forms of government remained the norm well into the 20th Century. Defining ethnocentrism is not necessarily as simple a matter as it might appear to be at first sight, however. This tendency to ascribe negative characteristics to those of other colors, cultures, languages and religions has hardly been unusual in history, and is by no means confined to the Western capitalist powers. Even after the end of feudalism in the West in the early modern period, ethnocentrism and racism continued in new forms, even if the labor system was no longer as violent and coercive as slavery or serfdom. Slave labor was generally relegated to the colonies and the periphery, including Russia and the Southern United States. Apart from throwbacks like fascism and Nazism in the 20th Century, however, outright slavery has long since been in decline in the core capitalist nations.

Although formal colonialism had ended by the 1960s and 1970s, the present global economy has its roots in the conquest of the Americas that began with Christopher Columbus in 1492. For centuries, the main role of the colonial and semi-colonial economies in the world was to supply raw materials and agricultural commodities to the few Western nations that controlled almost the entire planet. Some of these products like cotton and tobacco were produced by slave labor, which in the Americas was based on a racial caste system that still exists today. Originally, the United States was part of this colonial system, and in fact was the first European overseas colony to gain its independence, although the Southern part of the country continued to be dependent on export commodities produced by slave labor. As W.E.B. DuBois pointed out in the early-20th Century, the majority of workers and peasants in the world were always yellow, black and brown, while women in the colonial area were often oppressed by gender and race as well as social class. In this analysis, these mutually reinforcing systems of oppression like racism, patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism are inseparable and all part of the same phenomenon. For DuBois, real democracy would only be possible through revolutionary transformation although he did not and could not put a timeline on when such change would finally take place (Eisenstein, 2004, p. 123). Martin Luther King also envisioned a "more inclusive" form of democracy than the one that privileged white males of the middle and upper classes, although like Gandhi he hoped the revolution would be a nonviolent one (Eisenstein, p. 179).

Racism as an ideology is a modern invention, originating with proslavery writers in the United States before the Civil War, and later with Social…