SOCIAL DECONSTRUCTIONISM

For a politics forum, I wrote the following mini-essay as a means of expressing some of the ambiguities in human "ingroup chauvinism" as a counteractive to the poorly reasoned ideology of "race as socially constructed." I largely anticipated that the reasoning would be lost on the ultraliberal ideologues, and my prediction proved true. One moron thought I was trying to float some sort of racial murder-fantasy, when it should be entirely evident that the standards I'm applying to my hypothetical African tribe are being applied across the board to all human ingroups, all of whom participate in the same practice of phenotypic chauvinism.

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First, so I don’t have to type “social construct doctrine” over and over, I will abbreviate it as SCD.

SCD came about as an overreaction to European theories about human racial groups from the 19th and 20th centuries. Many if not all of these theories tended to promulgate absolutist ideas about the respective capacities of the racial groups, often with the probably intentional effect of putting the white race on top of the heap. A reaction against this polemic was natural.

SCD, however, decided that the best solution was to claim that race was a social construct. Sometimes the rhetoric asserted that “race” was given the context of “species,” but I seriously doubt that even the most xenophobic theorist would have claimed that the various human races could not interbreed, given so much evidence to the contrary. The principal purpose of SCD was to assert that racial differences had been invented by Evil Overlords seeking to stigmatize some differences and champion others. The use of the term “cline” came into vogue as a way of discussing phenotypic differences between groups without bringing the taboo word “race” into the question.

To test the validity of SCD, one must abandon both the worlds of Eurocentric pundits and their equally impaired opponents, and seek to imagine how phenotypic differences might have resonated with homogeneous groups “in the wild” as it were.

So I imagine a homogeneous Black African society in pre-colonial Africa, far removed from contact with any heterogeneous societies. Since there’s nearly no exogamy, most everyone in the tribe shares the same hair and skin color. There could be a few neighboring tribes, but they’re genetically almost identical to Primary Tribe. The natives have no cognizance of any humans who are not black skinned and wiry haired, and if they imagine the forest beasts taking on human form, the magical animals share all the routine appearance of the tale tellers.

Given this scenario, the tribe can have no concept of race, and no overlord would seek to advance one. But given that humans like to feel good about themselves, the phenotypic norm would still be the tribe’s aesthetic baseline. If your skin looks black, you’re healthy, but if it turns grey from illness, that will be physically repugnant.

Now imagine that into this tribe is born— the first albino infant ever. Imagine further that the child’s mother and father are the only ones present when the baby is born.

They look over the infant. There’s nothing in their experience to account for this. They exchange looks, and simultaneously opt to smother the child and bury it.

Now, we are not privy to their thoughts. SCD would say that, even without the tribe having a concept of race, they kill the child because they’re afraid that their neighbors will abominate the atypical infant, and that this would be the equivalent of “constructing race.”

But what if their primary thoughts are aesthetic? What if the parents themselves are repulsed by the infant’s color, and they feel shame at having produced such a bizarre creature? In the real world, we certainly have ethnological evidence of parents who have slain or abandoned offspring for no better reasons.

Proponents of SCD are stuck in a box. They MUST believe in some form of “race construction” by the society in order to remain on-point against the Evil Overlords. But often it’s the people, not the Overlords, expressing preferences that have nothing to do with social controls as such.

Ah, that was good exercise. Wish I thought the bulk of responses would provide me with as much.