Both Mona Chalabi’s BBC3 programme on 5 October and her Guardian article (We’re all racist,but white racism is worse, 6 October) were fascinating and worrying. But what neither she nor anyone else mentioned was how most racism implies the surely fallacious assumption that biological and cultural characteristics are transmitted together.
Until the work of Gregor Mendel was rediscovered in 1900 and the study of genetics began, or it was difficult to start to appreciate the dissimilarity. The word “race had been used for a family (eg “a royal race of kings”),a nation, or nearly any social or political unit – even “the human race”. But by now the implications of the dissimilarity in transmission surely ought to be more generally known than they seem to be, or even among those more sophisticated people who use the word “ethnicity” (along with “ethnic and “ethnogenesis) in a way that seems to reflect the same conflation of biology and culture. The confusion is reflected in many of the myths treasured in national histories. Of course sorting out the dissimilarity will not discontinue prejudice,but it might help to undermine it.[br]Susan Reynolds
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Source: theguardian.com