Fake “Race” versus Real Ethnicity

Olmec head made in Mexico sometime between 1000 and 1500 BCE

Continuum…

Our local once-a-year jazz project wrapped-up last night.

When considering what the USA has given the world, you’ll usually hear things like Hollywood, rock & roll, cheeseburgers, or democracy.

I’m not here to defend the merits or legitimacy of those claims.

But jazz.

As jazz legend Art Blakey once remarked “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life”.

In centuries to come, when the USA is but another in a long line of defunct empires, I hope the world will still be playing some form of jazz.

At the end of last night, a very friendly and elderly lady was passing among the tables in the lobby, handing-out a survey form.  By its questions, this survey was clearly intended to gather the data required to show the value of this music festival to the local community and economy when applying for government funding.

The section of the survey asking questions of ethnicity was a somewhat heavy-handed attempt to collect data showing how music encourages the positive aspects of “multi-culturalism”.

Those being surveyed were asked to circle their “ethnicity”.  This is the only question I refused to answer on the questionnaire, because as I’ve written a hundred times here and elsewhere, “white” is not an ethnicity.

The idea that I would be lumped into a group including people from Poland, Spain, Michigan, New Zealand, Canada, Florida, South Africa, or Finland for “diversity” figures was rankling in the extreme.

And I imagine that those of darker complexion would find it annoying if various peoples from Madagascar, California, Nigeria, the UK, Brazil, Senegal, South Carolina, Jamaica, or Kenya were collectively described as being from the same ethnic group.

This placing of “race” above culture and actual ethnicity is why I got home and put-up yesterday’s post, inviting people to pretend for a moment that “race” actually exists in the American sense.

Many readers described the man in one of the pictures correctly – by POPULATION GROUP, rather than “race”.

Most readers were honest, and said that in the USA, the people in both photos would probably be simply described as “Black”.

The boy on the left is from the Batek tribe of Malaysia.  The man on the right is a central Pacific Marshall Islander (where Bikini Atoll saw the USA conducting atomic tests during the last century).

If our identity were determined by genetics alone, both of these people are more closely related to many Europeans and indigenous Americans than to most Africans (Africa being the most genetically diverse region on Earth).

But of course our identities are far more complex than a collection of inherited genes.

The colossal Olmec heads of eastern Mexico show facial characteristics which most Americans would associate with Africa, yet they were sculpted thousands of years before West Africans began their forced migration to the Americas.  In other words, the genes which can be expressed as certain phenotypes (physical characteristics) are present IN EVERY POPULATION IN THE WORLD, including the European population.

It is easy to forget that much of Europe was probably still “black” as recently as 8,000 years ago.

If either of the people shown in yesterday’s post were to immigrate to the USA, their unique histories and identities would soon be subsumed within ridiculously arbitrary “race” categories.

I am not here to explain anything to American people of color, who know only too well that the “Black experience” is very real, even if actual “race” is not.

But spreading a wider understanding of how population genetics actually works is one small part of dismantling race-based social and political structures.

#raceisasocialconstruct #weareallrelated #ethnicity