It is past time to stop the haters from dividing us by the fiction
of humans being of different races
The article attached below is just one of many
that can demonstrate that there are no separate human races.
Then, why is racism
actually a growing problem in America?
The Repressive/Regressives (a.k.a. “progressives”) have utilized the
government and the media in a relatively short period of time to transform
awareness and acceptance of homosexuality, transgender, same sex marriage, and
multiple other formerly publicly taboo issues—why not race?
Answer: Issues of
race serve the Repressive/Regressive agenda.
More than arguments for
or against evolution, the scientific
evidence that there is but one race, the human race—and we all descended from a common ancestor. This has been established by anthropology
as well as genetics. Any differences that exist between different groups
of people are due to the fact that we all have unique genetic makeups, and that
if you isolate any group of people for sufficient generations, certain genetic
features will become predominate in one group or another.
So, if we want to end racism in America, why are
we not teaching this throughout our schools, promoting it in the media, and
enforcing it through government? There should be a legal prohibition about including
designations of race or ethnicity on any application or personnel file. Again, it does not suit the
Repressive/Regressive agenda to do that as the problems created by perpetuating
racism allow the Repressive/Regressives to manipulate
and grow government for their purposes.
As a nation, we should
be celebrating that we are all of a common ancestry and end the divisiveness. We should celebrate that through the
uniqueness provided by our DNA, the human race has a vast diversity of
peoples...we are all unique. I am certain, that if government wanted to,
it could essentially eradicate the type of racism based on differences in
ancestry or genetics.
Such websites as Bi-racial
celebrities, 28
Celebrities you probably didn’t know were mixed-race, 30 Beautiful And Inspiring
Interracial Celebrity Couples sicken me...just as those who call Clarence
Thomas an “Uncle Tom” because he does not bow to the Repressive/Regressive
formula for the supposed “black race”.
We fought a costly Civil
War, primarily to expunge our nation of the terrible tradition of slavery that
we inherited from the colonization of this nation. Thanks to such as the Separate but Equal
federal court decision, President
Woodrow Wilson’s discrimination and segregation of blacks a lot of the
progress following the Civil War was reversed as government promotes
racism.
Try to fill out just
about any federal form for employment, educational matter and you will be
required to identify your racial ethnicity. This is not just disgusting,
it promotes racism and the idea that somehow mankind is descended from
different strains of some evolutionary strain of creatures...some better than
others, but certainly not the same.
I blame the federal
government and to a lesser degree the media for promoting racism in America.
While the current POTUS has certainly exacerbated the issue, he did not
originate the problem, he has merely capitalized on it for his own societal
destructive purposes.
We all have our physical
preferences, which is not necessarily racist, as to what we personally find
ourselves physically attracted in regard to the opposite sex (or for some same
sex).
Aside from physical
attraction of a sexual nature, what attracts me most is my ability to relate
intellectually or otherwise with a person. And thanks to the
Repressive/Regressive agenda over the past half-century, I am saddened as well
as turned off what we have done to
much of poor, especially in the inner cities, which is a serious blight to our
nation that must be successfully addressed if this nation is to survive.
These are just a few of
many links indicating a common ancestry for all humans: http://www.livescience.com/38613-genetic-adam-and-eve-uncovered.html,
http://phys.org/news/2007-05-theory-modern-humans-descended-small.html
The article below is from NEWSWEEK magazine, and written from the
perspective of the evolutionist...who also conclude that there are various
races is a myth.
It is well passed time that we start promoting and enforcing the
reality that we are all of one race!!!
THERE IS NO
SUCH THING AS RACE
BY
ROBERT WALD SUSSMAN
11/8/14
In 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) issued a statement asserting that all humans belong to
the same species and that “race” is not a biological reality but a myth. This
was a summary of the findings of an international panel of anthropologists,
geneticists, sociologists, and psychologists.
A great deal of evidence had
accumulated by that time to support this conclusion, and the scientists
involved were those who were conducting research and were most knowledgeable
about the topic of human variation. Since that time similar statements have
been published by the American Anthropological Association and the American
Association of Physical Anthropologists, and an enormous amount of modern
scientific data has been gathered to justify this conclusion.
Today the vast majority of
those involved in research on human variation would agree that biological races
do not exist among humans. Among those who study the subject, who use and
accept modern scientific techniques and logic, this scientific fact is as valid
and true as the fact that the earth is round and revolves around the sun.
Yet as recently as 2010, highly
acclaimed journalist Guy Harrison wrote:
One day in the 1980s, I sat in the front row in my first
undergraduate anthropology class, eager to learn more about this bizarre and
fascinating species I was born into. But I got more than I expected that day as
I heard for the first time that biological races are not real. After hearing
several perfectly sensible reasons why vast biological categories don’t work
very well, I started to feel betrayed by my society. “Why am I just hearing
this now? . . . Why didn’t somebody tell me this in elementary school?” . . . I
never should have made it through twelve years of schooling before entering a
university, without ever hearing the important news that most anthropologists
reject the concept of biological races.
Unfortunately, along with the
belief in the reality of biologically based human races, racism still abounds
in the United States and Western Europe. How can this be when there is so much
scientific evidence against it?
Most educated people would
accept the facts that the earth is not flat and that it revolves around the
sun. However, it is much more difficult for them to accept modern science
concerning human variation. Why is this so?
It seems that the belief in
human races, carrying along with it the prejudice and hatred of “racism,” is so
embedded in our culture and has been an integral part of our worldview for so
long that many of us assume that it just must be true.
Racism is a part of our
everyday lives. Where you live, where you go to school, your job, your
profession, who you interact with, how people interact with you, your treatment
in the healthcare and justice systems are all affected by your race.
For the past 500 years, people
have been taught how to interpret and understand racism. We have been told that
there are very specific things that relate to race, such as intelligence,
sexual behavior, birth rates, infant care, work ethics and abilities, personal
restraint, lifespan, law-abidingness, aggression, altruism, economic and
business practices, family cohesion, and even brain size.
We have learned that races are
structured in a hierarchical order and that some races are better than others.
Even if you are not a racist, your life is affected by this ordered structure.
We are born into a racist society.
What many people do not realize
is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have
shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race.
There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be
considered human “racial” characteristics.
There is no inherent
relationship between intelligence, law-abidingness, or economic practices and
race, just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood group,
or skin color and any set of complex human behaviors.
However, over the past 500
years, we have been taught by an informal, mutually reinforcing consortium of
intellectuals, politicians, statesmen, business and economic leaders and their
books that human racial biology is real and that certain races are biologically
better than others.
These teachings have led to
major injustices to Jews and non-Christians during the Spanish Inquisition; to
blacks, Native Americans, and others during colonial times; to African
Americans during slavery and reconstruction; to Jews and other Europeans during
the reign of the Nazis in Germany; and to groups from Latin America and the
Middle East, among others, during modern political times.
In my book, The Myth of Race:
The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea, I have not dwelt upon all of the scientific information
that has been gathered by anthropologists, biologists, geneticists, and other
scientists concerning the fact that there are no such things as human
biological races. This has been done by many people over the past fifty or so
years.
What I do is describe the
history of our myth of race and racism. As I describe this history, I think
that you will be able to understand why many of our leaders and their followers
have deluded us into believing these racist fallacies and how they have been
perpetuated from the late Middle Ages to the present.
Many of our basic policies of
race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their
followers in control of the way we live our modern lives. These leaders often
see themselves as the best and the brightest. Much of this history helped
establish and maintain the Spanish Inquisition, colonial policies, slavery,
Nazism, racial separatism and discrimination, and anti-immigration policies.
Although policies related to
racism seem to be improving over time, I hope to help clarify why this myth
still exists and remains widespread in the United States and throughout Western
Europe by describing the history of racism and by exploring how the
anthropological concepts of culture and worldview have challenged and disproven
the validity of racist views.
Over the past 500 or so years,
many intellectuals and their books have created our story of racism. They
developed our initial ideas of race in Western society and solidified the
attitudes and beliefs that gradually followed under the influence of their
economic and political policies.
Then, approximately 100 years
ago, anthropologist Franz Boas came up with an alternate explanation for why
peoples from different areas or living under certain conditions behaved
differently from one another. People have divergent life histories, different
shared experiences with distinctive ways of relating to these differences. We
all have a worldview, and we all share our worldview with others with similar
experiences. We have culture.
It took many years for Boas and
his few followers to develop this idea and pass it on to others. However, over
the past fifty or sixty years, anthropologists, biologists, and geneticists
have written many articles and books explaining why biological race in humans
is nonexistent.
At first, scientists attempted to
classify human races based on variations in characteristics such as skin color,
hair color and form, eye color, facial anatomy, and blood groups. In the recent
past, various scientists, such as Franz Boas, have divided us into anywhere
between three and more than thirty different races, without any success. Most
of these hypothetical “races” were developed using assumptions about genetic
relationships and distributions among different human populations.
In 1942, Ashley Montagu, a
student of Franz Boas, claimed that “there are no races, there are only
clines.” Traits considered to be “racial” are actually distributed
independently and depend upon many environmental and behavioral factors. For
the most part, each trait has a distinct distribution from other traits, and
these traits are rarely determined by a single genetic factor.
This type of distribution of a
biological trait is referred to as a cline. For example, skin color is related
to the amount of solar radiation, and dark skin is found in Africa, India, and
Australia. However, many other genetic traits in peoples of these areas are not
similar. Furthermore, similar traits such as skin color are convergent;
different genes can cause similar morphological and behavioral characteristics.
For example, genetic pathways
to dark skin are different in Tamil Nadu and in Nigeria. Genetic traits usually
do not correlate with one another and are not distributed in the same place or
in the same way over time.
Race is supposed to tell us
something about our genetic history. Who is related to whom? How did
populations evolve over time and how isolated were they in the past?
Recent studies have shown us
that humans have been migrating since Homo sapiens evolved some 200,000 years
ago. This migration has not been in one direction but had happened back and
forth. Our genes have been mixing since we evolved, and our genetic structure
looks more like a complex, intermixed trellis than a simple candelabra.
It is very difficult to tell
what our particular genetic background is over human historic time. We humans
are more similar to each other as a group than we are to one another within any
particular racial or genetic category. Many anthropological books have been
written to explain this phenomenon.
Our view of genetics has also
changed in recent times. Although many people still believe that genes, or a
series of genes, directly determine some of our most complex behavioral or
cognitive characteristics, the reality is more complicated.
Studies now show that each gene
is only a single player in a wondrous, intricate drama involving non-additive
interactions of genes, proteins, hormones, food, and life experiences and
learning that interact to affect us on different levels of cognitive and
behavioral functions. Each gene has an effect on multiple types of behaviors,
and many behaviors are affected by many genes as well as other factors. The
assumption that a single gene is causative can lead to unwarranted conclusions
and an over-interpretation of any genuine genetic linkage.
Before beginning this story,
however, it is important to understand how scientists define the concept of
race. How is race defined in biological terms? What do we mean by the term race
when describing population variation in large mammals such as humans? Do the
criteria used in describing these variations hold when we examine human
population variation?
In biological terms, the
concept of race is integrally bound to the process of evolution and the origin
of species. It is part of the process of the formation of new species and is
related to subspecific differentiation. However,
because conditions can change and subspecies can and do merge, this process
does not necessarily lead to the development of new species.
In biology, a species is defined
as a population of individuals who are able to mate and have viable offspring;
that is, offspring who are also successful in reproducing. The formation of new
species usually occurs slowly over a long period of time.
For example, many species have
a widespread geographic distribution with ranges that include ecologically
diverse regions. If these regions are large in relationship to the average
distance of migration of individuals within the species, there will be more
mating, and thus more exchange of genes, within than between regions.
Over very long periods of time
(tens of thousands of years), differences would be expected to evolve between
distant populations of the same species. Some of these variations would be
related to adaptations to ecological differences within the geographic range of
the populations, while others might be purely random.
Over time, if little or no
mating (or genetic exchange) occurs between these distant populations, genetic
(and related morphological) differences will increase. Ultimately, over tens of
thousands of years of separation, if little or no mating takes place between
separate populations, genetic distinctions can become so great that individuals
of the different populations could no longer mate and produce viable offspring.
The two populations would now
be considered two separate species. This is the process of speciation. However,
again, none of these criteria require that speciation will ultimately occur.
Since speciation develops very slowly,
it is useful to recognize intermediate stages in this process. Populations of a
species undergoing differentiation would show genetic and morphological
variation due to a buildup of genetic differences but would still be able to
breed and have offspring that could successfully reproduce.
They would be in various stages
of the process of speciation but not yet different species. In biological
terminology, it is these populations that are considered “races” or
“subspecies”. Basically, subspecies within a species are geographically,
morphologically, and genetically distinct populations but still maintain the
possibility of successful interbreeding.
Thus, using this biological
definition of race, we assume that races or subspecies are populations of a
species that have genetic and morphological differences due to barriers to
mating. Furthermore, little or no mating (or genetic exchange) between them has
persisted for extremely long periods of time, thus giving the individuals
within the population a common and separate evolutionary history.
Given advances in molecular
genetics, we now have the ability to examine populations of species and
subspecies and reconstruct their evolutionary histories in an objective and
explicit fashion. In this way, we can determine the validity of the traditional
definition of human races “by examining the patterns and amount of genetic
diversity found within and among human populations” and by comparing this
diversity with other large-bodied mammals that have wide geographic
distributions.
In other words, we can
determine how much populations of a species differ from one another and how
these divergences came about.
A commonly used method to
quantify the amount of within -- to among -- group genetic diversity is through
examining molecular data, using statistics measuring genetic differences within
and between populations of a species. Using this method, biologists have set a
minimal threshold for the amount of genetic differentiation that is required to
recognize subspecies.
Compared to other large mammals
with wide geographic distributions, human populations do not reach this
threshold. In fact, even though humans have the widest distribution, the
measure of human genetic diversity (based on sixteen populations from Europe,
Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Australia-Pacific region) falls well below
the threshold used to recognize races for other species and is among the lowest
value known for large mammalian species. This is true even if we compare humans
to chimpanzees.
Using a number of molecular
markers has shown that the degree of isolation among human populations that
would have been necessary for the formation of biological subspecies or races
never occurred during the 200,000 years of modern human evolution.
Combined genetic data reveal
that from around one million years ago to the last tens of thousands of years,
human evolution has been dominated by two evolutionary forces: (1) constant
population movement and range expansion; and (2) restrictions on mating between
individuals only because of distance.
Thus, there is no evidence of
fixed, long-term geographic isolation between populations. Other than some
rare, temporary isolation events, such as the isolation of the aborigines of
Australia, for example, the major human populations have been interconnected by
mating opportunities (and thus genetic mixture) during the last 200,000 years
(as long as modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around). As summarized by
A.R. Templeton, who is among the world’s most recognized and respected
geneticists:
Because of the extensive evidence for genetic interchange through
population movements and recurrent gene flow going back at least hundreds of
thousands of years ago, there is only one evolutionary lineage of humanity and
there are no subspecies or races. . . . Human evolution and population
structure has been and is characterized by many locally differentiated
populations coexisting at any given time, but with sufficient contact to make
all of humanity a single lineage sharing a common, long-term evolutionary fate.
Thus, given current scientific
data, biological races do not exist among modern humans today, and they have
never existed in the past. Given such clear scientific evidence as this and the
research data of so many other biologists, anthropologists, and geneticists
that demonstrate the nonexistence of biological races among humans, how can the
“myth” of human races still persist?
If races do not exist as a
biological reality, why do so many people still believe that they do? In fact,
even though biological races do not exist, the concept of race obviously is
still a reality, as is racism. These are prevalent and persistent elements of
our everyday lives and generally accepted aspects of our culture.
Thus, the concept of human
races is real. It is not a biological reality, however, but a cultural one.
Race is not a part of our biology, but it is definitely a part of our culture.
Race and racism are deeply ingrained in our history.
From The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific
Idea by Robert Wald Sussman. Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
http://www.newsweek.com/there-no-such-thing-race-283123