Race is a myth

 

Race is a myth. A lot of things are actually – Gender, race, religious conflict, I could go on.

They are social constructs that were designed to keep humans apart, to create divisions that have historically justified wars, slavery and oppression on the basis of factors beyond the control of anyone.

To fully understand this, we have to go way back into the history of human beings – To evaluate why things are the way they are with reference to population distribution and the reasons for it, using the widely accepted theories formulated by really cool people like Charles Darwin and Karl Marx.

 But before that, we have to disclaim two things.

1.       There is an important distinction to be made between one’s skin color and one’s race. Skin color is a biological phenomenon relating to how much melanin is in your skin and has a lot to do with ideas of natural selection and migration. Race refers to the ideas surrounding one’s skin color in association with their ethnicity. The difference between the two is parallel to the difference between sex and gender.  

2.       There is a greater correlation between one’s geographical location and their skin color than between one’s ethnicity and their skin color. 

With that, we begin.

Seven million years ago in east Africa, humans first appeared. We know not of the exact circumstances surrounding this appearance, nor of the numbers in which they appeared, but what we do know is that when they appeared, they began to reproduce so rapidly that they soon overpopulated the available space.

Note that these people were fairly homogenous – They had a very close common ancestor but moreover, lived under the exact same conditions for the most part, meaning that if mutations happened, they were either a) very minute or b) inconsequential. These people, by virtue of living in the equatorial regions of the African continent developed dark skin. They had little body hair. They were the first ‘black people’.

But the story of a population is never that straightforward.

After a few generations, the population of these humans grew too large. The story of scarcity begins here – There were too many people with too many needs and even more wants and so, they began to break up in groups and settle in other parts of the world. Different periods of exposure to sunshine here led to varying degrees of importance of the melanin in the skins of these humans and mutations passed onto succeeding generations, coupled with the diets of these humans (e.g. more fish and vegetables in northern Asia, more meat in Southern Africa) led to these differences in skin color.

Somewhere along the lines however, the world got even more populated and with increasing competition for resources, war was born, beginning as being direct fist-to-fist combat. But this too lost effectiveness eventually. Promptly, humans had to think of another solution. Suddenly, women were being denied of opportunities because they were “too weak” to take them up and better suited for household work. From nowhere, black people were “uncivilized” and good “only for labour in factories and cotton farms.” Suddenly, entire communities of people were no longer entitled to civil liberties, and in the greatest act of systematic oppression, discrimination was born.

The problem with this was that these ideas were never proven to be true. They were, in many cases, opinions that were argued and explained to a select group of people in such a way as to speak to their interests and to make rejecting such ideas seem almost outrageous. What European capitalist would pass off the once in a lifetime opportunity to trade human beings by displacing them, putting them on ships where living conditions were horrendous and selling them for a few hundred dollars in North America? What man in the n^th century would pass off being regarded as the superior gender, revered for their purported strength and emotional stability, even at the expense of the supposed inferior gender?

The acceptance of these ideas by first generation misogynists, racists, etc. led to their being suggested to people within their spheres of influence and inculcated into their offspring. The effect of this was like wildfire, spreading rapidly and gaining leverage and eventually finding itself in Parliaments where in the final blow to human rights, they were inscribed as fact in Constitutions across the world where in many cases they still stand today, a testament to the power of an opinion.

But the thing is, nobody ever took the time to interrogate these values.

Because had we taken the time to sit and understand the underlying principles behind the many ideas, we hold today about the many issues we face, we’d realize how baseless they are. And it is a very special kind of wisdom to be able to pick apart ideas, to critique them and to decide on their admissibility.

Race is a myth. A lot of things are actually – Gender, race, religious conflict, I could go on. But they are myths that have become so inculcated into our minds that the only way deal with them is to work with them, i.e. it is far too late to start reconstructing the ideas of race. Perhaps one day it will be possible. But for now, advocacy has to focus on working within the system: Acknowledging the existence of gender and trading that off for the sake of advocacy for, in the very least, equality of these imposed ideologies. But this serves as a clarion call regarding the ideas we are predisposed to accepting, many a time, without dissecting them and analyzing their core beliefs, and the potential threat that exists regarding the ideas we normalize and how they impact future generations. 

Race is a myth. It is a myth that has become a reality because of the many years of history attached to it. Despite the fact that it is an idea that was created with a certain agenda in mind, its execution through things like the Transatlantic Slave Trade and racial profiling around the world has made it a reality that all too many people are forced to experience. It, together with many other things, is a social construct that was designed to keep humans apart; to create divisions that have historically justified wars, slavery and oppression on the basis of factors beyond the control of anyone.

They exist as thorns in the sides of a progressive world and were designed to keep people under control – To limit their capacity to actualize by instilling ideas about themselves and their communities into their minds; the wrong ideas.

These ideas are flawed and baseless. 

And they must go. 

Sincerely,

Muku

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash