Race is a Meaningless Distinction
I’m sure to some people this sounds ridiculously untrue, but if you are willing, stick with me for a moment.
Imagine you are sitting at a table and the person across from you slides two portraits in front of you. You don’t recognize the people in either of the pictures. All you can tell from the headshots is that they are of similar age, same gender, but different race.
The person across the table then asks, “What can you safely assume about these people based on their race?”
What do you say? (Seriously, what do you say? What do you believe you can tell about these two people based on their race?)
You can’t tell anything about:
- Their personality
- Their values
- Their competence
- Their character
- Their beliefs
- Their interests
- Their level of intelligence
- Their abilities
- Their socio-economic status
- The obstacles and hardships they have faced in life
- The privileges they have enjoyed
- The health or dysfunctionality of the family they grew up in
- Where they were born
- Their present nationality
- etc.
The race of the individuals doesn’t tell you anything meaningful about the people in the pictures. In other words, race is a meaningless distinction.
“But wait,” you say, “there is tons of research in a number of different fields showing all sorts of differences between racial groups.”
Wonderful point! What does all that research about racial groups tell you about the two people in the picture? A few probabilities perhaps, but still nothing that is certain and still nothing meaningful.
The data on racial groups can’t tell you anything meaningful about an individual based on their race. Specific to the question at hand, the data on racial groups doesn’t let you know anything meaningful about the people in the two pictures. As I have written about a number of times before, people aren’t color-coded.
This means that anytime someone makes a statement (outside the language of statistics) about “black” people or “white” people or “Asians” or “Indians” or any other race, they are almost always making a misleading statement based on a flawed assumption about race.
This unfortunately happens all the time. How often have you heard or read someone talking about a racial group of people and their characteristics, behaviors, privileges (or experiences of oppression), or general life experiences as if everyone in that racial group held these things in common?
These people are talking as if they believe you can look at the pictures of those two people and know something meaningful about them based on their race.
They are saying something about a group of people that in some cases may be true and in other cases may be false. Wherever this comes from across the political or ideological landscape, these race-based statements are misleading and based on a flawed assumption.
Even when someone’s race means a lot to them, it is meaningful to them in a particular way as an individual. Not everyone of their same race feels and thinks about their race the same way.
It is concerning to me that despite all the hard lessons of human history where too many people wrongly believed that race does tell you something meaningful about a person and almost fifty-four years since these famous words were spoken at our nation’s capital: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”, too many people from across the political and ideological landscape have yet to accept and embrace that race is a meaningless distinction.
May the day come where more of us see ourselves and the people around us, not as members of a racial group and all the false assumptions that go along with that, but as unique individuals, each with our own unique story, experiences, ideas, abilities, and character.
On that day we will all be more free to be the unique individuals that we are. On that day, The Dream will have come a little closer for all of us.
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