Inspired by the book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara J Fields and Karen Elise Fields
Race is the conception or doctrine (ideological fiction) that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined on the basis of inherited genetic and behavioral traits (personality/character).
Biological race is the classification of human beings based on subjective and arbitrary phenotypic traits that can’t be consistently ascribed to all within the “racial group”. There is more genetic variation among individuals in “racial groups“ than between them. Meaning, for example, there is more genetic variation among populations of people from East Asia than between populations of people from East Asia and Europe.
Small arbitrary differences are zeroed in on to make the case for race. For example, different adaptive processes occurred in populations in different parts of the world due to varying environmental climates, mutations occurred, and the ones that increased survival were selected for, which increased that particular trait within the population.
Skin color is a human adaptation to ultraviolet ray bombardment. Darker skin (increase melanin production) was evolved via natural selection in populations who found themselves closer to the equator. Populations that are closer geographically are likely to share some phenotypic adaptations due to similar environmental pressures on evolution. Melanin is a broad category of natural pigments produced by melanocytes; via melanogenesis, absorbing 99.9% of all ultraviolet radiation, protecting skin cells from mutagenesis (cancer).
When the totality of genomic evidence is taken under the scope of review, the hypothesis of racialized human populations collapses into absurdity upon the slightest examination. Race is a quasi-genetic taxonomic unit; two generations of anthropology, genetics, and molecular biology have demonstrated that there are no sub-species-level populations of Homosapien sapiens that are larger than the local breeding group (one’s family ancestral dissent).
Race is a classist and cultural invention reflecting the specific material interest of the dominant Euro-American planter elite of the time. The creation of racially ascribed identity groups supplied the means of explaining slavery to those (Euro-Americans) whose social terrain was a republic founded on a radical doctrine of liberty and natural rights. More importantly, a republic in which those doctrines seem to represent accurately the world in which all but a minority (African-American slaves) lived.
Only when the least reflective members of Euro-American society became aware of the anomaly of the denial of liberty to a minority of society, did racial ideology systematically explain the anomaly (i.e., slavery among African-Americans)
Race explained why some people could be rightly denied what others took for granted, namely, liberty, a supposedly self-evident gift from god. It was used as a narrative of ascribed difference to naturalize existing human-created hierarchies as justified and legitimate, creating a self for filling prophecy of systemic inequality.
It was not African-Americans who needed a racial explanation. It was not they who invented race. Euro-American planter elites resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty coexisting differentially in a democratic federal republic by defining African-Americans as a race. African-Americans resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of the infernal institution of slavery.
In the words of Frederick Douglass, the creation of race was not color but crime, not God but man; what man can make, man can unmake.
My point is that the act of racecraft transforms a person’s action (racism) into an inherent characteristic of another person’s being (race). The transmogrification of race into an identity is an attempt at making the immaterial material.
Race is not an element of human biology, or even an idea; race is, an ideology that came into existence at a discernible historical moment. In this instance, I use professor emeritus Adolph L. Reed Jr.’s definition of ideology which is the mechanism that harmonizes the principles you want to believe you hold with what advances your material interest.
Racism is the theory and practice of applying a social, legal, or civil double standard purportedly on the basis of ancestry; put more simply, it is the withholding of the presumption of equal humanity. This is not an emotion or state of mind; it’s an action or rationale for an action that takes for granted the objective reality of race as just a defined ontology.
Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide, which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion or superstition, or a hoax; it is a crime against humanity.
Race exists because of racism. It’s a cover story to sustain a particular hierarchy of exploitation and oppression. And if race lives on today, it does not do so because we have inherited it from our forebearers. But, because we continue to create and re-create it today, David Brian Davis had the courage and honesty to argue that during the era of the American revolution, both pro and anti-slavery voices were complicit in the infernal institution of slavery by settling on race as its explanation. We must today be courageous and honest enough to admit something similar about our own time in our own actions. What is needed today is not a more varied set of words and categories to represent racism (race) but a politics to uproot it.
Zedicus Thinks Ⓥ 