Sam Harris appeared on stage with Scott Galloway to discuss many topics, including “race.” I am using these scare quotes because I do not recognize “race” to be a reality-based category, but only an extremely toxic temptation for both well-meaning people and power-seekers. I’m convinced that from Day One, recognition of “race” was always a bad idea and it continues to be a bad idea that needlessly tears people apart, often causing physical violence and sometimes causing death. The concept of race has the scientific validity and reliability of astrology–both concepts are gross miscategorizations, attempts to silo complex human beings (and all human beings are complex) on the basis of immutable irrelevant characteristics. The less credence we grant this concept, the better, in my view. Here’s what Sam Harris had to say about his view of the best endgame for the concept of “race.”
The goal has to be to get to a society where we care less and less about the superficial differences between people. It seems to me patently obvious that there can’t be a matter of caring more and more about these differences. [There are] people who were actually living in a post-racial society in the sense that they weren’t they did not care about the color of anyone’s skin or anyone’s sexual preference or gender identity. There were many people living truly ethical lives having broken out of this this truly toxic past with respect to those forms of bigotry. They’re getting pushed back. They’re
being told by this corner of the culture “No no no! It’s too soon to say that. It’s always going to be too soon to say that you’re post-racial or blind with respect to these differences among people. These differences have to be ramified. They have to be acknowledged. You as a white person have no standing with which to say anything about race.” That’s madness. It’s absolute madness.The goal for us ethically and intellectually has to be to arrive at a time where we don’t care about these things no more than we care about hair color. Just imagine if we were coming from a time where people had been discriminated against based on hair color. That would be totally perverse.
When we lived in Loudoun County, Virginia, we had a marvelous dentist. We were more friends than doctor/patient. It will help to understand that I am an off-the-scale auditory, processing and storing information as sound. I have few visual skills.
He had done his undergraduate work at Virginia Tech, where our daughter was studying. During a visit I noticed a pin on his suit-coat and asked him about it. He was a member of the Society of Black Engineers. I had a puzzled look on my face, and after a split-second he laughed. “You never noticed I was black.”
Why would I?
It may be true that Race isn’t, but that doesn’t help much. After all, it remains in non-technical vernacular, which is the way most people use it. After all, the fact that there are no such things as witches didn’t save the dozen or so women hanged for practicing witch craft back in the old Salem colony. More to the point, Robin DiAngelo says quite plainly in chapter 2 that “Under the skin, there is no true biological race.” To say that racism is nothing but a social construct is to agree with CRT’s core issue. The whole point of CRT, if I read it right, is to reprogram society to use, in her mind, a more wholesome attitude toward the fallacy of race in our everyday lives.
BTW, I recently finished “The Myth of Race” by Robert W Sussman. Its a splendid history of the bifurcation of Race into cultural and biological understandings of “race.” Much of it was very interesting.