CAN YOU BE A MEMBER OF THE “WHITE RACE” WITHOUT BEING RACIST?

(The answer is more complicated than you think).

“So don’t care where you come from, As long as you’re a Black man, you’re an African. No mind your complexion, There is no rejection, you’re an African. Cause if you’re plexion high, high, high, if you’re plexion low, low, And if you’re plexion in between, you’re an African … No mind denomination, That is only segregation, you’re an African.” ~ Peter Tosh 1977 “African”

What exactly is Peter Tosh saying? Hint: he wasn’t talking about you’re skin color.

“While we are all free to choose an identity, we should understand what we are choosing.”

THE LIE: PART 1 described that legislation establishing “White” supremacy in the Colonies created an artificial identity of “White” people. That manufactured identity begged empirical data to validate and sustain it. At that time, “race science” (i.e. objective data to support a framework of racial superiority), did not exist.

Following the artificial designation of a race called “White” people in 1681, Carl Linnaeus, a Sweedish botanist, known as the father of modern taxonomy, presents the first formal definition of human “races” in modern taxonomic terms in 1758 (in Systema naturae) where he conflates character with anatomy. He proclaimed: “Homo sapiens afer (the African Black), is ruled by caprice; Homo sapiens europaeus (the White European) is ruled by customs.”

Later, two schools of thought emerged: monogenism and polygenism.

Monogenism, (origin from a single source), upheld the scriptural unity of all peoples in the single creation of Adam and Eve. Human races were a product of degeneration from Eden’s perfection. Races declined to different degrees, Whites the least and Blacks the most. Climate was thought to be the primary cause for racial distinction. Samuel Stanhope Smith, president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), hoped that American Blacks, in a climate more suited to Caucasian temperaments, would soon turn White.

Dr. Juliette McClendon, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, has noted that Benjamin Rush, the “Father of American Psychiatry” stated in 1799 that Black people suffered from a disease similar to leprosy, called “Negritude.” Dr. McClendon writes; “he asserted that this disease could only be cured by removing the Negro’s blackness” as if Black people could become White through some intervention.

Later there emerged Samuel George Morton: the empiricist of Polygeny. Polygenists held the belief that the human races were separate biological species, the descendants of different Adams if you will. As another form of life, Blacks need not participate in the “equality” of man. Morton wrote articles defending the status of the human race as separate, created species. His fame as a scientist rested upon his collection of skulls and their role in “racial ranking.” He “ranked races” by calculating the average amount of white mustard seeds that could be placed in the cranial cavities of hundreds of skulls of “different races.”

Morton presented his final tabulation in 1849. He proclaimed that the cranial cavities of “White people” were larger, hence, they were more intelligent. Morton’s “science” showed that status and access to power in America reflected a biological determinant.

Morton’s proclamation, however, wasn’t enough; the “science” of “race” continued to develop. In 1851 at the meeting of the Louisiana Medical Association, S.A. Cartwright, a prominent Southern physician, presented a paper where he claimed to trace the problems of Black people to inadequate decarbonization of blood in the lungs (insufficient removal of carbon dioxide): “it is the defective … atmospherization of the blood conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium … That is the true cause of the debasement of mind, which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves.”

Cartwright even had a name for it, dyesthesia, a disease of inadequate breathing. He described its symptoms in slaves: “when driven to labor … He performs the task assigned to him in a headlong and careless manner, treading down with his feet or cutting with his hoe the plants he is put to cultivate — breaking the tools he works with, and spoiling everything he touches.”

Cartwright identified insensitivity to pain as another symptom: “when the unfortunate individual is subjected to punishment, he neither feels pain of any consequence nor any unusual resentment more than stupid sulkiness. In some cases … There appears to be an almost total loss of feeling.”

Cartwright proposed the following cure:

“The liver, skin and kidneys should be stimulated to activity … to assist in decarbonizing the blood. The best means to stimulate the skin is, first to have the patient well washed with warm water and soap; then to anoint it all over with oil, and to slap the oil in with a broad leather strap; then to put the patient to some hard kind of work in the open air and sunshine that will compel him to expand his lungs, as chopping wood, splitting rails, or sawing with the crosscut or whipsaw.”

Cartwright did not end his catalog of diseases with dysesthesia. He wondered why slaves often tried to flee, and identified the cause of a mental disease called drapetomania, or the insane desire to run away: “Like children, they are constrained by inalterable physiological laws, to love those in authority over them. Hence, from a law of his nature, the Negro can no more help loving a kind master, then the child can help loving her that gives it suck.” For slaves afflicted with drapetomania, Cartwright proposed a behavioral cure: “they have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children, to prevent and cure them from running away.”

The “race science” beat continued. Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” in 1883 and advocated the regulation of marriage and family size according to hereditary endowment of parents. Nearly 50 years later, Hitler and Nazi Germany adopted this as their mission.

In 1906, a Virginia physician, Robert Bennett Bean, published a long technical article comparing the brains of American Blacks and Whites. Bean presented data on the corpus callosum, a structure within the brain that contains fibers connecting the right and left hemispheres. He measured the length of the genu, the front part of the corpus callosum, and compared it with the length of the splenium, the back part. He determined that whites have relatively large genus, hence more brain up front in the seat of intelligence. He further concluded that blacks suffer from a “paucity of intelligence.”

Moreover, Bean did not neglect differences in gender. He claimed that within each race, women have relatively smaller genus than men.

Bean attracted sufficient attention to become the subject of an editorial in American Medicine for April 1907. Bean had provided, the editorial proclaimed, the anatomical basis for the complete failure of the Negro schools to impart the higher studies — “the brain cannot comprehend them any more than a horse can understand the rule of three … Leaders in all political parties now acknowledge the error of human equality … It may be practicable to rectify the error and remove a menace to our prosperity — a large electorate without brains.”

Jensen’s theory on hereditary ability of IQ, race and intelligence “g-factor” (1969) and Murray’s “Bell Curve Theory” (1994) have sustained this parade of “race science” that serves to validate, through “measurement”, a biological-genetic nature for superior/inferior social and intellectual position in human beings; “White” always superior, “Black” always inferior.

Herein lies the danger of asserting that “Blacks can be racist too,” most notably by New York Times number one bestselling author and college professor, Ibram X. Kendi in his book “How To Be An Antiracist.” If Kendi’s proclamation is correct, then the position of shared equity on the racial hierarchy with Whites can only render a biological-genetic predisposition to explain all of their relative disparities. Even Kendi, a dread-locked brilliant Black scholar, falls into this trap. Might this explain why his thesis is a number one best seller?

Perhaps the most recent example of this dehumanizing race science is a publication suggesting that genes responsible for pigmentation in humans (i.e. melanin content) are pleiotropic for aggression and sexual activity. In other words, having Black skin predisposes one to be more aggressive and sexual. Two “scientist” (Rushton, J.P., and Templar, D.I., 2012, both now deceased) concluded that Black people have lower IQ’s, higher sex drives, higher birth rates, higher infant mortality, higher rates of HIV/AIDS, and higher rates of violent crime, and that these traits can be understood as an outcome of evolution forms of aggression, criminality and sexual behavior in Black people as a function of melanin. The reader should note that this study is published in a “respectable and refereed” scientific journal (i.e., Personality and Individual Differences). To their credit, this journal has now retracted the paper after a slew of criticism.

SO TO WHAT END?

Race-science serves the purpose of legitimizing a position of legislated superiority in a manufactured “race” called “White” people. Race-science provides an identity that compels dehumanization of Blackness, tacitly accomplished through a sustained vernacular of distinct and separate human “races” which, by design, places the “White race” always and unquestionably, in the superior position.

The notion of a “White race” is akin to a man-made lake, it is an unnatural artificial creation, manufactured and maintained for a purpose of divide and conquer. As it was in 1681, its original function remains in 2021; It keeps the aristocratic elite safe and secure.

Race-science legitimizes a hierarchical stratification based on skin color; hence, a Racial-Hierarchy.

In the song “African,” Peter Tosh wasn’t talking about your skin color (i.e. “As long as you’re a Black man”), he was talking about your identity. Identity as African is an identity based in genetic archaeologic reality, while identity as a member of the “White racial group” is endogenous to an artificial and manufactured illusion of genetic power over other human beings.

Whether you recognize it or not, as long as you self-identify as a member of the “White race” you are identifying with a historic domain rooted in legislated power, manufactured to place you in a position of superiority over other human beings.

How many are DRUNK off the Kool-aid and don’t recognize it? How many reference themselves as members of a “White racial group” every single waking moment of their existence without second thought? How frequent do you hear the routine reference, particularly in media, of multiple and varied “races” without pause. These manufactured constructs are so well embedded in the human vernacular that no-one dares to question their authenticity; with each passing generation, Pinocchio looms larger as a living-breathing entity.

But who is at fault? After all, we were all born into this world with this arrangement of pseudoscience-based genetic superiority, long in-place.

The objective, for those who care, is to establish awareness by dismantling the Racial Hierarchy; by refuting, altogether, identity as a member of a manufactured “racial group.”

You can’t choose your skin color, but you can choose your identity.

If you can acknowledge the existence of but one race, (or as Rastafarians would say, One Love) then you can extend your self-identity to an ethnic and cultural heritage steeped in human archaeologic reality.

As the song “African” fades away at the end, if you listen closely, Peter Tosh reveals his hand of wisdom:

“And if you come from Switzerland (you are an African). And if you come from Germany (you are an African).” Song fades.

If you are human, you are an African.