Let's junk the entire idea of race.

A perfect example of its uselessness is the Chicago Public Schools.

The concept of “race” is bogus. It always has been. It was created out of thin air.

What other concept has spawned so much violence and hatred? Bloody wars. Slavery. Jim Crow. Bombed churches. Lynchings. Murders. The Holocaust.

Even now, the rabid left sees everything through the prism of race: Structural racism. White racism. White privilege. Republicans.

America’s history has been corrupted by the rabid left’s certitude that the country was founded on racial injustice. Inbred. Riches were/are made by the “ the monetization” of race. Race baiters constantly remind us that we are in free fall, back to the days of Jim Crow. Or worse.

Multiple generations have justified violence in the name of race. “Mostly peaceful” protests that torched businesses (mostly of the small type) and a church. A Portland, Oregon, federal building under under siege. A Minneapolis police station abandoned and set ablaze.

School children have been flooded with racial teachings, creating self-righteous generations that tolerates censorship. Not since the horrid days of commie fighter Joe McCarty have I witnessed this kind of cleansing of the First Amendment. No dissent allowed. All in the interest of muzzling of fact-based science.

Hey, at least it has created jobs for sociology majors and demographers. They now occupy seats of power in the private economy, government and academia. An entirely new industry has sprung up of racial scolders, creating comfortable if not luxurious, woke lives.

Can we reverse this sorry state?

We can start by junking the whole idea of race by removing the question from the census. It has become meaningless, not justified by science. Race is not a binary concept. Can anyone argue anymore that “one drop of Negro blood makes you a Negro?

There are so many abundant shades of meaning* as to make the whole idea useless. Race should go away as did phrenology, the discredited pseudo-science that claimed it could judge a person’s worth by the size and shape of the skull.

I’m a mutt. Irish, German, Canadian, Scott Irish, Huguenot. Who knows what else. Native American?

The children of interracial marriages or partnerships used to be called mulattos, a word now generally unacceptable. The rape of black slave women by their masters has created millions of mixed-race Americans. Are they black or white. Fifty fifty? It’s all so insulting.

Here is how the National Library of Medicine tries to deal with the definition problem:

The terminology regarding descriptions of race and ethnicity have not been consistent and has evolved over the years. Differences in terminology, methods of data collection, individual perceptions of group identity, and changing demographics present challenges in determining racial and ethnic categories that are specific and acceptable to all individuals

In other words, we don’t know what the hell it means. The definition keeps changing, a fact that makes scientific analyses of race worthless. Impossible.

For now, the Office of Management and Budget’s Statistical Directive 15 defines six races: American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and white.

Just on its face, the definition is a useless brew of race and ethnicity. And yet, countless laws, government programs, and oh yes, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) force-fed schemes are based on this muddle.

To illustrate: The Chicago Public Schools’ Black Student Success Plan. It gives special attention to black students, excluding all other races from benefitting from this extra help. Here’s the problem: all the statistics that point to black “underperformance” compared to whites and Asians include black students that aren’t underperforming and don’t need the help.

It’s not a race problem; it’s a social-economic class problem. Extra help should be directed to members of this troubled group and not to blacks in general. If the programs were based on socio-economic needs, they would avoid the constitutional and legal prohibitions of racial discrimination. And thus, the federal government has opened a civil rights investigation into Chicago’s program. (The fact that the probe will be conducted by the Trump administration will be used by the school board, the Chicago Teachers Union, Democrats and ideological partisans to improperly try to discredit the inquiry.)

Of course, laws protecting people of different colors, religions and so forth from discrimination should remain on the books

I must be nuts, I’ll be told, if I think we can snuff out race as a useful scientific concept. Powerful interests depend on it. Social science scholars would be left with little to do. Demographers would have to focus on other socio-economic differences in crafting programs. There’s no counting the number of people and businesses the would be, well, out of business.

But, as professional scolders like to say, “It’s time we had a discussion about it.” Race serves no real purpose. Race corrupts the principles that the country has for decades, even centuries, struggled to make a more perfect union. Let’s debate it.

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*Here is Merriam-Webster’s description of Race

…the word race as it is most frequently used: to refer to the various groups that humans are often divided into based on physical traits, these traits being regarded as common among people of a shared ancestry. This use of race dates to the late 18th century, and was for many years applied in scientific fields such as physical anthropology, with race differentiation being based on such qualities as skin color, hair form, head shape, and particular sets of cranial dimensions. Advances in the field of genetics in the late 20th century determined no biological basis for races in this sense of the word, as all humans alive today share 99.99% of their genetic material. For this reason, the concept of distinct human races today has little scientific standing, and is instead understood as primarily a sociological designation, identifying a group sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history [My emphasis.