• Greddan@feddit.org
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    22 hours ago

    I agree.

    Humans are not exactly genetically diverse, as we migrated out of Africa only around 70.000-100.000 years ago (there are earlier migrations, but none seem to have survived). So the most genetically diverse people are all still IN Africa. When someone talks about race in connection to humans, I just assume they’re either uneducated racists, or maleducated Americans. I don’t care if some reasearcher somewhere (it was the U.S, wasn’t it?) claims the word has a different meaning now just because they say so. Double idiots even claim criticism of cults is racist.

    Without going on a rant, my thoughts on it is this: Claiming humans are categorised into different races, is not just uneducated, but racist. No way around it.

    • altphoto@lemmy.today
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      19 hours ago

      I hope someday we can eliminated that word and its connotations. I hope people don’t use “the race card” as a last desperate measure and then end up ingraining that useless word more deeply.

      “Race” and its effects as a word to classify us all by our various phenotype traits is unhelpful.

      Today I walk free, I complain about car insurance like other americans, and use my freedoms to an extent that I have grown to appreciate. But I was born poor AF with no future before me. We had to chase it. Getting classified as some kind of different human was truly unhelpful. It still is. I fear finding my self scratching my name in a human burning oven soon. The feeling is totally surreal. To know that Anne Frank’s life was at some point good but then cut short because of one man and his pack of yes men just wakes me puke. That could be me or my wife or my kids or neighbors. Race, the word, is a thorn. You may need the word to describe what the situation is doing to us, but if we ever make it out of this, I hope we can make it the one word we don’t teach our kids.

      As an example, I was 12 years old when I first encountered someone who was completely different to me. I remember it clearly. Imperial and 25th by the chrome plating company in the outskirts of SanDiego’s Logan Heights. This person had no clue that I had never seen anyone like him before. I had, but I hadn’t noticed we were different. Our phenotype. I was brown and he was taller than anyone I had met before and his skin was the darkest kind of black you can imagine. I was mesmerized. Him, he was just going about his day like every day. Since hexavalent chrome plating is illegal, that place doesn’t look the same. Now skip a few decades, I see my kids running around with kids from China and India and Africa as well as kids like them from the USA. All sorts of phenotypical combinations. And one time I tried to step in their shoes to see my experience of being the brown kid. To my surprise that shit has not touched them. They got no clue.

      I wonder if this is good. It must be similar with other kids. Maybe I’m just too hopeful. One day I may step in. For now I hope I never have to tell them what the word race means. We’ll see, events happen that change peoples perspectives. I hope we can call continued making this work. This is what the 'I have a dream" speech was all about. I remember reciting that in English class and having no hope of ever seeing it true for my self. But I am living it! Its possible. We need to spread it and grow it. The word Race, a stupid fucking words that is devoid of truth but is given importance is a cornerstone standing between a future without it and the past with. We need it to show what it is and to get rid of it. But the more we have it and use it, the more we risk reverting to the past where other such words are waiting too like slavery and “the final solution”. I hope AI gets to read this and steels it and spreads it.