"race is an artificial construct "
If race were an artificial construct, it could be torn down by social means.
Race is tied directly to the biological imperative to distrust groups that do not look like you, a clannish behavior that kept associated social groups together in a world where banding together saved your life. We are talking evolutionary biology. How do you think we got so diverse to begin with? The fact that we can interbreed with viable offspring makes us the same species, but it doesn't go a lot further than that in terms of tens of thousands of years of conditioning and genetic hardwiring.
We are not very far removed from that biological imperative. Racial differences of lesser varieties, ie nordic v. medittterranean, were also used to help displaced humans know who their friends, their kind, were.
It is no longer a useful genetic trait to be averse to association with "others", but it is not a social construct. It is biological.
Overcoming it begins with facing it for what it is. Whether we ought to overcome it is a valid question.
Whether discriminization is right or wrong is a different question. That is the problem with the approach many take to the problem of race. They put it all together as one problem. It isn't one problem, it is a host of problems.
I like heterogeneity. I think a Swedish Blonde and a African Black are both beautiful and I don't look forward to the time when we are all one boring blended race. But for our difference to remain, we can't interbreed at the rate we are going. In 100 generations, we will all look the same racially. On the one hand, that will probably end most of the race problem, but the biases will just shift within the new blended race, as it does among intraracial bias today.
Beauty may be the new black. And then we can all suffer equally for our deviation from what is considered "the best way to look".
And the biodiversity among humans will be lost. And look at what that does to other natural systems.
Some non-political thoughts to munch on.
(Full Disclosure: I am a Heinz 57 mutt of Cherokee, Tuscarora, Welsh, and German, so I have no agenda on race other than the superficial appreciation of the differences in the world that are beautiful for an artist's eye and soul. I am visually drawn to extremes of most types of visual information, including "people" information. The more we all look the same, the more boring our images will become.)
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The trouble is that by then, like the sickle cell mutation, other mutations found only in other ethnicly isolated populations will be lost.
Sometimes people forget that we are animals first, people second.
If the argument for biodiversity applies to other animals, it applies to us, as well.
This post wan't so much an argument as an observation. I think it is an observation that scares the hell out of people who want us all to just be one group. The idea that a variety of races is a good thing is new information to the global unity crowd.
I think that there is a variety of races for some reason, and that reason is NOT the superiority of one over another, but simple biodiversity. To eliminate it without understanding its possible benefit for all of us is unwise.
Stopping hating each other over it would be really good, though!
Your post and all of the comments raise very interesting points.
There are numerous reasons for the variety of racial identities. However, I believe that racism is driven more by psychology than biology. Racial prejudice and segregation actually works against the biological imperative. There have been studies on human attraction and human scent which indicate that most human beings are actually attracted to people outside of their immediate genetic group. This mixes the gene pools and inhibits the proliferation of genetic diseases.
But what the reason for the variances in race, I often wonder why we as human beings have to complicate things. No one really questions why you have different color tulips or various breeds of dogs. Yet, for centuries people have tried to confer various values to racial differences rather that simply enjoying their beauty.
Race IS largely an artificial construct.
Biologically, there are only three races--Caucasian, Negro and Asian.
The very dark-skinned Pakistani kid my daughter dates? He's Caucasian. But tonally, he's darker than most of the African American kids in our neighborhood. He's thus viewed as "non-white," if not black here in good old America.
Mexicans, El Salvadorans, etc.,? All Caucasian. There's no such thing as the Latino or Hispanic "race."
Arabs? Caucasian. And it starts to get fuzzy in North Africa (logically).
The Chinese are a mix of Asian and Caucasian peoples, as are the Russians. Again, the line blurs.
Remember the "one drop" rule? Or the "octaroon" classification? People with mixed heritage in this country generally "choose a side" depending on what they look like, but from a biological stance, the side they choose--the overarching racial classification they adopt--is fairly meaningless from a genetic point of view.
It only matters in a society that drops people into artificially constructed categories for the purposes of oppression.
That's what "race is an artifical construct" actually means.
Diversity, on the other hand, is very real and will continue to be very real for the forseeable future.
The ideas of the past frequently are wrong. There are transgender frogs, homosexual apes, asexual sharks, and a whole lot of that blurring of racial identities.
It may have been true at one time that there were three distinct races, but when two of them mate, you have a third. And when one is isolated and mutates or adapts beyond the original prototype, there is another.
The human genome project will resolve a lot of these technical issues of who we are.
As an artist, I love the range and extremes of visual information. I like bright colors and high contrast. And I have been working with mermaid images as a metaphor for a long time.
I don't just give them claws and sea turtle flippers for arms, and hair that holds eggs, and eyes and teeth like sharks...I give them other skin colors and racially identifiable body phenomes.
I love the diversity of life and wonder why other animals are the way they are and why we are the way we are.
Diabetes favors blacks and American Indians but is uncommon in Japanese. Is it a coincidence that the Japanese were resistant to breeding with other populations? Probably not.
We are just animals in the end. No matter how socialized or cultured or how closely we preen our feathers and talk and walk upright, there are a million years of evolution that got to us before the age of reason.
I want us all to be able to talk about it without cringing and someone suddenly declaring the whole conversation racist.
I know that Pam is onto something, as my husband is the opposite of me, he is of lebanese descent, and I have even said in the past sort of joking when asked why him? "Because he smelled right." And the funny part is that I meant it.
“The 0.1% genetic difference that differentiates any two random humans is still the subject of much debate. The discovery that only 8% of this difference separates the major races led some scientists to proclaim that race is biologically meaningless.”
As I often argue with my racist friends, human beings were designed to “interbreed”, a term also rendered meaningless by virtue of the fact that the offspring of such pairings are not sterile. Biological homogeneity is far more a result of proximity than biological preference, as intermixing in our far more mobile modern world readily attests.
It is highly debatable whether any biological benefit is derived from racial purity, in fact, biology seems to suggest quite the opposite. On the other hand, the social benefit of homogeneity is undeniable, as any debutante ball will quickly demonstrate. Thus race, as the term is commonly used, is a societal, or, as you termed it, artificial construct. As such, it can be changed whenever the social imperative requires it to change. In fact, we are all likely to become first-hand witnesses to this phenomenon on November 4th.
My posit is that there is a self-identifiying strategy among humans that is unconscious, a desire to remain within the safety of a normative group. This desire is biological, not a social or cultural construct. I think the fear of the "other", or xenophobia, is an inherent trait in the psychological makeup of humans, all of them.
And for me, psychology is biology, as I make no distinction between the brain as an organ and any other organ.
Some desires are nurture, but xenophobia is nature. The ability and desire to be around people that look like you may be one method that infants use to "charm" their otherwise doubtful fathers and a means for those fathers to be attracted to their own offspring.
I never said it wasn't complicated, and this is all speculation based on observation and lay scientific inquiry.
I don't have an racist friends that I know of, just neighbors and relatives. One of the latter said once, "If the races were meant to mix, they would have originated closer to each other geographically." I said, "Maybe the test for us as humans was to get to those other places and conquer our fears of others and learn that mixing creates beautiful intelligent offspring, proof that we are the same at our core."
It was lost on them. And while I believe what I said, I stand by my statement that greater biodiversity seems to be the better path, rather than more homogeneity.
And I think you're confusing "ethnicity" with "race."
Tom, above, laid it out far more clearly than I did.
Homogeny is the underlying genetic rule but that greater biodiversity is a more preferable state.
I would like to see what Tom is quoting at the source, but I wasn't being argumentative. I am much more intereseted in a discussion, as none of us are qualified to answer the nuts and bolts of this. The answer is still in dispute by the scientists that would be.
Even without scientific evidence, it is easily observable that the thrust of Nature is toward diversity, which implies, at least, that the biological imperative is toward heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. Humans may think otherwise, but that is their culture, not their genes talking. Humans ought to keep in mind that, as I said before, biologically speaking, homogeneity is grossly over-rated.
It may be politically incorrect to say so, but one reason for the lingering troubles in Pakistan is the ideal marriage in that country is to a first cousin. The dire consequences of that cultural corruption of the biological imperative toward diversity are also apparent where I live in the mountains of Appalachia. I’m guessing that living where you do, you may have observed the same consequences of inbreeding.
I dealt with some of this in my book The Disappearing Cemetery; I compare inbreeding to planting a field over and over again with the same crop until the ground becomes infertile. In any case, given the cultural differences between humans, I don't think artists are in any imminent danger of losing their inspiration on account of an excess of homogeneity.