Also, the second category/class/grouping begins with the subset:“Black or African American” followed by _______ American Indian or Alaska Native, allowing for self-identification as “Native American” or ???
Trivia: While working on a private genealogical project with a couple of Canadians, I used the term “Native American” and I was corrected. If I remember correctly, “Indigenous” was the proper term.
Canadians also commonly use First Nation. Though that too is not accurate, as I am sure there were many different geo-polititical groups lumped into that.
Back to race, the problem with any of these labels, it that they tend to carry our pre-existing ideas and stereotypes along with them as soon as we use them. The label prevents us from seeing them as they truly are without the veneer of our pre-suppositions. To some extent it is inevitable, as we cannot go through life without doing the same to situations throughout our daily lives. When someone steps out of a red Ferrari, we expect and see something very different than when the same person steps out of a Prius or a Ford pickup. However, we should be mindful of those things so we see past our pre-judgements.
For purposes of the US Government, it may be important to differentiate between the Indian and Asian and Islander, yet it generally believed that the populations of American Indians and Pacific Islanders came from Asian stock.
Speaking of which, Clare Herbert Woolston (1856-1927) wrote the song "Jesus Loves the Little Children, a Sunday School favorite when I was little.
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Do Protestant kids still sing it in Sunday School?
No, I’ve obviously not made myself clear. I’m not suggesting anything of the sort. In our society, we can’t not recognize race – it’s the water we swim in. What we can do is also recognize that treating race as a primary way of categorizing people, as well as the specific racial categories we divide people into, are relatively recent inventions, and that both were created to reinforce the dominant position of one group. Races are not neutral, scientific descriptions.
You illustrate the problem later when you write
Quite right. Everyone (or at least every American) knows that there are three(*) races and that everyone is either a member of one or a mixture of multiple races. That is widely known, obvious, and scientifically complete nonsense. There is no meaningful way, scientifically speaking, of breaking human variation down into a handful of essential populations, and the idea that everyone who doesn’t fit one of the neat categories represents some kind of mixture is just wrong. It treats a fiction as if it were a real thing and encourages the disasterously wrong idea that everyone who belongs to a given race has the set of characteristics assigned to that race.
The fact that the second category we immediately assign people to (after sex – which itself turns out not to be without problems) is race, rather than native language, religion, social class, or whatever, is a fact about our culture and does not reflect anything universal.
I will note that if we really wanted to, we could break down humans into three genetically different populations – not perfectly, of course, but meaningfully. But those three populations would probably be 1) the Khoisan of southern Africa, 2) the Pygmies of central Africa, and 3) everyone else. I don’t think that’s a classification that’s going to catch on.
(*) Or maybe four: ‘red and yellow, black and white’.
I think that is a song never sung anymore. The problem is that words have meaning, and even if we as speakers do not find it offensive, if a listener might do so, we are obligated out of love for them to not offend.
Thanks for that. Following your advice and Googling Khoisan, I ran across this article from 2016:
From the article:
If one were to compare the entire DNA genomes from representatively sampled human populations from around the world, the resulting relationships would look more like an evolutionarily reticulated chain-link fence. In other words, a network rather than a tree. This applies to even purportedly racially important anatomical features.
Given all this mixing, I find it amazing that groups like the Khoisan haven’t already just been genetically blended in so much that their distinctiveness is lost! I guess - given the image of the evolutionary “network” rather than the ‘tree’ or even the ‘bush’, I guess significant blending has happened, but apparently not so much that the distinctives can’t still be recognized.
Yeah - somebody should put in a survey form: “Khoisan”, “Pygmy”, and “Other”, and give a great many of us the taste of getting lumped into a leftover category!
it would be interesting to look at the churches still singing it. The YouTube’s I just looked at look like they were aimed toward churches stuck in the 1950s,
There’s the rub, eh? If a body doesn’t know a word or deed is offensive, how’s a body supposed to know. Fortunately, here in Biologos, there are a number of folks who are quick to correct an offense, and they’re not all moderators.
I remember, back in 1967, I rode a greyhound bus from California to Oklahoma. I was 18. Along about New Mexico, a black man in his 50s got on and sat next to me. I was unphased. We got to talking about all sorts of things, and I had cause to say: “Blacks …”. “Rat quick”, Mr. X said: “I aiin’t black, I’m colored.” No way I was going to argue; I quickly corrected myself, and we continued talking, … amicably.
Closer to home, …
I was about 6 or7 when the Hearing Baptist preacher and his wife gave my Deaf stepmother and me a ride to church one Sunday. I was talking with Mrs. Gunn about something and said: “The Deaf and Dumb … blah, blah, blah.” Mrs. Gunn chose that moment to enlighten me. “We don’t call 'em Deaf and Dumb, Terry; they’re not Dumb. We call 'em Deaf Mutes.” Earliest “WTH?!!!” memory I have. It never occurred to me that anybody would think that I was calling my mother or the Deaf “Dumb”; and yet, that’s what Mrs. Gunn was clearly telling me that I had done. From then on, all Deaf were “Deaf Mutes.” Years later, I realized, “Mute” is not fit for use either. More years later, I started to figure out that not all deaf are Deaf with a capital “D”; many are deaf with a little “d”.
Once someone suggested that if I found myself between two groups in conflict, one of my own race and one of another race, I would naturally run to the group of my own race. I disagreed that I would do any such thing. Now I am quite sure, given everything else being equal, I would do the opposite. Why? Because I would want to make it crystal clear that I am NOT joining the conflict. I have NEVER felt safer among my own race. White people, frankly, have always been the most viscous killers on the planet.
Race as a collection of biological characteristics is clearly not a social construct. It is making this a significant division between between people which is the social construct. Race is not who we are any more than other superficialities like sex. These are just the circumstances we find ourselves in. Who we are, our identity, is in the choices we make.
I recall a news report a year or two ago in which a young black reporter was condemning an old white man for using the term colored.
She probably did not realize that the old man was used what he was raised to believe was a polite term, one that the leaders of the civil rights movement called themselves in the 1960s (when he was her age).
All true, Terry. The problem comes when people are aware their words and actions are hurtful, yet defend their right to use them. I think there are times we have all made comments that were inadvertently offensive. I know I have. If we make those comments purposefully, holding our rights above concern for others, we are not walking in the light.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Racism is a real thing. A white thing. White supremacism is a real thing. Christian white supremacism. But we can’t mention it, it’s ‘political’. Like the Great Replacement Theory?
