9. ABOUT RACISM
WTM FAQ 9.2 I don’t agree with talk of some indigenous races like the Australian Aboriginals and the San Bushmen of South Africa being more ‘innocent’ than other races. Aren’t we all just ‘human’, there’s always some like Mother Theresa or the Dalai Lama and others like Stalin and Pol Pot?
Response by WTM founding member Lachlan Colquhoun:
Firstly, Jeremy Griffith uses the term ‘relatively innocent’ for some races or ethnic groups.
In the case of Australian Aboriginals, in Aeneas Gunn’s 1905 The Little Black Princess (Aeneas, also known as Jeannie Gunn, is the author of the famous 1908 book We of the Never-Never about her time at Elsey Station in remote northern Australia) she writes about her young aboriginal friend Bett-Bett telling her about when a raiding neighbouring Willeroo tribe had caught her and some of her tribe’s ‘lubras [adult women] and piccaninnies [infants], and all the lubras said they remembered it well. It was a fearful tale…[The captives] were made to travel very quickly because of pursuit, and at supper time there was no tucker, so the Willeroos killed some of the piccaninnies and ate them, and then went to sleep. Fortunately in the morning some stockmen, who had been following the tracks, rode into the camp, and the Willeroos took to their heels, and that time the Roper River lubras escaped, Bett-Bett among them. I asked her how it had happened that she had not been killed and eaten, and she answered with a chuckle—“Me too muchee all day bone fellow”—she had evidently not been worth eating, when fatter piccaninnies were about!’ (pp.82-83 of 107).
So the Australian Aboriginals have certainly suffered from the psychologically upset state of the human condition, but it’s about relative innocence, relative freedom from the ever-increasing anger, egocentricity and alienation that has been developing since the human race became conscious some 2 million years ago. At the very beginning of his one-hour interview titled THE Interview that’s ricocheting around the world because it’s creating so much interest, Jeremy explains in paragraphs 18 to 21 how the idea that we humans started off as brutal savages is completely wrong, and that the truth is we started out as cooperative, selfless and loving innocent nurturers. So it’s inevitable in that journey to increasing upset that all people will be in different stages of the journey, some more psychologically upset than others.
In chapter 8:16E in his main book FREEDOM, titled ‘The differences in alienation between races of humans’, Jeremy describes the ever-increasing corruption of our original all-loving, innocent instinctive self or soul. It has some amazing quotes about relative innocence, such as in paragraph 1028, Sir Laurens van der Post’s description of the Bushmen of the Kalahari, that ‘mere contact with twentieth-century life seemed lethal to the Bushman. He was essentially so innocent and natural a person that he had only to come near us for a sort of radioactive fall-out from our unnatural world to produce a fatal leukaemia in his spirit.’
Mick Manolis, a member of the famous indigenous Kuckles band, and musical director of the musical Bran Nue Dae, and founder of the WTM Broome Centre, has said ‘what Jeremy says in FREEDOM about the relative innocence of our people, and the original innocence of the human race, is true.’
Importantly, Jeremy is not romanticising some groups and condemning others, rather he’s bringing redeeming, reconciling and healing understanding to the whole human race. As Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, has said, ‘I have no doubt Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’
I recommend reading FAQ 9.1 ‘How does this put an end to racism?’ and Video/Freedom Essay 8 ‘How this ends racism forever’.
