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| Racists
can't
define race Race is a completely unscientific concept, as is shown by the fact that racists have been unable to define what a race is other than in completely arbitrary ways Most people are aware of the treatment meted out to Jews by the Nazis, the discrimination and violence, the forced emigration, leading up to the obscenity of the extermination camps in the so-called Final Solution. Anti-semitic propaganda had prepared the way for these policies, with Jews being blamed for almost all the ills suffered by German workers in the twenties and thirties. But it was one thing to rant about Jewish conspiracies and other nonsense, and it was quite another to legislate and implement specific instances of discrimination. For, once there were laws forbidding Jews from holding certain jobs or attending certain schools, the question inevitably arose of how 'Jew' was defined. How could law-abiding German officials know who to discriminate against? Jews did not resemble the lurid caricatures of Nazi posters, so it was hard to tell who counted as a Jew. It was not a matter of religion, since conversion to Christianity was not enough to save anyone who had been categorised as Jewish, so how couldthe demonised group be defined? The same problem has haunted every attempt at race-based politics. For though racists see race as the driving force of human history, as being behind what makes people behave in certain ways, in practice it is a difficult, if not impossible, concept to define. Human beings have wandered over the Earth for thousands of years, fighting and cooperating and mating, so that we are all mixtures in various ways, with different inheritances, resulting in a myriad permutations of skull shape, hair type, skin colour, build, and so on. Any attempt to draw firm distinctions within the human family is doomed to failure. Governments often have to set up arbitrary criteria for nationality, with regard to such matters as entitlement to a passport or eligibility for conscription. Sporting organisations may well have regulations along similar lines, for instance that to play for a country you must have a parent or grandparent from there - a mere great-grandparent will not do. Or you can play for the country if you've lived there for so many years. Now, nationality is something that can be changed, but race is a supposed integral part of a person, not to be altered by the mere act of filling in a form and providing satisfactory answers in an interview. ...continue to next page 7 |
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