this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
470 points (93.2% liked)
..:: tchncs ::..
1280 readers
1 users here now
Your friendly https://tchncs.de community! Discuss whats happening in the tchncs world and/or just use it as a community forum.
German and english allowed.
If you are looking for a way to support tchncs, please check out https://tchncs.de/donate
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But none of that is mutable, is it?
Your DNA isn't going to change, but those ethnic groups are transient things rather than an inherent feature of reality. An ethnic group is ultimately a relative thing. Some "African-American" people might be genetically closer to the African people from whom their ancestors came than the other ethnic groups living in America, but they're not simply "African" - they are a separate diaspora. Those ethnic groups change their makeups over time.
It's not like, say, elements. 1,000 years from now, the average genetic makeup of any given ethnic group will be observably different from how it is today, but a Hydrogen atom will still be defined in exactly the same way as now. Nazis believe that races are a concrete, reified structure that doesn't shift over time - it is a "pure" and "natural" state that becomes degraded and diluted by what they term miscegenation, rather than a fuzzy construct that changes over time.
Let's say you were born in Spain and your whole family has lived there for centuries, but your family are black - say, some of your ancestors arrived from North Africa long ago. I would still call you Spanish, but a Nazi would call you African (or more likely some kind of slur). They care about the colour of your skin more than your actual background. Likewise, no matter how many generations your family has lived in a country or how well they pass, Nazis assert that if any of your ancestors was a Jew, you are also a Jew, and that as a Jew, you are inherently inferior to non-Jews and consequently a racial contaminant.
I wonder how anyone stereotyping individuals based on far-distant ancestors square up these beliefs with hominid evolution. I guess the answer is "they don't".
That or some pseudoscientific bullshit. Or just lying. Plenty of Nazis call the "out of Africa" theory politically-correct propaganda and assert without evidence that white people are a different species from sub-Saharan Africans.
Just adding to this, following this same supposedly biological argument that advocates for a natural and morally correct path for the furthering of genetic lineages, Nazis persecuted homosexuality, bisexuality and trans people as a national policy, shutting down sexology research institutes, literally burning years of scientific advancements, and revoking official acknowledgements the Weimar Republic granted transgender people. It's often forgotten, but the inherent homophobia, biphobia and transphobia of neonazis and adjacent movements is not a recent development at all: https://www.advocate.com/news/holocaust-lgbtq-victims-german-parliament