Skin deep: Rejecting racial groupthink

The skin is the largest organ of the body, with a whopping total surface area of about 20 square feet. It shields us from harmful microbes and the volatile threat of many natural elements and helps us to internally regulate our body temperature in a large range of climates.

Skin is the means to engage many sensations which helps us discern pain, temperature, and texture in our volatile playground and helps keep us safe from harm.

Skin is also imbued with many mythical traits and abilities in our society. Depending on its particular complexion, humans through history have attributed inherent intelligence or idiocy, sophistication or incivility, strength or weakness, liberty or slavery. The cost of this skin-deep myth-making has been undeniably catastrophic, and despite the strides we have made in legislative departure from the grim consequences of skin colour discrimination, its legacy is still being maintained in some ways through the race-baiting and racialized politics of our day.

I can remember the historic occasion of the election of President Barack Obama so vividly. The first black president of the most powerful nation on the earth. I felt proud because this felt like a cultural moment of global solidarity for all black people everywhere - even for a black British young man living in England. While the historical significance of that moment shouldn't be denied, it brought into view the unexpected problems associated with racial groupthink and competency judgment based on skin colour. Many, especially black people, thought that because Barack was black, he would advance black ideas first, that would fix black problems and continue to have the unwavering support of black people as that is what black folks do right? Wrong.

In the end, many found themselves disappointed because their racialized expectations were unrealistic, and Barack was just another career Democrat who did more measurable policy and legislative lifting for the LGBT+ cause while so-called black issues got virtue signaling and empty rhetoric.

Race is a complex social amalgam of ethnicity, culture, and the aforementioned mythmaking around the social meaning of skin complexion. I'd go on to posit that race largely functions today as a socially constructed political concept - a shape-shifting proxy for some other strategic, clandestine agenda. I notice this, particularly in the way police brutality is discussed and evaluated in popular culture. Pundits on the left and less so on the right immediately zoom in on the skin complexion of the officer(s) and that of the victim, to curate a political statement about what happened that is often indifferent and precedent to the establishment of the facts. 

I've learned not to fall for the mainstream media sensationalism and spin on these tragic events as I once did. The agenda seems obsessed with politicizing these events according to a narrative that scares dark-skinned people far and wide about life in America for black people. Political propaganda is always about control and trading individual liberty for security. It's giving needless language to skin colour that left me convinced that when race is forced into focus you can be certain it is being used to obfuscate the issues rather than bring honest clarity.

A Lot of what we think of as "racial" in society, is really a cultural phenomenon that often varies significantly even with racial categories. What we think of as "black" in the heavily politicized sense as it relates to ideas, policy, and immoral behavior are not equally held or affirmed by all dark-skinned people. The problem with racialized thinking is that it often presupposes a kind of biological determinism on cultural phenomena, which is problematic as this presumes cultural behavior is inherited, immutable & hopelessly resistant to change. 

If we assume for instance that gang culture, selling drugs, and violent crime are the black race's problems, we are likely to project those negative stereotypes on all black people globally independent of their individual or cultural distinctions that mitigate engaging such delinquency. Now I'm not saying that there aren't problems that manifest disproportionately in certain groups or communities that happen to be of a particular "race" or ethnicity, but we must consider the underlying cultural issues and work towards real solutions that address them as opposed to the usual race blaming or deflection from taking responsibility.

Racial essentialism is the belief that racial groups form discrete genetic categories; that individuals of the same racial category are biogenetically similar; and that different races are fundamentally different.

I think the idea of racial essentialism is flawed to the core and highly reductionistic when tested in the real world. Instead of offering unity in solidarity as hoped, it often erases individuality, ethnicity, and cultural variation.

It also produces or exacerbates social misunderstanding, racial conflict, group blame, and racial groupthink leading to societal chaos.

I believe racial categories & assumptions may have limited & declining utility & descriptive specificity in a local place with a relatively stationary population and limited cultural shift, but these ideas quickly become redundant faced with widespread migration & cultural exchange.

But when it comes down to me as an individual and my perspectives on almost everything, I am not beholden to the presumptions of race. My skin isn't a mediator or modifier of my thoughts or opinions. I don't have "black" ideas and I reject that unhelpful categorization. I want people to weigh the substance of my thoughts, the quality of my arguments, and the evidence that supports any of my claims. 

I think it's high time we reject racial groupthink.