Transcription
So today we're going to find out how race is on its deathbed, but how it is struggling to stay alive. And so, what we're going to do is go into a Wikipedia article and we're going to type in "race." And and I want to go to the Wikipedia article to show you how easy it is to find information about race and the idea of it, where it came from. It's not something that's hidden. It's only hidden to people that don't look for it. And what we're doing is we're looking for it, so we're actively finding it. And you'll find all types of information related to race, the idea of it, how it started, um, the purpose of it, right? It's something easy to uh to find. So let's go into the Wikipedia article and find out about race.
So also, what I want to say is, when we're going into the Wikipedia articles, they have their references and sources always attached to the article. So it's uh someone writing it, but the sources are there. So let's make that clear that it is a reputable source because it has also the um other sources that it's referring to, right? So let's go into this article and let's find out how race is on its way out while other ideas are going to be making their way in.
Race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. So let's stop right here. The first thing that we notice is that it says it's viewed as distinct within a given society. And what this lets us know is, when we understand the history of race also, is that race in different societies means different things in different countries. The way they categorize it has been different, has changed over time. So it's based on a given society's idea of what race is.
This classification of humans, the term came into common usage during the 16th century when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds, including those characterized by close kinship relations. By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical phenotypical traits and then later to national affiliations. Understand that race came during the time of colonialism when the European elite were going around conquering other peoples, and they're categorizing people based on phenotypes and physical appearances that they see fit, right? And it's for themselves to understand the world. It's not for anyone else. It's for the European elite for them to classify people according to the the way they see it and the way that works for them. That's how they're going around colonizing people. And we talked about this in another video, The Invention of White People. During the 16th century, the 17th century, around this time is when um race is really starting to become the prominent way to socially divide people. So the Europeans are using this as a tool to fit their agenda of dominating people around the world, including other Europeans.
Modern science regards race as a social construct. So what we want to take note of is that it says modern science. Science that was taking place during the 16th, 17th, 18th century, this science was um being used as the tool to support the worldview of racism and and the racial ideology and white supremacy. So they were trying to come up with all type of um experiments and conducting all type of um um analysis and coming up with conclusions to support the idea of race and the inferiority of other people because they wanted to continue the enslaving of other people. But modern science had to come along, right, and reexamine many of those things and get rid of that stuff, right? Because that was what is termed to be pseudoscientific. And it says modern science is regarding this idea of race as a social construct.
Now, it's about to explain what social construct means. An identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. It says rules made by society. And like I said, the earlier scientists were conducting experiments and they were creating conclusions to make it fit the rules made by society. Who made those rules of this society? The elite Europeans did. And when when we're talking about race, right? And so modern science had to come in and find out that this is these are rules and um uh constructs made by society, which means that they do not have an actual physical flesh and blood existence in the actual real world. They exist in the world of imagination or in the astral realm, where some people in certain areas call it that.
So, for example, we can create an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society, right? Now we can say everyone who has brown eyes and and has a bald head, all those people come from the Galaxy Andromeda, right? And if we start getting everyone to believe in it and everyone's starting to say, yes, everyone with a bald head and brown eyes, they're from the Galaxy Andromeda. That's a social construction. And it would be accepted as true in the world of imagination or the astral realm, right? That's where it would be accepted as true and we would agree with it. But then you would have physical scientists that come along and want to test this out to see if this is true in the actual physical flesh and blood world, right, the objective world. And they would run their tests, run the genetics on it, and they would see like, okay, the people with brown eyes and bald heads, they have a genetic um code that's just the same as everyone else on the planet Earth. And therefore, these people do not come from the planet or the Galaxy Andromeda, right? That's just a socially constructed idea. That's the same occurrence with race.
While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning. Now, this is exactly what we were just talking about, that there's no inherent or biological meaning to this uh concept of race. This is something that is constructed socially and people agree upon. But when they go in and test the biology of it on the physical flesh and blood world, they don't find anything that indicates something known as a race, a black person, or a white person, or any of these types of things to to try to squeeze people into to create these nice neat categories.
The concept of race is foundational to racism. When a house is being built, what they do is they start by creating the foundation and they pour concrete in it, which gives the house that they're going to build on top of it structural support. The concept of race, that's the foundation or the structural support for the house of racism, right? And so what this lets us know is that if you want to get rid of the house of racism, you have to go through and you have to tear down the foundation, which is this concept and idea of race, which we start to understand that it's slowly being torn down and dying, but it's fighting to survive.
The concept of race is foundational to racism, the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. And this is what the concept of race is supporting, one group of humans being dominant or superior over another. And when you bring yourself into the world and agree upon the idea of race, white people automatically go to the top, black people automatically go to the bottom. Anytime you acquiesce to that system, that's in the world of imagination, you automatically fall into that. And that's the house that's built upon the concept of race, which is in most people's interest to want to tear it down. But the elite who set it up, it was in their interest to build it up.
Social conceptions and groups of races have varied over time, often involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Modern scientists consider such biological essentialism obsolete and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable, scientists are around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways. While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive or simplistic. Because there's some scientists that still are trying to hold on to the idea of race, and they're trying to squeeze out any way possible that they can in order to keep it alive, whatever their vested interest is, right? Some of them do not want the system to end because they benefit from it. But others, on the other hand, are seeing it and are saying, this is naive and it's simplistic, right? It's time to get get rid of it. We understand what this is about. It's time to let it go.
Still others argue that among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. And this is the same thing that we believe, that all humans belong to the same subspecies of human, Homo sapiens sapiens. And any divisions after that belong to ethnic and cultural divisions, which allow people to be separate within their own unique ways. But the racial concept and and these other taxonomies, those things have to go.
Since the second half of the 20th century, race has been associated with discredited theories of scientific racism and has become increasingly seen as a largely pseudoscientific system of classification. Although still used in general context, race has often been replaced by less ambiguous and or loaded terms: populations, peoples, ethnic groups, or communities, depending on context. This is how we divide ourselves into ethnicities, cultures, communities, peoples, right? This is how we view the world. But we understand that other people don't view the world that way. They see themselves as as races, right? And so we acknowledge that as well. But for ourselves, we don't acknowledge that we have a race. We're not going to go into that racial racial worldview and um be subjugated by other people's thinking and ideas.
Its use in genetics was formerly renounced by the US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2023. And we can see that modern science is on the forefront of renouncing these concepts, right? Anthropology is one of the other main ones that's on the forefront of doing that, understanding what this concept of race is really about and what its actual purpose is, right? It's to subjugate the minds of people and have people identifying themselves either as an inferior being or a superior being, right? And that's an old outdated concept, right? And we see that the scientific community in this particular instance has is letting it go. And this is 2023 when this is happening, right? They're letting it go. They are progressing and moving forward. Forward. And the more people can become informed and understand the information about race, the faster the idea of race can buckle to its knees and it can actually rest in peace on its deathbed, right? But into that time, there still is a lot of fight that this idea of race is putting up, right? A lot of people uphold this idea. Black and white, I understand after many years of looking at it, that both of these people love this concept of race, right? Both of them do. And many people in between as well, right? And they don't understand the implications of it, and that it's in many people's best interest to get rid of it, right? And so that comes with being informed and just um understanding the problem and then looking at ways to solve the problem, right? And so hopefully this video has provided some information, has got someone to think and to just take a look and, you know, just consider some things and see what you want to do about it, you know, coming up next. Because that's the ultimate goal, is to find the information, get the information, and then actually do something about it, right? And that's what we want to do here, right? So hopefully you've enjoyed this video. I want to thank you for watching until the end. Uh, my name is Brookland St. Michael, and I'll see you on the next one.