Charles Benedict Davenport, a world renowned researcher at the time, observed, for example, that if a member of a tall race, such as the Scots, should mate with a member of a small race, such as the Southern Italians, their offspring could inherit the genes for large internal organs from one parent and for small stature from the other, resulting in viscera that would be too large for the frame.
Naturally these claims were not tenable for long, but they were soon replaced by assertions less easily disprovable, as some social scientists insisted that the children of mixed race parentage were morally and intellectually inferior to either of the parents. Although belief in such genetic mismatches was once fairly widespread within the scientific community and cited specifically to rationalize various racially oppressive policies, this notion now enjoys far less credibility.
However, while there has been absolutely no evidence that racial interbreeding can produce a disharmony of any kind, warnings of some kind of genetic discord are still far from entirely extinct. Only a few years ago, Glayde Whitney, a prominent geneticist and former President of the Behavior Genetics Association, claimed that the intermarriage of "distant races" could produce a harmful genetic mixture in offspring, citing the wide range of health problems afflicting African Americans and their high infant death rate as examples of the effects of "hybrid incompatibilities" caused by white genes that were undetected due to the "one drop" convention defining all "hybrids" as blacks.
Unsurprisingly, he was also a regular speaker before neo-Nazi groups and, in an address to a convention of holocaust deniers, blamed Jews for a conspiracy to weaken whites by persuading them to extend political equality to blacks. Another trend in the scientific justification of racial discrimination has been the claim that prejudice is a natural and indeed an essential phenomenon necessary for the evolutionary process to be effective by ensuring the integrity of gene pools.
In this view, evolution exerts its selective effect not on individuals but on groups, which makes it necessary for races to be kept separate from each other and relatively homogeneous if there is to be evolutionary progress.
One anthropologist who adheres to this belief refers to the tendency to "distrust and repel" members of other races as a natural part of the human personality and one of the basic pillars of civilization. Finally, the most common way in which science has been used to support racial discrimination is through pronouncements that some groups are systematically less well endowed than others in important cognitive or behavioural traits.
This is not to say that there may be no group differences in these traits, but rather that at this point there are no clear conclusions, which in any event would be irrelevant to issues of social and political equality. Others see racism as merely a series of basic errors in thinking. Non-racists all know that the visual appearance of a person does not identify what kind of person they are or how they will behave.
There is no direct relationship between what a person looks like and who they are. A person who has dark skin is not innately different from or similar to any other person. The idea that people who belong to the same cultural group, who look the same, are all the same is just nonsense; no one is ever the same as anyone else.
Yet racists believe that humans are grouped into distinct races with very similar abilities and behaviours that allow each group to be ranked against another. And a racist always believes that they are a member of the superior race; historically, there are no examples of evidence being put forward by race theorists that a race other than the one they belong to is superior. Racism remains socially significant because it is a basic tribalism that allows groups and individuals to imagine that they are superior.
Everyday racism involves local and contextual actions that rely on the shifting interplay of values within contemporary society. This interplay allows extreme views and racially motivated statements to be discussed as a feature of free speech.
It is the rich and the powerful who are the beneficiaries of this false consciousness. It is the poor and the powerless who are divided into white and Black and yellow and red. The rich and the powerful use these fictitious racial categories to get people to despise each other and thus conceal the real battlefront — the one between classes. Race is the colour codification of that relation of power, not that relation of power itself.
Nothing but the delusion that he or she belongs to a superior race while they share identical economic hardship with equally disenfranchised people they have been told to hate as Black, brown, yellow, or red? In the same vein, if you do not feel a victim of the very same colour codification then you are not Black, brown, yellow, red, or any other colour thus designated by the same code.
You are a human being. We do not need the false colouring of our troubled imagination. We need the polishing sparkle of our peaceful souls. The four women who Trump targeted, Reps.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez N. Policy encompasses written legislation, mandates, acts, and regulations in governments, institutions and businesses to influence behaviors. Policy also comes in the form of practice—regularly exercised procedures that are also used to influence behaviors. Many policies are unwritten or are implied through communicated rhetoric. Many voters make decisions and vote on racist rhetoric just as they would act on issues of foreign policy or social security.
Racism should never be diminished as a distraction—history shows well that the strategic deployment of bigotry is a default practice used to undercut democracy.
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