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Racism: A Study Guide
I’m an ethnic Quaker, pale skinned (“white”), who spent many formative years outside the United States and its territories. My choosing to concentrate in philosophy added more mental distance between my headspace and that of those around me. I’m beyond mere middle aged at this point; I’m in my sixties.
Where I come down in the humanities is with H.G. Wells in three writings, with C.P. Snow and his “chasm”, and with R. Buckminster Fuller and his plan to bridge said chasm.
In the humanities, we study Social Darwinism as a consequence of both Darwinism and industrialism. Social Darwinism takes us onward to Eugenics, as popularized in the United States and its territories, and onward to the Third Reich and its Made in America Hollerith machines.
The first of the H.G. Wells writings is The Time Machine, perhaps his most famous work of science fiction. Like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Abbott’s Flatland, this classic comes with social commentary, which in turn tends to become tinged with satire where imaginative fantasy is concerned.
One of the definitions I learned, of racism, I forget where, maybe Princeton, was: the dogma that humans divide into specific subgroups known as ‘pure races’ which form a primary ‘basis’ for anyone ‘mixed’.
