by Primo Levi
Tuttolibri 5, no. 48–49 (December 22, 1979)
Racial Intolerance
I will start with a declaration of humility.
Ours is a strange time, with an abundance of people who will explain everything to you; it’s the age of explainers, of people who will clarify everything, get to the bottom of everything, its causes and its consequences. And no doubt this is a praiseworthy endeavor. But to believe that one has truly explained everything, in the original sense of the word—that is, made clear the necessary trigger of historical events, the causes that necessarily lead to a result, the nexus between cause and effect that is the foundation of science—is a bit rash.
It should be said that this system of explaining things doesn’t work very well for the phenomena—racial prejudice and intolerance—addressed by this course. To believe that everything can be explained deterministically is naïve, and to make others believe it, to induce the public and the listeners to believe that there really is a satisfactory and complete explanation, is unquestionably misleading.
For this reason what I say this evening will be merely an attempt to explain—no more than a proposal, a series of proposals.
The fact that the phenomena associated with prejudice and intolerance elicit not one but many explanations doesn’t necessarily mean that there are many explanations. Rather, it means that the explanation, the complete and credible motivation, has not been found, or doesn’t exist, or is lurking deep inside our brains, or maybe even beyond our brains, in some deeper place.
Intolerance and, in particular, racial intolerance, which is my topic tonight, are multifaceted phenomena, like everything that concerns man, his mind, his history.
These subjects are never exhausted, and it will always be possible to discuss them.
Racial intolerance, as the term itself implies, is intolerance between human races. Now, there is no question that human races exist. There is no doubt that a black man’s skin is black, or darker than that of a white man, there is no doubt that the eyes of the Japanese, of the orientals, have a different shape from ours, there is no doubt that there are taller and shorter human races. . . .
But when we try to define the human races, their distinctive traits, the demarcation lines between them, and, above all, to which race, or races, a nation or a single individual belongs, we are immediately in trouble.
The history of mankind is extraordinarily complicated—I refer to written history, the history that is documented, if not by actual writings, at least by ruins, by remains—and it dates back about six thousand years.
There is no doubt, though, that, long before traces, evidence, began to be left behind, there existed not just a single human species but innumerable human races, different from one another and almost certainly in competition with one another.
Man has existed for at least a million years, and every year this date is pushed back by a dizzying magnitude; now it’s three million years, but every year there are new archeological finds and our ancestors move further away. In other words, this origin, this Adam and this Eve, nest in an ever more distant past, and there is no reason to doubt that, just as there were different races, so there was also friction among races.
It’s sad to observe that most of the skulls that archeologists find in their digs, and are finding currently in East Africa, are smashed in—and someone smashed them.
The story of Neanderthal man is largely known. He was a human being: not Homo sapiens, but very similar to Homo sapiens, and certainly he possessed our same technical skills, those of our distant ancestors. Neanderthal man lived until ten or twenty thousand years ago and then was exterminated, probably by us, Homines sapientes. This shows that aversion, the obscure instinct that pushes men to identify each other as different, has very old roots.
Moreover, if we consider more recent times, times that have left a record, we notice that in Egyptian drawings and paintings the people performing the humblest tasks are dark—essentially Ethiopians, Nubians, Sudanese.
In the Song of Songs it is written “Nigra sum sed formosa,” “I am black but beautiful,” not “I am black and beautiful,” and this is an important clue. Even more important is the story we read in the first chapters of Genesis, about Noah, the invention of wine, Noah’s drunkenness, and his wicked son, Ham. This wicked son who exposes the nakedness of his drunken father has a name, Ham, that in Hebrew means “the burned one,” or the tanned one, the one with the dark skin. This is not openly stated, but in the subsequent genealogy the peoples who are said to descend from Ham are the peoples of black Africa. And, remarkably, already at that time a rationalization was resorted to, as this aversion toward the dark-skinned man sought and found a justification in the fact that he had broken a taboo, had violated a sexual taboo. Note that this sounds like one of the accusations that to this day are frequently made against the black man.
The black man is a violator, especially of sexual taboos; he is a transgressor. “I don’t hate him because he is black, but because . . .” etc. Thus the Bible story, as far as Ham is concerned.
This deep loathing does not appear to be universal, to infect all civilizations. It should be said that during the Roman Empire it was almost nonexistent; Latin historians talk about enemy peoples, white or black, as having roughly the same features, without making many differentiations. The Nubians are not described as being inferior to, say, the Parthians or the Britons.
On the other hand, other civilizations, other empires have been deeply tainted by this strong drive against those who are different. We need only recall that the myth about Ham recurs in the word “Hamitic”; “Hamitic languages” is still said to this day. It’s hardly a scientific term, but it has persisted. It was used, abused yet again, rationalized during the centuries of the black slave trade, which was not marginal but substantial, relying on the British, Portuguese, Spanish, Arab, and Dutch mercantile fleets: one might say that all of Europe was involved.
The number mentioned, though it’s hard to confirm, is about fifty million slaves deported across the Atlantic after the discovery of America. In discussing this matter I don’t mean to malign only white-skinned men, since blacks were also engaged in the slave trade. Leaving from central Africa, the slaves passed from hand to hand; their black chieftains sold them to other chieftains who in turn sold them to Arab or European merchants on the coast, and they finally landed, greatly reduced in number, on America’s shores. And if today North America has a racial problem, a black problem, this is notoriously due to the fact that the slave trade lasted for centuries and that it was so sizable that it essentially depopulated Africa.
In this case, in the case of racial tension, of the white man’s abuse of the black man, it’s often difficult to disentangle racial intolerance from many other intersecting and complicating factors. There are economic factors, factors of language, religion, social development, and so on. So I will again appeal to that declaration of humility I made at the outset: it’s often not easy to disentangle the causes, and it’s almost impossible to find a single cause, the reason for racial intolerance.
The case of South America is both similar and different.
While Europe, that is, the European and Mediterranean peoples, had known of the existence of black Africa from time immemorial (there have always been contacts, since the remotest ages), after Christopher Columbus we had a surprise. We were faced with a new continent, which was not India, and with unknown individuals, peoples, countries, communities. Here again the problem of the encounter between European civilization and this new Central and South American civilization immediately became complicated, for economic reasons, but also for religious reasons. Did the Indios, those Indians who weren’t Indians from India, have a soul or not? If they had a soul, they should be converted to Christianity; if they had no soul they could be exterminated or used as domestic animals.
This matter was debated at length, and both solutions were pursued: the Indians were exterminated widely and thoroughly, in an effor
t that continues to this day, and at the same time there was an attempt to educate them, that is, to win them over to European civilization.
The case of the Australian aborigines is, again, different, because they were, or rather are, as they still exist, tremendously different. They are so different that the question has been raised whether they belong to the same species we do. And this brings to mind the consideration that even when there is the best intention to integrate, to assimilate, objective difficulties arise. Often the population that is not tolerated does not, in turn, tolerate the people and culture that have arrived. This is an explosive situation; from one case of intolerance another is born, the front becomes two-sided, there is a will to nonacceptance, to rejection, rejection is confronted by rejection.
This is a chain reaction, self-catalytic, leading to situations that can no longer be remedied. I mentioned earlier the difficulty of finding, of identifying causes. Last Monday Norberto Bobbio1 concluded his lecture by saying that prejudice originates in man’s brain, and therefore man’s brain can also extinguish it. I don’t entirely agree with this—that is, that cultural prejudices, religious prejudice, religious intolerance, and linguistic intolerance are clearly “human” phenomena. I say human in quotes, meaning characteristic of man, in that they belong, for good or for ill, to our civilization.
Rather, I believe that racial prejudice is something that is barely human; I believe that it’s pre-human, that it precedes man, that it belongs to the animal world rather than the human world. I believe it is a feral prejudice, typical of wild animals, and this for two reasons: first, because we find it among social animals, which I’ll talk about later, and, second, because there is no remedy for it. You can protect yourself from religious prejudice by changing your religion; there is a remedy for linguistic prejudice, for linguistic difference—it may be painful, but by adopting the language of the other you lose your stigma. However, there is no defense against racial prejudice. The black man remains black, his children remain what they are, and there is no defense. Thus, there is no salvation; when intolerance turns into hostility and then slaughter—and, as we will see, this did happen—there is no refuge.
I was saying that in my opinion—I propose this solution to the problem—racial prejudice originates in the animal world; and in effect we find it among most social, gregarious animals, those animals that, like man, can’t survive alone and must live in groups. Among these animals we can observe many phenomena that are typically human. There is almost always a division into castes, especially in the Hymenoptera, the ants and the bees, in which the caste system is innate, and individuals are born already stratified into different groups.
We recognize the need for a hierarchy. This is a strange and poorly explained phenomenon, but it is well-known and occurs even among domestic animals. In a herd of cows, there is always a number one cow. Cow-fighting competitions are held in all the valleys of Valle d’Aosta, and the cows accept them willingly. Even among these animals, so deeply modified and distorted by domestication, and subjugated by man for thousands of years, this basic need for a hierarchy is retained.
In chicken coops there is a pecking order among the hens; after a certain number of preliminary pecks, a precise order is established according to which there is a hen that pecks all the others, a second hen that pecks all except one, and so on down to the last hen in the coop, which is pecked by all and pecks no other.
And this phenomenon is chilling, because it’s very similar to the one we are talking about.
Next to these phenomena, let’s call them animal intolerance, there are others that can only be called the equivalent of racial intolerance.
Konrad Lorenz, the founder of ethology, who won the Nobel Prize, wrote marvelous popular books, and in particular one called, in Italian, Il cosiddetto male (On Aggression), where he talks about aggression. There is, in this book, a chapter about rats that, in my opinion, serves perfectly as a starting point from which to explain and justify my earlier assertion that racial intolerance has very old origins, not just prehistoric but pre-human, innate in certain primeval instincts of mammals, and not only mammals.
By this I don’t mean to say, indeed I would never say, that racism is an incurable evil; if we are humans it’s because we have learned to protect ourselves, to deny, to thwart certain instincts that are our animal inheritance.
Lorenz writes that rats divide spontaneously into tribes, that the rats of a certain cellar, of a certain larder, constitute a tribe that is different from and hostile to the rats that inhabit a nearby cellar. If you take a rat from Cellar No. 1 and move it abruptly to Cellar No. 2, it will be torn to pieces. If, on the other hand, the rat is moved to Cellar No. 2 inside a protective cage, after three or four days the other rats learn to recognize it visually, and it is accepted. It’s impossible not to think of the human analogies, of the immigrant who, until he has acquired not, let’s say, just the smell but also the accent of his new country, is identified as different. Usually, and luckily, he is not torn to pieces—though sometimes this has happened—but at the least he is identified as different and is marginalized, boycotted.
I described a pre-human, prehistoric racial intolerance, and the historical but remote intolerance of the slave trade; I will now speak about modern-day racism.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the great centuries of Europe, the centuries when the great philosophical systems were built, when the awareness of intolerance and the advocacy of tolerance originated.
In spite of all this, there has been, precisely within Enlightenment and, later, positivist thought, a continuous effort to justify, to find a rational motive for racism, this instinct that is anything but rational. It’s fascinating today to read books by scientists of absolute good faith, respectable and, to this day, respected people.
I recently reread a book by Camille Flammarion, a famous astronomer and a celebrated popularizer, a writer with a strong humanitarian spirit. In describing the world before man’s creation, he writes about the brain, about how it developed, starting with the animals, with the invertebrates even. He finds a continuous chain of cerebral capacities; he finds that there are the mammals, then the monkeys properly so called, then the anthropomorphic monkeys, then blacks, then whites, or, rather, the French. This is quite remarkable; Flammarion was French and finds that the best brain is the French one and that all other brains are a little less valuable, a little less complete, a little lighter than the French brain. On the other hand, when the anthropologist was British, the best brain was undoubtedly British. And time was taken to measure not just the weight of the brain but also its volume, the number of convolutions, the surface of the cerebral cortex, the diameter of the pelvis, and, especially, the facial angle.
The facial angle had become extremely important. Scientists observed that the facial angle of the Negro was just midway between the facial angle of the gorilla and that of the Frenchman, the Briton, or the German, obviously. This was fundamental—they had found what was missing, the missing link in evolution that explained the passage from animal to man. That link was the Negro, or the Australian aborigine, or anyone, but not the European; the European was different. In practice, we can observe that the superior race is always the theorist’s, and that no anthropologist ever realized, with terror and shame, that his race was not the superior race but an inferior one.
Even Hegel, the famous founder of idealism, when talking about Negroes says things that today make our hair stand on end. He says that Negroes are outside the civilized world, they are part of nature, they have an uncontaminated, uncorrupted nature, they are, forgive the pun, nature in a natural state, part of the ground, even part of the vegetation. And therefore they are what they are, they will never be acceptable, they are a different race.
At this point it should be said that no serious anthropological study, in spite of all the anthropologists’ efforts, has ever been able to reveal a difference in worth among human races once the nonracial factors—th
at is, the cultural factors—are eliminated. It’s clear, there are white people, black people, yellow people, and so on; there are differences in appearance, in height, but when we come to talk about “worth,” or the good and the bad, these differences slip away. A colossal number of lies, of scientific lies, maybe even in good faith, have to be accumulated, to demonstrate that one race is worth more than any other race.
For instance, there was a lot of debate about psychological tests after it was maintained in North America that blacks who took tests devised by whites showed a lower IQ.
But when the opposite was done and whites took tests prepared by black scientists, the result was the same, that is, the whites showed a lower IQ.
In spite of everything, it’s clear that this measurement of IQ is extremely presumptuous and not as impartial as it’s purported to be; it’s just another tool for rationalization. Similarly, when it comes to learning languages, for instance, it was claimed, and many still believe, that there is a Negro accent, and that American Negroes, or Negroes who immigrated to Italy, France, or elsewhere, all speak with a different accent. Until a few decades ago, it was said that there was no remedy for this, it was anatomical: the glottis and the larynx of Negroes weren’t the same as those of whites. Therefore a black person could never learn to speak with the correct accent a language that was not his.
This is totally false; leaving aside prejudices, because these are prejudices, we find that a black who studies at Oxford, and who has lived in England since childhood, speaks with the best Oxford accent imaginable; blacks who study in Italy, if they were separated from their environment at the age when languages are learned, speak perfect Italian, without the trace of an accent.
Or think of supremacy in sports. Some may remember the scandal at the Berlin Olympics of 1936, in Hitler’s racist Germany, when a Negro, an American Negro, Jesse Owens, won the 100-meter race. And how could the National Socialist racists explain it? They had to hush the thing up: it was proof that at least in this test, the test of the 100-meter race, there was a black man who was worth more than a white.