For starters, if you think race is real, then you are part of the problem.
Most social scientists now recognize that race is no more than a “culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation.” In popular culture the term for this is social construction.
Race does not exist in nature, where there are continuums of differences stretching from one end of humanity’s biological spectrum to the other. Hair type, eye and skin color, bone and body structure physical characteristics typically used to construct racial stereotypes seamlessly transition into one another and cluster in innumerable combinations.
Humanity is more like a rainbow than a box of crayons.
Historically, racial lines have been drawn by those in positions of authority who wish to protect their advantages of power and privilege. To do so, they have drawn lines at arbitrary points along the continuum of human diversity that provide them with the most benefit. This is where the misleading but otherwise benign concept of race turns into the highly destructive instrument of racism.
The Greeks and Romans used a number of terms to reference the diversity they saw among populations in their far-reaching Classical world empires. Their concepts roughly equated with ideas of race and ethnicity employed today. Believing the differences they saw were largely due to environmental factors, they grouped humans according to geographical place of origin, shared lines of descent, and common culture. The emphasis was unabashedly practical and subjective.
In the Bible, neither a term for nor concept of race exists. Some people have imposed it onto the text to serve their own dubious agendas—as happened in America to justify slavery. The alteration and misinterpretation of the story of Noah’s three sons, Japheth, Ham, and Shem, was reconfigured to make them the predecessors of the Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid “races,” with Ham’s descendants bearing Noah’s curse of becoming a slave to the others.
How convenient!
Throughout the 18th-20th centuries, biologists and anthropologists attempted to systematize human differences into stricter, more scientific categories. Despite their illusion of objectivity, their results always served the colonial interests of Euro-Americans. Early scientific attempts to classify humankind were
accompanied by the arrogant and now-debunked notion of unilineal cultural evolution the theory that every society was in the process of moving up a hierarchical scale of progressive stages from primitive to advanced. Not surprisingly, the stages equated primitive with black and advanced with white, while other hues occupied levels in the middle.
Among non-Western cultures, India has a long history of racially linked discrimination inherent within its caste system. Historically, the higher the caste the lighter one’s skin was expected to be culminating in Brahmins with the lightest hues of skin color. The centuries old phenomenon persists today. White is still associated with purity and black with evil. China has its own historic version of racism, one exposed during the COVID-19 outbreak there.
Even Africa has home-grown racism and a history of slavery that pre-dates European colonial rule. Arab Muslims have also discriminated against and enslaved non-Arabs for centuries, notorious for their ruthless slave trade networks in Africa. South America too has an unsavory history of race-based
discrimination, especially toward indigenous populations and those of African descent brought as slaves.
From colonial days to the present, Americans have been divided by what we now call “race.” The Irish used to be considered “racially inferior” by the Anglo-Saxon English, as were the Italians and many other immigrant groups to America. A pecking-order of “whiteness” existed early on in our nation’s history, with groups moving up and down the scale depending on their changing roles in society and the status accorded incoming nationalities.
Slavery doomed us to see one another through race-colored lenses, and became a handy tool to exploit minorities, the poor, and powerless. When we elected our first “African-American” president, he, like so many others before him, was considered a black man, though he was half white (Caucasian). How did we arrive at that determination? Why not the opposite? Because race in America, as elsewhere, is a social construction. This is becoming ever clearer as genetic research by scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. helps us uncover a long history of interracial admixture in America.
The Problem with Race
If one believes that races actually exist as inherently distinct biological categories, the focus on differences opens the door for the worst of human nature to find expression.
Inevitably, humanity gets divvied up into various groupings of “our people” and “not our people,” making it easier to justify ostracizing and dehumanizing those “others.” Although Nazism is the prime 20th century example of thedestructiveness of an ideology of racial superiority based on the misapplication of human biological variation, racist ideologies litter history and currently exist
across social and cultural groups the world over.
Many people erroneously think that what divides us is what defines us. The notion of racial superiority is firmly linked to ethnocentrism, an affliction that taints the whole of humankind, wreaking havoc between communities, “racial/ethnic” groups, and entire countries.
