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RE: Race and IQ, The Alt-Right, and the Post-Racial future of humaity

in #philosophy8 years ago (edited)

I can't see what is happening in the USA from here, but globally, it's not always about race, that's just a post-hoc way of grouping "the others that are not us and therefore no good"; it's about groups feeling threatened. In Europe, you can see the same thing happening, but it's more often about nationality or religion (of ancestors) than about race, eg. "the Poles are steeling jobs from Dutchmen by undercutting wages", "the Greeks cost us too much money", "Moroccan youths are all criminals", "Islam equals terrorism" etc., leading to "Poles suck", "Greeks are lazy bastards", "kick out all Moroccans, and all Muslims while we're at it". Real bigotry, no hypothesis of racial differences required. I think that even if you could convince everyone "race" does not exist, the bigotry would merrily continue. Meanwhile, I will continue using the term "race" to distinguish between groups of people, however ill-defined the term may be, mainly because I rather like the differences the term conveys.

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There is a huge difference between religion being the basis of the community and race. When it's religion then people have the option to convert. When it's culture, people have the option to convert. When it's race there is no option for the excluded races to ever be accepted.

So basically, the faction of the alt-right which is racist is seeking to exclude all human beings who aren't born into the right race. There is no compromise, no surrender, you either are born into that identity or you're not. You get no choice to join, or integrate, or belong.

As far as religion goes, if the churches aren't segregated then maybe it's not racist. But I don't have enough information on that to determine. Of course racial bigotry isn't the only kind of bigotry that can exist but the racial kind of bigotry divides people of the same ethnicity, with in some cases the same ancestors, over a concept which doesn't really have any basis in science.

For example, Malcolm X was killed and he had white ancestors. But because America was obsessed with race, he was categorized as black, and took on a black identity. In other examples, you can have black and white Americans who share Native American ancestors. They might have more in common genetically with each other than African immigrants or European immigrants. Race divides them both against each other even if they are the same culture and ethnicity.

And then the concept of race also distorts medicine. Race based medicine vs personalized medicine, which is better? Personalized medicine is always going to be more accurate than race based medicine.