Scientists Finally Disprove the Existence of "Race"

In a landmark discovery, an international team of scientists have determined that humans cannot be accurately classified according to their “race” (referred to as “species” in the animal kingdom), and that human beings are physically, mentally, spiritually and culturally identical. “We mistakenly believed that humans could be classified according to their species, which we believed was related to the location of their forepeople (‘forefathers’ having been recently stricken from the dictionary as ‘sexist’) on the planet,” said Dr. Enrico Maggioletti, a former “italian,” who is now referred to as “a person who descended from people who lived in the area of Europe known as Italy.”

While it is true that people are generally believed to have descended from humans that evolved on different parts of the planet, scientists now refute the idea that these differing environments had anything to do the development of distinct races. “For years, we referred to Asiatic peoples, African peoples, European peoples, Arabic peoples, et cetera,” said Dr. Maggioletti. “Now we have learned that any perceived differences between what we thought of as races of peoples is exactly that: a subjective perception that exists in the mind of the beholder, without any scientific basis whatsoever.”

“As far as science is concerned, a ‘race’ is a contest of speed that may be held between a wide variety of animals, including humans,” Dr. Maggioletti said. His colleague and associate, Dr. Pearl Ng, added, “science has finally caught up with increasingly popular notion that differentiating humans according to shared physical characteristics and cultural practices is simply wrong. The bottom line is that we are all humans, to a degree, and there is no scientific difference in our physical or mental makeups.”

To illustrate the point, Dr. Ng said, “If somebody makes the observation that many people from the area known as Vietnam (formerly known as “vietnamese”) have high cheekbones, and assume that this similarity is a manifestation what we formally thought of ‘racial attributes,’ they would be incorrect in making that assumption. The perception that people from the area of Vietnam share such a trait is purely subjective–a form of ‘othering’ (formerly known as ‘racism’):

“There’s you, and there’s the ‘others,’” said Dr. Ng. “You may think your skin is lighter or darker than ‘others,’ but that is a purely subjective observation, the same way some people believe that certain shades of red are actually orange, and vice versa.”

The discovery means that some groups that have historically claimed superiority in a given field due to what was believed to be genetic predisposition toward a certain physical characteristic–muscle mass, for example, or height–will need to, just like everybody else, attribute such perceived shared characteristics to pure coincidence. The same applies to what some have perceived to be shared mental predispositions based on cultural and environmental differences. For example, people that have descended from the area known as Germany have been mistakenly assumed to have superior engineering abilities, as opposed to people that have descended from the area known as Hawaii. The fact that BMWs weren’t invented in Hawaii is pure coincidence, and observing such is now considered a form of “othering.”

In another example, the scientists wrote that it is now considered “othering” to label certain types of food as Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Mexican or what have you. Instead, the correct way to refer to foods that share similar characteristics based on their location would be “food commonly found in China and traditionally prepared by people from that area and markedly different than food prepared by people from Kansas.” While this distinction may prove difficult to use as an identifier, particularly on a restaurant sign, scientists and sociologists suggest that "Food Traditionally Prepared in China" is far preferable to "Chinese Food."

For those that might observe that this breakthrough discovery is yet another way of saying “we’re not in Kansas anymore,” scientists suggest that it would be better to perceive the discovery as indicating that Kansas, any perceived characteristics shared by the people of that area, are purely subjective figments of the imagination.