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Why assume that race matters?
John Mcreery (jlm@TWICS.COM)
Sun, 23 Oct 1994 08:58:20 JST
To all those involved in the great "race" debate--a simple question--
why should it matter? At all?
As someone who is old enough to have graduated from a segregated high
school in Virginia and been around to watch the original Civil Rights
Movement unfold, I feel very deeply about this.
I forget who it was who pointed out to me that even if there were correlations
associating skin color with other characteristics--sickle cell anemia, IQ,
you name it--the bell curves overlap and it is impossible to predict where
any individual will fall on any of the curves. There is, then, no moral
justification whatever for political or personal treatment of others on
the basis of what may be an entirely misleading and otherwise meaningless
visual cue.
Which is not, of course, to deny the *social* reality of thinking in terms
of racial categories, a phenomenon whose moral idiocy is apparent, regardless
of who is doing the thinking.
John McCreery (JLM@TWICS.COM)
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