Race is just plain stupid

Read aguanomics http://www.aguanomics.com/ for the world’s best analysis of the politics and economics of water NB: National Geographic Magazine just published a full issue on race. Here is their mea culpa on perpetuating racist images and thinking.

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We know that “All men are created equal,” but the men who wrote those words were slave-owners who institutionalized inequality by counting slaves as 7/10 of a human. (Let’s not even get started on the equality of women.)

This example — and you can provide your own — is part of a problematic definition that interferes with our social, political and economic relations.

“Race,” in other words, interferes with:

• How we relate to others because the color of skin has nothing to do with the person or their mind.
• How we vote and act collectively because it groups people who share physical characteristics when we should be grouped by ideals or goals.
• How we work, trade and develop because it pits one “team” against another in an irrelevant game.

Jesus washed feet in this book too!

Race is a silly hang-over from a primitive time when strangers meant conflict, we married into our tribe, and people tried to justify their cruelty towards others based on a “God-given right” they had written into their holy books.

My personal experience brings me to this opinion. I am “white” (or Caucasian, a word that’s even more stupid) because I say so, but my DNA shows that 1/6th of me comes from South Asia.

My academic research supports my opinion, as I have easily “manipulated” random strangers into cooperating with each other in an effort to beat “the other team.”

What does this all mean?

• We need to stop thinking of ourselves as from a “race” when we are all humans 
• We are too complex to sort into neat buckets, as our DNA is mixed from everywhere
• “Black” or “White” means nothing because it’s subjective. I just talked to a girl who said she was “black” in the Netherlands but “white” in Tanzania. 
• What really matters is a person’s education, their cultural background and — above all — their socioeconomic status, as I am pretty sure that rich people have more in common than poor people, American have more in common than Germans, and so on.
• Going further, it’s more important to focus on someone’s community as a source of their identity, strength and limitations than their skin color.

Bottom line: Race and color are easy to identify but wrong to focus on. Governments (and people) should focus on the factors that matter and stop discriminating (positively or negatively) on superficial appearances that have nothing to do with someone’s mind, intentions, contributions or potential.

Source: http://www.aguanomics.com/2018/03/race-is-just-plain-stupid.html