Sample From a Race Denier

From this post, New Cavalli-Sforza Gene Maps, a comment from a race-denier:

Why do you categorize people like this? Race is purely a social concept not a scientific concept. I hate to see people categorize people like this, it makes no sense to do so. We all have the same 46 chromosomes.

Nothing makes us different than skin, hair and facial features. But how important is that? They are all beautiful in their own way. It is ridiculous to keep putting people in groups. Africa is a continent full of people with different facial features, hair, and skin. But all is beautiful.

Just like Europe has people with different skin, eyes, and hair. I am tired of reading about Africa and seeing people trying to separate everyone due to looks. This is 2009!

Well, I must say, I object to this whole line of thinking. Why don’t we stop putting animals and plants and languages into groups, after all, separating them out just makes us want to kill some plants as weeds and cultivate others for crops? Some animals are varmints to be exterminated, while others are cuddly and furry house pets. That’s so discriminatory. Truth is they are all just critters. Why separate out languages anyway? It just makes people fight. Look at the Sri Lankan Civil War that Obama, the World Media and the World Elite are all so ecstatic about since the fascists got the upper hand. In a huge way, this was a war over language. Let’s quit dividing up all these languages and just say that we all speak Human. This nonsense was already getting started back in 1962 with the big fight over Carleton Coon and Carleton Putnam. They were both upper-class Northeastern bluebloods, one a professor of history, the other a businessman and author. Putnam plunged headlong into the Civil Rights controversies raging at the time, while Coon coolly stayed out of it all. At this time there was a war going on between two schools of anthropology, the Boas School and the anti-Boas school. The Boas School had the upper hand. Boas was Jewish and had for some time been pushing a strong anti-racist and even race-denying, “culture is everything” line. Margaret Mead was an acolyte, played for a sucker by canny Oceanians and hung to dry later on humiliating winds of ridicule for her silly meanderings about culture in the South Seas. This was 1962 and anthropologists had good reasons for being Boasians. Eugenicists and racialists had just about blown up the world while massacring millions on the grounds that they were genetic defectives. The Civil Rights Wars were raging in the South. At this time, Carleton Putnam wrote a book called Race and Reason, a horrid racist tract that is appallingly revered by White nationalists to this day as one of their Bibles. This blatantly White Supremacist diatribe was distributed widely in Southern schools were teachers were forced to teach it to K-12 kids as a mandatory syllabus. Its premise: Blacks were inferior, there was nothing to be done about it, they were uncivilizable and did not deserve equal rights, and therefore, segregation was proper. The deeper line, not explicitly stated, was that integration would eventually so result in a mingling of the two races in the South that the feared specter of miscegenation would raise its head. Blacks and Whites would so interbreed that the result would destroy the Great Southern White Culture. It sounds retarded to most sane Americans nowadays, but White nationalists, believe it or not, still talk like 1962. In this environment, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) was holding regular meetings, and segregation was often discussed. The segregationists had enlisted a number of racist scientists to advocate that Blacks did not deserve rights equal to Whites. Segregationists like Putnam felt that Boas and his fellow Jewish scientists (mostly Communists, according to him – Putnam was enchanted by the Nazi-like Commie = Jew line) had perverted science in favor of an “equalitarian” agenda that was blatantly anti-scientific. In particular, Putnam hated social anthropologists. He expected that Science Guys like physical anthropologists and geneticists would better help the segregationists cause. But these folks wanted no part of the segregationist cause either. In 1961, the AAPA held a meeting where they denounced Race and Reason and the uses to which Southern segregationists were putting it. Carleton Coon was president of the AAPA had been carrying on a surreptitious conversation with Putnam for a year or two. In outrage, Coon resigned as head of the AAPA. Later, Coon published The Origin of the Races. It did not get a good reception, and segregationists used it to further their cause. Coon’s theory was opposed to the current Out of Africa model, and suggested all five races – Khoisan, Bantuoid, Caucasian, Asian and Australoid, had all evolved from separate Homo Erectus types over many hundreds of thousands of years. Coon concluded that Blacks were 200,000 years behind Whites in evolution. This theory has now been proven to be incorrect, and science had shown the all modern humans came out of Africa in the past 70,000 years. And most of the major races are less than 12,000 years old. Nevertheless, Coon did some great work in physical anthropology. He delineated a race called the White Race or Caucasian Race that included Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Arabia, the whiter parts of North Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. He did aver that there were what he called Australoid types in India who were not White. As a Pan-Aryanist or Pan-Caucasianist, I appreciate his reasonable boundary-marking of our people. The AAPA issued some silly resolutions back in those days, and they were well on the road to race denial. You would think we would have made some sensible progress in almost 50 years, but we’ve only gone further into dumbass race denial. For such a supposedly smart species of critter, that’s pretty discouraging.

References

Jackson, Jr., John P. 2001. ‘In Ways Unacademical’: The Reception of Carleton S. Coon’s The Origin of Races. Journal of the History of Biology 34: 247–285.
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6 thoughts on “Sample From a Race Denier”

  1. Race deniers are like young-Earth creationists. Despite the massive, easily identifiable, straightforward and incontrovertible piles of evidence, they believe religiously in their insupportable paradigm.
    The difference is that while young-Earth creationists are mocked and villified, race denial is the cultural norm. For every true-believer race denier, there are 1000 people scared into silence. I would very much like to know what a true-believer race denier thinks when he looks at the NBA or the 100m Olympic races.
    “Race is a social construct” is perhaps the most baldfaced widely accepted lie in human history.

  2. The notion that there is an evolutionary ladder is incorrect. There is no superior or inferior life-form. It is impossible for any particular race to be more evolved than any other race because there is no degree which to measure evolution and any measuring system someone could invent would be flawed.

  3. I think that there are archaic and progressive humans, for sure. I also think that some humans are more evolutionarily advanced. I’m sure that Asians are more evolutionarily advanced that we Whites are, for instance. As far as whether Blacks are less advanced than we Whites, I am not going to discuss that. I do think that Aborigines are pretty primitive folks. I suspect that Bushmen may be too.

  4. I wonder if Patrick is making the point Noam Chomsky made in the opening pages of ‘ Hegemony or Survival’: that there is little evidence that ‘intelligence’ is an advantage by the evolutionary criteria of survival and increase of the species. Chomsky points out that, by these criteria, the cockroach is the most successful product of evolution.

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