Is it time to stop calling people "white"? No one is white. Human skin colors include: beige, brown, and black. Descendants of people that inhabited northern / cold latitudes (e.g. Northern Europe and Northern Asia) inherited beige pigmentation or melanin. Descendants of people of tropical / warm latitudes inherited brown or black melanin. All humans are people of color. Perhaps it's long due to stop referring to people as "white". What do you think?
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Racism is a socioeconomic system based on the construct of race.
Different socioeconomic systems assign social privileges and economic benefits on different bases. For example, capitalism assigns privilege and benefit based on the concept of money ("capital"). Socialism assigns privilege and benefit based on the concept of civil society. Communism assigns privilege and benefit based on the concept of community, which in practice translate to membership to the ruling political party.
Racism assigns social privileges and economic benefits based on "racial" discrimination. There is only one race, the human race. However, primitive humans invented "racial" classifications to justify colonization and exploitation. Religions with creationist myths contribute to racism by promoting the idea that the gods created different human races.
In fact, all humans are African primates. Different environmental and climatological circumstances generated different adaptations and mutations. Those random events do not provide adequate justification for socioeconomic discrimination.
Humans are storytelling primates. We are so good at storytelling that we end up believing our own stories. Gods and demons are good examples of fictional stories that with the passage of time and constant repetition, most humans end up believing.
The more primitive and less educated the human, the higher propensity to believe in gods and demons. To make matters worse, some cultures consolidated all gods into only one god. That "only one" god was then supposed to be a man because men used to be in charge of everything. Men were the lead storytellers, therefore the stories were crafted to favor men.
Just like the story of gods, the fictional story of human "races" is widely accepted as true. This is understandable because humans in fact exhibit different biological characteristics inherited from ancestors. For example, primitive human tribes that migrated to northern latitudes developed beige melanin while primitive tribes that stayed closer to the Equator either kept brown melanin or developed black melanin.
Regardless of ancestral skin pigmentation, which is based on ancestral tribes out of our control, we are are all humans. The same applies to all other biological adaptations such as hair texture and facial features. They are all biological mutations and adaptations primarily due to environmental and climatological circumstances of ancient times.
Ultraviolet (UV) radiation emitted by the sun is the main factor contributing to the development of so-called "races" and "racial" features. UV rays are super blue light invisible to the human eye. UV rays burn the skin, damage DNA, and causes skin cancer. Melanin acts as a natural sunscreen protecting the skin from UV radiation. The stronger UV radiation in a geographic region, the darker the ancestral melanin, and vice versa.
From Africa, primitive human tribes migrated northbound into the Central Europe or Caucasus region. Up there, humans eventually developed different mutations and adaptations that we refer today as the Caucasian race. From the Caucasus, some primitive tribes migrated north east into Northern Asia, developing the characteristics that we refer to as Asian "racial" features.
For example, after millennia living in snow covered mountains, some humans developed the epicanthic fold mutation ("Asian" eyes) that worked as natural sunglasses shielding the eye from snow sun glare. As another example, the primitive human tribes that migrated way north into cold and inhospitable areas of Scandinavia developed melanin mutations that led to changes in eye color and even hair color in some limited instances.
All around the globe, primitive human tribes developed different mutations and adaptations that helped them cope with the climatological and environmental circumstances in the respective regions. Naturally, in different regions of the planet, primitive humans also developed different languages and cultures. As the different cultures interacted with each others, interesting coalitions and conflicts emerged as tribes developed different technologies (tools and methods) to endure this brief experience called life.
Life keeps evolving and making progress. Today we know more about the science of life than ever before in human history. It's easy to see and understand now that we are all members of the same race, the human race. Today, we can understand and appreciate what our primitive ancestors could not. Today, we can finally eradicate racism and end "white" privilege.
Racism and white privilege are very ineffective socioeconomically. They limit economic growth and development to members of a group to the exclusion of others. By definition, racism is limited to a segment of humanity, excluding others from the socioeconomic game. The less players, the less overall progress for the game.
It's time to end racism. No one chooses whether to be born with beige skin, brown skin, or black skin. It's happenstance. It's irrelevant. To assign privilege based on skin color gives us useless monsters like Donald Trump and his racist followers. Can you believe that the guy is still playing golf and grifting people despite everything we know about him. If it were not for racism and white privilege, Trump would already be in jail and everyone would know that crime does not pay, and that is better to work together building a better United States.
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