Us vs. Them

      A black cardboard cover adorned with plain, sliver type is tucked away snugly under a white dustjacket showing an upright-standing egg and the single word RACE. The pages glued in place between the book's synopsis and New Jerseyite Marc Aronson's abbreviated autobiography are double-spaced, with black print against a bleached white paper, adding an almost sterile backdrop to the identically bichromatic images that often decorate the pages. 

      Race, from a design standpoint, is pleasantly basic, fitting in well to the rather modern minimalist aesthetic. It is clean-cut, ship-shape, and poised, but it's content both complements and contrasts sharply with this purposeful design choice, as any text dedicated to the history of racism and prejudice is bound to be. 

      Marc Aronson's driving purpose with his 2007 book is to explore the history, or rather, evolution, of race as we know it today. He wishes to take something that is simultaneously explicit and subtle, something so loud yet so shushed, and try to define what it means in the simplest possible terms. In the introduction to the book, he creates a 4-pillar model that is meant to quantify how and why humans divide themselves into categories. The four pillars are as follows:

1.) Physical differences matter.
2.) These differences in our bodies cannot change.
3.) That is because they are inherited.
4.) Each group has a distinct level of brain power and moral refinement, thus they are naturally and unchangeably ranked.

(Pages 2-3).

      Aronson begins the introduction begins by pointing out that the way that we, specifically Americans, think about race in terms of the events relating to or as a result of the American slave trade is a very new idea. The argument of separating different perceived races into genetically "distinct" groups only came about in the last century, and it still is a highly opinionated process to try and separate specific human groups into different categories when the highest amount of genetic variance is within these manufactured groups to begin with. He continues this argument and follows the aforementioned four pillars by stating the thesis of the book:

"This whole book is devoted to tracing out how, in the Western world, these four ideas grew, developed, were linked together and came to be regarded as true." 

(Page 3).

      Race is already one of the hardest conversations to have, but it'd really be better if we brought highly dense Enlightenment-era epistemological philosophy into it, don't you think? As I read through the first few sections of the book, I couldn't help but notice the way in which Aronson developed his argument concerning the nature of race, as it strongly reminded me of German philosopher Georg Hegel's theory of self-consciousness (If that sentence turned you off from ever trying to read something ever again, don't worry, it took an equal amount of painful effort to write that). Essentially, rather than humble shame, Hegel uses self-consciousness to refer to how an individual is aware of themselves in respect to other individuals and groups of individuals. He, as well as Aronson, argues that humans are defined by exactly what they aren't, that the master could not exist without a slave to dominate. 

      Aronson frames this dichotomy as the classic "us vs. them" duality, but it's a classic idea for a reason. All throughout recorded history, we see various forms of this rivalry and how it morphs and changes from culture to culture, from era to era, from society to society. His first example is that of the Amazonian Munduruku tribe, who have one word for themselves, for themselves as humans, which is Munduruku. All others are called Pariwat, synonymous with "other" or the universally dangerous "them." He then compares this with more "sophisticated" societies that are, by our standards, more civilized, but still hold this basic idea of us vs. them, of master versus slave. 

     The Hebrew people were kept in slavery by the Egyptians and led by Moses to the promised land, where they developed Judaism, a new moral code that strengthened each individual's bond with God. Judaism arose out of slavery, was founded to spite prejudice, but it still was trapped in the same two-sided battle between the Jews and the Gentiles. The Greeks are credited with founding democracy as we know it, but it was still a society, or rather, a group of smaller societies that functioned together, surrounded by a social wall. The Greeks created the word barbarian from the Greek equivalent of the word for gibberish in order to separate the civilized, intellectual, and defensive us from the angry and offensive them. When Rome was developing as a society, the Romans purposefully adopted the cultural norms of the intellectual Greeks to enforce their rigid status system that left one in three Romans in slavery. 

      However, Aronson doesn't structure his argument as a direct progression from Munduruku vs Pariwat to White Americans vs Black Americans - he highlights the differences in how these cultures treated race to illustrate that the modern idea of racism is not a constant, fixed idea. Aristotle considered the people who lived in the region we would now call Europe to be inferior, because of the way he believed that physical climate influenced civility. The Romans, though they strictly enforced a rigid status system, would allow slaves to attend events at the Colosseum and created art that appreciated the natural beauty of them, rather than criticize them for their them-y appearance. 

     To me, so far this is a book about the way that no matter how much we think we are different from other societies, whether they exist today or existed 3,000 years ago, we are all bound to the innate, yet necessary, relationship between our group and others - whether those groups be leagues of countries at war with each other or a middle school football tournament. As Aronson points out, when our ancestors lived in the wilderness hundreds of thousands of years ago, those that survived were the ones who had the sense to be afraid. Any sound, sight, or smell would be a matter of life and death, and those individuals that made the snap judgment to err on the side of defensive would not only be the ones to pass on the genes that programmed us to fear the ever-present unknown, but the ones to pass on the culture of us vs. them.