The Special Relationship: Uncle Sam and Britannia, weapons in hand and accompanied by their heraldic national beasts, stand atop the world. The image neatly captures the racial assumptions of global power, but it errs in its inclusion of the feminine. It is the 5 percent of the human population that is White and Male who wield 100 percent of the power-that-matters on Planet Earth.
HOW DOES A TINY MINORITY control an overwhelming majority?
As a young history student, it was a question that continued to intrigue me.
How, for example, did Great Britain, a nation of less than 15
million in 1850, manage to control the more than 190 million Indians? More
specifically, how was a ridiculously small occupying force of British businessmen,
bureaucrats and soldiers able to subordinate the interests of the entire Indian subcontinent to those of their British homeland?
The answer, it emerged, was that, at its heart, the whole
imperial enterprise was nothing more than a gigantic bluff. The British ruled
India for more than a century because they could. Or, more precisely, because
the Indian people believed they could. The moment Mohandas Gandhi and the
Indian National Congress persuaded them to stop believing in the imperial might
of the British Raj, its days were numbered.
With imperialism (at least of the pith helmet variety)
safely interred in history’s graveyard, it was tempting to believe that the
whole notion of a tiny minority controlling all the peoples of the planet had
been buried with it. New Zealanders still look back with pride at the role
their country played in the abolition of minority rule in Apartheid South
Africa.
These were, as Paul Simon told us in his 1986 album Graceland, “the days of miracles and
wonders”, and, to many, the fall of Soviet Communism and the triumphant progress of democracy
across so much of the Earth, seemed the most wondrous miracle of them all.
So far, so smug: so safely and conventionally liberal.
And then, just the other day, my attention was drawn to the
existence of a tiny minority whose power exceeds that of all the nineteenth
century imperialists combined. In spite of the fact that they comprise just
five percent of the world’s population, White Males control the planet.
I was stunned. In fact, I was in denial. Could White Males –
the minority among whom I must include myself – truly represent such a tiny
fraction of global humanity? I would have to check.
Not such an easy thing to do.
Since the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the entire concept
of “race” – of “whiteness” and “blackness”, “Übermensch” (Supermen) and
“Untermensch” (Subhuman) – has been declared dangerously unscientific and
politically disreputable. As a consequence, the agencies of the United Nations
neither collect, nor publish, data on the “racial” composition of the human
family.
In order to pursue this question further, therefore, it was
necessary to descend into the underworld of what is today referred to,
euphemistically, as the “Alt-Right”. For the advocates of “White Supremacy”,
the ratio of “Caucasians” (Whites) to the rest of humanity is a very important
statistic indeed.
The world of the White Supremacist is not a nice place to
visit. It is enveloped in a thick and choking atmosphere of unabashed racism.
The fetishization of ethnicity that constituted not only the essence of Nazism,
but also of the ideology of “Scientific Racism” (which, alongside the
imperialist era it did so much to justify, reached its apogee at the turn of
the nineteenth century) certainly did not die with Hitler. On the Internet it
is alive and kicking.
From the Georgia-based National Policy Institute (the least
sulphurous of the American websites visited) I learned that the “White Race”,
which constituted 35 percent of humankind in 1900, had, by 1950, shrunk to just
under 28 percent, and was projected to collapse to just 10 percent of the
global population by 2060. The present-day figure, calculated at 6-8 percent by
the only slightly more respectable CIA
World Fact Book, makes the NPI’s projection look wildly optimistic.
In hard numbers, the total of “White” human-beings is
generally agreed, by White Supremacists, to be 750 million. With the current
human population estimated at 7.5 billion, the “White Race” thus tops-out at 10
percent of the total. Divide that figure by two, and “White Males” are, indeed,
representative of exactly one twentieth of the human species.
Such a tiny number, and yet, in every sphere: be it the
global financial system; the global media; or, the ability to project decisive
military force anywhere on the planet; the power lies preponderantly, and
indisputably, in the hands of White Males.
So, how does Donald Trump’s and Harvey Weinstein’s tiny
sliver of humanity get away with it? Because we can. Because the rest of
humanity lets us.
“You will not replace us!”, chanted the White Supremacists
marching through Charlottesville on 11 August 2017.
Yes, my brothers, they will – just as soon as they find
their Gandhi.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 17 October 2017.
