If you will bear with me on this, several random events have happened recently that have lead to this diary. Thoughts on language and this issue that some call race.
More below the fold.
Over the weekend I was cleaning out a box of old papers that I keep down in the basement. I like to go to yard sales and auctions and I have a friend who collects old military papers so I pick up things for him and then periodically mail them to him. As I was sorting out the things that I wanted for myself from his pile, I came across an old publication from the Naval Academy. The name is escaping me right now, but it is a magazine put together by students for students. It was from 1939 and as I flipped through it I was unexpectedly struck by a few jokes referencing "mokes." Now I thought I knew most of the derogatory words out there, but "moke" had escaped me. I looked it up and saw that it is yet another derogatory term for a black person. Then later on in the magazine there was a horrible cartoon featuring a profile of a black person's head that made him look like a worm with big lips. Truly disgusting anywhere, but in a publication made by the "greatest generation," it was really repugnant.
With that in mind fast forward to Armando's diary about race. I hate that word and I apologize if I was a bit too strong in my wording regarding that issue. Seeing the "wormish looking black man" so soon before that article had made me too sensitive on this issue I think. Back in grade school we were learned how to classify plants and animals. Kingdom Class, genus species, etc. Well, race isn't on the list and so my scientific mind rejects it as a viable classifier.
Regarding race as a classifier, I like the way that Wiki puts it:
Since the 1940s, 1. evolutionary scientists have rejected the view of race according to which a number of finite lists of essential characteristics could be used to determine a like number of races. Many evolutionary and social scientists think common race definitions, or any race definitions pertaining to humans, lack taxonomic rigour and validity. They argue that race definitions are imprecise, arbitrary, derived from custom, and that the races observed vary according to the culture examined. They further maintain that race is best understood as a social construct. Other scientists, however, have argued that this position is motivated more by political than scientific reasons.
I completely agree.
So what makes people different and how do we describe it. Superfically, the thing we get caught up on is the degree of pigmentation. Then religion, speech, music, clothing, history, oh there's hundreds of ways to dissect us and categorize the collective us. And we get caught up on it, we thrive on it. Especially the pigmentation and the history. I am of the poorly pigmented oppressor group and your people were the oppressed and I can't understand you if I don't understand every nuance of how my ancestors oppressed yours and how it carries on to this day. Let it go already.
Then we have the incident at work. Seems a black truck driver and his black helpers were making too many wolf whistles to some of the Guatemalan girls at the plant. So the Bolivian scalehouse manager took up for them and it escalated for a few days. Andthe story got back to me that this brouhaha was "racially motivated."
Excuse me? And your proof of this is what? Why does pigment have to be the scapegoat for all our differences and squables? When does a truckload of boorish, impolite, sexually-immature men just get to be a truckload of boorish, impolite, sexually-immature men? When does the Bolivian guy get to be just a nice guy taking up for nice girls just trying to do their job? I don't give a rat's ass in this situation that the guys giving offense had black pigment. They were wrong and I leave it at that. But others watching the events won't and some reporter may catch wind of it and then the next thing you know it will appear at six o'clock as, "A continuing sign of mounting tension between the races."
It's crap, and I'm sick of it. I don't care what ethnicity you come from or how pigmented you are. The neighborhood I live in shows it; black, white, latino and plenty of them are poorer than me. I love all kinds of music, even hip hop and R&B and I play it all the time, sometimes just to piss off my bigoted neighbor in the end unit. I'm sure I know the term he uses to classify me!
But seriously, I care that we get away from using the term race, a construct of the nineteenth century. Call it a tribe, call it ethnicity, just liberate your mind from the yoke of that word. The wormish looking guy in the magazine will thank you. He's not of a different race as me, there are no sub-orders to humanity, he's just a human being, same as me. But by perpetuating that word, we subliminally reinforce the idea that someone with different pigment, who eats different foods and worships a different god is somehow less human than I am.
Sometimes I say, a jackass is just a jackass. I will know that we have gotten somewhere when we call the offending person a jackass first and then a (insert pigmentation of your choice) jackass second. "But chillin," my critics will say, "you are turning your back on all that history. You were just six credits shy of a minor in history; you of all people should know better." Yup, they're right, but I am not a part of history yet and therefore I choose to get over it.
In closing, for the next year I challenge you to remove the word "race" from the discourse. I think we would all be better for it.