If you haven’t seen Avatar, it’s a half-a-billion-dollar adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where Mr Meek gets to be Mr Hero, kill Baddies, and get Big Chief’s ethnically-optimised uber-daughter into the sack. All in his sleep. Apart from being more visually stunning than anything you’ve ever seen, it’s nothing new.
Except, many claim [...]
Much has been written these last few days on Claude Lévi-Strauss. Le Monde devoted four pages to the Grandfather of Anthropology, who has died aged 100. In an odd irony – after reams of praise for his insights into ethnographic diversity and the rich taxonomy of humankind – an unrelated article in the same paper [...]
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Definitions of race range from those who say it does not exist – that it’s purely a social construct – to those who insist it has a biological warrant. All sorts of semantic problems arise, let alone political ones: if there is no such thing as race, what does “diversity” mean? If on the other [...]
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An anti-racist stance has to be consistent, otherwise it’s just… more racism. When I went on Anti-Nazi League marches with my schoolmates, the hope (as I understood it in my hormonally left-wing state) was for a colour-blind world of equal treatment and opportunity. All racial differentiation was bad.
That was before Diversity(TM).
Now, race – which has [...]
Race is not a choice, let alone one that requires a defensible moral rationale. Religion, on the other hand, is exactly that.
The opportunity to overlook this distinction is taken up, enthusiastically, whenever a criticism of religious ideology is dubbed as racism. Further obscurantism is supplied by the prevailing confusion over what race is, or isn’t, [...]