WHITE GENES MATTER?

Graphic from City Data.

I heard an abysmally awkward and rather inane discussion of the resignation of a genetically Caucasian woman from her leadership of  NAACP of Spokane, WA. Granted, as can be seen from the pie chart above, it may have been difficult to find a person of color with Ms. Dolezal's talents, lying aside. The discussion on NPR this morning was less measured than my humorous consideration of the reasons behind this controversy.

 

A presenter and Africa-American reporter rattled on about race as a "social construct". They even compared Ms. Dolezal's possible delusion to being transgendered. Yes, she was born Black in a White body...that was the gist of it. The discussion sounded like a comic's riff on the issues without the laughs. I was left thinking, "Some Hollywood plastic surgeon is probably running to a lab to figure out a way to make Caucasians Black."

 

Race makes people crazy in part because of the denial of racial differences. Our eyes and ears tell us there are racial differences, but the social dictators of the age in Western culture are telling us that we are imagining this obvious perceptible reality. The emperor's new clothes.

 

Perhaps the focus of developing racial equality should be the acceptance of racial differences and assertion that they make absolutely no difference in legal rights and responsibilities in a society. This is the hard path, as has become obvious in the gay rights movement. Gay politicos have been striving to deny the obvious differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals in an attempt to assuage heterosexual fear of homosexuals.

 

This assertion of sameness seems to be a hard-wired defense mechanism against fear and the potential of conflict between those who are of different tribes. Maybe it reaches back to the conflict between early human subspecies. In any case, it is not logical or scientific. Science reassures us that genetic differences are a good thing for the species. Now all we have to do is convince ourselves of this and get on with saving our dying ecosystem.