Why white people dominate (part 4)

Continued from part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Some groups, like Australian Aborigines, never developed food production. But this, of course, was due entirely to where they were, rather than who they were. Australia has no plant species that are easily domesticable. The only native Australian plant to be successfully domesticated is the macadamia tree, and that only after a worldwide gourmet market was established. Nor does Australia have any large domesticable animals. The only possibility is the kangaroo, and how do you farm an animal that can jump over fences and can’t be herded? Lastly, most of Australia is dry and arid, with little soil. Aboriginal Australians could never have developed farming, even if they wanted to.

The fact that some peoples developed faster than others does not mean that the people themselves are smarter or better. People everywhere are people: intelligent, creative and curious. But, due to their environment, some groups did have greater opportunities than other. One group, in the fertile crescent, had far better conditions than any other, and they were able to develop faster. Their developments spread across the continent and into Europe. Europeans benefited to such an extent that, thousands of years later, they would be able to dominate the globe and subjugate the groups that never had the same opportunity.

Many people still assume that, because they developed paper and iPods, Europeans are somehow better than Africans or Polynesians. While it’s easy to see how the assumption is formed, it is completely baseless, and at bottom, racist. We need to affirm the good in other cultures, recognize the environmental situations that shaped them, and share the developments that once allowed us to crush them, so that they can benefit from them in the same way that we have.

Photo by vtveen via Flickr