Race Argument

Welcome to my fourth blog post! Thank you all for responding to the question I posed at the end of my last blog post; it was really interesting to be able to hear your thoughts. I have now read up through part five out of seven in Race, so I have been able to get a good feel for the book. What has been difficult is finding a single argument because the book covers so much material. For this post, to keep it short (which is actually pretty long), I narrowed it down to two to talk about.

Although Aronson says that he wants us, as readers, to be able to think about the issues for ourselves, his writing and the facts he incorporates sends a message. He has different arguments about specific parts of racial bias and prejudices, but one of the main arguments that he has is that prejudice affects minority groups negatively around the world, and we can never seem to be without it. This argument is why I asked, at the end of my last blog post, if we can ever be without prejudice because, by the descriptions Aronson gives, it seems as though we can't.

The negative effect of prejudice is shown through the many depictions of the violence that occurs against different races. Over the course of the book, Aronson describes the horrible things that happened to people of many different races, so that we would be able to see the negative effect it has on so many people. Specifically, the section that I read this week, focused on the Holocaust a great deal. The seeds of the Holocaust were planted when Adolf Hitler categorized Jews as a race. In his book, Mein Kampf, he said "'Jewry is without question a race and not a religious fellowship. The effect of Jewry will be a racial tuberculosis of nations'" (pg. 205). By separating the Jews and forming them into a completely separate race, Hitler created prejudice against them, so he was able to win over Germany and start one of the worst genocides ever. Aronson describes the horrible treatment Jewish people endured over the course of the Holocaust: "Nazi doctors experimented with plunging people into freezing water to observe the damage to them, and to determine how to best recover" (pg. 214). They did this in order to determine how to best treat German pilots whose planes had been shot down into the sea. The examples of the inhumane treatment of the Jews strengthen the argument that prejudice has a negative effect on people because it shows the violence that minorities have to endure. 

A poster used by the Nazi Party to explain the Nuremberg Laws. The Laws defined what ancestry a person had to have in order to be a "pure" German. 

Nuremberg Laws. Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/

     background-and-overview-of-the-nuremberg-laws. Accessed 4 Apr. 2018.

Aronson shows the widespread effect of prejudice throughout Race by exploring racism in countries all around the world. When he addresses the status of Jews, he mentions all the groups he has explored in different countries: "The same pillar of race theory that confined Africans, Irish, and Indians to eternal subhuman status was now applied to Jews" (pg. 184). This statement encompasses many of the groups that Aronson investigates throughout the book: Africans, Irish, Native Americans, and Jews. Even earlier in the book, he explains prejudices in Rome and Greece. All of these groups are affected by prejudice and bias in a negative way. 

Through exploring all the prejudices in different cultures all over the world, Aronson strengthens his argument by making you wonder if there could ever be a world without prejudice. For me, seeing the horrible way that many different groups were treated over centuries makes me feel as though we can't. Like I said in my last blog post, in America, we went from prohibiting Africans from becoming citizens to blocking Asians from becoming citizens. It seems like as soon as one prejudice fades away, another takes its place. When the Irish started arriving in America, there was a great deal of prejudice against them: "many Americans saw the Irish as 'savage,' brutish,' ape-like" (pg. 146). They were only accepted as "responsible white Americans" when they redirected the prejudice back to black people in America. This shows how prejudice never truly goes away, it just gets moved from one party to another, which is one of the points of Aronson's argument. 

One other big argument that Aronson forms is that race is a social construct. He addresses this when he writes about how race is created. When he describes how the ideas of race are formulated, he explains the background of who came up with the ideas and what they led to. For example, he explains how the first pillar of race, that physical differences matter, came into existence. He describes how Augustine depicted "monstrous men," people who were savages. Aronson writes, "with the monstrous men, physical characteristics had become crucial. The first pillar of what would become 'race' was in place" (pg. 73). The distinction was obviously created by people in society, which shows that race is a social construct and not a real thing. Without people, racial distinctions would not exist. Another way Aronson shows this idea is by putting race in quotation marks. He does that in the quote I used before, but also in many other places. In the same paragraph as the quote above, Aronson puts race in quotation marks three times: "the invention of monstrous men was a crucial crossing point on the way to the idea of 'race,'" "would later take to form as 'race,'" and "what would become 'race'" (pg. 73). Putting race in quotes exemplifies how it is not real and is something society just made up, which is what Aronson is arguing. 

I personally agree with the claims that Aronson makes. First, I am absolutely 100 percent certain that prejudice affects people all over the world, and it has a very negative effect on those people. Like Aronson, I am not certain if we would be able to live without prejudice. In an ideal world, we would be able to, but our world has never been ideal. Like Aronson shows us, it seems like we can't get rid of one prejudice without another taking over. As for race being a social construct, I completely agree. Throughout the course of Race, I have seen how different people "invent" aspects of race, all of which never would have existed without society's influence. 

Aronson has made very strong arguments throughout the book, and I am looking forward to seeing what he does to end Race. Thank you for making it to the end of this very long post!