We All Know What Race Is
Right? Everyone knows what race is. We use the concept all the time. It is included in so many things that we do. The funny thing is, it does not exist. This cartoon image comes to mind when I think of how people use race, even when not trying to be racists. It is an absurd, non-existent thing.
I knew a guy in college who tried explaining to me that cigarette smoking was good for your health. I was smack up against an absolute absurdity, and I couldn’t accept it. I listed numerous things that depended upon the fact that his conclusion was 100% false. One that I recall was mentioning how every health text, in every health class, in every high school in America taught about the dangers of smoking. To which, he answered that his text said it was good for you. (Another absurdity based upon the first). Somewhere in the evening he said that his textbook was written by the tobacco lobby. This was obviously a lie, but he was trying to tie his imaginary world in with the real one that we both lived in. Right there was when, “the miracle happened”.
Most everyone that both of us knew took this guy, Pat, with a grain of salt. I couldn’t. It drove me nuts. I said, accepting his lying kind of contaminates everything else. You can’t absorb obviously false concepts into your mind because they can become support for other necessary understandings. This is what the concept of race is, from the Pat of the 1450s.
07/03/2023 @ 11:41 pm
Of course race doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have to, because it isn’t its existence that drives behavior, it’s the myths of its existence and characteristics.
Ethnicity exists, even if not always well defined. Ethnicity is often mistaken for race. Myths about race can be worse than myths about ethnicity because many tend to be biological. Whatever is vilified can be written off as somehow immutable. Not that myths about ethnicity can’t be bad. They can be awful.
07/04/2023 @ 8:42 am
Ethnicity can be changed as simply as changing the color of your coat. “Race” tends to require that you change the color of your skin. One could drop a vowel or a syllable from their last name and change ethnicity. As ethnicity is a social construction, it can be socially, (or individually) deconstructed, denied, or destroyed.
07/05/2023 @ 9:52 am
And race isn’t a social construction?
07/05/2023 @ 3:06 pm
No, it absolutely is. It is just harder to prove that it is an invention. It has skin color as evidence…for those willing to believe that it is something real.
07/06/2023 @ 9:06 am
With ethnicity, passing is easier. Changing, not so easy.
07/04/2023 @ 10:49 am
Lengste dag👍
07/05/2023 @ 9:53 am
Wasn’t that the 21st?