Racism isn't exactly racism

As a scuba diver I should have realized this: racism isn't racism.

It's actually a natural part of speciation--the way in which one species of animal or plant divides into different races, then into different species (more on this later).

Our race has outgrown the need for what we call racism, but treating it as innately evil is a big mistake.

You can't "cure" people of a natural trait, nor can you stamp it out with moralizing and accusations. Those can shut people up--but they'll keep on muttering the things you don't want them to say, and they'll say them out loud to like-minded people, while using cover terms with you that give them plausible deniability.

Thus "keep the Negro down" morphs into "states' rights" and a devotion to "limited government." And that makes it triply hard to do anything about it, even when proponents of these things don't hesitate to trample on states' rights and aggressively expand government when it suits them.

So first we have to understand just what racism/speciation is.

Basically, it's the way in which a new part of a species consolidates whatever evolutionary advantage that caused the new race to develop in the first place. Humans are visual animals, so the differences we use are mainly visual. A scent-oriented species would focus more on differences in smell.

Suppose some members of some animal species start to exploit a new ecological niche. I'll illustrate this with a neutral example, from another species.

The Namib desert beetle was originally a black beetle, and it still is across most of southern Africa's Namib desert. The beetle's black shell enables it to crawl out into the sunlight at dawn and warm up quickly (remember, insects are cold-blooded). It goes about its business until the heat of the day, when it hides from the sun and takes a siesta to avoid overheating. In the late afternoon it comes out again, and uses its dark shell to stay active as late as possible.

But some of these beetles wound up living on the coastal strand of the Namib desert. There the noonday heat isn't so hot. There a beetle with a light-colored shell can stay active through the heat of the day, which more than makes up for them having to wait longer to get going in the morning (because the light shell doesn't absorb heat so well).
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Where what we call racism comes in is how did each Namib beetle race "fix" its geographical advantage? Speciation works not just from isolation, but from the speciating races coming to prefer their own kind when it comes to mating. That preference preserves the advantage. Otherwise you'd get a mid-hued beetle that's inferior to the white and black phases in each one's ecological niche.

I brought up my experience as a scuba diver because tropical coral reefs are the richest, most diverse habitats on this planet. And it has become clear that the wild color and fin variations among similar races/species aren't just mating displays--they help those races/species preserve the advantages they have in each one's ecological niche.

That advantage doesn't have to have anything to do with the differentiator. Thus one butterfly fish might have a longer snout but a smaller mouth, letting it get at prey in crevices that others can't reach. However, its color/fin scheme could be what helps males and females find each other.

And once two races become reproductively separated, they progress to becoming actual different species--i.e., the different species don't produce fertile offspring if they mate with each other. A horse can breed with a donkey, but the resulting mule or hinny is sterile, and so take no part in evolution.

The trick with the human species is that we've been around long enough--perhaps 100,000 years--to divide into different races and subraces, each adapted to a different environment, but not long enough for those races to become different species. And once we started adapting the environment to ourselves instead of vice versa, and started flying all over the place, the process of speciation stalled, and will probably never occur now, although we keep evolving at a microscopic level.

So--racism is really just an aspect of speciation. It isn't immoral or moral. It's an evolutionary holdover designed to keep, for example, the Oriental's epicanthic fold over their eyes and flatter nose and thicker, coarser hair, all to protect their eyes and faces and heads from the incredibly harsh winters on the steppes of central Asia. These adaptations to nothing to help a Han Chinese in Shanghai or an Indonesian living on the equator, but they stick around because the adaptations don't reduce their effectiveness elsewhere either.

Whereas Oriental skin tone does vary from Siberia to the equator, because that does make a difference. Though now there are light-skinned Han Chinese living in equatorial Sulawesi. They just use lots of sunblock.

You might ask why, then, is there so much plastic surgery done in Asia to make Orientals look more Caucasian; why Tehran is the world nose job capital; why the first black millionaires in America made their fortunes from skin lighteners and hair straighteners; why there are more bottle blondes of every race than real blondes. And why so many mixed-race marriages occur.

The answer is that the human mind is flexible. You can find individuals who go against the tide about almost everything. Also, there's an additional human trait, which pushes against incest (children never fall in love with parents they were raised with, nor siblings), and towards exogamy (hybrid vigor--visit Pitcairn Island and you'll understand).

It's also possible that blondes are regarded as prettier for biological reasons we don't fully understand. The zoologist Desmond Morris has some interesting speculations about this in his book "the Naked Woman."

Racism is speciation. It exists, and its universal, not just among humans, but among most if not all living organisms. For humans it's also obsolete (unless we start colonizing other planets with really different conditions). But the way past it isn't enraged accusations of immorality. At worst the racists are just atavistic. Mainly it's an educational challenge.

That still leaves us with about 20% of Americans unable to admit that President Obama is a smart guy (independent of whether you agree with his policies), solely because of his skin color.

We just have to keep patiently pointing out the flaws in their reasoning. Or, if you share my mischievous streak, you could try to explain to fundamentalists (as most of them are) that they're just being Darwinian when they do this.