January 16, 2024

The term “race” has served only one group well: Racists.

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Contrary to the racist absolutists on the left, race is a non-scientific, socially constructed archaic system of classification. “Race differences are relative, not absolute.” Indeed, they’ve always been relative and, more recently, have been intended to give people a stick with which to beat a disfavored group.

In 1919, Adolf Hitler argued that “There is living amongst us a non-German, foreign race. There are three general types of races, the culture creators (the pure Aryan race), the culture sustainers (races with substantial Aryan blood), and the culture destroyers (the Jews).”

Slightly more than 100 years later, Whoopi Goldberg presented a dissenting opinion. “How can you say it’s about race when you’re [white people] fighting each other?” During her casual reference to the worst genocide in human history, Whoopi proclaimed, “Well, this is white people doing it to white people. Y’all go fight amongst yourselves.”

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In the Wonderful World of Whoopi, race is defined as, “… being something that I can see.” According to the Whoopi hypothesis, those afflicted with impaired vision are incapable of racism.

Image: 1850s physiognomy chart (edited). Public domain.

Still, despite crackpot theories, scientists reject “race” as a scientific system of classification. In 2018, 67 scientists from a broad range of disciplines stated that the “robust body of scholarship recognizes the existence of geographically based genetic variation in our species but shows that such variation is not consistent with biological definitions of race.”

RACE: From benign to bigotry

Aristotle is the first to have believed that a person’s traits can be determined from their outer appearance, i.e., Physiognomics. Then, observations about skin color to categorize humans had nothing to do with inferiority or superiority. It was just a description, with the Greeks and Romans observing without judgment that “The Africans’ color was regarded as their most characteristic and most unusual feature.”

Before the 17th Century, “race” as a grouping system was harmless. In 17th-century Europe, though, race became a pseudo-scientific system of classification based on superiority and inferiority. The concept stemmed from the false notion that “white” people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than non-white people. Europeans used this perception to justify colonizing and enslaving Africans and treating cruelly “savages” in “The New World.”

During the late 19th century, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants in the USA were referred to as separate races. Today, members of these groups are classified as white. We Jews still get treated separately amongst white supremacists who deny our whiteness and black Hebrew Israelites who deny our Jewishness.