Is "Race" More Important Than Skin Color?

by: francislholland

Mon Nov 02, 2009 at 19:08:09 PM EST

Francis L. Holland Blog said...(at The Desultory Life of a Public Citizen blog),

The biggest "struggle with race" is the struggle for Americans to acknowledge that "race" does not exist and it never did. The concept is just a mental redlining of our minds, the way whites' banks redlined "do not loan" neighborhoods wherever Blacks were predominant. The biological concept of "race" is a tool to keep the "races" segregated, and to naturally assure that Blacks received the short end of the segregation stick.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Human Genome Program:

"DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other."

In other words, the Human Genome Project has proven that, as a matter of scientific fact, that which we call "race" does not exist as a matter of biology, and so all references to "race" are references to a fallacy.

Blacks and whites use the term and fallacious concept "race" ubiquitously in our publications. Does this mean that the concept benefits the oppressed as much as it benefits the oppressor? Does ANY social construct benefit the oppressed as much as it benefits the oppressor?

I think we have to decide who has benefitted and continues to benefit more front Americans' belief in the existence of "race" - whites or Blacks. Once we have come to a new level of consciousness that the concept of "race" was not invented by whites to help Blacks achieve liberation theologies, then we can make a conscious decision about whether we want to perpetuate believe in something that has been, as a matter of science, wholly disproven.

Look at it this way: Is there any reason why a scientific hypothesis whose existence has been disproven by modern science should still structure our debates about skin color and skin-color-related politics, culture and sociology?

If you begin to use the terms "skin color" and "skin color groups", you begin to see that the word "race" is superfluous at best and represents a fundamental miseducation of the populous - Black and white - in reality.

The Francis L. Holland Blog

November 2, 2009 3:02 PM

Francis L. Holland Blog said...

When whites invented the concept of "race" they hoped it would perpetuate slavery and they knew this concept would tie our minds in intellectual knots for centuries to come.

So far, they have succeeded. Just Google the word "race" (even while excluding usages that could refer to bike races and ball bearings) and you discover that the term "race" has been used 448 million times in the United States in the last year alone. That's a lot of usage for a scientific concept that has no basis in science.

If, instead, you search for the phrase "skin color", you'll discover that it has only been used 4 million times in the United States in the last year. The concept of "race" is used more than one hundred times more often to describe "skin color" than the simple visible fact of skin color is.

What this means is that we are more willing to believe in a hypothesis about the relationship between skin color and DNA ("race") for which there is "no evidence" than we are willing to believe in and study the sociological, cultural, economic and political importance of "skin color", which is something that we can see with our own eyes!

In the words of Spike Lee, we have been bamboozled. All of us.  "Race" is the most ubiquitous scientific concept that has no basis in science.