Proud to be among the "Woke"

by Daniel Cano                   

                                                                               

Books over Ignorance

     As I listened to Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis and his acolytes rant against the teaching of ethnic and African American studies in Florida schools, and their demonization of the “woke” crowd, I couldn’t help but think of the hypocrisy, many, like DeSantis, educated at the best “woke” institutions of higher education in the country, Harvard and Yale. Yet, they choose to censure books and areas of study they consider too divisive for today’s students. So, I recycled a past essay I submitted to La Bloga. It seems appropriate now, sadly, since DeSantis does not only attack ethnic studies but American history, as well as education, itself.

     In the 1990s, I heard a lecture by UC Berkeley historian Ron Takaki, an early proponent of university ethnic studies classes. I remember, Takaki, stopping his speech and running his fingertips across his arm, rubbing his skin, as if to make a point. “White?” he asked the audience, rhetorically. “What is white? I don’t know what that is. There’s no such thing as white.”

     Of course, what Dr. Takaki meant was that no person is literally or culturally “white”, just like no person or culture is black, red, brown, or yellow. Those are impersonal designations meant to dehumanize people, like assigning them a number, as the Nazis did to Jews in the concentration camps and southern plantation owners to African slaves before Emancipation.

     Just like there is no such thing as “white”, there is also no such thing as “race,” biologically. If all students learn about ethnicity in school, they will understand how we, as Americans, and as a people, are much more united than we are divided.

     Europeans and their descendants are considered Caucasian, racially, a more serious term for “white”, I guess, but then aren’t folks from South and West Asia, the entire Middle East, India, and portions of Africa considered Caucasian, I mean, if you’re looking strictly at “race”?

     Does this mean Neo Nazis or white supremacists will open their arms to Arabs, Mexicans, Persians, East Indians, or others who fall under the Caucasian designation? Of course not, since racists believe Caucasians descend from the European continent, primarily northern Europe, factually incorrect. Even the word Aryan, and the notorious swastika, are not German, nor are they European, but have their origins in Persia and India, in the Sanskrit language. Germany, as a country, didn’t even exist before 1850.

     If the Neo-Nazi or White Supremacist definition of “white” or Aryan means “pure blood”, that knocks out most Americans because few Yanks can claim a 100% pure bloodline, not even Donald Trump. In fact, Trump’s kids are of German and Russian heritage, since their mothers (minus one, Marla Maples) were products of the old Soviet Union, a splattering of many ethnic groups and religions.

     As hard as our nation’s secret service agencies worked to keep Russian infiltrators and sympathizers out of high-level U.S. government positions, we recently had a family of them in the White House. Looks like they slipped through the cracks or are they as American as the rest of us, a smorgasbord of ethnicities and bloodlines.

     A while back, I watched Mexican television journalist, a very light skin, blue-eyed, Jorge Ramos, interview an older, olive-skin, self-proclaimed white supremacist, who donned a suit and tie for legitimacy, I suppose. During their exchanges, Ramos kept using the word “White” to denote race. It sounded absurd to me because Ramos was lighter than the white supremacist he was interviewing. Does that mean when Ramos used the term “white” he was referring to himself, as well?

     According to the accepted racial designations, Latin-Americans, including Mexicans, are “white,” or Caucasian. If Chicanos, for example, use the words “White people” aren’t they talking about themselves, that is, unless they can prove 100% indigenous bloodline, which is possible if the person hails from Southern Mexico or Central America, places like Oaxaca, Chiapas, Honduras, Guatemala, and carries pure indigenous blood?

     Throughout Mexican and U.S. history, the largest numbers of Mexicans who migrated north came from Central Mexico, the regions of Jalisco, Michoacan, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and, later, the border areas. With nearly 500 years of European mixing, from the Spanish conquest to the migration of Mexicans north, the number of pure-blooded Indians in the U.S. is low. It did receive a bump during the migration of Mayans, Mixtecas, and Zopotecas from southern Mexico in the 1980s.

     Often, I hear Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists claim Western Civilization as their heritage, which means Greece, Rome, and parts of the Byzantine empire, including Egypt and other parts of Africa. The thing is, Greece and Rome did not divide their citizens by race, like some in the U.S., though, most historians consider U.S. a society of immigrants, except for the various indigenous groups.

     Rome considered itself a society of slaves. Why? A common Roman practice, for decades, was to free slaves and admit them into Roman society with all the rights afforded any other Roman citizen. No doubt, there were Africans and Jews among the freed slaves. One catch was that the freed slave had to accept Roman politics and religion.

     So, if American Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists hail Greek and Roman civilizations as their heritage, then they must also accept the inclusion of blacks, Jews, and other people of mixed blood in their heritage. Since Constantin also declared Rome a Christian Catholic state, Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists should also be willing to kiss the pope’s ring. And any Irish, Scot, Italian or Polish Catholics out there marching with Neo-Nazis had better realize their heads might also be on the chopping block, when their friends, eventually, turn on Catholics, and believe me, they will. Evangelical Protestantism runs deep among racists.

     According to research by many sociologists, like educator Joy DeGruy, race didn’t become an issue for any society until the late 16^th and 17^th centuries, when Europeans had to justify African slavery to the world by proving Africans weren’t human. That’s when European, so-called scientists, with little scientific training, began measuring skulls to see if European skulls had different shapes than African or Mongolian skulls. In theory, a skull of certain proportions meant one race was more intelligent than another. Then, the so-called researchers began measuring the skulls of parents and children of the same race. When they found that many Europeans had different shaped skulls, this debunked the theory.

    Even the tern Caucasian had a suspicious evolution. In the 1700s, a pseudo-scientist, a man who received his doctorate after writing a fifteen-page paper, without ever attending a university, coined the word Caucasian. Why? He argued the most beautiful people in the world hailed from the Caucasus region of Europe.

     Now, we all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so scientifically, the word Caucasian has no scientific merit. He just used the personal library of a friend who oversaw his thesis. He then continued his theory, creating the various races, like Negro Africanus and Asiatic, offering his opinions of their beauty, intelligence, and behaviors, of course, placing them on the lowest levels of intelligence and culture.

     Today, with DNA and a myriad of tools at their disposal, scientists have proven that all human beings share 99.9% of the same biological composition, regardless of skin color. Our physical differences are not biological but geographical. That’s why parents from one region of the world where food is abundant and living conditions healthy might be tall and strong. If they emigrate to another region where the food is scarce and living conditions unhealthy, after a few generations, their descendants will most likely be short and scrawny. Check out surfers who stay out under the sun and in the water every day, year after year, the damaged skin, changes in pigmentation, and hair color. Imagine, their descendants, after generations of the same behavior. Forgive the weak example, but I think it makes the point.

     Scientists, today, agree “race” is a myth. It doesn’t exist. It is a social construct, invented by the powerful to exploit the weak, or anyone who does not agree with them. Like fairy tales, passed down from generation to generation, they are dependent on those who interpret and apply them to everyday life.  

     Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, and the great “un-woke” still believe one race is superior to another based on skin color. It isn’t. We’re all one. Racial superiority is manufactured, like so many of today’s cheaply manufactured goods. One race is no better or no worse than any other.

     If anything, racial hatred of the “other” is harmful to us and our descendants. Consider the eighteen-year-old who drove 200 miles to kill as many African American as he could on a Saturday afternoon before police stopped him. He murdered ten people. Radicalized on-line by hate groups and listening to Fox Television host Tucker Carlson, he said he wanted to kill Black people and Jews, or the El Paso shooter who drove ten-hours and killed twenty-three people, as he looked for Mexicans at a Wall Mart.

     Instead of attacking domestic terrorists, and the great "un-woke," some, like DeSantis push the narrative that studying each other’s ethnic history is evil and causes division. Thomas Jefferson, at sixteen years of age, believed, “Ignorance was not only a disgrace but a handicap,” in all people; and yes, he considered African slaves "people," though he inherited many, even as he fought for the abolition of slavery.

     Unlike many politicians, today, seeking a political edge, any way they can, they defend “ignorance,” over enlightenment. They crucify the “woke,” and uphold those who “sleep.” They ignore the fact that many of the U.S. founding fathers argued for “Enlightenment.”        

     As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion with education,” nothing about banning books, or knowledge.