THE MANIFEST DESTINY OF THE SUPERIOR RACE MYTHOLOGY

By Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell warns that racial pride can quickly become harmful racial supremacy (1946):
“Another passion which gives rise to false beliefs that are politically harmful is pride - pride of nationality, race, sex, class, or creed." 

When I was young France was still regarded as the traditional enemy of England, and I gathered as an unquestionable truth that one Englishman could defeat three Frenchmen. When Germany became the enemy this belief was modified and English people ceased to mention derisively the French propensity for eating frogs. But in spite of governmental efforts, I think few Englishmen succeeded in genuinely regarding the French as their equals.

Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, or Hungarians and Rumanians. 

It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as unjustifiable as that of a little Balkan country.

Pride of race is even more harmful than national pride. When I was in China I was struck by the fact that cultivated Chinese were perhaps more highly civilized than any other human beings that it has been my good fortune to meet. Nevertheless, I found numbers of gross and ignorant white men who despised even the best of the Chinese solely because their skins were yellow. 

In general, the British were more to blame in this than the Americans, but there were exceptions.

 I was once in the company of a Chinese scholar of vast learning, not only of the traditional Chinese kind, but also of the kind taught in Western universities, a man with a breadth of culture which I

scarcely hoped to equal. He and I went together into a garage to hire a motor car. The garage proprietor was a bad type of American, who treated my Chinese friend like dirt, contemptuously accused him of being Japanese, and made my blood boil by his ignorant malevolence.

 
The similar attitude of the English in India, exacerbated by their political power, was one of the main causes of the friction that arose in that country between the British and the educated Indians. The superiority of one race to another is hardly ever believed in for any good reason. 

Where the belief persists it is kept alive by military supremacy. So long as the Japanese were victorious, they entertained a contempt for the white man, which was the counterpart of the contempt that the white man had felt for them while they were weak. Sometimes, however, the feeling of superiority has nothing to do with military prowess.

The Greeks despised the barbarians, even at times when the barbarians surpassed them in warlike strength. The more enlightened among the Greeks held that slavery was justifiable so long as the masters were Greek and the slaves barbarian, but that otherwise it was contrary to nature. 

The Jews had, in antiquity, a quite peculiar belief in their own racial superiority; ever since Christianity became the religion of the State Gentiles have had an equally irrational belief in their superiority to Jews. Beliefs of this kind do infinite harm, and it should be, but is not, one of the aims of education to eradicate them. 

I spoke a moment ago about the attitude of superiority that Englishmen have permitted themselves in their dealings with the inhabitants of India, which was naturally resented in that country, but the caste system arose as a result of successive invasions by 'superior' races from the North, and is every bit as objectionable as white arrogance.”
— Bertrand Russell, Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind: Man's Unfortunate Experiences With His Self-Made Enemies (1946)

(1911 poster of the “Five Races of Man”. The illustration depicts five men representing different cultural spheres: an American Indian, an Australian Aborigine, an African, an Asian, and a European, with the European centrally positioned, exemplifying the Eurocentric worldview prevalent during the early 20th century.) 

This poster was published as an illustration in a Dresden-based German magazine. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. Modern scholarship views racial categories as a human construct, not a biological reality, but rather an identity created by socially dominant groups to establish power and meaning in a social context.

In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: “The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past.”