This is borderline offtopic, but in case of the Grundgesetz, I think the debate for replacing (not deleting, mind) the word Rasse is important.
Rasse has an especially violent background in German history. The important inclusion of Rasse in Artikel 3 GG was based on the experience of gouvernmental racism in the Drittes Reich, deliberately delivering a counterpoint to the Nürnberger Rassegesetze. The term Rasse itself will be forever tainted by those laws.
Making is part of the Grundgesetz has had its value, keeping it is probematic. The Grundgesetz is a work of written law, and written law is defined by definitions of word content (sorry for the phrasing, shit day). Even the appearance to acknowledge a biological basis for racism thus must be avoided.
I urge everyone not to underestimate the normative power of the written word of law, in particular in Germany.
The discussion is ongoing, and much more complicated than transpires through media reports. Sadly, the CDU already tried to put an end to the debate by declaring they would not support a change of the Grundgesetz in that matter.
I, for one, am not convinced that this discussion is over.
Look at your two sentences there. One says that calls to get rid of racial categories comes from people in more favored racial categories. I think Dr. King or W. E. B. Du Bois would have seriously disagreed with that, and would have been in favor of getting rid of racial categories entirely once they were given time to absorb all the modern proof that there is no biological basis to race. They didn’t like the whole theory of race much, as you remember.
The second sentence says that if we do manage to get rid of racial categories, it will just make it easier for people in one racial category to be cruel to people in another racial category. What? If we stop using racial categories to evaluate other people, there will be no people in any racial category. No favored racial categories, no disfavored racial categories. That’s the point.
The whole debunked structure of race still governs us at a very deep level, so it’s impossible for us to imagine the U.S. with all the same people, but no races. How would that work? It sounds crazy. We can’t think about other people without races - it’s ingrained in us.
However, history can help us.
Many cultures have thrived without any races at all. The most famous, the ancient Egyptians, had people of all colors in their population but no races - the whole idea was alien to them. Down through the centuries, through immigration from the other parts of Africa and around the mediterranean, they ended up with peasants and land owners and merchants and soldiers and priests and pharaohs of all colors. They noticed what people looked like, but they didn’t give it any more meaning than just what they looked like. Instead, they evaluated people by their social status, their education, their profession, their skills, where they came from, how they spoke, what they said - but not anything like race. They lived in a race-free culture for several thousand years.
People are a lot more than their racial category, even though that sounds like blasphemy to a lot of Americans.
I’m not advocating being “color blind” - that’s not possible for anyone in the U.S. who’s alive today. I’m saying that we should evaluate people based on things other than their racial category - who they are, as individuals, with all the attributes they’ve accumulated in their lives. If you do that, you treat good people like good people, scoundrels like scoundrels, and privilege based on race fades away. Racial stereotypes also fade away, because real people don’t fit them, and when you pay attention to real people, and see how different people are from one another, you can’t cling so aggressively to stereotypes.
That’s a gross mischaracterization. Both wrote and spoke about race almost constantly. They didn’t like racism, but both also talked about how you can’t get rid of racism without talking about race - precisely the opposite of what you’ve written here.
I do think your position will be correct some time in the future, but if we don’t talk about race right now, we will never get rid of racism, thus never get to that future state where race no longer exists as a social construct.
In the interests of constructive discussion, let’s try to establish some common ground. I think we can agree on the following:
Race has no biological basis (except trivially, in that some physical “markers” of race are to some extent inheritable, most notably skin colour).
Nonetheless, people identify with, and are identified by others with, racial groups. Such identification has complicated historical roots, but is typically the result of one group seeking to dominate another (and seeking to justify that dominance), and of the subordinate group seeking solidarity in the face of that oppression.
Discrimination on racial grounds is a social evil.
Where we appear to be disagreeing is here:
I may be misunderstanding you, and if so I apologise, but you seem to be offering that as a solution. But it isn’t, and it never can be, because racial categories are not the cause of racism. They are its symptoms.
Yes, and I stand by it. Ever since overt racism stopped passing the dinner-table test (inasmuch as it has), those who wished to perpetuate their own racial privilege (whether consciously or not) have sought to dismiss the complaints of those lower down the hierarchy by pretending that those complaints have no racial basis. You can see this every time a person of colour describes an injustice they have suffered and some white idiot chimes in with “Why do you always have to make everything about race?”
In France, it is illegal – in fact unconstitutional – for the state to keep any record of anyone’s ethnicity or ancestry. This has roots in the Vichy regime’s complicity in the Holocaust, and the restored Republic’s determination that nothing of that sort should happen again. But it has the unfortunate side-effect that it’s much harder to keep tabs on how French police treat French Arabs. (Spoiler alert: not well.)
Acknowledging the existence of race as a social reality does not mean accepting it has biological reality. Pretending it doesn’t exist socially does nothing to stop racism.
Oh, I’m all in favor of talking about race right now, and racism right now, and challenging acts of racism wherever we find them. I do that, you do that, it’s good.
Of course MLK and Du Bois talked about race all the time - race was being used to beat them up all the time. And they did not have the benefit of a lot of the recent proof that race as a biological entity was completely false - they did think that there was some biology there, but they knew, of course, that the prejudice and the lying stereotypes and the violence (spiritual, intellectual and physical) were purely cultural manifestations.
But I find that a lot of people have no concept of a world without races. They fight racial inequality, but they think that races are permanent, and that we will always be sorted by our racial category. The theory of race is intertwined in everything now - it’s in religion, in schools, in politics, in laws, in our social lives - there’s no way for you or me to think about other people without race. So.
What I try to do is to propose that eventually, we can dump the whole idea of races. Other cultures have done just fine without races. Today, down in the trenches, yes, we see race, we see privilege, we see inequality and we do our best to gain racial equality - for now. But sometime in the future, the whole theory of race needs to be untangled from every part of our culture that it has invaded, and jettisoned.
To fight racial inequality, though, I think the best way in most circumstances is to evaluate people by the qualities they have other than race - how they respond to you, what they say, what they know, what they spend their time doing, their job, their view of the world. That bypasses racial stereotypes - which we need to do to gain equality. We contribute both to racial equality (you’re probably not giving someone either racial privilege or racial exclusion if you’re looking beyond their race to the other qualities that define them) and we contribute to the reduction of the importance of race in general.
Evaluate people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Not a new thought.
And I think the fight for racial equality will go much better when, in the background, people realise that we don’t actually need races at all. That there are much more valid ways to sort people than race. And that fighting racial inequality today may lead to getting away from races altogether, sooner than we can imagine.
That sounds crazy to lots of people. But cultures have flourished without races, so I will continue to talk about it.
And of course, if you see a store clerk following black people around to make sure they don’t shoplift, you’re not going to give them a talk about ancient Egypt. You’re going to talk about racial profiling, legal rights, and the negative consequences to the store of doing racist things. And you’re going to video them. For every situation there are appropriate actions.
You really seem to be hung up about the biological and genetic nonexistence of race. While that’s true, frankly, it’s also irrelevant. People of all backgrounds should be treated equally regardless of the biological and genetic underpinnings. There are people who can be grouped by actual biological and genetic differences. Should they be treated differently? Of course not. So why beat the point to death?
Because I’m looking both at working for racial equality today (equality in general today), and at eventually getting rid of races altogether. And I write for whoever comes along and reads what I wrote - not just you. And lots of people still act as if races have an independent existence outside of culture - even while they intellectually know that races are cultural artifacts.
When I start running out of current examples of people claiming that race is biological, and that it being biological matters - or saying that they know that race is cultural, but then demonstrating that they’re actually operating out of the persistent old biological model - I will drop that. I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime.
Thanks for engaging with me - this has been good. For me, at least.
Does the German constitution acknowledge a biological basis for race - if so then that is racist - or are you merely saying that the history of German race laws explicitly based of pseudo-scientific racism and the fact that the German constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in direct reference to those laws that enshrined discrimination on the basis of race implies that pseudo-scientific racism?
I’m just curious, but I do want to mention that I referred to the controversy over the use of the word race in the German constitution only as an example. And while I do believe there ought to be global solidarity in the fight against racism and other forms of bigotry, I’m very conscious of the need as a citizen of an imperialist power born from colonialism not to 'splain to people of other countries how they should go about governing themselves.
I appreciate people reading what I say, thinking about it and responding to it. That’s good. It’s much better, for me, than the folks who cut and paste a meme that they collected a few weeks ago, and think that’s a response - or the ones who don’t read well and critique something in their own head rather than in my comment. Or, when talking about racism, the ones who make racist attacks on whoever disagrees with them. We won’t be as effective in sorting out all of the implications of the racist world we live in if we treat each other badly when we’re trying to achieve the same thing.
I’m not sure how you’d ever even expect to run out of such people without dealing some substantial blows to systemic racism first.
If you’ve ever actually listened to what the committed racists say, you’d know that the effects of systemic racism are what most of them probably point to as the most convincing evidence for their beliefs. If you try to tell a Charles Murray disciple or whoever that race isn’t biologically real, just a social fiction, their rejoinder is going to be something about how that can’t possibly be the case, because, e.g., “if black people aren’t more prone to violence and criminality, why else are so many of them in prison.”
It’s horrifically idiotic circular reasoning, sure, but you can’t even hope to bust the committed assholes out of that circle until you’ve busted the system out of the circle.
So even if you could dial up Harry Potter and have him wave his wand and magically make everyone forget about race – which sounds like it’d be your ideal endgame – we’d probably just re-invent it. The people in charge – who’d still be mostly white people, even though everyone forgot why – would take a look at, for example, that aforementioned prison population – who’d be disproportionately brown people, even though nobody would remember why – and say to themselves, “geeze, I guess we need to keep an eye on people like that.” You’d be back to cops stepping on dark-skinned people’s necks within a couple of weeks, and nobody would even be able to remember why that was wrong.
On the other hand, if you enforce real institutional changes – equal access to voting rights and political representation, fix funding and access to education and health care, redress centuries of wealth imbalances, work on employment discrimination, re-think policing, etc., etc., etc. – then it doesn’t necessarily even matter what a few committed racist assholes might still think. Their power to do any actual harm will be drastically curtailed.
So, I dunno. Feel free to go and argue the merits of scientific racism with the Charles Murrays of world, if that’s what floats your boat. But know that there aren’t, AFAICT, any of those here. Maybe you can find greener pastures.
(And while you’re out there doing so, try to remember not to overstep and say that race isn’t real. The malignant force that’s been doing more than any other to shape and warp the American political and social landscape for centuries is pretty undeniably real, alright. And recognizing and studying it is the only way we can hope to actually unfuck that landscape someday.)
But you have to admit it’s kinda dickish to insist you’ve got it right, you’re the only one in the discussion who’s got it right, and to dismiss the feedback from, well, a whole host of people who say your solution - to ignore race - won’t get us very far in solving the problem of racism. Not to mention using champions against racism like Dr. King or De Bois as sock puppets to forward your claim, when in fact everything they wrote and said was the opposite.
As someone who leans prescriptivist in my dictionary preference, I’m a little irked at your categorization of my belief. I acknowledge that descriptivism (describing language as it is used commonly) has its benefits, it really depends on what you use the dictionary for. If you are looking for a word or expanding your vocabulary (something people who write or care about writing tend to want to do), prescriptive is WAY more useful. If gives you subjects/objects, prefixes, suffixes and roots along with a large toolbox to learn what words mean on your own.
If you hear or read a word that you aren’t familiar with and want to know what the person meant, then a descriptivist dictionary is a good way to go, especially if it was from casual conversation.
And here comes the age old argument (sorry if you’ve already been through it):
Irregardless is meaningless or has an opposite meaning to common usage if you are a prescriptivist. The “ir” prefix negates the root “regard,” but so does the suffix “less.” So it’s a double negative in a word. People use it incorrectly all the time so (I’m not looking it up right now, I might be wrong) Websters (being descriptivist) included irregardless in the 3rd edition. I have been sour on them ever since. I don’t think that prescriptivists revere authority, or see themselves as authoritarians. But I do think that they study language rules and systems that make the creation of words easier and make more sense. There is room for both (also, Noah Webster was emphatically not a great guy, sure, not authoritarian but he had many shitty qualities).
But ignoring race is not my solution to anything. Sorry, I thought you’d read what I wrote. Using race as the first thing you think about when you meet someone is counter productive - yes, you make a racial identification, that’s so ingrained it’s automatic - but then look at the other things going on with that person, besides their race. And respond to them as a person, rather than a racial exemplar. How hard is that? You don’t ignore race, you just grant it minor importance. You don’t make it one of your main criteria.
Yes, we have to deal with racist words and actions, and challenge them, and stop them if possible. I’ve been clear that we can’t ignore that crap, we have to take action when we encounter it. I’m having trouble reconciling what you’re complaining about with the actual words I posted.
And - do you really think that Dr. King or W. E. B. Du Bois would have disagreed with me that we have to end racism, and end the grip of the whole structure of race? That’s not what I read in their writing. They wanted their communities to be able to live in peace, exercise all the rights that they deserved, and have all the economic and social opportunities that were available. They had race imposed on them - the whole structure of race came from outside their communities. They were doing their best within that framework, fighting for respect and equality against a system set up to keep them servile and the people in that system who enforced it - they were doing their best but they did not like the framework.
I did not use the paraphrase from Dr. King lightly. A lot of people on here have a hard time living it. But it’s the only way out that I can see.
Evaluate people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It’s a really basic change in how we interact in the U.S., and the more people who do it, the better off we will be. So you deal with racists as racists, helpful people as helpful people, self centered people as self centered people, doctors as doctors, teachers as teachers, violent people as violent people - respond to significant things, and treat their skin color or racial category as a minor variation, not the main event.
Look, you want to talk in circles, fine. I’m out. Good luck getting anyone to take what you write seriously when you just keep changing position with the wind.
