On Race and Critical Race Theory

Cartoon by Clay Bennett, 5 June 2021

The word race as biological term applied to all lifeforms comes from the 19th century, where it was used for what is now usually called a subspecies, though “race” is still a valid term.  That is the sense in which I am about to use it now.

The modern Human Homo sapiens sapiens race began flourishing just 195 thousand years ago. 

Out of the two known races (H. sapiens sapiens & H. sapiens idaltu) of the Homo sapiens species, it is the only one remaining.  There have been nine other known species (H. neanderthalensis, H. denisova, H. habilis, H. naledi, H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis) of the 2.8 million year old genus Homo, each of which has only one race identified in it, except for Homo erectus, of which nine races have been identified. 

Of these twenty races of Homo, or Human, known to have walked the Earth in the past 2.8 million years, only ours remains.

So, when Edward James Olmos as his alter-ego Admiral Bill Adama of the Battlestar Galactica (BS-75) said in an appearance with his crew at the UN that there is only one race, the human race (and so say we all, or at least we should), he was literally as well as rhetorically accurate.

All other uses of the term “race”, such as that which the white supremacist-dominated General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, along with its Governor of the same ilk, is trying to enshrine in stone as an Eleventh Commandment, are nothing more than racist social constructs.

I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth.  The whole world is my home and all its people, human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic, are my brothers, sisters, and cousins.  Like our more distant cousins on other planets across space and throughout time, we are all children of the Universe.