(This assessment applies with equal validity to ANY type of discriminatory behavior--both to the discriminators AND to those discriminated against. There is a shared responsibility in any dialogue, and no situation involving discrimination ever involves someone merely speaking privately to themselves.) ...In human terms DNA analysis dismantles the idea of race completely. Race has no biological reality, says Professor Jonathan Marks of Yale University; the human species simply doesnt come packaged that way. Rather, race is a social, cultural and political concept based on superficial appearances and historical conditions, largely those arising from encounters with other peoples as Europe developed a global reach, with the slavery and colonialism that followed. It was not only Linnaeus who knew that race is a fiction. In the mid-nineteenth century E.A. Freeman famously discredited the whole idea of community of blood, as did Ashley Montagu in the mid-twentieth century. Even Hitler knew it, despite making the concept central: I know perfectly well...that in a scientific sense there is no such thing as race, he said, but I as a politician need a concept which enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely new and anti-historic order enforced and given an intellectual basis...And for this purpose the concept of race serves me well...With the concept of race, National Socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world.... ...To advance beyond racism one has to advance beyond race. But that goal is not helped by what Sartre called anti-racist racism, as with the Black Power movement and its cognates. It is understandable that communities which suffer prejudice and abuse should shelter behind a protective assumed identity; but identities grow rigid and become a source of new pieties, new excuses to repay evil with evil—and thereby indirectly entrench the very idea that lies at the root of the problem. Racism will end only when individuals see others only in individual terms. —A.C. Grayling, Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 17:32:22 +0000
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