Does Race Have Meaning?
June 23, 2011
IN PREVIOUS discussions of interracial marriage at this site, one reader insisted that the white race was a “dangerous fiction.” She stated:
There is quite simply no ‘white race,’ not even in America.
In other words, the white people are nothing more than an amalgam of physical characteristics, not a distinct people with cultural tendencies. There is no reason for whites to identify with each other.
See this excellent reply by Robert B., who wrote:
Only a non-thinking fool would think race and culture have nothing in common…
See the rest of his historical essay. Here is an excerpt:
[T]he whole idea of modern “racism” did not exist even one-hundred years ago. The term was first employed by Karl Marx’s philosophical heirs. The ultimate proletarian was the nonwhite. This was the Communist belief since the whites had so easily conquered the rest of the world. In other words, the idea of being loyal to one’s ethnic group and by extension one’s racial phenotype was a given– it was considered natural, until the Communist One Worlders saw it as an impediment to One World Government. The first Westerners to espouse the idea of miscegenation were the American Quakers, who viewed it as a responsibility (but not for them) of whites as a way of uplifting the Africans in America. Of course in 1850, they were viewed as being somewhat insane for proposing such nonsense. I would postulate that whites, alone amongst the three main racial phenotypes, are the ones for which this represents a form of genocide. One generation of European genes in Africans or Asians will, over ensuing generations, be effectively wiped out, whereas one generation of African or Asian genes in Europeans effectively wipes out the ability to produce red heads, blue or green eyes and largely blond hair–not to mention all the shades therein. We are, in point of fact, the world’s minority. Once 20% of the earth’s people, today we are a mere 7%. It is our culture that gave birth to virtually all known inventions of the world–going thousands of years. This was only possible due to our belief in an absolute truth–that which gave birth to science. We are the only peoples in the world who had/have this belief. This is now and has been, under assault by the Left for sometime. Absolute truths negate the idea that man can simply make them up as he sees fit and change the world accordingly. This absolute truth, nestled in the belief in an absolute Creator above the laws of man, is what gave birth to our Constitution and the idea of rights that no man could morally take away. This is an absolute necessity to the whole idea of individual freedom.
— Comments —
Georgia writes:
Robert B. wrote:
“Only a non-thinking fool would think race and culture have nothing in common–how else can one explain the divergency of cultures and their view of the world that dominate in each of the three main phenotypes? No where else in the world did the idea of individual freedom and of inherent equality come into existence except for Western Europe. No where else in the world does the idea of treating women as more than cattle exist. No where else in the world does the idea of humane treatment of animals exist–nor of humane killing and warfare, or of protecting children from those who would exploit or otherwise harm them. These are purely Western cultural mores. Though there are many national ethnicities in Europe, they should be seen as regional cultural norms and thus a subset of European culture as a whole–not a denial of “whiteness” in general. They all contain the same basic precept of what civilization means.”
Only someone ignorant of the history of Eastern and Oriental Christianity would say something like that. Many of the early fathers of the church were non-white and espoused revolutionary ideas about justice and human equality. Part of the problem is that people seem to think that races are “black, white, and asian.” This is foolish. A Berber is more genetically different from a San than an Asian is from a Caucasian. You probably have facial features more similar to an Ethiopian than some Russian people. You probably have more in common values-wise with an African Coptic Christian than with some lower-class whites in America with low IQ, high levels of poverty, divorce, and out-of-wedlock childbirth or the many many alcoholic drug-addicted Russians responsible for their country’s declining life expectancy. No, I don’t want to be identified as part of some grand “white race.” My upper-class ancestors didn’t want to be identified like that either, which is why many them would be horrified if their children married some low-class Irish immigrant. Humans are tribal, not racial.
I do think it’s interesting now that we have relatively cheap DNA testing how many black intellectuals turn out to be mostly white from a genotype perspective
It also turns out that most middle class white people are mostly white and that stories about Native American admixture are fictions. But Robert might be quite disappointed to find that quite a lot of Greeks have African admixture.
I was personally quite disappointed that like most people of “Albion’s seed,” I’m more Germanic and Iberian than British or Celtic.
Laura writes:
My upper-class ancestors didn’t want to be identified like that either, which is why many them would be horrified if their children married some low-class Irish immigrant. Humans are tribal, not racial.
To say that there are racial distinctions is not to say there are no distinctions of ethnicity, class, or nation. Also, I think your ancestors would have been even more uncomfortable if their children had married Africans. I’m sure they would have. Whites of their time were so uncomfortable with interracial marriage that it rarely happened whereas it was much more common for people to marry outside their class or ethnic group. Your ancestors didn’t need to think of themselves as whites because it was just taken for granted. Their cultural surroundings were white.
People in a largely white society identify more immediately with their ethnic group than with the white race as a whole. However, if Georgia lived in Africa, she would find these ethnic distinctions relatively minor compared to the racial distinctions. She would have more cause to immediately identify with whites (which is not the same as choosing to only associate with whites), as Josephina in the foregoing discussion found to be true once she lived in a community that was 70 percent black.
As whites grow much fewer in relative numbers in the West, racial distinctions naturally play a greater part in identity. That is reasonable and normal given that other races possess a strong racial consciousness. However, to say that is not to say that race becomes the sole, or necessarily the most important aspect of identity, or that one thinks of oneself always as first and foremost white or that one denies the essential humanity that joins all the races. When with the Japanese, Koreans tend to think of themselves as Koreans. When Koreans and Japanese are surrounded by whites, they tend to think of themselves as Asians.
The forefathers of the church were not black or Asian in the sense Robert B. refers to. They were from Asia minor. Semitic peoples would be considered whites in Robert B.’s classificiation system. That is not to deny that there is a great deal of intermixing and that racial categories are inexact. Despite these blurring lines, a black neighborhood is clearly different from a white neighborhood, even if the white neighborhood is made of up many European ethnicities and even if the black neighborhood possesses its own ethnic differences.
You probably have more in common values-wise with an African Coptic Christian than with some lower-class whites in America with low IQ, high levels of poverty, divorce, and out-of-wedlock childbirth or the many, many alcoholic drug-addicted Russians responsible for their country’s declining life expectancy.
The statement, “race means something,” is not, “race means everything.”
I may have more in common in certain senses with a Christian man than with a Buddhist woman. Does that make me a man? Does that mean I don’t identify strongly with other women in certain senses? The African Coptic Christian is part of a culture that is distinctly different from that of the low-income American, and race is an important reason why it is different.
Georgia seems to be saying that Christianity would do perfectly well without whites. I disagree. The absolute truths of Christianity need to be guarded by the white European-descended people because only they possess a strong penchant for absolute truths, as Robert B. argues. In order to flourish in other parts of the world, Christianity must be defended at home. That doesn’t mean Christ came for whites only. The European peoples are his first defenders, having created an entire civilization that embodied Christ’s love, in which the very streets and steeples proclaimed absolute truths.
Lydia Sherman writes:
I wrote some time ago on my blog that the term “race” was not even in the Bible, except where alluding to “running the race.” I had read that it was Charles Darwin that popularized the term “race” in reference to skin color. The Bible categorizes different people by nations, language and culture. Darwin was busy categorizing animals and plants and so he found it easy to divide people into races. His races were not accurate, however.
Laura writes:
Race has come into greater use as a term as the idea of a nation or civilization that joins all European people, including those in America, has declined. But we are not simply talking about genetic attributes.
John writes:
Actually the word “nation,” used in the Bible, has a racial component. It derives from the Latin word nationem, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) as “breed, stock, race, nation.” Nationem in turn derives from the Latin word nasci, “to be born.”