The Problem of Race
By Neil Gonsalves | Are racial categorization inevitable, or in the battle between philosophy and ideology have the generals cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war?
Written by Neil Gonsalves for Seeking Veritas on Substack
“Race is the child of racism, not the father.”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
Race is not a biological fact, but to many it is a social reality. Race is the host on which the parasitic monster Racism feeds upon. It’s only over the last five centuries that race, as we understand it today, has become an organizing principle constructed socially, politically, and legally to structure societies, comprehend experiences, and develop identities. Race is the shorthand that allows us to categorize the US and the THEM. - But is it deterministic, unchanging, and eternal?
Should we nurture race, take pride in it, hold on to it or reform it? Should we celebrate the black experience, and the brown experience? What about the white experience, is that a current social fact or merely a historical reference? How about the blended beige experience or the more ambiguous white-adjacent experience? Where do they fit on the cherished mountain of lived experiences? What wisdom might we access if we choose to imbibe from the sea of human experience instead?
Singularity
Regardless if you are a descendant from the Indus Valley, the Arabian desert or Mount Something-Mythical, for all those who believe in a supreme deity, that omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent watchmaker - the origins of humankind has a singularity and a common, albeit divine source. A oneness, a masterpiece that reflects its creator. For some the supreme deity with divine power created a goddess through whom the first human was born, who subsequently fathered the rest of humanity. Some insist that humans are a special creation built in the image of the divine. Others yet will offer that the supreme being created the first human from clay and then breathed spirit into him.
For the secular science-y types, the great origin story began with apelike ancestors approximately six million years ago, which led to bipedalism, large complex brains, and ultimately the capacity for language. It involved a walking tour out of Africa into Asia, ultimately leading to Europe and eventually the Americas. Notice however the origins of humankind here too has a singularity and a common, albeit evolved source. A oneness, a masterpiece that reflects cause and effect, adaptation and variation.
For the believer and the non-believers alike, the accepted wisdom is that from one we became many. That point is worth repeating. FROM ONE WE BECAME MANY - Said differently, before we were many we shared a common humanity, a foundational origin story grounded in singularity, a history of cooperation not just conflict, and a proliferation of life by multiplication not division. Moreover, regardless of a secular or religious disposition, history demonstrates a consistent human capacity for blending, adapting, and growing community, notwithstanding our other equally prolific proclivity for ostracism, retrenchment and destruction. Our capacity for language allowed us to organize dominion over all other living beings, while ironically creating disharmonies among ourselves.
Racial Categories
According to the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA):
“No group of people is, or ever has been, biologically homogeneous or “pure”, human populations have never been biologically discrete, isolated, or static … and there is significant scientific consensus that genetic variability within and among human groups does not follow racial lines”.
There is a certain arbitrary and artificial division in what we understand today as race and therefore racial experience. The most damaging legacy of racial essentialism are the structures of inequality that have tainted the human experience, both past and present.
So if five centuries of data, history, and yes experience has taught us that racial categorization is a by-product of prejudice, bias, hatred, and their corollary, racism - why do we cling on so tightly to a construct that has done so much to undermine our common humanity? Race is not a biological fact, and yet we use it and embed it into our education system, our government, our workplaces, our policies and our personal lives.
The Paradox
One may logically conclude that we have so deeply internalized the construct of race that the most critical among us see it as an inevitable social fact, immutable and eternal. However once you arrive at that conclusion, you’ve boxed yourself into a paradox. Race is, at one and the same time, not real and also the source of the greatest injustice. From that vantage point you must fight the thing that both isn’t there and is also consistently kicking your arse and holding you down. Of course to not appear as merely a shadow boxer, you must commit to its existence, lest someone thinks you are simply fighting an imaginary enemy.
Let me be clear; we all do operate in a world that acts as if race is real, we design systems around the concept and order society as if it were true but for the lie to work it must be constant and unwavering. In the morning when the bigots arrive and speak of superiority and human hierarchies, you will fire back that we are all the same if only they could go further than skin deep. You will remind them that DNA proves that “between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about 0.1 percent.”
In the evening however, when the agent of the state arrives you will remind them of the historical marginalization and the need for special interest groups and race based remedies. You will advocate for creating programs for the racially oppressed (well at least those that can also organize and enlist lobbyists). You will support targeted grants and funding models that support your uniquely selected racial group deemed deserving.
You may even articulate a reason why the money should flow to the equity deserving before the equity seeking groups and definitely over the historically privileged even if some of their members are currently impoverished. It appears there are great incentives for everyone to keep the concept of race intact. We really need to think about why we do that, and more importantly how our fealty to the concept inhibits our ability to address racism where it exists.
The Prestige
So is race the child of racism or the father? Are we so varied we must either fight or celebrate our difference, or do we originate from a singularity worth remembering? Do we have black, brown or white experiences or simply human experiences? Experiences full of complexity, contradictions, and duality.
Perhaps I spend too much time philosophizing about an ideology whose tenets are already calcified, whose litmus test I cannot pass, whose dogma I cannot adopt, whose canonical doctrine I will not recite, and whose orthodoxy I will not abide. Or maybe it’s hubris that has made me believe I have any of this right.
I borrow then bastardize Hume’s account of Epicurus when I ponder, if racism is evil and race its progeny, can we not stop it? If we are willing but not able, then we are impotent. If we are able but not willing, then we are malevolent. If we are both able and willing, then its continued existence is simply evidence of complicity or worse apathy. That’s the generous reading, the alternative would be far more cynical, but dare I put Mark Antony’s words in the mouths of the ideologues, who knowingly may utter, “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” for time and time again we have seen that there is a predictable albeit contrived order that comes after chaos, regardless if that chaos originated organically or by design.
I could say, to hell with it, let the devil take tomorrow but conformity has alway been so damn boring!
About the author: Neil Gonsalves is an Indian-born Canadian immigrant who grew up in Dubai, U.A.E. and moved to Canada in 1995. He is an Ontario college educator, a TEDx speaker, an author and columnist, a recreational dog trainer and an advocate for new immigrant integration and viewpoint diversity.
Sankarsingh-Gonsalves Productions 2024
Notes:
https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/
Introduction to Human Evolution | The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program
Understanding Human Genetic Variation - NIH Curriculum Supplement Series - NCBI Bookshelf