Member-only story
Why Nations Are Racist
For today’s article, I will be discussing why nations are racist.
The answer to this boils down to 3 factors: factor 1, the nature of humanity; factor 2, history; and factor 3, the political development of different portions of humanity which have developed independently around our planet.
Human beings are naturally tribal and mistrust outside groups.
This leads to societies developing greater sophistication, moving from tribal societies to city-states and, finally, the nation-state.
When a human civilisation becomes sophisticated and develops a nation-state, it is in the nation-state’s interests to maintain the culture and ethnic group within that nation-state from any other foreign ethnic group outside of that nation.
History also leads other nations to be racist against each other due to the various interstate wars over millennia or hundreds of years between different nation-states and the history in which nations develop their sense of independent identities from one another.
The earliest example of this in Western history is the Greek historian Herodotus, whose name we derive the word history from in his telling of the Greek-Persian wars.
He built a historical narrative of the Greeks and the Persians as separate people.
