There was an episode of Star Trek (The Original Series) called "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". In it, two people are at war with one another over racial issues. They are both bi-cromal (two colors), white and black. But one is white on the right side while the other is black on the right side. This was the basis for a racial hatred that destroyed their homeworld.

Obviously, this ST episode was a not-so-veiled stab at social commentary on the issue of black civil rights. (Remember, this was a much bigger topic than it is today, since in January 1969 when the episode first aired, the civil rights movement was in full swing. MLK Jr. had just died 9 months earlier, and Star Trek had just had the first interracial kiss ever shown on TV six weeks earlier.)

But one thing we get from this episode is the fact that people don't need "race" as an excuse to hate each other. They can do it just fine without racial differences. Eliminating "race" or references to "race" from the dialogue won't change the hatred. Race is just an excuse.

Yes, DC is right, there is no racial difference between Jews and non-Jews. So what? The hatred would be there even if nobody ever mentioned "race" ever again. And if we want to change that, we need to change more than just words. We need to change a whole system of thinking. Words are important, yes, but they are not the entirety of the equation.

Elliot

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ETWolverine

There was an episode of Star Trek (The Original Series) called "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". In it, two people are at war with one another over racial issues. They are both bi-cromal (two colors), white and black. But one is white on the right side while the other is black on the right side. This was the basis for a racial hatred that destroyed their homeworld.

Obviously, this ST episode was a not-so-veiled stab at social commentary on the issue of black civil rights. (Remember, this was a much bigger topic than it is today, since in January 1969 when the episode first aired, the civil rights movement was in full swing. MLK Jr. had just died 9 months earlier, and Star Trek had just had the first interracial kiss ever shown on TV six weeks ealier.)

But one thing we get from this episode is the fact that people don't need "race" as an excuse to hate each other. They can do it just fine without racial differences. Eliminating "race" or references to "race" from the dialogue won't change the hatred. Race is just an excuse.

Yes, DC is right, there is no racial difference between Jews and non-Jews. So what? The hatred would be there even if nobody ever mentioned "race" ever again. And if we want to change that, we need to change more than just words. We need to change a whole system of thinking. Words are important, yes, but they are not the entirety of the equation.

Elliot

---

Even as the idea of "race" was becoming a powerful organizing principle in many societies, the shortcomings of the concept were apparent. In the Old World, the gradual transition in appearances from one group to adjacent groups emphasized that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them," as Blumenbach observed in his writings on human variation (Marks 1995, p. 54). As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term population to talk about genetic differences, Historians, anthropologists and social scientists have re-conceptualized the term "race" as a cultural category or social construct, in other words, as a particular way that some people have of talking about themselves and others. As Stephan Palmie has recently summarized, race "is not a thing but a social relation";[7] or, in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, "a metonym," "a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference."[8] As such it cannot be a useful analytical concept; rather, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race: history and social relationships will. For example, the fact that in many parts of the United States, categories such as Hispanic or Latino are viewed to constitute a race, while others view "Hispanic" as referring to an ethnic group, has more to do with the changing position of Hispanics in U.S. society, especially in the context of the civil rights movement and the debate over immigration.

Race (classification of human beings) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia