The Past, Present, and Future of Race

      

       The days here are hot. The milky blue burns down, scratching at your throat with thirst and carving away at your stomach with shriveling hunger. The thought of stopping and resting now is a delusional fantasy. What's worse are the nights. Frigid and unknowably dark, your only option is to gather with the others for warmth and you're left to try and sleep, all the while remaining wary of what could possibly be out there, the speckles of starlight floating atop the ripples of unfriendly eyes. Your child, still small enough to be held, is already asleep beside you. That untouchable, unknowable feeling of dread is quiet tonight as well, likened to the sound of the dry, wind-blown reeds shushing you to sleep. Tonight may not be one to lay awake in fear, but you know that one of those nights is - nay - has to be coming soon. You'll have to teach your child this fear as well. You'll have to teach them to run as soon as they can walk. You'll have to teach them fear, because fear is what keeps you and the others alive.

(Via Flickr.com)

       I remember last year when we had a local behavioral therapist come to our school and give us a talk about maintaining mental health as a modern teenager. I happened to know her prior to the assembly as a family friend, so that sense of familiarity helped me stay invested in what she was talking about with us. However, one thing that she kind of tossed aside as a joke about the amygdala has oddly stuck with me this long. The amygdala essentially processes emotions including, but not limited to, fear and anxiety. The way that we currently understand it, it's the product of natural selection from thousands of generations of humans that have been bred to fear. To paraphrase her, the caveman that got spooked by the rustling in the bushes and ran away was far more likely to survive and pass on his genes than the caveman that ignored it and got eaten by a tiger. On this innate, primitive, almost juvenile level, we fear what we aren't familiar with - what isn't like us - and we take refuge in the things that we have learned are similar to ourselves.

      But of course, this is a simplification. Humans don't activate their fight or flight response whenever we see anything remotely different for the same reason that a blonde seeing a brunette for the first time doesn't immediately punch them in the face. We know how to control fear, how to grip the reigns of angst, and use them as a weapon to control the thing we fear or die trying, however that may be. 

       Believe it or not, we live in a society. Society is defined, rather poetically, by the Oxford dictionary as "the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community" (key phrase: more or less.) The worldwide society as we know it is a very complicated series of interrelated systems that we all pretty much agree has advanced astronomically since the time of wearing hide cloaks and domesticating grain. But a model such as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs shows us that we are all still fundamentally built on the caveman ideas of survival--we are a society of fear and comfort more than we are one of democracy and innovation.

(Via Wikimedia Commons)

          Marc Aronson's book Race deals with the historical past, the current present, and the potential future of race. The focal point of the book is that of how race has changed, evolved, and morphed alongside humans throughout our existence, but the fact that is there to begin with has never changed. What I took away from this book was mainly that which relates to the second point: race has always existed and, unless we redesign the human condition entirely, will continue to exist for as long as we do. We will always, whether consciously or unconsciously, fit people into the discreet boxes of "us" and "them". Whether that be Jew and Gentile, white and black, gay and straight, cis and trans, or western and eastern, we are helpless against the innate urge to categorize people and places into 'objective' dichotomies. 

          So what does this mean? Does this mean that we are all helplessly, primitively, naturally bigoted and should just give up the whole equality thing already? No. Race and racism aren't the same things--race is the idea of separating people into discreet groups, whereas racism is the idea that an individual or group of individual races are superior to others. We can acknowledge that we recognize others as different, but we can also recognize that that fear tied to difference is irrational, as these people pose no threat. In this sense, race functions almost as a sense of identity. By fitting into a group, we feel comforted by the idea of being surrounded by people like ourselves. As Aronson discusses in the section titled "Mein Kampf", Adolf Hitler used his charisma and common prejudice among the German populace to weaponized the identity, the race, of Aryanism against the Jews, the Others. But in a later section, titled "'Black is a way of Acting': Race Today", he discusses the way that race is more about perception, and this perception can be changed. People can "act black" or "act white" in order to better fit into the group that we feel we align with better. These are clearly two very different ways of dealing with the angst of different groups or races, deciding whether to integrate or to intimidate.

       Later in that section, Aronson says, "Nothing is more human than to notice people who are different, and to think yourself superior or to fear yourself inferior. But right now, for the first time in human history, we have learned to mistrust those feelings."

         This mistrust is the exact thing that we all need. We can use it as a tool through which to examine the way that we have built a system around maintaining white supremacy almost worldwide. We can examine the way that people choose to "act" certain races and why. We can examine how to expand our concept of "us". We may have been descended from a people who roamed Eurasia in fear of their practically ever-looming mortality, but that doesn't mean that we have to let fear command the sinews of our hearts like a marionette's strings. That doesn't mean that we have to undergo the beyond-Herculean task of abolishing race altogether, either--we can teach ourselves to embrace our inherent differences. Rather than use these differences to bolster our own sense of self and wrap ourselves in the comfortable feeling that we're superior, we can learn to recognize that we're all afraid of the unknown, and we're all the unknown to each other, so how can we possibly go at this totally alone? Everyone must overcome that fear, even within groups, so why not expand that courage across borders and boundaries? Why see the stars reflected in the eyes that look back at us with grim intent when we can all choose to look up instead, at the sky that we share?

Works Cited

Aronson, Marc. Race: A History beyond Black and White. New York, Ginee seo Books/Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2007.

Coconino National Forest Staff. Night Sky near Flagstaff. 17 Sept. 2017. Flickr.com, SmugMug+Flickr, 17 Sept. 2017, www.flickr.com/photos/coconinonationalforest/37462383664. Accessed 3 Apr. 2020.

Finkelstein, J. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. 27 Oct. 2006. Commons.Wikimedia.org, Mediawiki, 27 Oct. 2006, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs.svg. Accessed 3 Apr. 2020.