For a long time, I have been involved in academic work in the field of international humanitarian law, where the term racial discrimination has been used repeatedly. Such recurrence led me to question some of the facilitators, with an elementary question: What is race? I argued that an adequate answer would lead us to understand what racial discrimination is really about. On that occasion I did not get an answer, which encouraged me to look for it in another way.

At this point, my concern returns when I look at the events that have taken place since the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis, that is, the demonstrations in various parts of the United States, the world, and on social networks, which in particular raise as a demand the elimination of racial discrimination, in addition to many others, as well as police treatment in accordance with human rights principles.

Implicit in this demand is the idea of race as a fact. Which, in the language of the law, could be described as a false assumption, does race exist? Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias, in his article "Las razas humanas no existen" (published by The Conversation in the Huffington Post -Spanish Edition); states "There is, therefore, no basis for invoking its existence. Nor is there any justification, on non-existent grounds, for other differences", although the Real Academia Española (and surely other languages) has a definition, the product of an old and reduced convention.

Professor Pérez Iglesias opportunely explains that "The colour of human beings today is the result of a complex sequence of biological and demographic events. It is not possible to delimit some groups biologically and others according to that feature.”

So, what does exist? Genetic diversity, says Pérez Iglesias, is determined by "random mutations and by the effect of natural selection on the frequency of genetic variants in each population, of the gene flow caused by migrations and crossings between individuals from different populations, and of genetic drift.” And he concludes "there are no homogeneous sets of variants that allow us to define large human groups that we can call races.”

There is also the myth of race. A false story that is promoted by those who generally assume that they are better than the rest and that this condition is innate to them, in other words, they are biologically determined. So there are groups of people who exist to dominate and others to be dominated, for example. The idea of race is more typical of metaphysics than of science, but it has a social function, it seeks to legitimize the relations of domination in a given society.

The best known reference of a society that assumed the myth of race (with pseudo-scientific foundations), is the German one, with the rise of the national-socialism by the hand of Adolf Hitler. The terrible consequences for humanity of such a course are well known.

The idea of race not only reflects or defines the one who considers himself superior, but the other, in such a way that it determines him in the culture of domination. You conceive yourself within the framework of the dominator. Just to illustrate, I refer to that old difference between the slave and the enslaved, the first one lacking the notion of free will, which makes him submissive; the second one knows that it has been taken from him and recognizes his right to fight to obtain it.

If race is a myth, so is racial discrimination. And the question arises: What are we really talking about when we look at events in the United States of America? We are talking about a society whose center is the maximum reproduction of capital, promoting competition and individualism as core values, and which, in order to ensure property in a few hands, develops and imposes parameters of discrimination based on social class, social condition, abilities, gender, skin color, religion, belonging to an ethnic group or geographical region, among others. We are talking about a society where citizens lack strong organized expressions to counterbalance the corporations and the State at their service, and which from time to time explodes, as it has done recently, with a spark, which is what the Floyd's murder became.

This reflection not only calls for the eradication of the idea of race, so we can truly approach what is happening in the United States of America (and other latitudes), but also so we do not naturalize biological determinism. It is a fact, we are different, but discrimination in human groups is constructed and deconstructed in society, thanks to a complex amalgam of cultural, social, economic and political mechanisms, which, among other sciences, sociology studies.

Race should be one of those dead or disused words. At most, as Eduardo Galeano said, it should be exhibited in a museum so that the new generations know what mistakes they must not make again.

In memory of George Floyd,

as well as hundreds of thousands more who die without media coverage

and the millions who continue to have a knee on their neck.

- Jesus A. Rondon

@JesusRondonVen