Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Rachael Dolezal, Racism and Denialism

So someone working to advance the interests of people of 'color' doesn't seem actually to have any African or otherwise dark skinned ancestry. If that offends you, if you think someone with say 10% African ancestry would be better at the job, are you a racist?  Just asking because I don't know what a racist is any more and I'm afraid to ask,  Everyone has a different opinion and often a self-contradictory one.

It's not actually something I'm very concerned with, I care about what people do, and not who their great, great, great grandparents were, but for those people, like Bill Nye who insists there is "no such thing" as race it must cause some dissonance. If race is non-existent, how does one select which one to belong to except at random?  As far as I know, there is no legal standard and if there, as some say, no scientific standard, how can there be a problem? If Rachel Dolezal "identifies with Black?"  why complain?

After all as I heard the Bow Tie Science Guy say, all of us humans can cross breed and the offspring will be human so there's no such thing as race, which argument of course depends on a false definition of race closer to Species.  If you're reading this, we're certainly all the same species, The official catechism is that we can't tell a man from a Manatee by looking at the genomes which again is a falsehood.  Looking at my own genome it's apparent where my ancestors came from over the last thousand years or so without looking at my face or hair or eyes. Some from the British Isles, others from what is now Germany, France, Italy, etc, etc.  Many of us have had our genomes mapped for various reasons.  The results can be what you expected or otherwise, but if you're blessed with sub-Saharan ancestors, the percentage thereof is apparent as is the location within Africa.

If your ancestry is Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western European -- Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, it's as apparent. as your gender is, with or without the "operation"  Just to poke Nye in the eye, I've found that almost three percent of my forefathers were Neanderthalers who were not actually the same species as modern humans. Lions and tigers can produce offspring with characteristics of both parents.  They are not the same species as any science guy should admit.

Is it that some academics need so much for things to fit the dogma they make a living from or that they think we just can't handle the truth?  Because if one controls the definition of race, one controls the definition of racism and if one gets to say who is or isn't a racist one has a lot of power in today's world. It's the "you can't handle the truth" approach to science that smells so much like religion to me however.  Like most religious rhetoric I find it an insult.  I'm insulted by those who demand I accept that there is no difference between male and female, Indian and Italian and it's all the product of culture and so all distinctions are null and void and usually bad.

Or varied genome is our history and each of us is a grand travelogue of our long and various journeys that separated us and then brought us back together. To deny it is to deny our mothers and fathers and to deny them is to deny our common humanity.

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