Reply #20: The idea "race" is very flexible nonsense: it is an empty vessel into which [View All]

[struggle4progress]

people can pour vague feelings and ideas.

The one purpose of "race" in Western history has been to mystify exploitation and extermination by providing the excuse they are of a different race than us, a excuse which (conveniently) cannot be refuted because it has no scientific content to refute.

Can we become rich planting sugar in the Caribbean? Then let us enslave the natives and when they have been worked to death, we shall import other still people from across the seas also to work to death. Can we become rich by stealing this land? Then by all means let us exterminate the original population. Can we become rich by forcing most of the population into to farm as share-croppers? Can we become rich by exploiting Irish or Chinese immigrants? It is always acceptable because they are a different race than us.

Since the concept has no meaning, every discussion involving the word is filled with bogus "meanings": the unknown sexual proclivities of that savage race, their inability to value life as we do, the thousands of years of odd traditions and ancient tribal rivalries which that curious race cannot possibly overcome, ad nauseam

Though there are no "races" there nevertheless certainly is racism, a scheme insisting some people are simply trash by accidents of birth, a doctrine teaching some idiotic nonsense like if several of your great-great-grandparents was born into a traditional African society then you must be ashamed. This racism was designed to serve the institutional structures that "race" was intended to obscure: it is easier to exploit people who believe (for some logically unintelligible reason) they deserve to be exploited. The antidote to this psychological poison is straightforward: it is to recognize that everyone has a right and duty to choose who to be in the real world, to fight back against ignorant idiocies and oppressions, crude or subtle.