Separate State And Racism

Thomas Jefferson's proposed separation of church and state has been a founding stone for the United States of America's democracy. Article 6 of the United States Constitution provides that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States".
Until then, the global norm was that monarchs ruled by the idea of divine right. This began to fall out of favor during the Enlightenment as a number of political philosophers argued against religion as basis for government authority.
Immanuel Kant, the great enlightenment philosopher, lost the argument against his peers. He had argued against the separation. However, Kant's scientific racism was not separated from the state. Sadly, race theory and state has not yet been separated in the U.S.

Today Americans are still subdivided into racial (and ethnic) categories. Although, the race theory officially isn't based on genetic biology and isn't normative - favoring one race over another - as it did in Kant's days, it is still bogus science.

Race theory as we know it, is an old European construct that conveniently appeared when slavery, colonialisms and other Western geopolitical interest needed justification. Most states have separated race theory and state and don't register their inhabitants according to race; Only a few other states still do.

• White
• Black (...)
• American Indian (...)
• Asian Indian
• Chinese
• Filipino
• Other Asian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Vietnamese
• Native Hawaiian
• Guamanian (...)
• Samoan
• Other Pacific Islander
• Some other race

• Hamitic
• Semitic
• Hausa
• Bantu
• Guinean
• Bantoid
• Mande
• Nilotic
• Sudanic
• Kanuri
• Songhai
• Khoi-San
• Malayo-Polynesian
• Other African
• Some other race

We keep witnessing how very real racism is in the U.S. these days, but ironically race is not real. Genetically speaking, races you find in the U.S. census don't exist.

The U.S. census does point out that its concept of race is not "scientific or anthropological", but then ads that it takes into account "social and cultural characteristics as well as ancestry", using "appropriate scientific methodologies" that are not "primarily biological or genetic in reference"
and "generally reflect a recognized social definition of race." That "scientific methodology" sounds pretty hazy to me. I still think that, to be able to demarcate something it must be clear what it is. My point is, end of the day the term "black" must refer to something real in the world to make sense, and it doesn't.

To some Americans this might come as a surprise that traits such as skin pigmentation and other don't add up to any genetic grouping. These kind of human traits are not specific for any continent, but can be found anywhere where they represent an evolutionary advantage.

When you are not of African descent you don't necessarily understand why you now need to call people of African descent something different from what you did as a kid. The argument goes - we all know who we are talking about, so what's the problem? As per above, we don't. We don't refer to a specific group of people. We woulld not think it made sense to confuse Pacific Islanders, Inuit, and Mexicans with one another, yet they are more closely related than Africans are to one another.
You might also want to add, that the term does not refer to a real color, but is a translation of the racist N-words into English. Arguably, the term "black" comes with an even more sinister history than the holocaust. It is not an innocent descriptive word.

Minister Busingye Johnston the Minister of Justice for Rwanda, has had to lead his country from genocide to justice since 1994. I asked him how he intended to bring the Hutus, Tutsis and Twas together. His reply that the labelling and calling out of these three groups was the root of the genocide and that there now only was one group of people in its census, Rwandans. The U.S. is not all that different from Rwanda. It must stop falsely labeling its people.

We inadvertently keep oppressing Africans when we label them by an approximated color - and even when we confuse a specific socio-cultural group such as the Afro-Americans with Africans.

Based on the census' racial grouping of "blacks", it is the group that perform the worst academically in the U.S., but based on nationality, the international norm, "blacks" from African countries perform far better than any other census group in the U.S. If we are to stay within a race logic, we must jump to the most likely conclusion that the European genomes in Afro-Americans contaminate and negatively influence their academic performance. Or we could just opt to discard race theory altogether.

I believe we need to lay race theories to rest: Democracy - and identity - is difficult enough without "scientific" obfuscation. A true democracy starts by separating state and bad science. Let's make America democratic.