Race does not exist.
Now let me give some very quick history about homo sapien sapiens, and yes I am going with the rather controversial form of our scientific name under the argument that homo sapein neanderthalensis is a sub species of the genus homo.
We, in all our hominidae glory are a very young species. We only came out of Africa around 70, 000 years BP. The earth, by best scientific date is 4.54 billion years old. To put it better range, compress 4.54 billion years to just one year. We have only existed for 23 minutes*. We are basically a new born baby.
And like new born babies who can’t hold their neck up without help by parents, we have not existed long enough to evolve into different “races.”
There is no Asian race, no White race, no African race, no Latin race and etc.
Now there is a problem with that above sentence. Can you spot it?
If you don’t that’s fine, I didn’t see it for awhile either.
But I just used phenotype and geographic location interchangeably as an indicator of these supposed different human “races.”
What is Asia? A continent, including Russia. What is white? A colour. And in this terms used to describe a phenotype.
Now tell me what does an Asian look like? Black hair, pale skin, small eyes? What does a White look like? White hair, white skin, white eyes?
Now we are getting into phenotypes.
What is a phenotype? Well it’s Greek, and according to the biology-online.org it is “the physical appearance or biochemical characteristic of an organism as a result of the interaction of its genotype and the environment” or “the expression of a particular trait, for example, skin color, height, behavior, etc., according to the individual’s genetic makeup and environment.”
It’s what you look like in layman’s terms.
Now someone told me that only the Scottish have freckles. Not true. What is true is levels of frequency. Certain traits may show up more often in certain areas of the world than in other areas. I would argue that certain phenotypes are more linked to geography than biology, however that is not worth getting into here.
For freckles happening only in the Scottish, example 1: Lucy Liu has freckles. I do not believe she is Scottish.
Therefore that is invalid.
And now before people argue that she is an exception, I have freckles with no Scottish ancestor in me at all.
Now we’ve moved off phenotypes, let’s talk slavery.
Slavery predates concepts of race and racism.
Everyone forgets this. Europeans had slaves who were other Europeans, Asians had slaves that were other Asians, Africans had slaves who were other Africans.
“Race” was not a factor in slavery at the beginning.
I am not going to even try to argue that “race” did not come to play a factor in slavery, it did. And to ignore that is stupid and ignorant. But not at the beginning.
Now “race” unfortunately had some help by 18th century European scientists which started the lovely Europe-centric culture we’ve got going on, though one could argue it moved towards being rather American-centric now a days. Before then though, humans organised themselves by religion, status, class, language, and place of origin.
Humans did not classify themselves by what they looked like
“Scientific racism” became huge then 18th century by Linnaeus and Blumenbach, and by the mid 19th century race in terms of species had become widely accepted despite there is no biological evidence supporting this.
But no one listened, and these were outcomes a long with a lot of other big ones, say the Holocaust, and the Rwanda Genocide both of them are fairly recent. Rwanda only being 18 years ago, meaning that a majourity of the people reading this were alive at that time. Admittedly you may have been two, but still death because of “race” is ongoing.
Now factoring in that “Scientific racism just came about in the 1700s, just for the sake of making math easier say to be precise 1764 and we are now in 2012 this concept has only existed for around 250 years give or take, maybe less. Now in the Holocaust alone, approximately 6 million people were killed and in the Rwanda Genocide an estimated 800000 were killed, which gives us a rough estimate of six million eight hundred thousand dead due to “scientific racism”, and this is only in two hundred and fifty years.
Now the final point is that race and from that racism is made from society. It is not natural, nor has it ever been natural. Also its a fairly modern idea, if it’s only come to existence in the last 250 years.
Going back to the beginning when we made 4.54 billion years into one year, and the human race having been born for only 23 minutes? Racism then is maybe a nanosecond old. And race is only a nanosecond old too.
It’s new and it has to end.
— Victoria Chiu,
