Term:race

From dKosopedia

The __term__ race has social but not scientific meaning now: there is no basis in genetics for a claim that there are fixed or genetically discernable borders between races of people.

However, in various US and state laws, the concept of race is recognized and defined into rules by affirmative action laws and by rules defining who is a Native American for purposes of aboriginal treaty rights and other federal benefits. Thus the legal concept of race remains somewhat legitimate.

Also, socially, certain people are perceived as being symbols or role models despite their actual ethnicity or desire to be free of perception as such. The celebrity politics of race can be particularly toxic, with for example the prosecution of Michael Jackson perceived by many as being "anti-black" when Jackson himself has taken pains to surgically eradicate most traces of his African-American ethnicity from his face. Or, more seriously, O.J. Simpson's trial for killing his "white, blond" wife, being affected by considerations that "race riot"s could result if he was convicted: at least one juror in the case admitted that this affected their vote.

Or on a more petty but insidious level, the perception that Halle Berry is simultaneously a role model for black actors but also "not really black" because her mother raised her, and "is all white" despite her difficult decision to marry a black man in the 1960s in America and raise a mixed race child to respect herself, arguably a harder task than an equivalently educated and incomed black woman raising a black child in an all-black environment. Berry's mother is thus subtly degraded for not being black, a seemingly racist position, and Berry was even criticized by a very few people for bringing her mother to the Oscars and making this obvious, a totally racist position. Yet it persists:

People continue to believe things, disbelieve things, and act on an idea called race that they have in their heads. Use of the term is an excuse to do this or an admonishment not to do it, but it is never truly a neutral concept:

As the term politically and scientifically diminishes, it rises in its legal and social importance, until its every use implies a specific legal or social choice which one is expected to make based on an "us versus them" division or plan.

For instance, resistance to re-introducing multi-member districts which would advantage third parties greatly in American elections, has been largely framed in the language of race, since such districts were broken up due to gerrymandering to prevent minorities from getting seats in legislatures. Today, ethnic minorities have access to posts of power but an ethical minority in the form of a minor political party, does not. In every nation in the developed world there is some system relying on large multi member districts or a proportional representation based on party lists, and minorities are dealt with somehow. But in the US the fear persists that such a system will be abused to favour one race over another, and that the gerrymandering is inevitable and cannot be overcome, say by bioregional multi-member districts whose borders do not change, ever, and deal with population shifts by adding proportional seats in small numbers, rather than shifting the borders of the district.

This is just one of many examples where fear of the race card plays a big role in preventing change.