Wise words, onionman. On racism: I think anthropologist C. Loring Brace has had the last word, so far, on the complex subject of racism in his magnum opus, Race Is A Four-Letter Word: The Origin of The Concept. He peels back the layers of human history and finds the false concept of race embedded in the birth of the science of anthropology which, in its early days, unfortunately did much to promote the idea that white Europeans were superior to other third world people of color. You’re right, Glenn, to not understand it. Race is a pseudo-scientific concept, not a scientific truth. There is only one species of human, no subspecies, races or varieties.
Without pointing fingers at the first people who understandably thought of other humans outside their tribe as “the other,” he describes how sailing ships enabled Europeans to arrive in foreign lands suddenly facing very different looking people. Brace explains how those physical differences evolved as adaptations to different climates as humans migrated. He invented the term “racialism” for the tendency to regard other strange-looking Homo sapiens as a different race of human and assigns no blame to those who unwittingly subscribe to it.
“Racism,” on the other hand, is the purposeful use of outdated and debunked racialist ideas to subjugate and demean other people. Brace has no tolerance for that.
Side note: he also had no tolerance for new CA governor Ronald Reagan who announced upon assuming the job in 1967 that taxpayers should not be subsidizing “intellectual curiosity” in the state’s universities. Brace promptly left UCSB — where I had had the privilege of attending his Physical Anthropology class — and continued his decades-long career at the University of Michigan.
Wise words, onionman. On racism: I think anthropologist C. Loring Brace has had the last word, so far, on the complex subject of racism in his magnum opus, Race Is A Four-Letter Word: The Origin of The Concept. He peels back the layers of human history and finds the false concept of race embedded in the birth of the science of anthropology which, in its early days, unfortunately did much to promote the idea that white Europeans were superior to other third world people of color. You’re right, Glenn, to not understand it. Race is a pseudo-scientific concept, not a scientific truth. There is only one species of human, no subspecies, races or varieties.
Without pointing fingers at the first people who understandably thought of other humans outside their tribe as “the other,” he describes how sailing ships enabled Europeans to arrive in foreign lands suddenly facing very different looking people. Brace explains how those physical differences evolved as adaptations to different climates as humans migrated. He invented the term “racialism” for the tendency to regard other strange-looking Homo sapiens as a different race of human and assigns no blame to those who unwittingly subscribe to it.
“Racism,” on the other hand, is the purposeful use of outdated and debunked racialist ideas to subjugate and demean other people. Brace has no tolerance for that.
Side note: he also had no tolerance for new CA governor Ronald Reagan who announced upon assuming the job in 1967 that taxpayers should not be subsidizing “intellectual curiosity” in the state’s universities. Brace promptly left UCSB — where I had had the privilege of attending his Physical Anthropology class — and continued his decades-long career at the University of Michigan.
I highly recommend his book if you can find it.
Awesome!