Fasces, you deny that you are racist, I have no doubt of that.

But would you please care to write for a us your opinion on race in general, and the European race in particular, in no less than 500 words? I think it would be fairly instructive. Or don't. But in that case, it once begs the question - why wouldn't you tell us what you think of race?

In the interest of fairness I'll start:


“Race: A social construct”

Race generally refers to the genetic phenotypic heritage of an individual, usually correlated to a geographic area. In the ancient past, race varied gradually through space, such that seeing an individual who looked much different from yourself would have been rare, compared to today. But as interaction accelerated, humans began to define themselves, phenotypically, in opposition to others. These phenotypic differences, of course, came along with cultural differences, which were conflated with the phenotypic differences.

Over time, as Europe came to dominate the world, the Eurocentric view that the white, European races were superior to others came into common parlance. Whites accepted the new racism easily enough, and the ideas were also institutionalized and forced into the minds of the oppressed (an ongoing process now referred to as “the colonization of the mind”). “Scientists,” who were in fact actually just racist hacks, set about quantifying the concrete differences among races, measuring skull sizes, nose widths, and so on. They invented ridiculous terminology like “Negroid” and “Mongoloid” to use as jargon in their emerging field of social Darwinism (the idea that Darwin’s ideas on natural selection could explain the social positions of the various races worldwide).

It was in this period, also, that today’s “races” were first conceived. It was in these times that the terms “white” and “black” and “colored,” still so often heard around the world today, came to take on their modern meanings. This occurred as people of certain phenotypic heritages became dissociated from their specific geographical homeland as nascent globalization spread people all over the world. The perfect example is in the New World, where specific geographic origins mattered far less than “black” and “white.”

In order to justify their grievous exploitation of non-white people, white people made up stories about how inferior the others were, and told them to themselves. A language of inferiority and superiority was used. You might have even heard a nineteenth century bigot such as Henry Morton Stanley uttering words like, “Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races.” And indeed he truly believed his words.

It was not until the late 20th century that this ridiculous rhetoric at last began to come to an end. As the moral arguments of the civil rights movements of the 1960s penetrated even white consciousness, the old-style, naked racism could no longer be acceptable. This is the time when it became a bad thing to be racist, in the eyes of society. But racists were still there, from every color and creed. Their language was new, however. They began to speak of innate differences between cultures in their effectiveness or morality. They began to speak of innate differences in their physical or mental abilities. No, the racism was not gone; it had merely taken a new form.

At last, however, scientific studies debunked once and for all the old notion that the races were biological categories any more significant than that of hair color. Races had at one time been thought of as a kind of subspecies, but modern science showed that such categorizations are actually meaningless outside of a social setting, like a census form.

It was a decisive and meaningful moment in the history of race, because it meant that fact was now on the side of those who had long maintained that the perceived differences between people were immaterial, and that the similarities far outweighed any appeal to “otherness” that exploiters and bigots may have appealed to in the past.

Of course, the historical legacy of the creation of these categories has meant that “black”, “white” and so on, although unfounded in biology, are now all too real. There is still racism based on these old principles. Even today, you may hear assholes talking about why it is prudent to be careful around black people, statistically more likely to commit crimes as they are. So, racism is certainly not dead, although race as a biological concept absolutely is.