truepenny | IBARW--let's think about the word "race"

And let's understand that the concept behind the word "race" is completely bogus and likewise invalid, because it's the idea that the human species can be divided up in a pie chart. And the human species can't be divided up like a pie chart. If you had really fancy graphing software that could graph three-dimensional Venn diagrams, you could maybe represent the human species like that. As a species we do not, so to speak, color within the lines.

(I am not saying that ethnic diversity does not exist or shouldn't exist. I'm saying that the word "race" carries with it the baggage of a conceptual framework that does not work.)

And then there's the problem of what constitutes a "race." In the nineteenth century, the English considered the Irish a different (subhuman) race, complete with egregiously simian caricatures that look horrifyingly familiar to anyone who's read--oh, for a random example--Tintin en Afrique. Or pick your pictorial representation of Africans, or persons of African descent, as ape-like. And, mind you, Victorian ideas of "race" were backed with scientific evidence--just like the idea that criminals could be identified by the shape of their ear.

"Race" also, of course, has built into it the assumption that one "race" is superior to another. You don't need to catalogue the ways in which the Irish, or the Africans, or the Jews, or the little green people from Mars are inferior to the fine upstanding Anglos if you aren't setting out to prove that the fine upstanding Anglos are the greatest thing since, well, ever, and are rightly masters of the universe. Hence Manifest Destiny--and, you know, I remember learning about Manifest Destiny in junior high history classes, but I can't remember anyone ever mentioning that it was (a.) complete and utter bullshit and (b.) the direct ideological cause of, hello, GENOCIDE perpetrated by our heroic ancestral Anglos against everybody in their way.

Also, hence the Final Solution and the Holocaust. And even that isn't enough to kill these bogus ideas about "race" and the inherent superiority of one group over another. Because the thing about our dominant culture, all these Anglos striding around like they own the place, is that it seems to need constant reassurance, constant bolstering, and thus the constant demonizing, Othering, oppressing with which all cultures different from itself are greeted.

To be fair, I suspect this insecurity is a characteristic of a culture being dominant, not a culture being Anglo, but it got reversed in classic Freudian fashion (sneaking suspicion that this other group may be cooler than our group transmogrifies into loud assertions that our group is obviously cooler than that other group, and that other group has cooties, as well, so there), and then codified by the Victorian scientists and explorers who were busy making sure it was their, Anglo, culture that dominated, by God. And a lot of the world is still living with the fallout, one way or another.

My point is that the ideas of "race" we're still wrestling with are based on a lot of bogus Victorian pseudo-science. Oh, the Irish have moved up the evolutionary chain to be "white," but the Victorians, both British and American, had equally silly ideas about Jews, Africans, African-Americans, Asians, other non-white people encountered in various parts of the globe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And while we (using "we" to mean the dominant Anglo-American WASP type culture that gets itself proliferated via movies and television) may have ditched the bad science--at least some of us, to some degree--we're still floundering around in a morass of cultural assumptions that they started and nobody's yet managed to dismantle.

This problem is what post-colonialism is about: trying to learn not to see with white Victorians' eyes. The terrible thing, as post-colonial artists and scholars have proved, is that you don't have to be white to be trapped in that very narrow viewpoint. Because they taught their way of seeing to all the native peoples they didn't just kill. And did us all, as a species, a great disservice thereby.