Over the years, even centuries, people, and even learned scholars, have offered various rationales about “race,” either saying essentially that all generalizations about race and racial traits are false, or at the other extreme, claiming that racial heritage is a significant determinant of such individual traits as intelligence, muscular ability or lack thereof, industriousness… and the list is sometimes endless. In the course of finishing my latest SF novel [The One-Eyed Man, which I just turned in and my editor hasn’t even begun to read], I thought a great deal about why people are the way they are, and what factors influence them.
On Earth, civilizations have risen, and they’ve fallen, and there have been pretty impressive civilizations raised by peoples of various colors. Ancient Egypt boasted one of the largest and most long-lasting of the early civilizations, indeed of any civilization to date. The Nubians of the eighth century B.C. were strong enough to topple the Egyptians and ruled all the way from the southern Sudan to the sea and much of the southeastern Mediterranean. There are massive ruins in central eastern African embodying huge palatial complexes that had to represent a large organized state. The various Mayan civilizations not only represented an intricate and complex civilization but one with a mathematics involved enough to create a calendar that would be largely accurate for tens of thousands of years. The Aztecs and the Incas created significant empires despite lack of critical resources (such as beasts of burden and transportation). Archeologists have now discovered traces of ancient large cities in the United States, along with significant earthworks and plazas. At one time, the Chinese empire was without peer anywhere. The most advanced sciences in the world at one time were Islamic. Rome controlled the entire Mediterranean basin for hundreds of years.
All of these civilizations had differing “racial” backgrounds, but all were great and advanced in their time. If one looks at modern industrial nations, the vast majority have individuals of virtually every racial background who have great accomplishments. Yet the Mayan civilizations of 1500 years ago vanished without a trace. The great African civilizations are long gone. So is the Roman Empire. Egypt has been an impoverished backwater for hundreds of years.
Historians will give many answers, and all too often the most common answer among most people is that “they got conquered.” That’s true in some cases, as in the instance of the Aztecs and the Incas, but it most instances, the civilization collapsed from within, sometimes under pressure, sometimes not. One of the most interesting and, I believe, revealing cases is that of the Mayan city-states in the northern Yucatan area. Although they had developed sophisticated water gathering and use systems and weathered extreme droughts in the past, another drought finished them off. The people dispersed, from not a few cities and towns, but from thousands… and they never returned, leaving the magnificent ruins we see today. While there is some evidence of battle and brutality… in most cases, that doesn’t appear.
What I found intriguing was that the final decline of the Maya coincided with the rise of a new, and more brutal, and perhaps even more fundamentalist religion, the worship of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. I’m not about to blame the decline on just that, but I do think it points out that the decline of almost every past great civilization is linked to a change in the “culture” of that civilization. One can date the decline of the great Chinese empire to the time when a new emperor burned the entire fleet – the greatest in the world, that had explored the Pacific and all the way to east Africa. Did that emperor change culture? It’s more likely he reflected that change, but with that change from outward-looking to inward-looking, the decline proceeded. At one time, the greatest scientists in the world were Islamic, and the western European world learned from them. Then… over a few decades, that intellectually open culture closed, and the Islamic world went into a long and slow decline.
Too often, it seems to me, those people who profile “race” aren’t profiling race at all. They’re profiling culture. Like it or not, all too few blacks coming from U.S. inner city backgrounds, especially young males, are all that successful, and the murder rate is astounding. Is that racial? I doubt it. Is it just poverty? I doubt that as well. It can’t be racial, because very few black males who are raised outside the inner city culture demonstrate the traits of inner city black males, and one can also see similar traits of violence and anti-social behaviors in other impoverished groups, but they’re not identical because poor white culture isn’t the same as poor black culture… but it’s the culture that makes the difference, not the racial background.
And, like it or not, some cultures are toxic. The Ku Klux Klan is a toxic culture. So, frankly is the current inner city black culture. So is the pure white Fundamentalist Latter Day Saint culture. So was the Nazi culture, and there are certainly others that could be named. Not all cultures or subcultures are worthy of preservation or veneration, regardless of the diversity movements that are so popular among certain groups… but I think it’s well past time time to make the clear distinction between culture/subculture and race.