racial discrimination is against the to humanism. justify
Answers
The humanist position on racial discrimination is clear: we are against it. That’s fine, but it’s too easy; everyone likely to read this essay will agree.
A further question, on which there is likely to be less agreement, is this: Do racial divisions exist within the human family as a biological fact, or is the whole idea of race among humans nothing more than a construct of the human mind, without any basis in the biological world? I shall argue that the humanist should accept race as a biological fact, and that many liberals are in a state of denial when they claim it isn’t. They came by this state of denial for good and honorable reasons, and for a while it served a useful purpose, that of opposing race discrimination in the most direct way they could think of. But that was half a century ago, and they should now take a new look at the facts in the light of all we have learned in the meantime.
The view that race is a human construct, not a biological reality, established itself as politically correct during and after the Second World War, as a reaction to the crimes of the Nazis, carried out against Jews, gypsies, and others that their persecutors identified in racial terms. And it was not only the Nazis who were committing ugly acts of racial discrimination. Our own blacks were still getting lynched and our whole country was going through a kind of crisis of conscience. From the liberal point of view, rooting out racism became a crusade, to be waged with any and all available weapons.