LTE: On Race and Biology

Date: Sun, December 29, 2002 5:57 am
From: George Winkel
Subject: Letter to the editor: Kwame X segregates himself in a “black race”

Reader “Kwame X” Knawledge@blackhistory.com (Date: Fri, November 15, 2002), wrote (in part; with his misspellings, punctuation corrected so as to help read him):”When will you understand ‘race,’ … matter[s]? There are obvious differences b/w us, even if you think these differences are superficial/insignificant. You can’t just simply IGNORE them. …

“How you look does and always will matter. That’s human nature. How you look matters, it affects how others view you and how you view yourself. People differentiate from people who look different then them. “Let me speak how I honestly feel. The idea of living in a ‘color blind society’ where “we are the world” reigns, and I can’t distinguish myself as a proud Black man (not better or worse then anyone else, just different) makes me so sick to my stomach to the point of vomitting. I don’t want to be viewed as ‘no different’ then whyte people [sic]. That disgusts me. This is just how I feel. “Race” is not something that you will teach away as ‘unscientific.’”

Kwame X clearly doesn’t want to be thought a “white” person. But he contradicts himself before declaring that “’Race’ is not something that you will teach away as ‘unscientific,’” saying:”I am not arguing that we [“black”] are a completely different species, or completely different biologically, which ‘race is not a biological concept’ scientists keep insisting is not so, WHICH I’M NOT EVEN ARGUING IN THE FIRST PLACE.”
Whatever Kwame X tried to say, everyone of our human race are clearly one and the same species. (Species Homo sapiens.) Otherwise no biracial, Mulatto, or any other multiracial persons would even exist. Some people argue virtually all the African Americans are “admixed” with “white,” so that effectively “black” means “multiracial” and therefore the Multiracial identity should be dropped. (They are so full of themselves, they seem to think “black” and “white” are the only two “races.” Is one of them Kwame X?)

Again, “black” identity activists, with Africanized names who remind me of Kwame X, seem so full of themselves that they often forget other color-coded “races” were recognized beside “black” and “white.” How many of these plural human “races” are there? How can science count them?

The dismal taxonomy of “race names” (e.g. “Caucasoid,” “Mongoloid”), from the beginning evoked some continents, or only part of Africa in the case of sub-Saharan “Negroid.” But most continents are interconnected land-masses – certainly Europe, Asia, and Africa always were as far as evolution of mankind is concerned. Their names, their boundaries were arbitrarily given them by people. Continents never knew where they began or ended. Neither did pre-modern peoples, who simply lived where they lived, and did not concern themselves with fabled “subspecies” rumored to “divide” the human race across suggested “race-lines.” The result of widespread humanity made racial variation – variation visible from space, in the sense that racial comparisons across distances of such scale caught the attention of eighteenth century European and English travelers. Racial variation first caught the attention of Englishmen running the Virginia Colony, looking for profit growing tobacco in the American colonies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. (The Jamestown colonists first landed in 1607. First Africans arrived in 1619; they were treated the same the English servants working off their indenture-contracts. The plural “races” proposal was not “scientifically” suggested until 100 years later.) The planters, after 1662, solved their problematic labor shortages growing tobacco, by declaring themselves to be a “white race.” It justified for them, among other things, their importing and breeding “black” Africans as slaves. The fabled “separate” “black race” which Kwame X seems so proud to be remains this most repugnant leftover “badge” of antebellum slavery (1662-1865).

So, the “difference” Kwame X seems so committed to proselytizing was invented about 1662 to clear “white” consciences to treat “black” “red” (every other “color” people) as sub-human. After all – “race” means “subspecies.” The way that human “races”-taxonomy came into being, and all its long history implying “difference,” was to claim the “whites” were superior; the “blacks” were not equal. (Can Kwame X understand that “different” is not “equal”?)

The triumphant 1960’s civil rights movement was committed to integration, not to Jim Crow’s old or to Kwame X’s new fable of “different, unequal” “races.” Kwame X evidently has no use for that hard-won civil rights victory, however. He wants to toss it away and be “different” – “minority,” etc.

“Black” people of decades ago, living through the segregated Jim Crow years, had “different,” “separate,” “minority” – they had the segregated, separate world of Kwame X’s “black identity.” But they did not find happiness segregated off in their own world as if they were quarantined, diseased. What they wanted, struggled many whole lifetimes for, and finally won the means to achieve in the mid-1960’s was integration. And by integration they meant assimilation with the “mainstream,” with “white” society. Until only 100 years before, in antebellum times when master and slave lived in close proximity, “black” people must have dreamt of some day exposing the plural “races” fallacy then used to justify handling them as chattel – for branding them two-legged livestock, “altogether unfit to associate with the white race.” (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 407 (1856).)

Why does Kwame X wish to sell his American birthright? Will he trade it for a bowl of porridge out of fear his skin color will smudge the “white race”? Will he sell himself and his children down the river to save the “white race” from having to change its name, due to having Kwame X and his descendants in it? Why does Kwame X take on himself such unconscionable sacrifices merely to whiten the “white race”? Who cares (beside Kwame X) which complexions “color” our American “white race” or what it calls itself? All that counts is the counting our one human race.

George Winkel