Is There Anyone Here Who Is Actually Dumb Enough

[Bucky]

40. You should know that race isn't a scientific term. Hatred doesn't have to be accurate.

Race is actually a pretty fuzzy concept. It's based on a raft of social conventions that are themselves fuzzy and fungible over time. Generally speaking, any group of people can be referred to as a race and it's just as valid, as far as scientists are concerned, to call culturally Middle Eastern Muslims a race as it is to call any other group of people walking on North America a race. Race, a biologist will tell you, doesn't actually exist.

The idea that a hatred toward Muslims isn't acted out through a broad spectrum of cultural, phenotypal, and epidermal markers and presumptions is silly. There are cartoon exaggerations that we could clearly identify as Muslim. They're stereotypes, and of course riddled with inaccuracies and distortions. But the same is true for any attempt to identify race. John Adams when he was in Europe announced that there was "a new race of man on the face of the Earth--an American race." To him, race meant nationality.

The Irish and other Celts were categorically considered non-white 150 years ago. No one would make that argument now. In Mexico before the War of Independence, the racial designation "white" meant one was born in Spain. If both your parents were born in Spain, but you were born in Veracruz, you were a different race, a criollo. You could even go to court and have your race legally changed--Father Morellos, the leader of the War of Independence after Miguel Hidalgo died, had himself legally rebranded from mulatto to mestizo just to get better legal treatment.

In the 1940s, Mexican Americans in Texas fought for their civil rights by asserting they were white--emphasizing their European and denying their native genetic inheritance. Since the 1970s more and more have strongly insisted they are La Raza, native to the land, and deemphasizing their European roots. It's all fair game. Race is as fungible as personal identity.

The truth is, we're all blended humans. Who doesn't get a good laugh out of those white bigots who take the genetic marker tests and find out they're part black?

Let me get back to your point. When Bill Maher goes off on a tear about how evil and violent Muslims are, he's not talking about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He's not talking about Aasif Mandvi. He's talking about people from a particular cultural and ethnic set, cutting across nationalities from Arab to Palestinian to Iranian to Libyan.

If his terminology isn't precise, well, neither is his hatred. But it's hatred nonetheless and it's hatred pointed at a group of people who are grouped by inaccurate social perceptions, but grouped nonetheless. I'm not going to depend on the perceptions of a bigot to determine the accuracy of my calling out his hatred. It's indiscriminate hatred; it doesn't have to be accurate.