QUOTES ON RACE & RACISM

Even if it were proved - which it is not - that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevent to one's judgment of him. A genius is still a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race.

If races exist, then one must be supreme. Much of the Race Does Not Exist cant stems from the following logic (if you can call it logic): "If there really are different racial groups, then one must be The Master Race, which means - oh my God - that Hitler Was Right! Therefore, we must promote whatever ideas most confuse the public about race. Otherwise, they will learn the horrible truth and they'll all vote Nazi." # RACIAL DIFFERENCES

Are indigenous peoples merely not inferior? In truth, on their own turf many ethnic groups appear to be somewhat genetically superior to outsiders. Many people appear to confuse the concepts of genetic superiorities (plural) and genetic supremacy (singular). The former are circumstance-specific. For example, a slim, heat-shedding Somalian-style body is inferior to a typically stocky, heat-conserving Eskimo physique in Nome, but it's superior in Mogadishu.
In contrast, genetic supremacy is the dangerous fantasy that one group is best at everything. Before the European explosion began in the 15th Century, it seemed apparent that no race could be supreme. Even the arrogant Chinese were periodically overrun by less-cultured barbarians. The recent European supremacy in both the arts of war and of peace was partly an optical illusion masking the usual tradeoffs in talents within Europe (e.g., Italian admirals were as inept as English cooks). Still, the rise and reign of Europe remains the biggest event in world history. Yet, the era when Europeans could plausibly claim supremacy over all other races has been dead for at least the 60 years since Hitler, of all people, allied with Japan.

More than 70% of western Europeans by descent can drink milk as adults, compared with less than 30% of people from parts of Africa, eastern and south-eastern Asia and Oceania. Biologists have found evidence that the people with the highest frequency of milk-digestion ability were the ones with a history of pastoralism. The Tutsi of central Africa, the Bedouin of the desert, the Irish, Czech and Spanish people - this list of people has almost nothing in common except that they all have a history of herding sheep, goats or cattle. They are the champion milk digesters of the human race. Even at its fastest, genetic change is extremely slow. One of the fasest major genetic changes is the increase in the number of people able to use lactose, the sugar present in milk. The highest peak registered is 90 percent, in Scandinavia. This level may have been reached over a period of around ten thousand years, starting from an initial incidence of 1 to 2 percent, or maybe lower. The same time lapse may apply to lightening of skin color and generally to the Scandinavian's virtual loss of skin, eye, and hair pigmentation, starting from original colorings that were perhaps similar to the Lebanese of today. So is there any logic at all to genetic disease? Scientists are discovering in nature a kind of cold-hearted logic, a calculus of life and death. UCLA Medical School Professor Jared Diamond says genetic diseases may persist, because while they condemn some people to death, they confer life on others. Take the gene for sickle cell anemia. The gene tends to be confined to specific racial and ethnic groups, namely blacks from equatorial Africa and their descendants, certain Mediterranean and Arabic populations, and people in India. What these diverse groups have in common, besides a propensity for sickle cell anemia, is that they or their ancestors inhabited tropical parts of the old world. The sickle cell gene turns out to afford protection against the tropical disease, malaria. History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves. The more powerful the environmental diversity, the more natural selection would adapt people to local conditions. In the last four Olympics all 32 finalists in the men’s 100 meters, the race to decide The Fastest Man on Earth, have been black men of West African descent. Since people of West African origin make up roughly 8% of the world’s population, the chance of this happening purely by luck is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001%. As the Olympic running races have become a more equal opportunity competition, the results have become more segregated.
Sports nuts, cannot turn on the TV without being confronted by lean East Africans outdistancing the world's runners, massive Samoans flattening quarterbacks, lithe Chinese diving and tumbling for gold medals, or muscular athletes of West African descent out-sprinting, out-jumping, and out-hitting all comers. "The blatant lies that went on, I was insulted to my face. The project was called unethical when it was an attempt to put the research on an ethical basis. To study differences is not racist. Racists don't need to study differences, they are doing just fine as they are."

        - Professor Kevin Kidd of Yale University, on opposition to the Human Genome project

# GENOCIDE

Perhaps the commonest motive for genocide arises when a militarily stronger people attempt to occupy the land of a weaker people, who resist. Among the innumerable straightforward cases of this sort are not only the killing of Tasmanians and Australian Aborigines by white Australians, but also the killings of American Indians by white Americans, of Araucanian Indians by Argentineans, and of Bushmen and Hottentots by the Boer settlers of South Africa. Another common motive involves a lengthy power struggle within a pluralistic society [Rwanda/Burundi; ex-Yugoslavia; Zanzibar].
At the opposite extreme are scapegoat killings of a helpless minority blamed for frustrations of their killers. Jews were killed by fourteenth-century Christians as scapegoats for the bubonic plague, by early twentieth-century Russians as scapegoats for Russia's political problems, by Ukrainians after the First World War as scapegoats for the Bolshevist threat, any by the Nazis during the Second World War as scapegoats for Germany's defeat in the First World War. Racial and religious persecutions have served as the remaining class of motives.

"Burundi is disfigured by a form of apartheid which keeps eighty-five per cent of the population - the shorter Hutu, like the Bantu with their flat noses - under the thumb of the often astonishingly tall, thin-nosed Tutsi, descendants of Ethiopian cattlemen. The massacres [of August and September, 1988, involving some 2,000 Tutsi and perhaps 23,000 Hutu deaths] started after months of army manoeuvres aimed at checking Hutu smuggling of coffee. ....[I saw] Pascal Baukuri, aged two-and-a-half. Her left arm was amputated at the shoulder after a bullet wound became infected with gangrene. Her father explained that her mother and two other children had been killed. When I took Pascal's photograph, she was frightened by the flash and started to scream. I went outside and wept uncontrollably at the horror. The horror of it all." When we consider early literate civilizations, written records testify to the frequency of genocide. The wars of the Greeks and the Trojans, or Rome and Carthage, and of the Asyrrians and Babylonians and Persians proceeded to a common end: the slaughter of the defeated irrespective of sex, or else the killing of the men and enslavement of the women. We all know the biblical account of how the walls of Jericho came tumbling down at the sound of Joshua's trumpets. Less often quoted is the sequel, Joshua obeyed the Lord's command to slaughter the inhabitants of Jerihco as well as Ai, Makkedeh, Libnah, Hebron, Debir and many other cities. "No reason exists to believe that modern, western, even Christian man is incapable of holding notions which devalue human life, which call for its extinction, notions similar to those held by peoples of many religious, cultural and political dispensations throughout history, including the crusaders and the inquisitors, to name but two relevant examples from twentieth-century Christian Europe's forebears.
Who doubts that the Argentine or Chilean murderers of people who opposed the recent authoritarian regimes thought that their victims deserved to die. Who doubts that the Tutsis in Rwanda, that the Lebanese militia which slaughtered the civilian supporters of another, that the Serbs who have killed Croats or Bosnian Muslims, did so out of conviction in the justice of their actions. Why do we not believe the same for the German perpetrators [of the Holocaust]?" # ESCAPE CLAUSE

What genocidal acts can we expect from Homo Sapiens in the future? A hopeful sign is that modern travel, television and photography enable us to see other people living 10,000 miles away as human, like us. Much as we damn 20th century technology, it is blurring the distinction between 'us' and 'them' that makes genocide possible. The modern spread of international culture and knowledge of distant peoples have been making it increasingly harder to justify.
When I try to think of reasons why nuclear weapons will not inexorably combine with our genocidal tendencies to break the records we have already set for genocide in the first half of the 20th century, our accelerating cultural homogenization is one of the chief grounds for hope that I can identify. Loss of cultural diversity may be the price that we have to pay for survival.

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