We know that "All men are created equal," but the men who wrote those words were slave-owners who institutionalized inequality by counting slaves as 7/10 of a human. (Let's not even get started on the equality of women.)
This example -- and you can provide your own -- is part of a problematic definition that interferes with our social, political and economic relations.
"Race," in other words, interferes with:
- How we relate to others because the color of skin has nothing to do with the person or their mind.
- How we vote and act collectively because it groups people who share physical characteristics when we should be grouped by ideals or goals.
- How we work, trade and develop because it pits one "team" against another in an irrelevant game (National Geographic's race issue has a great article on this topic, on which I've done research, i.e., how to manipulate teams to improve cooperation.)
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| Jesus washed feet in this book too! |
Besides my intellectual perspective on this topic, I also have personal experience. I am "white" (or Caucasian, a word that's even more stupid) because I say so, but my DNA shows that 1/6th of me comes from South Asia.
What does this all mean?
- We need to stop thinking of ourselves as from a "race" when we are all humans.
- We are too complex to sort into neat buckets, as our DNA is mixed from everywhere.
- "Black" or "White" means nothing because it's subjective. I just talked to a girl who said she was "black" in the Netherlands but "white" in Tanzania.
- What really matters is a person's education, their cultural background and -- above all -- their socioeconomic status, as I am pretty sure that rich people have more in common than poor people, American have more in common than Germans, and so on.
- Going further, it's more important to focus on someone's community as a source of their identity, strength and limitations than their skin color.
6 comments:
Well, it seems we're talking about different things. You're talking about culture (or institutions), and I am talking about skin color. I agree with you that "racial sensitivity" is no reason to avoid discussions of rape etc. I disagree with anyone who says "that's what [insert color] people do." My main point is to treat people as people (rapists or scholars) rather than trapped in their skin. Some cultures are indeed toxic (white supremacists or buddhist chauvinists) but that does not condemn everyone else who looks like them or worships like them...
It's not worth getting into an argument over for which I don't have time. Suffice to say that accusations of "racism" are being used by politicians and academics as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility and ignore difficult problems.
You don't have to argue (whoops -- you deleted your comment above), as I already agreed w you...
Good stuff but I'm going to quibble with your opener on a couple of points:
1) Unless you're reading a different Constitution than I am, it was 3/5, not 7/10.
2) It wasn't the slavers who stopped slaves from being counted as whole people, it was the abolitionists. The slavers preferred that slaves be fully counted as part of the general population. Representation and electoral votes were to be apportioned by population and so it worked to the advantage of the slave states. The fact that slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person actually helped to perpetuate slavery in the Unites States. Had they counted as 0/5, slavery may have been abolished much sooner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
One race, the human race.
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