A widespread racist belief in America and Europe, especially on college campuses, is that white Americans and Europeans are genetically and culturally predisposed to colonialism, oppression, racism, and other injustices. The converse belief is that non-whites and the Third World are innocent victims and not guilty of any of that.
You can test those beliefs by playing Racial Roulette. Here is how the game is played:
- Place a bet against the house by selecting a ball that corresponds to one of the official races of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, North African, Native American, or Pacific Islander.
Note: These racial categories are used in the game although they are contrived and the result of a reductio ad absurdum, in which hundreds of ethnocultural groups have had their unique identities obliterated for political and bureaucratic reasons.
- Spin a roulette-like wheel that is inscribed with all of the world’s countries.
- You win if the ball lands on a country where your selected race engaged in colonialism, subjugation, conquering, slavery, genocide, slaughtering, or any kind of egregious injustice.
- You lose if the ball lands on a country where your selected race did no such thing, or, alternatively, did so but was not the only race to do so in the country.
Examples:
The Congo
You choose the ball corresponding to Whites, spin the wheel, and the ball lands on the Congo, or what was formerly known as the Belgian Congo. You win the bet due to what occurred under King Leopold II when the Congo was a slave colony of Belgium. The ugly period saw some of the worst racism and atrocities, such as White colonists cutting off the hands of Blacks who didn’t work hard enough.
Ironically, as with much of Europe, Belgium is now a very civilized country and the epitome of humanism, human rights, enlightenment, and liberal democracy.
It’s a cycle that has been repeated throughout history, going back to antiquity. Different types of polities, whether kingdoms or empires or republics, seem to have had to go through a dark period before becoming humanistic. Some have remained stuck in the dark. Generally, the ones with Western values and political systems are more likely to have become exemplars of social justice and tolerance.
Ethiopia
You put money down on Whites, spin the wheel, and land on Ethiopia. You react with a fist-pump, because your understanding is that Whites colonized and brutalized all Africans, as was the case with the Belgian Congo. But then you find out that you’ve lost the wager.
The reason for losing is that Italy failed twice at trying to colonize Ethiopia, but native Ethiopians were quite adept at oppressing their own. In 1974, for example, Emperor Haile Selassie was toppled in a Marxist coup, and tens of thousands were killed in the subsequent revolution. Ten years later, there was the great Ethiopian famine, brought on by the Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who joined with the dominant ethnic group of Amharas to use starvation as a weapon against the opposition ethnic groups of Tigrayans and Eritreans.
You’ve heard of this, right? Colleges stress this injustice, right?
Well, no, even though the sordid saga continued well into the 21st century. Amazingly, Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for brokering a peace between Ethiopia and its former province of Eritrea. But that was a pretext for him to conduct a military assault in 2020 on the rebellious northern province of Tigray, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Tigray refugees escaping to neighboring Sudan.
Speaking of Sudan, the war there—or what many call a genocide—gets little mention in the Western media, especially in comparison to the constant coverage of the war in Gaza, in spite of the fact that over 150,000 Sudanese have died and 12 million have been displaced.
Also rarely mentioned is the intent of Arabs to ethnically cleanse Sudan of non-Arabs, and, specifically, of Blacks. A March 2024 report by Unicef, the UN children’s agency, claimed that armed men were raping and sexually assaulting children as young as one. Apparently, Black lives don’t matter in Sudan.
India
You put money down on Whites again, spin the wheel, and land on India. A sure winner, you think, given the British colonization of India known as the Raj. History shows, however, that the Brits were latecomers to the subcontinent.
Preceding them were Mongol invaders, the Mughal Empire, the Persian Empire, the Kushan Empire, the Turkic Tughluq dynasty, the Afghan Lodi dynasty, and other conquerors.
When India was partitioned after gaining independence from Britain, it retained the British legacy of democracy and liberalism, as well as the British railroad system and port infrastructure. By contrast, Pakistan became a seedbed of Islamic extremism under military rule. The same for Afghanistan. At the same time, India’s northwest border remains a dangerous flashpoint due to its belligerent neighbors. And within India’s borders, a high level of mistrust between Hindu and Muslim citizens results in political dysfunction and periodic bloodshed.
Latin America
A winning bet would be to put money down on Hispanics and see the ball land on just about any Latin American country. It’s almost a certainty that a history of injustice at the hands of Hispanics can be found, in spite of them being characterized in some quarters as victims of injustice and not victimizers in their own right.
Hispanics also go by the name of Latino, Latinx, or their nationality of Mexican, Columbian, etc. But except for the ones who are 100 percent Native American, or indigenous if you will, almost all of them have some Spanish or Portuguese ancestry. As such, their history includes slavery, given that the Spanish Empire began its slave trade before the English and Dutch did and enslaved more Africans than they did.
Prior to that, the Conquistadors weren’t exactly humanistic. Nor were the indigenous Mayans and Aztecs.
Mexico and other Latin American countries continue to this day in trying to overcome their legacies of a one-party state, an extraction economy instead of a production economy, and a two-class society of aristocrats and peasants, as well as the corresponding corruption and crime.
It’s a taboo subject, but also holding Mexico back is a culture rooted in an unfavorable climate instead of a temperate one, and in Catholic traditions instead of the Protestant Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment (I say this as a Catholic). After all, as a large landowner in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Church had fought land reforms and republicanism, siding with the aristocratic establishment against the peasants.
The Islamic World
Your chances of winning are slim if your ball lands on most parts of the Islamic world, and in particular, the Arab part of that world. That’s because more than one race, ethnic group or nation had a hand in the injustices that have occurred there and continue to occur there.
The Ottoman Empire ruled for six centuries, Europeans were in control for a much shorter period and carved up the region into artificial states, Americans played a geopolitical game there in pursuit of oil and in defense of Israel, and went on to make the strategic blunder of the Iraq War. But it’s not as if the natives were innocents.
Take slavery. It lasted in the Islamic world for a millennium longer than it did in the Americas. It began earlier and was abolished later, but ended only due to pressure from the West. It was legal in Saudi Arabia until 1962. In all, an estimated 17 million people were enslaved in the Islamic world.
De facto slavery still exists in some areas. For example, an estimated one million people are living in hereditary servitude in Mali, where they toil in fields for bare subsistence, and where women are routinely raped.
The extent of slavery in the Islamic world is detailed in a newly published book, Captives and Companions, by Justin Marozzi.
The possible scenarios in playing the game of racial roulette could go on for hundreds of pages. But it doesn’t take many spins of the roulette wheel to realize that all of the official races have been both the perpetrators of, and victims of, injustices—some more recently than others, some closer to home in America than others, and some in larger numbers than others.
They all have human nature in common; that is, they have the same seven deadly sins and capacity for good and evil. Homo sapiens have something else in common: They killed off Neanderthals in the first genocide.
Cultures are a different matter, of course. There are wide differences in culture, stemming from differences in geography, resources, climate, religion, governance, economics, technology, and proximity to trade routes.
Throughout history, the cultures with the means—with advantages in military might, leadership, geography, technology, resources, communications, governance, finances, or administrative abilities—subjugated the ones without the means, especially those living in Stone Age conditions or those beset by too much diversity in the form of tribal and ethnic hatreds. Genetics had nothing to do with it.
A few examples out of hundreds:
The Mongols under Genghis Kahn excelled at horsemanship and a warrior tradition; the Comanche were similar.
The Romans had chariots and many other advantages, especially the ideal location of Rome; the Vikings had longboats and seamanship; and the Normans had coinage, castles, the stability of a hereditary monarchy, and the capability of sailing an army across the English Channel.
Alexander the Great conquered Persia with military might and cunning; Abdulaziz Ibn Saud relied on charisma, a warrior tradition, and the Wahhabism version of Islam to vanquish and unite Arabian tribes in creating the vast desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which, today, gets its influence and wealth from oil.
China has a civilization that goes back thousands of years—one that has survived numerous dynasties and political upheavals, that had a tributary approach to foreign relations for most of its history, and that expects its numerous ethnic groups to conform to the values of the Han majority rather than valuing diversity and pluralism.
Judging by the negative beliefs of college students about Whites and the United States, colleges don’t seem to teach such rich history or the universality of good and evil. Worse, college graduates don’t seem to recognize how little they know.
If knowledge and wisdom come in a twelve-volume set, a college degree gets a person to only the second volume, if that.
Some college graduates feel superior to working-class “deplorables” who have only a high school education. However, the graduates are just one volume away from the deplorables but ten volumes away from the truly wise and educated.
As such, they might want to practice a little humility. Or at least play several rounds of Racial Roulette.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
Where is “Jesus” in this game? IXOYE in all of these lands