Why “Race” is the DNA of Racism

Perhaps life’s greatest tragedy is it’s possible to “know” something that’s false

“Hey, Genius… ever noticed you’re one of the few Black guys livin’ in our building?” my pal joked, with tongue firmly in cheek.

I smiled, racking my brain for a witty comeback.

“Hey, Nick…” I said while pointing to his feet. “Ever noticed you’re one of the few whose feet wear red shoes while livin’ in our building?”

His eyebrows raised. Seconds later, his face contorted in a squint before erupting in laughter.

Such goes the arbitrary nature of “color.” For example trumps precept, let’s take a routine traffic light for instance.

Red means stop. Yellow means hesitate. Green means go. Excellent!

Of course, if from now on we agree green means stop, yellow means hesitate and red means go… guess what?

Such “language games,” said Wittgenstein, far too often confuse us. After all, viewing Google Maps isn’t sightseeing Paris any more than browsing Olive Garden’s menu is tasting spaghetti.

As for the so-called color differences, they’re irrelevant. Ultimately. So long as each color belongs to the same crayon box — they’re all the same.

In short, whoever grasps the above insight glimpses the nature of color unmasked.

I. The Danger of ‘I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know’

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”

—Socrates

Wisdom, said Socrates, begins with clear definitions…

…With this simple insight, Socrates gave us the Socratic Method.

Look up the word race, and the definitions range from “competition between runners” to “distinct physical characteristics.” Oddly enough, though both meanings point to different things, each perfectly describes today’s racial climate.

If the mere sight of skin color is point A, most people’s brains race at lightning speed from this arbitrary starting point to reach X, Y, and Z.

Ahh, but according to Dr Craig Venter, a leading expert on DNA sequencing, “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”

In other words, the very concept of “race” is the DNA of racism.

Bingo!

Just as the genetic code consists of four letters, the word “race” holds to form.

Sure instead of R, A, C, and E, life’s code is A, C, G, and T, these letters comprising our genetic alphabet nevertheless make up the whole of our genetic makeup.

Think about it:

💡 How absurd would it be for the word “act” to feel superior to “cat” due to this random formation of letters?

So advanced is today’s grasp of life’s alphabet that geneticists, such as Dr Emmanuelle Charpentier, have become every bit as skilled at “DNA editing” as book editors are at manuscript editing.

Given that, every human to have ever walked Earth’s skin shares the same group of genes, inherently — though with a few slightly different copies — skin color must be only apparent.

Appearances are deceptive, indeed…

…Simply put, because skin color is but a tweak made to Nature’s genetic blueprint, the very concept of race must be the blueprint for racism. After all, take away the idea of race, and guess what…?

Poof!

Like the dinosaurs of yesteryear, the idea of Race and her child named Racism are both going extinct. In 2024, dear reader, my fellow Millennials and freethinking Gen Zers are slowly distancing themselves from yesterday’s ignorance.

Perhaps many of society’s most harmful beliefs have survived due to our widespread misbelief that ignorance and absurdity lack the stamina required to survive into old age.

In short, race is no more at fault for racism than is a knife responsible for stabbing. The only good is knowledge, after all, and the only evil is ignorance.

As for ignorance, which always requires quietly removing the “-anc” to ignore the truth, perhaps our present case is no different.

II. Darwin “Understood” Nature Too Well to Take Race Seriously

“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”

— Charles Darwin

“A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.” Sir Isaac Newton’s emphasis on understanding explains why he singlehandedly discovered calculus. And gravity. And motion. And so on.

Among life’s greatest tragedies is it’s possible to “know” something that’s false.

Ouch!

For thousands of years, the smartest people in the world knew the earth was not only flat but also rests at the very center of our galaxy.

For thousands of years, the smartest people in the world knew these people were Black and those people were white and these people were _______.

Understanding, then, is to be prized even higher than knowledge! Perhaps this explains why King Solomon advised us to “get wisdom, get understanding,” above all else.

To understand something is to stand + under the surface of what appears.

To the naked eye, the sun appears to orbit the Earth. “I know this to be true,” the child naively points at the sky. But astronomy stands under appearances and tells a different story.

Knowledge is to understand what a cell is to a molecule… what a molecule is to an atom. The difference is a matter of depth.

Racism is a faulty conclusion that rests on an even faultier premise. As for the father of evolution by natural selection, he understood this to be true, despite the racially-charged climate of his day.

When reading the “Bible” of biology, On the Origin of Species, you can almost feel Darwin whispering to you via the pages.

“We share a common ancestor with chimps,” he whispers in the fourth chapter (“Natural Selection”). In the next breath, he hints at “don’t believe them, friend, there’s no such thing as race, unless you’re referring to the one human race.”

As for why Darwin didn’t outright spell out the implications of his radical theory, perhaps Chuck didn’t sign up to be martyred, as did that heroic fellow named Abe Lincoln, with whom Darwin shares a birthday.

Darwin published his magnum opus six years before Lincoln’s assassination. And believe you, me, dear reader — had Darwin dared to challenge the orthodoxy of his day, he would’ve been assassinated too.

In Chapter 2 of The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin recalls the horrors of having to endure witnessing his fellow humans enslaved, while visiting Rio de Janeiro:

“On the 19th of August, we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans…”

For context’s sake, slavery was still en vogue globally during this period. So for Darwin to have even expressed a hint of repulsion highlights — it’s no accident Darwin and Lincoln shared birthdays.

III. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” → Genius Turner’s “Final Species Code”

As part of the initiation into the mysteries, the wise men of old used to teach the world’s “geniuses” to carry on silent conversations between the ears and pages alike. Hence it’s long been said two persons can’t possibly read the same book.

There’s a “perfect intelligence that exists between wise men of remote ages,” Emerson once said. “A man cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book but time and like-minded men will find them.”

Did not the immortal Plato bury the eternal Form of the Good in the Republic, only to later have that “o” plucked (God)?

As for that Platonic Sun, whom Socrates “calls the child of the Good, whom the Good begat in his likeness, to be in the visible world,” was not that aborted vowel “o” swapped and exchanged for the “Son of God”…?

Just as Plato carried on silent conversations between pages, did not Darwin, too?

Shall not Genius Turner’s The Biological Code, and all such allegorical adaptations under the guise of his screenplay + stage play + novel, all titled The Last People, serve to translate Darwin’s insights encoded in Origin of Species, as do cells when using the genetic code to translate info encoded in DNA?

Because no idea is original, perhaps the “genius” simply removes the letter ‘K’ — from what people Knew yesterday — and repackages it as new today.

As part of the above “translation” process, it’s apparent as humanity’s evolutionary process continues, crude notions such as racism will continue to die off along with sexism, xenophobism and every other such “-ism” of the kind.

After all,

💡 Today’s genius is tomorrow’s common sense.

IV. Why Mother Nature Used Different-Colored Crayons

“I believe there is only one race — the human race.”

— Rosa Parks

Ever noticed how Mother Nature made continents yet humans made countries?

Ever noticed how Mother Nature made one human race yet humans made different racial groups?

Perhaps the human race is the biggest threat to the human race.

Genetics tells us skin color is only skin deep. Literally.

Peel back less than a millimeter of skin, and like peeling an apple, shall not the core remain the same?

Race amounts to separating a barrel of apples based on skin color, i.e., this apple’s red… that one’s green… yet are not they all still, well, apples?

From hair to skin tone, Mother Nature’s naturally selected palette of bodily colors were all biological adaptations.

No different from the robin when building her nest, Nature did what she could to ensure her offspring’s survival. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

When her children came of age and set out to leave the East African nest, Mother Nature adapted them accordingly. After all, neither “the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives,” said Darwin, “[but] it’s the one that is most adaptable to change.”

When the northern regions of Europe grew too frosty, Mother Nature simply clothed her children with a new, lighter coat of skin. This coat made with less melanin was better suited for colder habitats.

Put,

💡 Just as a natural response to a scorching summer afternoon is to seek shade, Nature initially selected darker shades of complexion.

Darker pigment on the skin is better suited for that blistering African sun… right?

This means when humans migrated into the colder European climates, Nature’s children with lighter-complexioned-body armor left behind more offspring than their darker counterparts.

Clearly in this struggle for existence, the survivors get to leave behind more offspring.

Judging by Nature’s patent recipe for sprinkling her spice of life, and variety, Einstein had it right: “science” is nothing but a fancy word for showing common sense to an uncommon degree.

In short, so far as light goes — sun and skin alike — less is more.

V. The Folly of Youth

Each generation “evolves” or becomes more “god-like” or more “ennobled.”

Each generation bears the right to issue its apology in advance. After all, today’s genius is tomorrow’s common sense. Or as Dr Maya Angelou once remarked, “If you knew better — you’d do better.”

Yesterday’s flat-earth belief is today’s race-distinction beliefs. Today’s job applications still demand that we, members of the same human race, must distinguish ourselves according to distinctions rooted in melanin levels.

Tomorrow’s children are sure to cringe at the mere mention of today’s folly. But again, we’re offering our apology in advance.

Racism is the diseased fetus carried around in the womb of race. And this fetus will only die out when its mother dies. Old sins cast long shadows, indeed.

For as long as people separate themselves based on coat color, this bastard child racism will live on.

VI. The Takeaway

“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”

— Honest Abe

A motivational speaker speaks about what people want to hear; a truth-teller tells people what they need to hear.

Sure, morphine numbs the pain of a body when afflicted with cancer. Such relief, unfortunately, is only temporary. The cancerous tumor must be removed from the body altogether.

Race is the tumor in the collective human psyche!

As fate would have it, the very martyr who died for the American slave’s emancipation was born in February — Black History Month.

Perhaps sooner than later, we’ll truly live in a color-blind society. Which makes me wonder:

💡 Perhaps ‘racism’ is sheer proof that history’s most dangerous combo consists of mixing ignorance with the ability to see.

Moving forward from entertainers to major media publications, perhaps society’s influencers will gradually adjust the symbols used in today’s language games.

“Because of their impact on our memories, writers rule,” Professor Danielle Allen writes. “They wield the instrument by which our world is organized.”

Perhaps it’s time to wield these instruments in a way more reflective of science and truth…

…After all, as Professor Richard Dawkins points out,

“We’re all Africans.”