The subject of race is subject to many long, drawn-out, emotional, nuanced arguments subject to personal beliefs and almost totally without confident resolve or objective conclusions. Here I will attempt to provide an explanation as to why all these debates are, have been, and will be, unnecessary, without factual merit, and bathed in projections of our beliefs onto reality.
Some time ago there was no life on earth. As complex organic molecules began to form, life emerged on this planet, bringing with it a multiplicity of organisms designed to survive in the environment they were borne into. As life begat life, and change continued its course, shaping the new organisms with the same forces that drove their original creation from those complex organic molecules, there were lots of bacteria, fish, algae, coral, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and so on. And then came man.
Man was an interesting creature. Like some other mammals, the species of man was divided between male and female. Somewhere in what we now speak of as Africa, men and women lived in caves and other shelters, both made by their environment and by themselves. These people, to us, may have seemed to look alike. Cavepeople. We can all access a portrait of these folks from our ancestral memory. Long, dark body hair, a shaggy mane, tanned skin, unibrow.
While to us, these people seemed the same, within their group, they surely seemed totally different. One caveman, lets call him Fred might say to his wife, Wilma, "Our neighbor Barney and his wife Betty are a couple of waterholers. Look at them with their fair skin and light hair. They're so much more stupid then us, I mean, just look at their pet kangaroo, what the fuck is that about?" And Barney might say to Betty "Gee Betty, I'm starting to think Fred and Wilma are different than us. Just look at them with their dark hair, olive skin, and mustard colored garments. It just doesn't make sense to me."
And life went on. As people spread across the globe, more differences emerged. All the while, by the same constant change of nature that produced the organisms that preceded Man. At no time did ever a division exist in that unbroken causal chain from the dawn of man to the beginning of time.
But as things went on, differences still grew. More change produced more variety. As time went on, while they also would squabble about whether Pebbles ought to be legally allowed to wed Bam-Bam on account of their differences, they got new things to think about. Under the same sort of circumstances, true racism emerged, bathed in the glory of the ideas that preceded it. These ideas also, a part of nature, part of an unbroken chain of events in nature, and, like life, the ideas of race took shape and became, figuratively, living animals of their own.
And it wasn't just japes about Betty's firecrotch or Pebbles' problems in school anymore. No, now Betty was said to have belonged to a group called "Caucasians" and Bam-Bam was now said to have belonged to a group called "Italians" Now, at no point did Betty or Pebbles or anyone else ever break off from the world and become separate from the other things in nature. What broke off, figuratively speaking, was the idea. The idea, the race-animal, if you will, became widespread and accepted as a way to talk about groups of people with common differences. The animal though, was, is, and always will be, a figurative one. At no point did the animal transverse the gap between the quite literal skulls of the people who came to use the idea and the reality surrounding them in which they observed these differences they came to name. But make no mistake, all of this was a natural process, all part of an unbroken chain of events we call nature.
So what do we make of this race-animal, now that it has become the joke it always was? I don't know. Should we use the language of race? Do we need to? Why do we use it, simply to make things faster, easier, or more simple? At what cost?
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