“The evidence of failure is all around us in the fires of prejudice most recently lit by the orange man in the White House,” writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.

RACISM is as old as humanity. It arose even before Homo sapiens became a recognisable branch of the evolutionary tree, a time when there really were distinct races. Today, however, there’s only one. 

Sure, there are some cultural and trivial ethnic differences as any geneticist will attest. In fact, it’s the remarkable advance in genetic science allied to similar progress in paleo-anthropology that has exposed the various “races” that perished via natural selection until there was just one survivor. Us.

Unhappily, it’s the knowledge carried deep in our lizard brain of the struggle between those races that has persisted until today. But even it would have probably died away had it not been for one particular group who we can thank for the tragedy that besets America.

Until only 12,000 years ago the people of the British Isles and Northern Europe were themselves dark skinned. It was only their continual habitation in their cold, wet, environment that gradually bled the need for melanin from their DNA and made their skins pallid. And Britain was favoured with the arrival 2000 years ago of an invasion from swarthy southern Europe led by Julius Caesar who brought them their first written language. This allowed them to keep records in Latin and then their several vernaculars.

Gradually, through further invasions from Scandinavia and Germany – and centuries of religious warfare – the island nation developed a mastery of the seas and began to colonise distant lands. 

Needing a cheap workforce, they absolutely dominated an horrific trading of less mechanised communities in Africa. In the centuries from 1640 their ships made more than 10,000 journeys from Africa to the European colonies of the Caribbean and America carrying 2.7 million slaves to be bought and sold at the whim of their (white) masters. 

So the lizard brain’s notions of race as the “other” to be feared and resisted was planted within the very nation born of a rebellion that declared: “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. 

Add to that little moral dilemma the British industries, which demanded cheap cotton for their satanic mills, then spice it with the notion that poverty equals inferiority, and you have the perfect predicament for the American community to solve. 

They tried civil war, a civil rights movement and even the election of a melanin-rich president in Barack Obama. Nothing worked. The evidence of failure is all around us in the fires of prejudice most recently lit by the orange man in the White House.

Here in Australia, since 1991, some 432 melanin-rich First Australians have died at the hands of white men in another British colony still struggling to resolve a similar dilemma with an obdurate man in The Lodge. 

The big difference is that the Aboriginal people were here first. It’s the whitefellas who brought white slaves here in 1788 and it’s their bastard sons with their British laws of property who tried to make them slaves, too. And when that and their contagious diseases failed, they tried to shoot them out and failed again.

Now with the great fires burning, the contagious diseases spreading, seas rising and the climate rebelling, the melanin-poor fellas are at last looking to them for at least some of the ways back to preserve and protect our land and our future. They hear the cry: “We’re all in this together.”

One race perhaps.

robert@robertmacklin.com