Our Loved Egyptian Night

Stereotyping, as we mentioned in the past, is a top-down act intended as part of the overall colonization and subjugation process. It then leads us to the question of how important race actually is in the shaping of American foreign relations. To what extent does race play a role in the determination and formation of American foreign relations? But as Le Bon argued, race is more psychological than it is cultural. He wrote:

“In waiting for the era, probably far into the future, where the progress of the study of the brain will have revealed to us the cerebral differences corresponding to the diverse modes of feeling and thinking, we ought to restrict ourselves to differentiating peoples only by their psychological qualities.” 

And if race is differentiated by psychological factors above all else, the two most important psychological factors which differentiate the various races and various peoples of the world is character and intelligence, as Le Bon argued. In turn, European colonialism – due to the fact that character is one out of the two basic psychological factors which determine race aside from intelligence, and in turn, race is one of two basic factors for colonization aside from money – has been given a moral justification by European peoples. The archetype for the moralization of European colonialism or the archetype for the “redeeming idea” behind European colonization is Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.” Kipling encourages Americans to take up the colonization effort and “civilizing mission” which the British started. It starts off by stating:

“Take up the White Man’s burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness, 

On fluttered folk and wild –

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.”

In sum, European colonization is seen through this particular prism or lens as the civilizing and development of less civilized and less developed peoples. Another stanza states:

“Take up the White Man’s burden –

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard –

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: –

“Why brought he us from bondage,

Our loved Egyptian night?”

Hence, and from the outset, European colonization is framed or is seen by people of European origin as a civilizing and moral mission above all else. And as a result of what European peoples perceived as their civilizing and moral mission of less civilized and immoral peoples, European peoples also conceived the social world as constituting a “racial hierarchy” which placed European peoples at the apex. To borrow from one scholar:

“This conception of race, defined by the poles of black and white, carried over into American foreign policy. By its grip on the thinking of the men who debated and determined that policy, by its influence over the press, and by its hold on the electorate, race powerfully shaped the way the nation dealt with other peoples. This included not just the Indian even before Franklin’s day but also the peoples of Latin America, East Asia, and Europe…”

It follows that America inherited the concept of racial hierarchy even before the advent of American global hegemony in the early 20^th century. What followed, nevertheless, was both imposition and exclusion based on culture and economics throughout the Anglo-American imperium and wherever Anglo-Americans could extend their reach.