It is important to ask if the concept of racism is ingrained in the human social dynamic, particularly in light of the tone of race relations discussions in recent months. In order to examine some of the roots of racism, it is important to look back in time and analyze the period or periods in history where racism really took root.

One of the cradles of civilization, Egypt was an empire in constant contact with people from Asia Minor as well as sub-Saharan Africa; as a result carvings on the pedestals of Ramses II at Abu Simbel depict Egyptian dominance over Assyrian “Asiatics” as well as Nubian “Africans.”

In reality, however, both of these groups were at times equal to or dominated Egypt. Rulers of Nubian descent were common in the New Kingdom period while Old Kingdom period rulers sometimes took wives from so-called Asian kingdoms. Though the carvings depict both Asians and Africans as slaves or defeated foes, the reality was far more complex and social mobility was not limited to the color of one’s skin. Often fortunes changed with political and economic changes; at one point, Nubian gold reserves were somewhat depleted, making the value of Nubian imports (and thus Nubian officials) less important. As a result, many Nubian merchants found few markets, but Nubian “Egyptians” still found their ways onto carvings and paintings well into the late New Kingdom period.

Imperial Rome approached race relations in a similar way; the actual number of Roman citizens born on the Italian peninsula was relatively small compared to the total amount of Roman citizens. In fact, by the end of the Roman imperial period, many Roman citizens had never actually been to Rome itself.

St. Augustine, the famous clergyman and moral commentator, was born in what is today Algeria. Descended from Berbers, a nomadic group from North Africa, young Augustine enjoyed the wonders of being a Roman citizen; participation in politics, a high degree of education, a privileged upbringing and a wealthy household. As a young man, he was a devout follower of the Roman gods before converting to Manichaeism and only later converted to Christianity — a religion that was quickly becoming popular in the Roman world. While studying at Carthage, he distinguished himself not by the color of his skin or the place of his birth, but by his logical acumen and theoretical mind. He would later go on to write one of the most foundational treatises on the Catholic religion; The City of God. His works influenced later theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin.

During the Middle Ages, despite the homogeneous depictions of 1940s Hollywood (thanks Errol Flynn), Medieval England was regularly visited by North African traders, emissaries, and refugees. Widely known as “Moors” these travelers of North African, Iberian and Arab heritage began integrating into English society throughout the Middle Ages, including during the Crusades. In fact, many people who bear the English name “Moore” as well as the Irish name “Muir” (also pronounced “moor”) may be able to trace their genetic legacy to the Moors of this time period.

It is no accident that the tragic hero of Shakespeare’s Othello is, himself, a Moor — though the play takes place in Italy, the residents of Elizabethan London were at least familiar with people with darker skin. Interestingly, 26 sonnets are addressed to a “dark lady” he was believed to have an affair with. Speculation about the “dark lady” has led many scholars to surmise that he was speaking to either Emelia Lanier or Mary Fitton, both of whom were elite women of their time and are believed to have been of African lineage.

It is important to note at this juncture that Ancient Egypt and Classical Rome both were slave-holding cultures but slavery was not tied to skin color or “race” per se, but rather to a set of circumstances. For example, it was entirely possible for a black North African Roman citizen to own a slave from Gaul and live in modern-day Turkey. And England of Elizabeth’s time had recently emerged from a spate of wars and plagues, leaving a dearth of labor for the jobs at hand but does not seem to have practiced slavery. Most likely this is due to England’s relative poverty, but even in Elizabethan-era France (which was immensely wealthy by comparison) there is little to no evidence of slavery existing at all.

Therefore, it must be concluded that in light of the experiences of these earlier societies, it was not the presence of slaves — or of their emancipation — which engendered racially-based hatred and discrimination in human beings in general. Indeed, it is entirely possible that these societies were more “color blind” than contemporary American society.

After Columbus’ discovery of the New World, Spain (and to a lesser degree, Portugal) experienced an increase in territory and access to natural resources. Originally, the native groups of South, Central and North America were compelled to work on plantations and in mines as a part of a de facto slavery scheme. When the native groups proved to be relatively weak (having been ravaged by small pox and other plagues brought by Europeans), Europeans turned to slaves taken from Africa.

To be fair, Africans had been enslaving each other — and selling excess slaves to outsiders — for hundreds of years. Until the discovery of the New World and the establishment of large, concentrated plantations and mining colonies, slaves were used mostly for domestic help and were usually sold to Arab merchants. Very few Africans were initially sold to Europeans in the early 16th century, and those that were were essentially indentured servants.

Indentured servitide was a popular 16th and 17th century method of transporting excess people from the homeland (also called the “metropole”) to the colonies (the “periphery”); England, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal all had a mechanism by which criminals, debtors, and others were sold into service for a certain period of time, usually between 7 and 20 years. Early slaves taken by Europeans were usually set free after their contracts had expired; typically closer to the 20 year end of the spectrum.

During that time, it was common practice to teach the slave skills such as smithing, cobbling, coopering and cartwrighting. This is because the relative scarcity of labor made it imperative to educate all laborers in a variety of tasks. For example, in New England, harsh winters, sometimes hostile neighbors, and primitive living conditions rarely allowed for institutional racism though personal prejudices still existed, even on a community level.

One example of a community level evidence of racism, or at least discrimination, was the lead-up and aftermath of “King Philip’s War.” Metacom, known as “King Philip” to the residents of Plymouth and Salem, Massachusetts, was reported to be hostile to Puritan missionaries and, thus, plotting to attack the colonies using a confederacy of Native American tribes. This news was given credence largely because of Metacom’s mistrust of English settlers’ intentions as well as their odd new religion. What is interesting is not that the war was largely caused by a tail that wagged the dog, but because the war was started by a man known as John Sassamon, a converted Native American (commonly referred to as a “praying Indian”) who exploited Purtian and English mistrust of “heathens.”

Using King Philip’s War as a larger example, though the war’s preconditions were based on a mutual mistrust between white and non-white settlers, the war itself was only sparked by the rumors started by another non-white, thus ruling out racism (or at least ameliorating it since whites trusted a non-white to tell them what they already suspected). Still, there is ample evidence to suggest that, despite off-and-on mutual mistrust, white and non-whites existed largely in peace and security.

As the 17th century progressed, however, the institution of slavery became increasingly profitable and by the 18th century was a booming business which saw the height of European market-driven cruelty. Partly due to diminishing levels of native population and partly due to the hunger for new (or more available) products such as tobacco, cotton, sugar, and furs, the need for slaves grew into an insatiable hunger. It is during the late 17th and early 18th century that the malevolent practice of stacking human slaves as cargo in the holds of ships was adopted.

Strangely enough, the European appetite for slaves remained undiminished throughout the 17th and 18th century despite increases in the availability of poor, European workers coming to or born in the colonies. In fact, as slaves became more available, they often displaced paid European workers in the fields and mines of South, Central and especially North America. Different European colonies and cultures dealt with this influx differently. In what would later be known as “Latin America,” 66 different categories of “race” arose from the intermixing and intermarrying of Africans, Europeans and Native Americans (also called Amerinds).

In Spanish-based societies, the scale was sliding; in other words, it was possible for the descendant of a Spaniard and his African or Native wife to eventually become “Spanish” again, thus making racial categories rather flexible and fluid.

At the same time, 18th century English-based societies made race more solid and less negotiable, engendering it with tones of racial superiority and hierarchy that would later characterize “social Darwinism.” Popular discontent among poor, rural whites over the loss of paying jobs to enslaved Africans was exploited by landowners who employed these whites in various slave-control positions including overseers and slave catchers.

Ironically, by the end of the 18th and early 19th century, Southern slave owners began employing black freedmen and trusted slaves as overseers because they were more restrained in punishing slaves as well as more efficient and reliable as overseers — thus blacks were again displacing poor whites in paying positions. Typically, the only positions left to whites were sharecropping on marginal land and slave catching.

As resistance to slavery in the North — particularly by religious groups such as the Quakers and the Amish — increased and the method of smuggling escaped slaves North became more prevalent and efficient, laws were enacted and instructions given to white slave catchers to return any and all blacks they could find to slavery on the plantations. Many cities and states resisted such laws with their own legislation or through other legal mechanisms.

For example, Vermont’s response to the various slave-returning acts pushed through Congress by an increasingly belligerent Southern Democratic bloc was to require slave catchers to hold their prisoners in county or municipal jails while the slave catcher’s papers were examined in court. Vermont jails became notoriously easy to break out of and as a result, many slave catchers operated illegally within the borders of Vermont — occasionally conspiring with sympathetic whites or other contacts.

During this time, racial categories became locked through implementation of the so-called “one drop” rule. According tot his theory, if “one drop” of African blood existed in the lineage of a person, they were not white and thus not subject to the privileges and rights appertaining to white Americans. This “one drop” mentality extended well into the 19th century with chilling effect.

The close of the 18th century was a time of rebellion in the American colonies as well as in the Caribbean. In North America, black volunteers participated in the defense of the colonies, largely inspired by the language of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, there was initially language included in the Constitution which would have emancipated Africans, but threat of secession by representatives of Virginia, the Carolinas and other southern colonies eventually caused such language to be struck from the Constitution, even after black colonists had participated in the Revolutionary War on behalf of the New Republic.

During the Civil War, Northern Democrats (and some Republicans) opposed the inclusion of black soldiers in the fighting, arguing that they would be unreliable troops who would be difficult to discipline.

Nevertheless, in 1862 Lincoln allowed the formation of the segregated United States Colored Troops — a year later the South began to follow suit, officially allowing black Southerners to join in an official capacity (though black soldiers did unofficially participate on the CSA’s side from the very beginning of the war).

Prior to the war, however, an increasing number of black escaped slaves and free men congregated in the largely urban and industrialized areas of New England and Michigan causing many “white” immigrants and laborers to begin resenting their presence and adopting much of the Southern-born language and stereotypes; these Northerners who sympathized with the South became known as “copperheads.” This mentality persisted after the Civil War and was exacerbated by the Reconstruction’s efforts at racial equality.

During the Reconstruction, resentful white Southerners began forming leagues such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League and embarked on a spree of politically-motivated assassinations aimed at black politicians and their white supporters. but such racism was not confined to just the South; as the North continued to industrialize, Republican-friendly industrialists began forming monopolies and “company towns” in which they exercised complete authority (with the exception of the post offices which were technically federal land). Big steel, coal mines, and other industries thrived on dividing its workers along racial lines, playing one off the other to keep the wages low, productivity high, and workers divided.

In this manner, the “progressive” Republicans aided in the institutionalization of racial discrimination on the social level, though not on the legal level. In fact, the popularity of “blackface minstrelsy” in the North during the latter half of the 19th century caused a boom in the touring circuit later known as Vaudeville as well as in home-play kits (song books, blackface make-up, and games which were used to entertain at parties and gatherings). Black Americans were made into an object of ridicule on a national level never before seen.

Southern Democrats, later known as “Dixiecrats” for their racist views and conservative voting records, enacted a series of laws aimed at bypassing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments through the institution of poll taxes and Jim Crow segregation laws. In this manner, racial distinctions were not just codified, but legalized. The famous Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 technically flew in the face of the 14th Amendment which gave full, equal citizenship to black Americans and was used as a bludgeon to prevent the full, equal integration of black Americans into society until the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954. Racism, however, was not confined to the South, and in the 1920s and 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan — having been largely debilitated by the efforts of the Reconstruction-era Republicans — resurrected itself in a more virulent and pervasive manner in the “North.”

From its new headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana, the new KKK engaged in a systematic campaign of domestic terrorism, assassination, and government corruption in an effort to “preserve” what it perceived as a “white nation” from the threats of non-whiteness, Judaism and Catholicism. Many members of the KKK either entered or recruited members of the military and police departments across the United States; in fact, until the 1950s the KKK counted many members of the Los Angeles Police Department and proudly proclaimed that its members were operating in the open in Birmingham, Alabama, with the assistance of the police and judicial system of the county. Birmingham acquired the infamous moniker of “Bombingham” in the 1950s due to racially-based terrorist bombings as well as the numerous politically- and racially-motivated assassinations which took place well into the 1970s.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Southern Democrats contemptuous of the Roosevelt-era progressive and liberal Democrats from the North began switching to the Republican Party. The most famous Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond (D,R-SC), once tried to derail the Civil Rights Amendment in 1957 through record-breaking filibuster. The era of conservative-Republicanism had already begun long before the Dixiecrat defection but was accelerated by it, and by the 1970s the Republican party was inextricably linked to conservatism, religious evangelism and anti-liberalism.

Oddly enough, the Equal Rights Amendment was a platform introduced and supported by the Republican Party beginning in the 1940s, but became a point of contention and controversy within the party in the 1970s which led to conservative religious groups aligned with the Republican party, such as the Mormons and some Catholic diocese, to oppose it from 1980 onward.

Outside of the political spectrum, the pervasiveness of anti-black hysteria was prevalent also. In midwestern towns such as Indianapolis, Detroit and Cincinnati, blacks who sought housing were unofficially relegated to lower-income neighborhoods with realtors and sellers refusing to show properties in other, predominantly white neighborhoods. Even if realtors and/or residents sold their house to a black family, neighborhood watches and vigilantes would soon take matters into their own hands, often engaging in racial intimidation — sometimes to violent conclusions — or would migrate away from the neighborhood, selling at or below the market price causing the phenomenon of “white flight.” Blacks soon became synonymous with neighborhood decline and blight a decade or so before the social programs of Lyndon B Johnson — programs which many conservatives today point to as the “beginning of the decline” in America’s neighborhoods and cities.

Though many conservative pundits and politicians love to point to the Civil Rights era, affirmative action and even the OJ Simpson murder trial verdict as proof that American society has moved beyond race issues and it is only the over-reaction of liberals and black racists that keeps such turmoil alive, they neglect the almost 400-year character of anti-black racism which infuses much of American society. For example, a women’s auxiliary group of the California GOP circulated an “inside joke” to their members via email with a crude photoshop of the “new” food stamp of an Obama administration.

Recently, much furor was made over the arrest of Henry L Gates, a black Harvard professor, by James Crowley, a white police officer, with conservatives calling the event a case of “reverse racism” because the president, a black man, had commented that the police acted “stupidly.” Following the event, the police department of Cambridge, several other cities, as well as the Fraternal Order of Police demanded an apology, putting on their best indignation faces for the cameras.

Unfortunately, the reality of police (and social) racism has undercut their arguments. Boston Police Officer Justin Barrett sent an email to colleagues wherein he described Dr. Gates as a “jungle monkey” but defended himself as “not a racist.” More recently, two North Canton police dispatchers (themselves not police officers, but working in close cooperation with law enforcement) circulated an email with a photoshopped image of Air Force One’s tail number. Again, the offending person has denied their racial attitude, but all the protestations in the world do not cover up the fact that there is prevalent racism in the politics and society of America. A few decades of half-hearted, resentful progress on behalf of conservatives — who draw on the legacy of Dixiecrats and their own neo-conservative rhetoric — does not equate to a post-racial society, nor does it negate the systemic, pervasive, and subtle level of anti-black racism.

If we are to take the e-mailers above at their word — that they sent these images as a “joke” and “did not mean to offend” anyone — then the power of such images and stereotypes is far, far more powerful than any conservative pundit gives it credit. It’s almost like not being aware of the contradiction of being dependent upon oxycontin while railing against the “fallacy” of being addicted to drugs, insisting that will alone is the issue.

Racism is a drug, one that is destructive and addictive and which needs to be confronted head-on by those who deny it the most.