Friday, February 1, 2019

ON RACE AND DESIRES

“Race has shaped many minds and even those who are completely free of ‘racialism’ have to deal with it, as we deal with each other and not all of us are necessarily ‘deracialized’.”  (S. Díaz de Menéndez)

The idea of race among serious academic discourses is kept closer to the parameters, borders, footnotes of texts and salons by big league scholarly players in their fields -with the exception of some genetecists looking for differences between those who are more nedentharlized than the rest, since “y’all” are “Sapiens”. And good looking female Sapiens excited so much the “machitos, cronistas de la conquista y civilización de Yndias” tthat, at night, in their cabins, the “cronistas” wrote about beauty and temperament. Mestizaje was to continue and extend itself.  

After days at sea, an island “a la vista”,  seeing the Arawak women coming out from the lush vegetation in the tropics, swimming the slender bodies into the emerald green sea of the Caribs, race was not what led the sailors’ body reactions, nor the Cross stopped them from lusting. Early 1500’s: race, the word, was used to describe certain common qualities in an individual or group closer to “temperament” and personality force, a long time held view of what made us different; not the phenotypical ascribed meaning “formulated” later on by the doctor from Lower Saxony. 

(Lower Saxony: excluded from history books on the 80Year War, disregarding the visual evidence that proves they were active against kingdoms from the South -check the hats and clothes they wore to pose for portraits in the Hannover museum; very political-; and it was not due to race or phenotypes, but about their ideas and rational reading methods -Descartes fought on their side- that led some, much later on, to, like the above cited doctor, explain “scientifically” human differences; race -the word- was transformed there; and turbans led the way; given foundation to the immigrants/colonizers from that region who were already racialized by the new use of the word; and when landing in South Africa or Les Antilles would not even speak to the slaves in the Antilles, so it was left to the Portuguese speaking Sephardic merchants to serve as intermediaries, and, therefore, created a lingua franca: Papiamento. It was not longer about temperament.

As most middle school textbooks chapter on science and evidence says, “the fact that if you do no see it does not mean it does not exists” or that “a belief is not always based on evidence.”, race exists only in many minds, most probably, with the certainty felt by lots of Middle Ages’ peoples when it came to fairy-godmothers, even claiming to having seen them, attested to, as they did not distinguish between big light-bugs -not extinct yet- and spiritual beings, similar to the Mayan non dense energies, an idea that can be deduced from Johan Huizinga’s book The Waning of the Middle Ages, applied beyond Europe. 

Race and fairy god mothers are part of the evolving density of light and short lived existences of word meanings; consequences, responses, values, influences and events everywhere: including the appearance and disappearance of the Nefertiti bust from the land of the Egyptians -not directly related to race but to desire to posses which, when combined with scientifically created image-making techniques, mixing coded messages associated with a particular constructed idea/visual perception of “what ever”,  including the desired other, can sell.

Race and desire and Madison avenue in progress resembles the “Yo mama” screamed by the Romans to the likes of the Nubian queen of Egypt who went shopping to Rome a few millennial years later -their beauties were already part of Greek mythology- and built inside the German archaeologist desires, driving him to dig in downtown Cairo; the guy who stole the creamy, busty, sexy bust and took it to Berlin.

Guilt -that sensation made into fundament, textually and structurally built-in by Christianity in order to sell  happiness, tranquility and capacity to tolerate reggaeton by the believers- also prevents some from talking about absurd, poorly thought, powerful words, race, desres; oh, well, that is another story, 

No comments: