There are lots of terms in racial discourse that I dislike; “people of colour,” “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” “black bodies,” but chief among them is “race.”
Admittedly, this is a bit of a pickle for a “race writer.”
My problem stems from the fact that “race”, as most people think of it, doesn’t exist. The idea that people can be divided into groups based on skin colour has been widely debunked for decades. Yet it lives on because the intuition that people who look the same are the same feels correct if you don’t think about it too hard.
In my article, Affirmative Action’s “Race” Problem, I pointed out that affirmative action suffers from a similar problem. Its focus on skin colour as a defining characteristic works against the people, black and otherwise, who most need help. The assumptions it was built on, decades ago, don’t hold today.
Celine seemed to believe this was a linguistic problem.
Celine:
Race is what causes racial discrimination. Without this man-made definition of race, there will be no racial discrimination.
As long as we continue to focus on race and not the real underlying economic hardship, accessibility to high quality high school education, stable and secured family support, community support, poverty will stay with us for centuries.
Steve QJ:
“Race is what causes racial discrimination. Without this man-made definition of race, there will be no racial discrimination.”
I'm not sure it's quite as simple as that. If I were to convince a klan member that race doesn't really exist, do you imagine his discrimination would disappear?
Racism is built on tribalism and fear as well as ignorance.
But I agree with the sentiment. I think we'd be better off in all kinds of ways if more people understood how silly it is to believe that people who happen to have a similar skin colour are all the same “race.”.
Celine:
If the Klan member was never taught anything about race, he or she will not be able to discriminate against others based on race. I am not saying there will not be other forms of discriminations. There will be. As humans, we always discriminate others, for one reason or another.
It has been proven that children have no sense of race. They do not see the physical differences as reasons to discriminate others. Unfortunately, children are taught those differences as they grow older and all the discriminatory references associated with the differences.
So, yes, I believe the sooner we drop all notions of race, the sooner we could rid this nation of racism. Won't happen to those who are already grown. But to the future generations, racism can only be overcome by one of two things (1) race differentiation does not exist (2) massive interracial marriages producing over 70% of mixed race populations.
Steve QJ:
“If the Klan member was never taught anything about race, he or she will not be able to discriminate against others based on race.”
Yeah, I'm saying that I don't think the concept of race itself is the issue. Most people, especially racist people, don't think about it that deeply.
"Your skin is a different colour to mine so you are different to me."
That's as far as most people seem to go. They don't need to call it race to have the fear that comes with difference. In fact, long before we talked about "races" this kind of discrimination still existed.
Children get a lot of things right. I wish we could retain more of that wisdom as we grow. It helps that they generally live in a world without competition or stress or concerns about how they're going to provide for themselves.
Celine:
Discrimination is in human DNA. It is a way to survive. When people see something as different, they see danger or risk. People will always discriminate against something, religion, food culture, music culture, dance culture, work culture, wealth culture, sexual culture and many more. Race is but one of them.
There is no future that I could see where humans no longer discriminate about some things or some people or some animals or some plants. However, if we want to overcome race discrimination, it can be done. If race does not exist, then it cannot be discriminated against.
“If race does not exist, then it cannot be discriminated against.”
I took the third repetition of this line, as my cue to let this one go. After all, the only way race can “not exist” in many people’s minds, especially racist people’s minds, is if everybody looks the same. That’s not the solution I’m hoping for.
The problem isn’t that there’s a thing called “racism.” Or even that there’s a concept known as “race.” The problem is that human beings still discriminate against each other over meaningless, immutable characteristics.
As I’ve said many times before, I like to believe that one day we’ll get past this instinct to judge people by the colour of their skin or their reproductive role or who they like to have sex with. But sadly, I suspect we’ll be finding things to divide ourselves over for quite some time to come.
So my slightly more realistic hope is that we learn to judge each other based on meaningful qualities. Things like shared values and a common sense of decency and a willingness to stand up against injustice.
These aren’t the kinds of things you can tell about somebody at a glance. And that’s as it should be. After all, it takes a little more effort to judge somebody by the content of their character.
Visible "Racial" characteristics; melanin, hair texture (follicle shape), nose shape, cheekbones, epicanthic fold, etc. give a recognizable tribal association. That would mean little or nothing except that people attach subculture perceptions to the tribe. If the view of the subculture is negative it is seen as racism though it is properly tribalism/culturalism.
As is often discussed in The Commentary, it is often monolithic, and individuals are prejudged by perceptions of the tribal subculture. The visible characteristics in appearance act as an identifying uniform.
You mention the miscegenation that comes with "interracial marriage/partnerships." It will take some time for visible vestiges of our "uniforms" to fade into non-recognition since everyone is not participating. A thing that does matter and perhaps I am overly optimistic in thinking it could happen sooner is fixing perceptions. Stereotypes are the result of broad observation and can be either negative or positive (to who?).
This is where I think that black people (in America and other places) have a bit of a self-inflicted wound. I will be accused of victim blaming by someone, no doubt, but we do need to clean our own house. In an effort to resist assimilation into "whiteness", purposeful trappings of "black culture" (having nothing to do with Africa) establish a tribe where the people who seem to cling to it most strongly are people that are not the best positive examples. The most common "fear" of black people found in white, Asian and Hispanic people is criminality associated with black people with the "Gangsta" persona. If there is a disparity in crime it has numerous causes (not as simple as choosing one like poverty). Gangsta subculture is not just tolerant of criminality but glorifies it. The monolith attaches it to melanin without justification, except the gangstas purposefully create the association, a curse upon the majority of black people.
To understand why I write that it would be helpful to read https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-White-Liberals-Autonomy-ebook/dp/B003XRDBYE/ref=sr_1_1
Tribalism may always be with us, and tribes are not always bad since they are unifying within while divisive from the outside. Can we reduce negative tribal (racial) associations? It's not just a matter of fixing our own perceptions of others, but also fixing the somewhat logical/justifiable perceptions of our own tribe. I'm not just pointing at black people with that. We all have those issues.
"So my slightly more realistic hope is that we learn to judge each other based on meaningful qualities. Things like shared values and a common sense of decency and a willingness to stand up against injustice"
Agreed, although I'm writing an article right now about someone's challenge last year on Medium just before I got kicked off. One of Medium's very good, but too-woke-for-her-own-alleged-feminist-good writers (and now a super-woke Medium staff member) and I were debating trans issues, and she fell on the 'transwomen are women' side. She asked where my compassion was & I asked where her brain was. The article is about the thinking I've done about compassion since then, and how easy it is to be compassionate toward people you like, and less about Those Other People (the ones you don't).
The ones I'm less compassionate about are the 'acceptable' Thems on t'other side - the people who belong to fundamentalist religion, MAGAs, white supremacists, etc. It's not okay to discriminate against people who were born with a particular biology, but it's okay to discriminate against those with bad values, hateful creeds, etc.
Why are we less compassionate about *them*? They may not have been born into a particular biology but they were into a certain family, community, culture, etc. and may not know any other way. The ones who think critically may leave that unhealthy mental prison but others may not; I'm reminded of a book written by a woman who escaped a fundamentalist Mormon polygamous compound out West who described in detail why so many women never questioned or challenged the notion that they had to be held essentially in bondage to male whims and sexual desires. A fundamentalist Christian friend I had years ago - someone who wasn't very worldly or bright and with some likely brain chemistry-related emotional regulation problems - told me when she was three her mother told her Jesus loved her and always would and she believed it, and stuck with her birth religion without ever questioning it.
She was a very kind and sweet person which made her fundamentalism easier to overlook than if she'd been a hateful Republican (which, back then, over 35 years ago, they weren't nearly as bad, but Ronald Reagan was setting the scene for the mess we're in today).
I'm working slowly toward trying to engage with Those People in dribs and drabs to try and understand why they think as they do, and whether there are ways to get through their muddy thinking. And who knows, maybe I'll find something to challenge my own muddy thinking at times ;)
Some ask, 'What would Jesus do?' I ask myself, 'Who would Buddha hate?'