Speech/Lecture

Neil Duran

English

As I look at each and every one of you I see the future, a future encased in a dense layer of ignorance. I implore you to attempt to break the habit of monotony, deviate from the path society has conditioned your brain to follow, create your own truth. There is an inherent diversity in all living beings: but a critical question stand does this diversity constitute a difference? We’re taught that certain physical characteristics and genealogy define your race, this concept of race is widely accepted by the population. What many of us don’t know is that race isn’t something as simple as the color of your skin or your chemical make up. What is the difference between me and you? What makes your skin darker than mine? What makes your hair fairer? What makes your eyes lighter? It’s the result of environmental stimuli that your predecessors underwent, this insinuates that at some point us as people as humans, we intersected and were a unified “Race”. I’m old my idea of race has already been cemented into my brain, even as I educate myself on the topic I still find it difficult to grasp. Your young you have the room for objectivity, the burden of ignorance is replaced by innocence. But how can you understand such a foreign concept, when your elders struggle with it themselves, alienating themselves into stagnant groups. The wisdom we have as adults are plagued by bias, we pass on information but in our own unique ways. We pass on our mannerisms and prejudices creating reflections of ourselves in the youth. We create the bias, we create the race, we create the exclusion when we should create unison. These are all premises that fall into the category of “racial skepticism”, what is racial skepticism you may ask? It’s a philosophical theory which suggests that Race isn’t a real concept, Naomi Zack a racial skeptic summarizes their argument like this “A summary of the racial skeptic’s argument against the biological foundations for race, sequentially summarizing the scientific rejection of essences, geography, phenotypes, post-Mendelian transmission genetics, and genealogies as possible foundations for races. Aristotelian essences, thought to ground the common characteristics of distinct species, were correctly rejected by early modern philosophers.” To summarize the summarization to be a racial skeptic is to challenge the validity of a long-held belief. I wanted to talk about this as a belief since in my opinion, most racial barriers are a result of faulty logic. One example of this is the self-segregation of people globally, there have been constant instances of people unconsciously dividing themselves on the bases of race. A prime is an example is Europeans and Africans, Europeans believed themselves to be above Africans because of their belief in Manifest Destiny or the white man’s burden. The superiority that they held in high regard lead to 400 years of oppression on their fellow man. Would the same situation play out if the Europeans were racial skeptics? Most likely, but at least it won’t be a race issue anymore. Racial skepticism isn’t a fix-all that’ll magically whisk away all the problems or tensions between people in this society. Racial skepticism, in my opinion, can be an effective tool in dispelling stereotypes and other situations along those lines, it isn’t going to prevent large scale acts such as slavery. But maybe with this ideology all black people won’t be seen as criminals, all Mexicans won’t be seen as immigrants, all these microaggressions that are present in everyday life will slowly fade out of existence. Imagine the good we can do if we acknowledge that we aren’t separate, more job opportunities, more diverse communities, more potential to grow! The boundaries that have been established over centuries of oppression and disdain can easily collapse through the spreading of tolerance. Prejudice is inevitable but only when those ideas are already cemented into your way of life. The only way to break this cycle of prejudice is to teach students these values, philosophy isn’t touched upon in-depth in high schools. Introducing kids to philosophies like racial skepticism can help kids make a decision on what they want to believe instead of playing into a narrative. Through education, these prejudicial values can be stopped in their tracks and a more open mind can be created. Individuality is built through experience, giving kids the ability to learn about these values will result in more free thinkers. Children who are given the chance to attain this knowledge will grow up to pass the same ideologies to their kids creating a new cycle of intelluatilism aimed at dismantling the bias in everyday life.