I am taking a sociology class titled “Cultures of Africa,” and we have been learning about colonization and imperialism. Essentially, this is how Europeans have taken advantage of African people throughout history. I was speaking to a friend of mine about this, and as I was explaining the rationale as to why colonization makes me angry, we got into a small argument. I was told two things.
The first was that I can’t blame all white people for the actions of some. I completely agree with this. It is not fair for anyone to blame an entire group of individuals (whether they be of a certain religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.) for the actions of people who do horrendous things that just so happen to belong to that certain group. This is something that a lot of people don’t seem to grasp. It is the entire reason that there is so much anti-Muslim sentiment, the belief that Mexicans are stealing our jobs and ruining the economy (even though this doesn’t make any sense), and why the stereotype that all black men are thugs still exists.
It is because of this reason that Donald Trump is able to gain so many supporters. When you feed off of one common theme, something that a lot of people either believe to be true, or something that makes sense to a lot of people, it is really easy to gain support. Making the case that those that are different than you are inherently evil is easy to believe when you are only shown the actions of some and have little to no exposure to others. It is this belief that will only divide humanity further apart. I will reiterate, you cannot blame an entire group of people for the actions of some.
The other thing that my friend had told me was that things like that in history are things that we need to keep in the past. That if we harp on them and constantly remind ourselves that these things have happened, it will only encourage hate. I completely disagree with this.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is a quote by George Santayana. If we do not remind ourselves of what has happened in history, we are only setting ourselves up for these things to happen again. If we forget about slavery, if we forget about colonization, if we forget about raping and stealing of land, then it will never allow us to learn from our mistakes.
Take the Holocaust for example. If we forget about a man that had raised tons of hate for certain minorities of people, a man that got a lot of backing from people who thought he could do great things for a nation, a man that allowed power to consume him and thought that he could not only rule the nation, but the world, then a person like this man will rise up again. If we forget about the past, we will continue to make these mistakes. So while it is not fair to blame an entire group of people for the actions of a few, it is also incredibly unwise to forget about history. So we will not just “let it go.”
