In a January 1864 issue of the magazine Harper’s Weekly there appeared photos of three mixed-race children who looked white. Their names were Rebecca Huger, Rosina Downs, and Charles Taylor. Harper’s Weekly also printed a letter about the children written by Colonel George Hanks. Colonel Hanks commanded a northern unit of black soldiers, and he was trying to raise money for the education of freed slaves. The three mixed-race children were slaves who had been freed when a northern army led by General Butler entered New Orleans. In his letter Colonel Hanks described the white appearance of the children:
Rebecca Huger is eleven years old … To all appearance she is perfectly white. Her complexion, hair, and features show not the slightest trace of negro blood … Rosina Downs is not quite seven years old. She is a fair child, with blonde complexion and silky hair. Her father is in the rebel army. She has one sister as white as herself, and three brothers who are darker … Charles Taylor is eight years old. His complexion is very fair, his hair light and silky. Three out of five [white] boys in any school in New York are darker than he. Yet this white boy, with his mother, as he declares, has been twice sold as a slave. First by his father and “owner,” Alexander Wethers, of Lewis County, Virginia, to a slave-trader named Harrison, who sold them to Mr. Thornhill of New Orleans. This man fled at the approach of our army, and his slaves were liberated by General Butler …
These three children, to all appearance of unmixed white race, came to Philadelphia last December, and were taken by their protector, Mr. Bacon, to the St. Lawrence Hotel on Chestnut Street. Within a few hours, Mr. Bacon informed me, he was notified by the landlord that they must leave. The children, he said, had been slaves, and must therefore be colored persons, and he kept a hotel for white people.5
Since it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, Colonel Hanks wanted to provide former slaves with a good education. This issue of Harper’s Weekly included other photos of former slaves, such as a black man named Wilson Chinn and a black boy named Isaac White. In his letter Colonel Hanks wrote: “Wilson Chinn is about 60 years old … When 21 years old he was taken down the river and sold to Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar planter about 45 miles above New Orleans. This man was accustomed to brand his negroes, and Wilson has on his forehead the letters ‘V. B. M.’ … [Of the 105 slaves who entered the Union camp] thirty of them had been branded like cattle with a hot iron, four of them on the forehead, and the others on the breast or arm … Isaac White is a black boy of eight years; but none the less intelligent than his whiter companions. He has been in school about seven months, and I venture to say that not one boy in fifty would have made as much improvement in that space of time.”6
As slave owners controlled their slave populations by using violence and forbidding them to learn to read and write, enormous governmental powers were also used to keep slaves in captivity. To better understand how unjust state-sanctioned slavery truly was, imagine if the role of American law enforcement officers was not to punish people caught with slaves, but to return their escaped slaves to them. According to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, any U.S. marshal who refused to arrest a runaway slave should be heavily fined, and any person helping an escaped slave by providing food, shelter, or any form of assistance should be heavily fined and imprisoned.
The fact that a descendant of slaves is able to write these words today, and the fact that attitudes toward mixed-race children have changed so much since the era when a few drops of African American blood could condemn a child to slavery, are proof that progress does happen. But this progress did not happen by itself. It requires struggle. Frederick Douglass said:
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.7
One of the most effective forms of struggle is the art of waging peace, which was successfully used by Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Wangari Maathai, and many others. Waging peace applies pressure through protests, boycotts, and other democratic means. Waging peace also attacks ignorance and hatred at their root in order to transform how people think for the better.
Two hundred years ago women could not vote, own property, or go to college, and those who advocated women’s rights were ridiculed and threatened for challenging the oppression of women. American women did not gain these rights by fighting a war. Instead, they waged peace during the women’s rights movement. And although the American Civil War kept our country together, African Americans did not truly gain their human rights until they waged peace during the civil rights movement.
Unjust policies are always supported by inaccurate beliefs. For example, American opposition to women’s right to vote was supported by the inaccurate belief that women are intellectually and morally inferior to men. As long as the vast majority of Americans believed in women’s intellectual and moral inferiority, it was easy to think women would endanger society if allowed to vote, own property, and go to college. Slavery in America was supported by the inaccurate belief that African Americans are subhuman, born to be slaves, and happy being slaves. As long as the vast majority of Americans believed that black people were racially inferior, it was easy to view them as objects with no human rights.
People have had many different kinds of inaccurate beliefs. For most of human history the majority of people believed the world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. These people were not stupid, but had based their views on the information most readily available to them at the time. Just as people had inaccurate beliefs about our external universe, most people today have inaccurate beliefs about our internal universe—the human condition. Again, these people are not stupid, but have based their views on the information most readily available to them right now. If we do not offer people accurate information about the human condition in a way that appeals to a variety of worldviews, we cannot solve problems such as war, injustice, oppression, environmental destruction, and trauma.
A widespread view today is the inaccurate belief that human beings are naturally violent. This book offers abundant evidence to show that human beings are not naturally violent. Furthermore, this book explores the hidden causes of violence.
In my other books I write extensively about the many causes of violence; this book identifies additional causes and provides more insights into curing the virus of violence. When someone gets malaria, cancer, or HIV, I have never heard anyone say, “Oh, that’s just human nature,” because people realize something has gone wrong within the human body. But if someone becomes violent, people often say, “Oh, that’s just human nature,” which assumes that violence is an essential part of being human (like eating and sleeping), rather than the result of something that has gone wrong. But what if violence, like an illness, has a cause that we can understand and prevent? This book will offer abundant evidence to support this claim.
Today it is common knowledge that war traumatizes the human brain. This is so noncontroversial that even pro-war people now say war is hell. But if human beings were naturally violent, why would war traumatize the human brain, and why wouldn’t people go to war and become more mentally healthy? If human beings were naturally violent, why would raising a child in a peaceful and loving environment be good for the human brain, and why would raising a child in a violent and abusive environment be bad for the human brain?
This book will challenge the inaccurate beliefs about violence that prevent us from creating a more peaceful world. Injustice benefits from the inaccurate belief that human beings are naturally violent, because if violence is as much a part of our nature as eating and sleeping, then I can look at gang violence among impoverished youth and say, “That’s just their human nature. It’s natural for them to murder each other. There’s nothing I can do about it, so why should I care?”
But what if human beings are not naturally violent? If