In response to Shelley Lynn Tremain's observations
about terminology and its connotations ...
The slogan "One race, the human race" needs saying
here. FIDE, the international chess body, with nearly
200 afiliated countries, has as its motto Gens Una
Sumus "We Are One Race/People".
Nevertheless there are subdivisions which slogans
cannot gloss over. And they have historical and
material roots.
Does "the idea that there are races being
scientifically unproven" merely mean there isn't a
different gene pool for yellow-, brown-, black-, red-,
olive- and "white" (pink?)- skinned people in the
sense that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals had clearly
differentiated evolutionary descent?
Well, for now, let us suppose that is so, and that the
boundaries between what are perceived as "races" (or
for that matter "tribes") are mainly cultural eg
language, beliefs, customs. Where does that get us?
Let us borrow the term "set" from mathematics and see
if its more neutral (ideologically) terms help here.
The set "Humanity" has 6 billion or more members and
many subsets. Individual humans belong to several of
these subsets and identify partially or wholly with
most or all of them.
Haves and have-nots
Men and women
Ectomorphs and endomorphs
(add to this list).
It is inescapable that some subsets have more power
than other subsets, and members of more powerful
subsets can and do discriminate against members of
less powerful subsets and that this is a problem that
needs addressing. And analysing.
I mean "discriminate" in the following sense: to treat
a person less favourably on the grounds that they
possess a characteristic in common with other members
of a definable group in society (eg skin colour, eg
income) which is not universal in humanity as a whole,
and which is the antithesis of the characteristic
possessed by those doing the discriminating, i.e.
"They" are perceived as different from "Us" (which is
the language of prejudice).
This seems to me to be the common thread, whether it
is sex, sexual orientation, race or disability that
is the form the discrimination takes. That should in
principle give the less powerful subsets a basis on
which to make common cause and generalise their
sectoral struggles in the direction of the unity of
the disempowered.
But for many different reasons, it doesn't always
happen. Indeed it doesn't often happen. The people,
disunited, often are defeated.
Perhaps it can only start to happen when leading
figures in the various subsets have a socialist
analysis of society.
The word "Equality" has many good resonances: in
modern times: equal pay; equal opportunities, equal
rights; And in the French and American Revolutions:
"liberte, egalite, fraternite"; and "all men are
created equal"
One hesitates to discard a word that has so many
fruitful resonances, but we have to be open-minded and
say there may be a better one.
What the various equality movements have in common is
a struggle against hierarchy based on the unequal
power of different subsets, and against the elitist
notions that support hierarchical practices.
So perhaps the direction we should take is to stress
freedom (from hierarchy) rather than equality (between
the different strata in a hierarchy)?
Can I therefore rewrite Rousseau to read "Man was born
free but is everywhere in chains of command"?
And those are the shackles that we have to cast off.
Bruce Birchall
London
(Activist and writer)
(I am not approving of women being left out of the
historical slogans cited above. But that is a separate discussion.)
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