by Steve Goodman

All kudos and laudamus te to Rachael Dolezal, for how, in a one-woman show she utterly exploded the malignant myth of race. There are no races folks, only gene pools. Race is a null, a vacuous concept of capitalist origin. If you want to enslave people, best measure, after selecting folks who are readily distinguishable at sight from the “rest of us” – the enslaving class – and making sure they have no guns, is to “rationalize” the process, ergo to “legitimize” it by establishing the notion of race, especially an “inferior” race – individuals who are “not quite human” – and therefore legitimately objects of trade, such as machines and animals.

Genetics? I am given to understand that there is no independent genetic marker for “race”. I’m not a science wallah so I don’t know that for sure, but I thought I’d throw it is as a think-piece given the rapid elapse of the (ahem) 24 hour news cycle. Genomics folks, which do govern phenotypic characteristics – skin color, hair consistency, left handedness, sex etc. You know, the gamut. But no “race”. Human beings come in a variety of colors, as do Buicks.

Ah, but having said that, does racism exist? O you bet your ass folks. But the key point here is that race is a creature of racism – not her other way around. Once you’ve decided that “niggers” are inferior, then it helps to “secure” this notion by (yup) deracinating “them” –i.e. establishing the idea of different races, one of which is inferior. You need the notion of “race”. Incredibly both Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman believed this garbage.

And so Reader, on to matters of language. The whole national vocabulary is wrong. The ideas of “black”, “African American”, and “white” are (while attempting “political correctness” read: often fascism of the left) are wrong, and however cryptically, reify the divisive madness. Black and African American have as their denotation, their primary conjured image, persons of relatively darker complexion. Thus by this veiled distinction, these terms, “black” and “African American” each serves as a pallid euphemism for “nigger”. And by extension, “white” denotes “non-nigger” – excluding of course reference to other racist slur words for the “other races”.)

Black and white are chromatographic terms, and the hybrid “African-American” are self-contradictory geographical predicates, erroneously applied. One time when working in bookstore, a “white” identifiably Jewish customer says to me in her best Johannesburg pom twang, “I’ve just moved to the Marina (Del Rey, CA” ) ‘ere from Sooth Africa! I’m an African American!” When I stopped “rolling on the floor”, I allowed as to how I was a Native American: I was born here. Besides, if Robert Leakey is to be believed, we are all African derived, via proto-mother Lucy. Thus, some “white” folks are Afro-Swiss.

Black people, so called are one shade or another of warm brown, and white folks are actually sort of ivory-pink. I have never seen a black person, although such may exist. In a National Geographic Magazine in the 1950’s there was a color photo of tribesmen: natives of the (then) Belgian Congo, naked except for sort of grass skirts and spears. These guys were profoundly black, black as your own black plastic telephone which succeeded the long standing hard rubber predecessor. These men showed up iridescently deep blue in the direct sunlight. And there are white or approximately white folks. Albinos.

But that’s inessential. The point is that that usage, from the best of politically correct motives is polarizing: conduces to conceptual separation of two distinct entity-classes, i.e. blacks and whites.
You might say it portrays things in uh, black and white. And that is opposite and inimical to any understanding of the unity of the (well) race – the human race.

Yes, color distinction has its legitimacy. If the cops have to catch (catch, not kill Officer) a bad guy, they gotta know what he (uh, or she) looks like. Similarly, your doc’s gotta know if you have a gene-pool specific illness, say sickle cell anemia, or Tay-Lussac’s disease. Or, if an “all black” woman has a “Jewish” gene for a cancer, as was the case with one woman I know.

Note too, that gene pools are not “pure” and blend to some extent into one another. “Racial purity” and to some extent DNA testing for well for “negritude” – are sheer Hitleric fascist fallacy. The human genome constitutes some 30,000,000, and each person gets 48, via the “dance” of the genes. And that tells a whole hunk of the story. But not all, there is also the recently posited matter of epigenetics – how genes may be changed by environment. Say, can you imagine if a “black guy” was subjected to an environment which deprived him of his love of watermelon?

On a personal note, I am trapped in this bullshit degenerative language. Going around saying “so called white, so called black” and/or throwing my hands in the air and making “quotation marks” with my fingers gets and is cumbersome. Or, as I am given to do, put multiple quotes around these terms used in this context when writing: thus, “””””black”””” and “”””white””””. Best I can do now is never mentioning that shit in reference to a person, unless it be absolutely necessary, and it almost never is.

One time when I was working as an employment interviewer with NY State Employment Service, a one of a kind form, and for a duration on only one month, this a special form was distributed in which we were required to fill in extensive personal information not otherwise needed. There was a little bordered box to the upper right, labeled “Race” and allowing the alternatives W N/W and INA. White, non-white and information not available, got it? (I privately wondered why it didn’t read “B, NB, INA – black, non-black, etc).

One time a job applicant comes to my desk for an interview. Her complexion was lighter than my own (standard Ushkanuzic (sp?)– Mediterranean Jewish). She had a slight flare to her nostrils, and I thought I detected the slightest tinge of a southern drawl. I honestly could not tell. I certainly wasn’t going to ask her. What was I to do: “hand this woman” her race by stipulation, “for recording and statistic purposes only”? So I entered INA – because I deemed the information unavailable to me. I got in trouble with the higher-ups, because unbeknownst to me, INA was applicable only to phone calls.

One time, I took it on myself to write “Bigot Box” in pencil in that little box on the form (for statistical purposes only, (oy you should only know). But I chickened out and erased it. But it had to be still legible, because the next day, when I was out either ill or malingering – liberal Irv, from Statistics – was seen stalking about the floor of 103 Employment Interviewers brandishing the thing and raving.

And culture is optional. One may authentically adopt another group’s culture. It may be rare for someone to carry it off, given the indoctrination (explicit and covert) of the culture of origin. But Gerry Mulligan is a “sho nuff” jazzman, and Andre Watts, is a “McCoy” concert pianist. Rachel is a fucking culture hero. If Rachel Dolezal defines herself as black, well then she is black. Socially black, politically black. Black. Of course I am aware that this utterly begs the objections – even fury that “born” black people, here especially black women may have. But that is another, albeit burning important question.

And of course, “culture” exists, and differentially – only a fool could deny that.
In concluding, why can’t a white woman head an NAACP component, or for that matter the whole NAACP? To exclude her would be well, discriminatory. Heh Heh! Why can’t an (ug!) transracial woman be president? etc. In the 20’s, the great pianist and premier of Czechoslovakia (!) Jan Masaryk when, on a visit to the United States he was asked to state his race on an immigration form wrote “human” Go Rachel Go! And let’s cut the bullshit, America, and murdering the language as well. 6/17/15