A friend of mine once gave me a good rule of thumb for “getting over” bad relationships – you know, the ones you get dumped from, or worse, the ones you have to end because there’s no mutual way out. He said it takes exactly half the length of how long you were actually in love, and because I’m a heterosexual, he also said “with the woman in question”. But I think he was on to something more general, which has been on my mind recently. I think human tribes have a similar function. This isn’t to say that we’re all tribal; no, I think we’re slowly – preciously slowly, and probably too slowly – evolving to the point where rank tribalism isn’t part of our emotional and mental makeup. But for most of us, it’s still there.
So let’s apply that calculus of my friend to some of the more fraught intertribal conflicts of our times. I live in America, and was born here and thus have too much of its tribal toxins running through my veins, so race is the thing that immediately springs to mind. I’ve been reading what I can about that over the past year, augmenting what I read about when I was an American history major at university, and it strikes me that Europeans have had a hang up about Blacks since oh, roughly Carthage. The Carthaginians were not much more than a string of small town-sized colonies strung through the Mediterranean, and they enforced their laws, their monopoly of power, and fought their wars against Rome and the Greek colonies in the area, largely through hiring African mercenaries. Black Africans: mostly slaves, purchased from the southern litteral of the Sahara in exchange for salt dried from flats along the shores of what we now call Tunisia and Libya. The trade in slaves was established in the vanished centuries of 800, 500, 400 BCE, and the slaves the Carthaginians bought were terrifying and effective but – as we all know – they weren’t enough. They lost – Punic War after Punic War – and the Roman Empire inherited a sense of Blacks as being both foreign and “naturally” slave. And that was roughly 2300 years ago.
Now of course, Black people in Africa were busy building impressive civilizations apart from this, but we live – in America at least – in the remnants of European thinking, not steeped in the local civilised history of sub-Saharan Africa. And while Europe slowly forgot about their Black biases over the course of centuries of non-engagement, once they rediscovered them in the 1400s or so and then almost immediately started importing Blacks as slaves to the New World, that hangover from Europe’s first impression of Blacks was immediately transmitted to what became Americans – North, South, you name it.
To the credit of much of the Americas, there quickly arose a counterrevolution in thought – in Haiti, for example, Blacks realised “wait, this is idiotic” and overthrew the French. In the United States, at least some Whites realised “wait, this is idiotic” and convinced a solid majority of their fellows to wage the most destructive war of the nineteenth century in an effort to eliminate the bondage of Blacks. In South America, Brazilians realised “wait, this is idiotic” and eliminated slavery while at the same time realising – with more cynicism but perhaps more honesty than their North American counterparts – that the real game here was not racial slavery, but economic slavery, and instituted the rural and urban class regimes which still today ensure that most people not only know their place, but know they can’t change it.
In any event: I have a sense that every regime that crystalises the idea that race somehow makes a difference in human capability goes through a hangover equal to that which my friend told me about: one half the duration of the bad relationship before you can let go of the lie. In the United States, I date the “breakup” to somewhere around the Civil War – at least at that point, much more than half of the country raised armies to kill the peculiar institution, and at least for 15 or 20 years after the end of the war, tried to enable the establishment of an equal peace. So that was 160 years ago; but the peculiar institution unfortunately may date much earlier than we think, not to 1619, like the idiotic New York Times project referencing the first date of an African slave being imported to America, but alas possibly back to Carthage. Or possibly back to the 1100s, when – according to Wikipedia, so don’t hold me to the accuracy – Black servants started being re-imported after centuries of trans-Saharan trade collapse to populate the servant ranks of Venetian and Byzantine and nouveau Roman nobility. Certainly back to 1600, when Shakespeare was playing on tropes of the slavish and sinister nature of Moors and Blacks in his plays.
So if the drinks ran out in 1865, but the “party” (I cringe at using the term) started in, say, 1400 – to average out a few markers – then based on my friend’s formula, we have a long way to go. Keep the math easy – we can only expect white America on average, or even at the median, to be non-racially oriented roughly by 2100. And oddly, given events of the past year and given a casual review of media trends over the last few decades, that doesn’t feel off.
That really, really sucks for Black people living today – especially, I can imagine, kids, who are wondering “what the hell, why aren’t we viewed on the average, or at the median, as totally uninteresting yet, given that literally ten or so generations have passed since Black slavery ended?” And I get it. But it’s just a formula: sorry, we’re a somewhat pathetic race – I mean human race, no difference here between any of us. We don’t get over girlfriends who dump us, or elections that we lose, or wars that destroy us, or any violent realisation that we are totally, completely, fucked-up-edly wrong for roughly one half of the length of the time under which we operated under the illusion that everything we thought was right and hunky dory.
This occurred to me in thinking about recent anti-Asian violence, and anti-Semitic violence, and again in the space of thinking about my failed marriage.
Let me put my marriage in context first. My ex-wife is a lovely woman, but we never should have gotten married, for a swathe of reasons. But I met her when I was a teenager, and fell in love with her almost immediately, and was in love with her – admittedly on and off, in the way that dumb ass young men can do – for a good fifteen years. Until I was roughly 32 or so. And then it occurred to me that I had been in love with someone who did not love me so much as she just needed me desperately, and in seeking love from her, I was drawing from a dry well. It took me a good seven years to break free of that feeling and make a break. This is nothing against my ex-wife – she is the mother of our child and she is beautiful in her way – but we needed and expected different things, but human attraction, human folly, is a strong drug. It took me 15 years divided by two to find the strength to do something different. I’ve noted, though, that the break for her happened when I left her – to do the math, after we had been together for 22 years. That means she started her (one-half twenty-two) 11 year journey on the day I split from her. And she didn’t feel as if she had agency for the decision, so add a few more years to that tally – that means that even though we split up six years ago, she’s still only halfway through her journey of realising a state of status quo ante bellum.
Europeans have had anti-Asian sentiments for much less time than they have had anti-Black sentiments – Europeans didn’t know China existed, except for a small and culturally irrelevant set of merchants, until the 1500s, and even then, the Portuguese and Spanish and Dutch merchants who met the people of Asia were frankly pretty pathetic. Racial attitudes got pretty fraught there for awhile, culminating as many people will remember in the late 20th century, when both Asians and Europeans embarked on vast wars of mutual hatred – the awkward Opium and Boxer Wars, the ill-fated East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere project, the obviously futile wars in Indochina, you name it. Arguably those only drew to a close with the evolution of mutual trade pacts and the recognition that we all like bacon and opera, roughly in the early 1980s. That means we still have at least a couple centuries of hangover – of Europeans being racist but also, because locally Asians never really lost power, Asian countries continuing to hold racist grudges – so at best we can expect somewhere around 2280 or so, Asians and Europeans will finally have some common ground.
And if we look at Jewish people, holy crikey Batman, we don’t have a good outcome. Let’s assume the worst day, the rock bottom, the “I’ve had so much heroin and brandy that I’ve shitted and vomited out every organ in my body” moment for the relationship between the Jews, who really are just regular people, and Europeans, who are astonishingly capable of assholishness, was the moment the US Army started liberating the concentration camps in March of 1945. Well, that’s just 2000 years or so after Europeans started scapegoating the Jews. That means maybe – by my friend’s formula – in 2950 or so we can expect to have an end to idiot yahoo people of European descent finally drawing to a close their knee jerk habit of blaming Jews for things they have nothing to do with. That’s, uh, not exactly something I want to put on a Hallmark card to the good people of Abraham and Isaiah.
The thing that sticks in my gut is that I’m still a product of all of these societies. I know I’m unintentionally racist – oh and we haven’t hit upon the ten millenia at a minimum of gender oppression which we still haven’t really woken up to – and unintentionally anti-Semitic (although oddly I think I’m better at that than the world at large; something about North America and the expansion of mass media did something there, plus my parents rejecting everything that their parents’ generation taught them on that score). I know I’m still lurching through a long tribal hangover of peoples who can’t yet realise that we’re all, totally, equal in form and in substance… but in fact we really want some hair of the dog to let us just be tribal again. It will continue for a very long time, and I want to tell my Black and Jewish and Asian friends “oh my gosh I’m sorry, my people just had too much tequila for way too long” but I also know they’re sick of cleaning out the back of the cab. All I can say is, maybe we’re reaching a day where your folks can drink too much tequila, and you’ll make me clean up the back of the cab instead. I’m good with that.
We all are human, and that means we all go too far sometimes, and we all have to clean up a mess. I may even deserve to clean up someone else’s mess for a bit, given that maybe I – or my parents, or my tribe, or my country – tied it on one too many times, too hard. Hangovers are not fun, and they last too long. I wish it were easier, but I fear its not. Whether it is love lost, or hate ended – and really, is there that much of a difference? – it takes awhile to recover. Half of how long we lived in the illusion.
Yikes.