Race: The Truth

Race: All of You Fools Fell For It
An Honest Examination by a Young Revolutionary



Now, don’t get me wrong. I am all for human progression. I love the computer I’m on, the internet that allows me to express myself, the radiator keeping me warm, the refrigerator that keeps my food cool until I cook it with the stove that I also love. I have a ball shampooing and conditioning my hair, brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush, and all under a steady stream of water warmed in a gas boiler. Believe me, these luxuries are fantastic, and they speak volumes for the progress that man has made. It is indeed an honorable thing, and credit should be delivered where it’s due.
Likewise, I am willing to admit that this, the convalescence from primitivism in the form of expendable luxuries and the industrial expansion that makes it possible, is, for the most part, a product of the Western World. So here I am saying to you, Anglo Saxon Protestant, and to you, Indo-European Industrialist, and you, Fair Skinned Imperialist, thank you for how far we’ve come to this point today. Without you, we may still be without air conditioning, cars, and airplanes. I honestly believe that the world truly appreciates it. Some of us just have a hard time appreciating who did it. And why? Why would a world, once devoid of he immense amount of luxuries at our current disposal, a world that had never before stepped foot on the moon, gazed so far into the cosmos, a world without meteorology that could effectively (within a margin of error) predict the weather, not consider the “White man” a savior and ultimate benefit to this world?
Well because, admittedly, something seems… “awry.”
I’m sure the majority of us thinkers have an understanding of the amorality of taking advantage of anything in order to create something that a single group of people perceives as “better”.
Let’s all be honest, here. Just as the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, there exists the ability to do something “good” for all the wrong reasons. Take the emancipation of slavery, for example. Why did the United States decide to “free the slaves”? Was it sympathy? Mercy? Humanism? Left-Wing extremists? No. You know why. It’s the same reason why anyone in the world with power does anything. More power. And how aside expansion does one accumulate more power? Money.
Yes, freeing the slaves yielded more money. If it isn’t obvious enough, the Civil War, as in every war, had everything to do with money and power. The Civil War was divided between the Union (those who desired to do away with the anachronistic, slave-fueled agricultural economy and progress to the Industrial Revolution), and the Confederates (who knew that the abolishment of slavery would uproot almost all of their business and render them either an industrial worker or destitute). There is no in-between. If it were more profitable, or even as profitable, to continue slave trade and slave usage, then the United States would have. But just as the factory worker was later laid off due to mechanical replacements, so were slaves being freed prior.
And what comes of a world wherein the primary concern is money? Now dissonance outweighs complacency. War outweighs peace. Identity is obscured. Culture is confused for status. Ironically, hundreds of thousands of people live amidst disease, pestilence, and poverty, and thousands more die every day as a result. And this is all within our country alone, and at a much smaller scale than many parts of the rest of the world. But greed is only a generalization behind this terrible state of affairs? Especially in this country, a large portion of it could be attributed to one concept: “race”.
Race is an idiotic concept derived mostly from nationalistic precepts rooted in Heidegger and Hegelian philosophy. Its basic premise is that people from different geographical divisions with like histories and cultures therein are separate and opposing peoples, meant to pursue exclusively their own progression at the expense of, or at least without benefit to, the other divisions of people. This resulted the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the stifling of the resurgence of another Greco-Roman Empire, the birth of colonialism, and the sudden taxonomy of people determining their quality and worth, and based only entirely on arbitrary trivialities such as appearance. Such is how the world has been shaped for over three hundred years.

The Divine White Skin

It appears to be the popular belief that a mass of glowing white angels in uniforms stitched with gold and silk with cups of tea in one hand and guns in the other descended upon tribes of cannibals who didn’t bathe, slept outside, and spent their days killing one another, and either saved them or cleansed them. This is the farthest from the truth. Whether it was natives in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia, those whom the colonialists encountered were not extremely unlike the colonialists themselves. The countries from whence they came courted characteristics such as the belief that bathing is unhealthy, the fashionable display of one’s genitals below their short-fitting tunics, frequent and catastrophic epidemics, and streets lined with refuse and dead bodies. By today’s standards, or any standards for that matter, that is hardly civilized. Likewise, those they oppressed rarely lived in “straw huts”, but more often fully-fashioned homes built with the resources available to them, and societies complete governmental systems and trade much like the people Europeans left behind in their native countries. The only major differences between the oppressors and those being oppressed were the guns and colonialist perspectives that the Europeans brought with them.
Granted, the Europeans did seem to have a step-up on matters such as education, but this could likewise be easily explained. Unfortunately for those who were being occupied, many of the dictators that governed the European’s targets used the same techniques of control that their Anglo-Saxon oppressors did against their own people. Among these control mechanisms included an illiterate and uneducated proletariat (or serf or lower class), static in their social status in order to sustain the ruling class’s power. This would be exactly why the Europeans endeavored to educate those they were occupying: to create dissonance amongst the society and weaken the established government. It worked like a charm.
This has prevailed over hundreds of years and continues today. This may be why the “White Race” is ostensibly superior—but how could other societies possibly develop when they are constantly being occupied, confused, derailed, and misguided? The point is, though, that anyone could have done it. These techniques and resources didn’t simply spring up from the supposedly exceptionally developed “White” mind. This was an accumulation of trials and attempts over hundreds of years—Europe was entangled in battles amongst itself, religious crusades, and cultural revolutions, all due to an insatiable hunger for more power. While the rest of the world attempted to coalesce where they could and otherwise benefit from their abundant resources or sustain their own massive empires, Europe was teaching itself through spilling millions of gallons of its own blood and of those around them until they had perfected the art of conquest. At the same time, they visited other nations and took what they could to further their goal; gunpowder from China, the use of prevailing winds from the Middle East, literacy and civilization from the Moors, and many, many other foreign inventions and innovations. Indeed, without the rest of the world, the “Divine White Skin” would be nothing but skin sans melanin. So then, what is all of this race nonsense about?

Race=Bullshit

Race in Medicine
One article, in defense of the race concept, suggested that studying physiological variation between races could be effectively applied to medical science in that treatment could be developed for specific “racial” divisions that would better suit their needs. This is a very compelling argument that could not only validate the division of races, but also apply it in a positive way.
Still, this sort of thought only reaffirms a human division nonetheless where no real human division exists. To base the variations of human physiology on a fallacious taxonomy is myopic and naïve because we’re not truly realizing the reasons for these variations. Allow me to explain.
In this same article, Ethnic Differences in Bone Mineral Density Were Identified in Chinese American Women, a sample of Chinese American women were found to have a significantly lower bone mineral density than those in a Caucasian female database. The article rationalized this study by pointing out that diagnoses of postmenopausal osteoporosis can now be more accurately diagnosed for women of Chinese descent with this information (Medicine and Law Weekly, 52). Notice, first and foremost, that there is a significant difference between a sample of 359 Chinese women and an entire database, but the real question was whether there any other possible reasons as to why these women had BMD deficiencies aside from the fact that they were Chinese.
According to the article Postmenopausal Bone Mineral Density In Relation to Soy Isoflavone-Metabolizing Phenotypes, women who consume soy, yet possess a phenotype that renders them incapable producing a chemical known as O-DMA, have a significantly lower BMD. (Maturitas May 2005: Pages 315-324.) This article illustrated that “White” women as well as Asian women can possess this phenotype—but the demographic that is more likely to consume soy would be Asian women. Along the same vein, such as the published record of the experiment Bone Mineral Density and Bone Turnover in Hyperprolactinaemia of Various Origins that concluded that more than anything else, diet and weight influences BMD (Endokrynol Pol 2007; 58(2):116-122). Ergo, it would be more logical to consider what about Chinese Americans aside their Chineseness that lowers their postmenopausal BMD, and that information could be infinitely more beneficial to medicine than relying on conclusions derived from an experiment conducted within the scope of a faulty classification.
This is only one example, but evidence that race is a conjectural classification is scattered all throughout scientific studies. Robert A. Thisted, chair in the Department of Health Studies in the University of Chicago wrote, “Is race a social determinant of health? Certainly the notion of race is a social construct, and there are notable mortality differences between whites and blacks in the United States. Yet we should be reluctant to say that race per se—the socially constructed label—causes poor health and early death. Rather, we are inclined to attribute these differences to multiple correlates of race, both biological and social.” (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 46.3 Supplement (2003) S65-S73.) Similarly, a special article in Family Medicine states: “While race is widely used as a way of identifying patients, this practice has been challenged as conceptually flawed, potentially misleading, and possibly prejudicial to th patient.” (Family Medicine June 2001: 33 (6) 430-4.)

The Significance of Geography and How It Influences Genetics
Indeed, there is far more evidence of the race concept’s fallacy than arguments defending it. There are three factors of geography that human variation may be attributed to: Physical barriers such as mountain ranges, oceans, desert regions, etc.; the effect of geography on climate which leads to the adaptive evolution within species, and the chemical or mineral variations in terrain and soil. (King 11-114) An example could be the gradient in hair types and corresponding skin complexions in relation to climate. In colder parts of Europe, for example, you will find majority straight hair with lighter coloring accompanying lighter skin complexions. In Mediterranean regions, though, you’ll find curlier hair and tan or olive skin. In the warmest climates, most people have very kinky hair and much darker skin. Furthermore, most human variation occurs within the population of a given area as opposed to between what we consider to be “races.” According to various scientific sources, 94% of genetic variation occurs within each continent. In other words, a Russian is more likely to be genetically different from another Russian than a Filipino. When one considers the facts with a critical eye, objective even to socially conditioned classifications, the truth becomes obvious.

Anthropologically Speaking
Of course, the subject of “race” has been approached in the study of humans, or Anthropology, as well. According to an explanation by Dr. Dennis O’Neill, the evolution of human classification is as such:
The first classification is known as the typological model, and was developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and divided variations in human evolution by recurrent distinguishing characteristics such as appearance. This was invalidated on the basis that too many of the criteria excluded those they were supposed to represent (for example, Europeans were classified to have fair skin, skinny noses, and blue eyes, but this excludes an enormous number of genuine Europeans) and that many proposed “races” have base characteristics from one (ancestry), but distinguishing characteristics from another (appearance).
The second classification brewed in the early 40’s and was based on shared characteristics between populations that have bred amongst themselves for extended periods of time. Called the populational model, it was discarded on the bases that populations that have bred only among themselves is rare and does not reflect real human evolution and variation, but rather idealistic perspectives on the same.
The last and prevailing means of classification, known as the clinal model, traces the gradual movement of genetic phenotypes from one region to another and has existed since the 60’s. This has, in one hand, exceptionally contributed to understanding human evolution and variation, but on the other hand, leaves no room for extracting classifications based on race in its interpretation. (O’Neill, Dennis. “Modern Human Variation: Models of Classification” Behavioral Sciences Dept., Palomar College. 3 July, 2007. 8 Nov. 2007. < http://anthro.palomar.edu/vary/vary_2.htm>)

So Then Why Do We Have Race?
To conclude, race is an instituationalized, conjectural taxonomy meant to instigate a hereditary classist system. Just as the United States’ current economic construct is proposed to be manufactured in a way that keeps the wealthy rich and the poor destitute, this classist system with “race” as its premise keeps arbitrarily classified people locked within their social constructs and dissonantly distracted from real issues. The effects, unfortunately, are real; in that same article from Family Medicine, certain connections were drawn between health and social constructs, and not purely on the basis of race, but rather on the basis of the social influences of the institutionalized concept of race. Problems were cited such as hypertension and dietary issues, all linked to race-influenced estrangement or economic straits. Moreso unfortunate is the fact that this country could have a far more solid foundation with a united people, indiscriminant in their cultural or aesthetic perspectives, and who instead concentrate on their ability to hold eachother up and together, advance. Divided we fall, together we stand—this is the concept that should have such powerful influence over the people of this country.

~ P.