Outing Race: An Essay
by David M. Loucas, MD
February/March 2003
Apparently Trent Lott’s sin wasn’t in what he believed- about this country being better off in 1948 if a segregationist Dixiecrat (Strom Thurmond) had won the presidency. His sin was in actually saying it. For many in the Congress as well as throughout this nation, it is okay to have hate thoughts, and to have a system of beliefs that denigrate and debase some people. Apparently, it’s even okay to do this shielded by a heretical interpretation of the Word, an apostasy from Christianity- a twisted understanding of God’s Love. It is just not politically correct in polite company to blurt out ones passion for prejudice, intolerance and bigotry in an opened forum- leaving the people who share your beliefs with the extreme discomfort of having to feign indignation, paste mock surprised expressions on their faces or espouse beliefs that are contrary to their actions and common discourse. It certainly would have been different and even politically correct had Trent Lott made his now infamous blurt before some closed reactionary group of likeminded bigots whose charter was an ode to self-aggrandizement through the affirmation of a neurotic mythology that made a self-fulfilling prophesy out of every absurd scrap of nonsense that they chose to endorse about their own assumed God selected superiority.
Mr. Lott was stripped of his leadership power position among the Republicans in the Senate for the crime of elucidation. If you stop and consider what has just happened, Mr. Lott’s transgression is no small one. Not so much because he gave offense to a broad section of Americans whose history is marred by outrageous acts of horror and intolerance, but rather because he put at risk the continued existence of the underlying lie to which the undeserving have glutted on unearned advantage. The damage that Trent Lott did to the delusions of his bigoted buddies and to the cause of intolerance may be irreparable. Let’s hope so!
Just in case Mr. Lott’s apologetic catharsis is the beginning of a cascade reaction that will be the harbinger of a new human reconciliation and understanding, here’s an essential bit of information that is unknown to most people. The faint of heart may want to avert their eyes at this point. This may well be analogous to debunking both the Santa Clause myth as well as the tooth fairy to a child. The fact is that: RACE IS NOT REFLECTED IN A HUMAN’S GENES. There is no such thing as ‘race’ among humans. About this there is wide agreement among anthropologists and human geneticists. The notion of race exists as a social and cultural construct, but from a biogenetic standpoint there simply is no marker that distinguishes one socio-cultural group from another. Remarkably darker people differ as much from each other genetically as they do from lighter people. And that makes perfect sense since they are all the same race. What makes this fact even harder to believe is that we have been so inculcated and indoctrinated to the contrary that we had to elevate visual variations of no actual significance (skin shade, facial features) up to the false domain of human racial delimiters. Even for those so-called enlightened liberal types who measure their tolerance by such utterances as, ‘They are just like us’, miss the point by a genetic mile. Of course the reasoning having ‘them’ just like ‘us’ leaves those who are members of the ‘us’ some comfortable wiggle room to be appropriately uncomfortable about ‘them’ dating our children, or ‘us’ going out with ‘them’ to a restaurant or on a cruise. It is simply not true that ‘they are just like us’: THEY ARE US! Until and unless this fact becomes held as a truth and as a buffer against the rote lies that have contaminated our discourse there will be those of us who will cleave to unfair and unearned advantage. As long as we are opaque to the truth we will never know the pure light of true grace and redemption, and our lives will continue to be shallow and our place will continue to be purgatory.
If we are to change the content of our thoughts and beliefs as acts of purification and renewal, then we should also change the syntax of our words and our language. Here are some rehabilitating recommendations:
1. The word ‘Negro’ has connotations of black and death. It is not a nice word and should not be used to describe other humans. It is a word that has been a justifier of race designation and a fortifier of the notion of otherness. It should be filed in the same trashcan with the ultimate abomination word, nigger.
2. It is just absurd to describe humans as black and white. This is so for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that people aren’t black or white. Beyond that which is apparent though the notion of black and white denotes things that are antithetical and antonymic: day and night, good and bad, holy and evil. We must stop cleaving from each other through the use of toxic language that nurtures a lie.
3. If color or human shade designations are to be used- in descriptions for example, then we can assign people identifiers such as light, light brown, medium brown or dark brown or even very dark. Similarly noses and lips may be described as they appear: full, thin, flat, wide…
4. The term ‘interracial’ is applicable in describing schnauzers, Dobermans, and German Shepherds. It has no application to humans, is totally inappropriate, and therefore should be scrapped.
5. With all due and heart felt respect to the NAACP, we ought to phase out and ultimately retire the term ‘Colored People’. The term is another myth handle and propagator of the ‘us and them’ mentality. Are the people who are not colored, ‘uncolored people’?
6. We must all come together on affirmative action as a moral imperative, an act of true contrition for those who are us whom we have so unfairly and cruelly disadvantaged by an adherence to a self-serving and heinous philosophy that espouses: It’s okay to do anything to anyone no matter how egregious or hurtful as long as we can rationalized it and get away with it.
For those who will accept the truth about who we humans are- with our cultural and social diversity enwrapped by our now proven genetic equivalence and our individual flaws and strengths, we can celebrate our multifaceted existence, knowing that ultimately we really do come together as one. For those who would fan the flames of old myths and lies there is only anguish and anger. To promote bigotry and hatred is profane. To ignore the truth is inane. To believe that somehow this will change is insane.
In the end Trent’s biggest affront was for being indelicate in his assertion of an allegiance to a system of beliefs that at its very core stems from the enslavement of human beings and the subliminal desire and longing for the continuance of that enslavement. So having opened the casket to the light we see that the evil within is still alive, breathing. Once and for all, and perhaps thanks to Mr. Lott, we should be able at last to thrust a stake into its rotten heart and kill it dead.
Dr. Loucas is an Internist who heads the Department of Evaluative Medicine and Risk Assessment at the West Palm Beach Veterans Medical Center. He originally hails from Brooklyn, New York and is a graduate of the New York University School of Medicine. He is 58 years old, has three adult, beautiful café latté children and one life mate and wife- the very noir Patricia Loucas- entrepreneuse and owner of Unique Concierge Services: www.unique-concierge.com.
Copyright (c) 2003 David M. Loucas, MD. All rights reserved.
Date: Tue, February 11, 2003 6:07 am
From: George Winkel
Subject: Re: Outing Race: An Essay
Dr. David Loucas wrote a fine essay, Outing Race: An Essay. In fact, his observations debunking the plural human “races” myth are so erudite that I feel I must disagree with him on certain points which I think are important.
Taking things in order of their importance in my view, I notice first that Dr. Loucas concludes his essay attributing Senator Trent Lott’s recent rejection for senate leadership to:”… his assertion of an allegiance to a system of beliefs that at its very core stems from the enslavement of human beings and the subliminal desire and longing for the continuance of that enslavement.”Dr. Loucas goes on expressing his admirable hope that exposing this evil “subliminal desire” as opening Dracula’s casket will kill it (racism) dead once and for all, “thrust[ing] a stake into its rotten heart.” But I think Dr. Loucas is missing the target aiming his rhetorical “wooden stake” at Senator Lott’s heart or any other human being’s heart, rotten or not.
Dr. Loucas has just told us his shuffling through DNA evidence persuaded him “race” does not exist. Yet he blames racism on evil in the hearts of men, targeting Senator Lott as example. Puzzlingly, Loucas seems to blame continued belief in false “race” on racism in the “rotten” hearts of southern “white” men, “subliminally longing” to be served by slaves? Senator Lott never had slaves. No man alive is spoiled rotten by slavery. If slavery was an addictive lifestyle, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, that habit was broken by the American Civil War. I see Loucas’s error as blaming evil men instead of the evil machine which in fact is to blame; and which by its pseudo-science, its hypnotism, victimizes us all, even racist evil “white” men whom it fills with subliminal fear, not longing. I blame the institutionalized plural “races” delusion which Dr. Loucas exposes so well.
Soviet Union leaders use to prop up decrepit Communism by always hunting “evil men” to blame, instead of blaming the system. They hid the inherent flaws in Soviet collectivism. I believe here, Racism is a rotten system kept propped up the same way.
Racism is merely the shadow cast by the not-looked at system of alleged plural human “races.” To me attacking “racism” without engaging its cause is absurd – that is – unless one’s heartless political ends are regarded justified “by any means necessary.”
Dr. Loucas advocated, in one of his points, dropping the term “interracial.” I disagree. I also disagree with his negligent miscounting with his claiming that no race exists. One human race necessarily exists for seeing and admiring all the racial variation and distinctions we are and all share genetically in our one necessary human species. It is the biologically unnecessary, spurious plurality of named “races” (named as implicitly bounded proper nouns), which does not exist. The unnecessary, made up, “subspecies” taxonomy, spuriously dividing Homo sapiens, names the false plural human “races.” They have no natural, necessary biological existence. They are arbitrary. The “races” exist in language only primarily in the language they began in and always have existed in law and government. It is the plural “races” taxonomy promoted in our law which is suitable for breeds of dogs and the other artificially selected (Man-bred) domesticated animals. But unbounded racial descriptions and ideas (e.g., interracial marriage, biracial people attracting the notice of strangers, multiracial identity and so on – NOTE, these “racial” descriptors are NOT nouns) are real, true, and necessary to the parsimony of science.
I am inclined to agree with Dr. Loucas that describing people’s complexion in noun colors (“black,” “white”), is hard to separate from identifying them as those colors, proxying for named “races.” The “of color” euphemisms march by with the years, vainly attempting to separate the descriptions from the notion of separate “races.” Separate, meaning different abolishes all hope of racial equality so long as our system mesmerizingly suggests “races.” Their only purpose is to suggest “difference” dividing our humanity in arbitrary “groups,” meant taxonomically to classify our “types” (i.e., unnecessary “subspecies”). Plural “races” taxonomy was originally suggested by European “whites,” who centered it on themselves as “Caucasian” people. In the paradigm of unnatural suggestion which is the same “races” hypnosis, “white” thus defines “top.” It is a top-down system of suggested racial inequality, which is impossible to deny while mesmerized, under its hypnotic delusion.
After law and government, I blame the plural “races” hypnotic delusion-system on cowardly Science. Medicine, too, is a guilty accomplice with hundreds of years of unclean hands. Timid Science did not have to await DNA evidence. The human species has always recognized itself. The proof of our specific inter-fertility is the necessary proof – all of it! Everything else is arbitrary. However, Science submitted to pseudo-science, by letting arbitrary slanders displace parsimonious logical necessity, from the beginning. Science took a powder in the eighteenth century; and still today it peeks timidly around the sheltering DNA corner at the social wreckage its centuries of yellow-bellied cowardice has allowed.
It clearly is a system, propagating the plural “races” delusion. Law and Science accuse each other. Meanwhile, the social engineers of “minority race” identity politics inexorably grind out balkanizing multicultural separatism, while ostensibly “fighting racism.” Where can this course lead, with “races” eternally fearing, fighting one another, but to ethnic cleansing in America (again)? Any truly addressing the “rotten heart” of racism will do all that it takes to dismantle the delusional, hypnotic plural “races” belief-system. This needs to start with dismantling Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action is predicated on the slander that “black” and “minority races” exist needing extra help (except Asian?) upholding a facade of “equality.” Such self-fulfilling government doctrine of “different” (inferior) “races” is flagship of the hypnotic legal lie that all men are not created equal. This is only the beginning.
George Winkel