Why we should get rid of race | David Livingstone Smith | FULL INTERVIEW

 

David Livinstone Smith discusses his work on dehumanisation, monsters and race.

Sacred Tension: The Illusion Of Race | Subrena Smith and David Livingstone Smith

Subrena Smith and I, talking about being anti-race.https://t.co/mrX4g0MZLZ

— David L. Smith (@DavidLSmith_Iam) January 3, 2024

Episode Description 

In this episode of Sacred Tension, I’m joined by philosophers Subrena Smith and David Livingstone Smith to discuss the challenge and necessity of abolishing race. Subrena tells her story of moving from Jamaica to the deeply racialized culture of the USA and explains why she is Race Queer instead of Black. We discuss the many ways the ideology of race obscures actual human diversity, the difference between race and ethnicity, the similarities between race and witchcraft, and much more. …

Black people's preferences being anti-correlated with US policy is just so... yeah. Yeah. https://t.co/dL74sakGEz

— Liam Bright (@lastpositivist) June 11, 2024

Believing that there are economic incentives to engage in mass incarceration isn’t a conspiracy theory what the fuck Pew

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) June 11, 2024

 

Racism and Genocide!!! 

 

The Myth Of Race || Vox Explains Race

• vox.com

By the way, I suffer from NO coronary insufficiency. 
It was the info I left to identify how deep and insidious the Brotherhood of the Crass was.

AH!!!

Lots of talk on this platform today (including by its owner) about "white people." But here's the real history behind that identifier. pic.twitter.com/0T8hYMPkFO

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 31, 2023

What Is Race Abolition? - DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH

Those of you who are acquainted with my work will know that I am a race abolitionist. Race abolitionism has two components. One is what philosophers call “descriptive”—that is, pertaining to how the world really is—and the other is what philosophers call “normative”—that is, pertaining to how the world should be. On the descriptive front, race abolitionists regard race as a fiction. And on the normative front, race abolitionists hold that the fiction of race is destructive, and should be eliminated. ...

#DEI #race #racism https://t.co/I47To6XheD

— David L. Smith (@DavidLSmith_Iam) July 8, 2023

What Is Race Abolition? 

Ending the career of a destructive ideology 

By DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH 

7 JUL 2023

Logical Empiricists’ Views of Race / Racial Explanations in Science || via jen foster @philoso_foster || Liam Kofi Bright

this paper by @lastpositivist on the logical empiricists’ views of race / racial explanations in science is super cool all of you should read it https://t.co/dUDwf4cE2m

— “jen foster” at all kim possible worlds (@philoso_foster) June 20, 2021

Stupidity REDUX: Racism

It went like this:

- He does not believe they (Africans, I think...) are inferior. Said one man to another.
- I did not know he was ...(I couldn't hear, was it a carpenter what he said? -- NOTE this: The fucker DOES not know me to say that or anything about me), said the interlocutor.










She said Nigger's Disease, with a deadpan and out of the blue (this was weeks ago.), of course, she was cajoled to perform.
I heard that stupid phrase the first time, years ago from a nurse’s lecture in one of Philip Morris International's factories, listening to her (stupidity from someone with higher education) did make my headache.
It was my first notice of the existence of the Brotherhood of the Crass.

NYTimes Opinion • How Italians Became ‘White’ By Brent Staples

via Howard French @hofrench

How Italians Became ‘White’ , an American story. @BrentNYT https://t.co/x4QguPGKEQ

— Howard French (@hofrench) October 12, 2019

Congress envisioned a white, Protestant and culturally homogeneous America when it declared in 1790 that only “free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States” were eligible to become naturalized citizens. The calculus of racism underwent swift revision when waves of culturally diverse immigrants from the far corners of Europe changed the face of the country.

As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson shows in his immigrant history “Whiteness of a Different Color,” the surge of newcomers engendered a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restrictive, politicized view of how whiteness was to be allocated. Journalists, politicians, social scientists and immigration officials embraced the habit, separating ostensibly white Europeans into “races.” Some were designated “whiter” — and more worthy of citizenship — than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable. The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.
...

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::


If the Italians with their HUGE cultural baggage DID "struggle" to get into the CLUB is not enough for you to stop using that token - WHITE, you are __________ (fill in the blank!)

Cognitive Dissonance :: Race

Historical race concepts (wikiPedia)

The concept of race as a rough division of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) has a long and complicated history. The word race itself is modern and was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries and acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology only from the mid-19th century. The politicization of the field under the concept of racism in the 20th century led to a decline in racial studies during the 1930s to 1980s, culminating in a poststructuralist deconstruction of race as a social construct.

…

In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were:

Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.

…

Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon[edit]

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887–1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. After returning to England from a tour of the United States in 1924, Huxley wrote a series of articles for the Spectator which he expressed his belief in the drastic differences between "negros" and "whites".^[28] He believed that the color of "blood" – percentage of 'white' and 'black' blood – that a person had would determine a person's mental capacity, moral probity, and social behavior. "Blood" also determined how individuals should be treated by society. He was a proponent of racial inequality and segregation.^[26]

By 1930, Huxley's ideas on race and inherited intellectual capacity of human groups became more liberal. By the mid-1930s, Huxley was considered one of the leading antiracist and committed much of his time and efforts into publicizing the fight against Nazism.^[28]

Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940) was a British anthropologist and ethnologist.

In 1935, Huxley and A. C. Haddon wrote, We Europeans, which greatly popularized the struggle against racial science and attacked the Nazis' abuse of science to promote their racial theories. Although they argued that 'any biological arrangement of the types of European man is still largely a subjective process', they proposed that humankind could be divided up into "major" and "minor subspecies". They believed that races were a classification based on hereditary traits but should not by nature be used to condemn or deem inferior to another group. Like most of their peers, they continued to maintain a distinction between the social meaning of race and the scientific study of race. From a scientific stand point, they were willing to accept that concepts of superiority and inferiority did not exist, but from a social stand point, they continued to believe that racial differences were significant. For example, they argued that genetic differences between groups were functionally important for certain jobs or tasks.^[26]

…



::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

… Freedom and its boat had arrived. And out of the freedom boat, almost imperceptible, just behind - some would say hand in hand with freedom itself, stepped memory, the vengeful, unforgiving brigand of all time. ´It is the storyteller,´Achebe has said, ´who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.´ Memory heals, it regenerates. It is an affirming god, a transcendent guide in the ritual of continuity. But when spurned, when repressed, memory mutates into a trickster imp and seduces the wayfarer to the precipice and beyond.
…

- Biyi Bandele
 “ … But there is no way in which such differences as do exist could satisfactorily explain the profound perception of alienness which Africa has come to represent for Europe.
This perception problem is not in its origin the result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think. At least, it is not ignorance entirely, or even primarily. It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate two gigantic historical events: the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa by Europe, the second event following closely on the heels of the first, and the two together stretching across almost half a millennium from about A.D. 1500. In an important and authoritative study of this invention, two American scholars, Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, show how a dramatic change in the content of British writing about Africa coincided with an increase in the volume of the slave trade to its highest level in the eighteenth century. That content

“shifted from almost indifferent and matter-of-fact reports of what the voyagers had seen to judgmental evaluation of the Africans… The shift to such pejorative comment was due in large measure to the effects of the slave trade. A vested interest in the slave trade produced a literature of devaluation, …”

  “The vast arsenal of derogatory images of Africa amassed to defend the slave trade and, later, colonization gave the world a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or, rather, not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day. ”


Excerpt From: Chinua Achebe. “The Education of a British-Protected Child” 



The dissonance is this - WHY then, we still use these false tokens to define ourselves - BLACK, WHITE?

You should respect people for standing for what they believe, regardless of it being in accordance with your own values.
You see yourself as a Nigger, White, Black, whatever rocks your world, it is a right, but accept the fact that I, I am not you.
I think with my own head, at least I try to.

Race Isn’t Biologically Real | vox

• vox

The Myth Of Race || Vox Explains Race

• vox.com