SECOND OPINION:'Race' is an incorrect term based on scientific ignorance
I WAS in Nantes last week visiting the new Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Memorial to the abolition of slavery) on the banks of the Loire. This grim underground building houses a permanent exhibition on the history of slavery from the 15th to the 20th century.
More than 12 million African men, women and children were traded through ports such as Nantes, Bristol and Liverpool. Nearly two million died en route to Caribbean plantations and the United States. Although slavery had existed for at least 6,000 years, by the 17th century the global economy was heavily dependent on it. Vermont was the first American state to abolish slavery, in 1777. Denmark followed suit in 1803 and Britain in 1833. However, an estimated 250 million people, including children, are still forced to work in conditions of slavery today.
Anyone who believes some human beings are superior to others needs to visit the Nantes memorial.
Taxi drivers in Ireland clearly think white drivers are better than black or non-Irish drivers. The displaying of ridiculous green lights showing the taxi is being driven by a genuine Irish person is not a trivial matter and needs a zero-tolerance approach from the criminal justice system. Sadly, only one in six people who experience racism report it to the Garda.
The words “race” and “racism” are misnomers and come from a time when scientists believed there were at least four separate races of people in the world: Caucasoid or white, Negroid or black, Mongoloid or Asian, and Aboriginal. These scientists, who were mainly white, thought racial groups could be categorised by their intrinsic characteristics or abilities, and that some were superior to others.
These beliefs led to the slave trade, the Holocaust, 77 people murdered in Norway, and the growth of far right political parties such as Golden Dawn in Greece. Heinrich Himmler, talking about Russian people in 1943, said “Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion while digging a ditch interests me only in so far as the ditch is completed for Germany. It is a crime against our own blood to worry about them.” Pygmy people were hunted down and eaten during the Congo war between 1998 and 2003 because they were seen as sub-human.
Science has recognised for at least 40 years that there is only one race – the human race – and that all humans originated from the same gene pool with identical characteristics and abilities. Despite this, “race”, like age and sex, is still used as a sorting category and allows people to be further divided into “mixed race” groups, whatever they are, thus compounding the problem.
Ireland has a peculiar slave history. Thousands of poor Irish people were sent as slaves to the Caribbean; at the same time many Irish merchants, including Daniel O’Connell’s cousin, got rich from the European slave market. The Irish were as energetic as every other nation involved in selling human beings. The Magdalene laundries used slave labour and this did not pose any moral dilemmas for the well-off Irish who presented their dirty clothes to them in vast quantities.
The health of Irish Travellers has not improved in the past 50 years and denial about Ireland’s slave history is one of the reasons. The life expectancy of Traveller men is 61, the same as the general population in 1945. Traveller women have a life expectancy of 70, like the general population in 1962.
The last census showed that 5 per cent of Travellers completed second-level education and only 33 Travellers have a degree. This is equivalent to a large town of 36,000, the same number as in the Traveller population, trying to function without qualified teachers, lawyers, nurses, doctors and so on. It would be impossible, yet this is what Travellers are expected to do.
The Children’s Rights Alliance 2012 report wants Travellers recognised as an ethnic minority. This is not a good idea. Ethnic minority status actually promotes discrimination because it emphasises the differences between people, not the similarities. All humans are born equal and are entitled to have their rights vindicated because they are human, not because they are Travellers.
The new Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission should help to achieve this goal if it is allowed to function independently of “the dead hand of the Department of Justice” according to the May/June issue of Village magazine. Watch this space.
Dr Jacky Jones is a former regional manager of health promotion with the HSE