This Steve King Really Is Horrifying

Ahh, Congressman Steve King. Dear, misguided, racist Steve King.

On Monday, during an interview, the Iowa Representative got upset when other commentators pointed out the relative whiteness of the Republican National Convention. His response, in the year 2016 in the 21st century? Read on:

“This 'old white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie," King said. "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"

"Than white people?" [Chris]Hayes asked, clearly amazed.

"Than, than Western civilization itself," King replied. "It's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."

Blinkity-effing-blink. The historian in me died a little. I won’t even make a list of all the things we lowly sub-groups have contributed.

Instead, I want to talk about what shapes the mindsets of people like King. He’s caught up in some hellish version of (un)reality in which he still believes the “Myth of the ‘Negro’ Past,” which Melville Herskovits explained way back in 1941. Some distinctive features of the myth:

Only the poorer stock of Africa was enslaved, the more intelligent members of the African communities raided having been clever enough to elude the slavers' nets;

Since the Negroes were brought from all parts of the African continent… no least common denominator of understanding or behavior could have possibly been worked out by them;

Even granting enough Negroes of a given tribe had the opportunity to live… the cultures of Africa were so savage and relatively so low in the scale of human civilization that the apparent superiority of European customs as observed in the behavior of their masters, would have caused and actually did cause them to give up such aboriginal traditions as they may otherwise have desired to preserve;

The Negro is thus a man without a past.

While Herskovits and other scholars worked to dispel this notion, it has never fully gone away. In 1963, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper opined*,

Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture… If all history is equal, as some now believe [t]hen indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped…

Fast forward to 2016, and you have a sitting Congressman echoing this notion that the peoples of Africa and pre-Columbian America have contributed little to Western “civilization,” a notion fed by the myth that Africa and the pre-sustained-European-contact (sorry) Americas were “dark” and “barbarous.”

And Asia fares no better in this mindset. Despite the long history and various cultures and contributions, Asia was regarded as somewhat mysterious by 19th and early 20th century Europeans and their American descendants, and in need of Western influence. Asians in the U.S. were commonly discriminated against and portrayed as sub-human and “uncivilized,” a “yellow peril.” The U.S. sent missionaries to “Christianize” Asian populations. They advocated an “Open Door Policy” that while benign on the surface (purportedly “an agreement among the European powers on the principle of maintaining an Open Door for trade and commercial activity,” in “spheres of interest” in China, eventually, much like the Scramble for Africa, allowed for the exploitation of China’s resources, in particular. During the Boxer Rebellion, for example, “foreign armies fighting their way from the Chinese coast to rescue their citizens in the capital, in some cases secur[ed] their own concessions and areas of special interest along the way.”

And thus, Westerners emerge as the saviors of the majority of the world’s peoples, bringing light to dark continents, Christianity to heathens, and “civilization” to all. This is the kind of drivel that shapes the ideas of Steven King, elected representative of various people, supposedly, in the year Two-Thousand-and –Sixteen. I just had to spell that out.

This is what allows the lies that Europeans have been a ray of sunshine, a model for guidance, an inherently good force for other peoples. This is what allows Steve King to trumpet all their accomplishments (many of which were borrowed from "benighted" people, but I digress) without acknowledging the realities of the greed, violence, and ravages of colonialism that accompanied "civilization." This is what allows that man to sit there and ask, with a straight face, "Where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about(?)"

Somebody help us all.

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You can google Hugh Trevor-Roper and African history for parts of this speech. I had the quote saved to a file and am having a hard time finding it all in one place in any one source.