Post No.: 0977
Furrywisepuppy says:
Cultures aren’t passed on genetically. So, say, a person born to Indonesian parents isn’t automatically going to recognise every Indonesian tradition if they weren’t taught them. Understanding this, anyone, regardless of their ethnicity, can be raised to be Indonesian – just like an ethnically Indonesian person can be raised completely British if they were born and raised in Britain.
Political or religious beliefs therefore aren’t passed on genetically either. Imagine if someone assumed, when addressing a white male, that ‘Adolf Hitler was white, and so are you, hence you must be like Hitler too’. Yet that’s how absurd some racial stereotypes are like! We’re not representatives of our own entire ethnicity or nation because everybody is an individual – even within our own biological family.
Hence the generalised language of, “You lot are…” or, “You lot all like…” is as naïve as approaching any random English person, telling them that jellied eels are disgusting, and expecting them to give a damn, either about jellied eels or what you think(!)
Such generalisations can be internally directed too when we’re more harshly critical of members of our own ethnicity when they’re competing against members of other ethnicities, as if they represent us if they do well or poorly. Similarly, nothing perks up our ears as much as hearing our own names, even when the speaker is referring to someone else who coincidentally shares the same moniker as us. And when we hear it, we hope our namesake doesn’t somehow tarnish the reputation of our name – as if they somehow represent us, which of course they don’t.
We can become automatically defensive when someone from another ethnicity makes a negative comment or joke about someone from, or something about, our own ethnicity, when they could’ve just intended to disparage that individual and not their entire ethnicity.
In the comments section, a video comparing basketball players Yao Ming and Shaquille O’Neal somehow descended into a generalised argument about comparing oriental to black people – even though nobody making those comments was anywhere near as good as either of those two players at basketball, and it’s just people trying to bask in their reflected glories! Group solidarity is commendable but it’s as if everything’s a war and everyone from ‘our tribe’ (by choice or not) is a soldier – and if one of our soldiers win, we win, and vice-versa. Or it’s the infantile ‘my dad could beat yours in a fight’ argument! Fight your own fights. They mightn’t want to fight anyone, never mind on your behalf.
Just because someone with the same ethnicity as you is adept at something – it doesn’t make you adept at it too. Therefore just because someone with the same ethnicity as someone else is terrible at something – it doesn’t make them terrible at it too. Each are your own individuals with your own reputations, achievements, failures, abilities, limitations, heroics and crimes. I don’t care what ethnicity or nationality you have or what that’s supposed to imply. So the question isn’t whether your ethnicity is great or not but whether you as an individual are. And the question isn’t whether someone else’s ethnicity is great or not but whether they as an individual are.
During international sporting competitions, the support for one’s national representatives isn’t about genetic/racial group superiority but which country has more effectively (tax) funded their sporting programs in particular events better than others. In domestic club competitions, it’s about which club owners have invested more effectively and efficiently than others i.e. deep pockets help!
The ideology of Social Darwinism is linked with fascism, racism, imperialism, a belief that the strong should be allowed to tread over the weak, eugenics and laissez-faire capitalism. But there’s a misperception that nature is about supremacy and hierarchy, not harmony and biodiversity; or about a linear ecosystem, not a circular one. This echoes the problem with our present unsustainable linear economy compared to a circular economy – see Post No.: 0962.
Predators aren’t dominant over prey – predators and prey need to be balanced otherwise the former will starve. In fact, the total biomass of prey needs to be greater than that of predators to be sustainable. Large, carnivorous apex predators are usually most at risk of going extinct when climates change. Although life necessarily began extremely simple, there’s also no direction to where evolution is heading – less complex organisms can evolve from more complex ones too. Physarum polycephalum, an enthralling slime mould, exemplifies how organisms don’t even need to be complex to exhibit intelligent behaviours. Bryophytes, which include mosses, are fascinating too, even though people often regard them like weeds.
When we see people with a wide variety of skin colours from dark to light, sizes (of body parts) from big to small, diverse sexualities, etc. all living healthily, independently and in numbers, it proves to us how those differences aren’t weaknesses – just differences. Those features logically wouldn’t be surviving so commonly within the population if they were genuinely weak. People with, say, big ears would be incredibly rare or extinct if having big or small ears mattered that much to the propagation of the genes that influence them. Naturally I’m not talking about dinner-plate-sized or thimble-sized ears but the broad range that’s common. Having only literally half a brain would matter, for instance – one can survive but not without difficulties that’d affect one’s longevity or independence. Yet, well, if someone is so notably different that they’ve got a disease or disorder, we should perhaps sympathise with them instead of contemn them.
There are some contentious areas regarding bigotry though…
In an early episode of South Park, the plot centred around the town flag, which depicted a black person being hanged on it. However, the kids didn’t consider it as racist because, to them, black was equally acceptable as the colour of the figure being hanged as any other on the design. Was this ‘seeing past colour’ or being ‘insensitively colour-blind to the real discriminations that existed (and still exist)’?
Chef, a black character, assumed that the kids had racist intent. Does perceiving everything according to race, even in the name of anti-racism, only exacerbate racism or merely highlight the racism that does exist?
It can be the case that we sometimes wrongly prejudge that others are prejudging us negatively (e.g. as a teenage single mother). Every equivocal gesture or word is then interpreted as a sign of their prejudice. Some people may be prejudging us, but not all.
We do occasionally get individuals who are from marginalised groups and they get rejected because they’re lazy, not a team player or some other valid criticism, but they’ll claim that they’re solely being discriminated against because of their group association. Everybody should be equally valid targets for valid forms of criticism.
Can’t people tease a specific individual for looking like a particular cartoon character with the same dark colour as them if they genuinely think they do look uncannily similar, without them being accused of being racist towards their ethnicity? And if that’s racist then is anyone who thinks that some white person looks like Jesus being racist towards white people? (For somehow Jesus is mostly depicted with fair skin! But that’s a separate issue of white propaganda i.e. ‘Jesus was good hence he must’ve been white’(!))
And if someone wishes to call themselves coloured then isn’t this fine? We may personally have some uneasy history with the term but they might have a more nuanced relationship with it. We might believe they’ve been indoctrinated to think the way they do but aren’t we all in every kind of context, like whenever we’re patriotic or speak the first language we speak and the accent it’s spoken in? We might speak the language or enjoy the sport that our country’s former colonial masters imported?
Skin colour is influenced by multiple genes related to melanin, additively; along with environmental factors like the amount of recent sun exposure. People can ‘look black’ externally but actually possess, say, more ‘genes from white ancestry roots’, and vice-versa. Two unrelated black people won’t have the exact same genes as each other. The genes influencing skin colour aren’t the genes for everything about an individual anyway. Way more genes make up someone than just those that affect the way they superficially look. So the only genes we can confidently infer merely from the colour of someone’s skin are those involved in influencing the colour of their skin. Well even this maybe isn’t absolutely certain because of environmental factors like tanning.
No absolute guarantees but parents from the same species who are genetically diverse from each other (quite unrelated according to their family trees) helps minimise the risk of recessive gene disorders in their offspring. Now this shouldn’t be extrapolated to mean that ‘mixed race’ people or people with low homozygosity are genetically superior when it comes to talents or some other measure. And if you don’t have a recessive gene disorder then you don’t have one. If you wish to point out all the successful multiracial people in the world (whatever ‘race’ means because race is a social construct, not a biological one) – one could also point out all the successful non-multiracial people too. Moreover, possessing ‘mixed genes’ cannot be reliably identified merely by observing the colour of someone’s skin, for the reasons explained in the previous paragraph.
Unless something is 100% consistent across an entire population of people, we’ve got to treat everybody as an individual. Understanding this, the notion of ‘race’ is arbitrary (even the notion of ‘species’ is blurry because the evolution from one generation of life to the next is gradual). General trends aren’t informative enough because no one marries or hires a race – they marry or hire an individual. If the colour of someone’s skin itself won’t affect their performance on a job then their skin colour is totally irrelevant and we shouldn’t infer from their skin colour any other trait about them as an individual. You wouldn’t pick a slow black person to represent your country in sprinting just because they’re black and many top sprinters are black. (We cannot even assume that most black people are great sprinters. And just like most dogs are furry, this doesn’t mean that most furry things are dogs – woof woof.) There exist differences between individuals but this won’t be due to their ethnicity but the simple fact that they’re individuals. There’s a vast variance between individuals within and across arbitrary skin-colour categories.
But ambiguous situations seem to lead people to rely on their default racial biases. If one candidate is clearly more qualified for a job than another, the more-qualified candidate will be selected. But if the picture is less clear, people will revert to their racial assumptions to guide their decisions.
We tend to seek to find the differences in people, even though there are far more numerous commonalities between everybody.
At one level, humans are all unique and individual – yet we mustn’t forget they’re all ultimately members of the same species and thus share incredible commonalities. For every potential difference, one could point out hundreds of fundamental commonalities like the need to breathe oxygen as a gas, having only one heart, having skin without feathers or scales, being red-blooded, etc.. These similarities are far more fundamental than a mere variance in size or difference regarding where one was born (countries are purely social constructs too).
Humans share many fundamental similarities with other mammals and complex organisms too – all life on Earth is connected via the same tree of life; having evolved from a common ancestor. Growing research finds that some other animals possess sophisticated languages, have cultures, friendships, share feelings, show compassion, mourn their dead, go to war, get high on drugs and more. How conceited to therefore think that humans are above other creatures that are equally alive today, never mind to think that some humans are above other humans.
Woof!
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