The Race to Ignorance

Race issues are emotionally charged.
We should instead perhaps categorize ourselves by ear size.  
Or freckle count.
Is that reasonable?

The young lady's photo was originally part of a campaign against racism and prejudice.  It

was stolen by the racist organization, Stormfront.org, and used for the opposite purpose.

Their use (left) was posted claiming there's a world genocide against whites ...

Modern science has provided the truth about racial differences.  There aren't any.  We're all 99.9% the same, genetically speaking, just human.* 

(The few visible differences have been determined to be no more significant than freckles.)

Skin color, for just one example, is a response to environment rather than ancestry.  If a white population migrated from Canada to the equator to live in the sunshine (and somehow remained isolated from other populations), their common skin color would permanently darken in response to increased ultraviolet exposure.  The trait would change in a hundred generations or so, just the blink of an eye, anthropologically speaking ... white to black, just by environment.

Or vice versa -- that's how white people appeared in Europe despite being dark skinned when their migration began from the tropical regions.

The pure white (Aryan) race of Nazi propaganda never existed, anywhere.  Every population and all individuals share a common ancestry, and suggesting we segregate ourselves based on skin color or eye shape is perhaps as meaningful as making that same distinction based on ear shape and freckle count.

So why do we struggle with racial prejudice?  What's the root of wanting to identify ourselves as separate and distinct from others?

• Why do we have an 'in-crowd' in high school?  
• Why do we have social classes based on wealth?  
• Does in-group against out-group qualify as collective bullying?
  What part is played by selfishness, hubris, anger, insecurity, fear?
  What part is played by our discomfort with a more complex world than we can easily grasp?
• What legitimate justification exists for prejudicial discrimination?

At every level from individual to global, the motivation appears to be the same.  Economic, ideological, and political competition all follow the same logic of us vs. them; the results are divisive and deadly.

Recent research in genetics unveils a wonderfully complex mapping of thousands of physiological elements, none of which provide any meaningful way to racially separate one group from another.  We're all 99.9% the same, genetically speaking, just human.*

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*Ignorance = lack of information

Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real.

Discussions of racial difference often point to gang culture, crime rates, and poor educational achievement as proof of white superiority.  Research (gangs, crime, education) shows such differences arise from imposed poverty, discrimination, and denied opportunity.   
What we do and don't know