You're Not Special

This started as a simple Facebook post. The more I thought about it, the more I felt it might need a bit more detail. This is where that led.

The real basis of racism has never been what you thought it was. It isn't that you're convinced your race is superior. That's what you tell yourself. That's what your friends say, if they agree with your premise that they, and you, are inherently superior. It's certainly what you want to think is true. You may be extremely proud of your race, whatever you think that means. But, if you exhibit racist behavior, this sense of superiority is very unlikely to be the true cause.

People don't become racists because they think they're superior. They become racists because they're deathly afraid that, in fact, their race isn't superior, and that the other guy's is.

Consider one of the basics of white American racism. How is a person classified by race? Physical appearance? Hardly. There are people who are, or would once have been, legally and irrevocably classified as black who are lighter, and have more "Caucasian" features than many white people. How, then, are they black? They're black because, if you look back over their most recent sixteen ancestors, one great-grandparent was black. You have eight great-grandparents, four grandparents, and two parents. Sixteen ancestors, going back three generations, and one of those eight great-grandparents was black, so that means, surprise, so are you.

Does this sound like an "inferior" trait? Blackness is so powerful that fifteen white ancestors are not enough to overcome its effect. It's the old "one drop" concept of race.

Certainly, some may argue that there's a reason for this. Superficial racial characteristics, in mixed parentage, generally blend. If black and white parents have children, they won't have alternate black and white children, they'll have children where the racial characteristics are blended. Skin tones tend to be somewhere between those of the parents. So, logically, someone worried about that sort of thing may see that as proving that genes for black skin are dominant, like the genes for brown eyes.

They're not, though. If they were dominant, the children would be black, not a blended shade. That they tend to be darker than their white parent is obvious, but, if you're paying attention, it becomes equally obvious they're normally lighter than their black parent.

But what about a case where there are no obvious surface racial characteristics? In Germany, in the 1930s, while there was certainly a belief that white Europeans were superior to blacks, the main concern was with Jews. Blacks stood out in Germany in those years, but Jews were generally indistinguishable from any other German. There was even a saying that many German Jews were "more German than the Germans." They were one of the most totally assimilated Jewish communities in the world. They viewed their Jewishness as a religion and not much else, and for generations had sometimes discarded it when it seemed to present an impediment to social advancement. To be "more German than the Germans" represented both a measure of assimilation and, equally, a reminder that, to many of their neighbors, the one thing they were not was German.

Just like the Southern registrar's insistence that a black great-grandfather made an apparently white man black, so the Nazis insisted that a Jewish great-grandparent made someone Jewish. It was entirely possible for someone to be a Lutheran minister, whose father, both grandfathers, and all four great-grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and one of those great-grandfathers married a Jewish woman who'd converted to Lutheranism in order to marry him, to be legally classified as a Jew and sent to a concentration camp.

The Nazis considered Judaism to be a race, not a religion. Again, they seemed to fear it. Homeopathy was developed in Germany, and perhaps there's an element of this in some forms of racism. In homeopathy, an ingredient is believed to become more potent the more it's diluted. Could it be that the racist fears that Jewishness, or blackness, or whatever race isn't his own, becomes more potent as it's diluted in the family gene pool? The reaction of some modern white supremacists to DNA testing certainly seems to point in this direction, though the usual reaction of one of these guys finding out he had some black ancestors several generations back is, "these tests aren't very reliable," or, "somebody screwed up the samples."

The goal of the civil rights movement was never one of race mixing, no matter how much a lot of old Dixiecrats may have believed it to be. Martin Luther King may have envisioned his grandchildren living in a post-racial America, but that wasn't in the sense that there would be no distinct races. However much some people in the 1960s may have believed Americans would eventually all look like Lena Horne, only perhaps slightly lighter, that wasn't the goal. The goal was simpler. Post-racial simply meant that, in housing, in transportation, in hiring, in voting, in anything that mattered, the one thing that would not matter would be race. It would be an America where, if a black man and a white man applied for the same job, the best qualified would get it, and who was best qualified wouldn't be affected by skin color.

In effect, it would be as if the decision was made by a computer that simply looked at all qualifications, but received no input regarding ancestry, and thus had no way of factoring in any subconscious racial preferences.

This is the America we're still trying to move toward. We might almost call it an evolutionary development. It's a cliché that "familiarity breeds contempt," but in that context "contempt" really means "indifference." As the average American lives, works, and socializes with other races, he or she tends to recognize an essential sameness. No matter who you are, or where you live, or what you look like, at the most basic level your concerns are remarkably alike. You need a place to live, you want to be loved, you need to eat, and, if at all possible, you'd certainly prefer being happy and content over being miserable and uncomfortable.

We are, or at least were, heading in that direction.

The Nazis in Charlottesville, and let's not try to pretend that's not what far too many of these people were, recognize this trend, and it scares the hell out of them. The idea of being treated as equals appalls them. They believe they have an inherent right to be superior. An idea made all the more foolish when you consider that, even within the white community, most of them are hardly in the upper classes.

Most of them, to be brutally honest, are much closer to the bottom of the social scale than the top. This, by itself, is more than enough to make many embrace racist philosophies. "I may not be as good as him," the racist thinks, "but at least I'm better than them." He wants to be special, even as he decries "special treatment."

Of course, he's not special. No one is, really. Every one of us represents, whether we like it or not, nothing more special than the random, lucky winner of a race between 40 to 60-million sperm on a particular day. Had the timing been off by even a second, someone else would be reading this. Or not reading it. One particular little swimmer among all those others had to win in order for me to be here to write this, too. Being born is so utterly dependent upon that sort of thing that, had a particular, small Devonian fish been eaten ten minutes before spawning, instead of ten minutes after, there might not even be a human race to worry about all this.

People want to be special, certainly. That doesn't mean there's a requirement for superiority. We're all special in the fact that we exist, that somehow millions of generations of ancestors, some of them microbes, managed not to die before producing the next generation, but we're also all quite ordinary for exactly the same reason. You may be a little smarter than somebody else. You may be a little stupider than another guy. It tends to equal out.

But know this. You're not more valuable than the other guy, nor is he more valuable than you. You're equally important, and equally unimportant, to the future of humanity. The tenth-great-grandchild of a pauper may be the scientist who finally banishes the last form of cancer to afflict humanity. The tenth-great-grandchild of a billionaire may turn out to be the most prolific serial murderer in history.

We don't know the future. But I believe we can make a fairly good argument that it's likely to be better if people can just learn to get along with each other.