Thursday, December 6, 2007

Is Paternity Testing An Instance Of Racism?

I have seen definitions of racism which specify the attaching of cultural-political importance to genetic lineage, as the essence of racism. If such a definition be not unreasonably broad, must not the use of paternity testing for determining various connections of cultural-political importance, then become 'racism'? If so, then anti-'racism' would be highly inimical to the requirements of human life, or at least civilized life, as reponsibility of parentage, its determination and enforcement, and more, would be crippled by being damned as 'racist'. The slippery slope equivocations and false dilemmas of anti-'racist' smearing would be entrained, making parental responsibility, and its foundations, out to be expressions of racial hatred, all the way out to mass-murder. There is no rational argument for trying to make people attach zero cultural-political importance to lineage, when genetic connections are not known to be unimportant in the cultural-political sphere of affairs. This would be why smears are used instead. Customs and laws against inbreeding treat such degrees of relatedness as culturally and politically important, enough to militate against certain kinds of breeding. Valuing openness to diversity implies that there can be too much relatedness in a population, even when there is no inbreeding to the extent of first cousin marriage, and that this is a matter of cultural and political importance, and is claimed to be a way of working against racism. If racism were defined as assigning cultural-political importance to genetic lineage, how may it also attach such importance to the coalescence of such lineages, or their long maintenance as distinct ones, for that matter?

3 comments:

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