Thursday, February 07, 2008

Racism?

The Free For All - The Roots of All Racism: "Racism in its most virulent and violent form relies in part on an obsession with bloodlines. Think of the 1935 Nuremberg laws that codified the de-naturalization and de-humanization of Jews, in the interests of maintaining “the purity of the German blood,” which was “the basis for survival of the German people.” These laws “for the protection of German blood and German honor,” included prohibitions on marriage or extra-marital sex between Jews and “citizens of German or related blood.” Jews were defined according to their bloodlines and included anyone with 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any sane person today willing to defend the Nazi’s belief in racial purity and the importance of bloodlines, but it’s easy to find people who seek pride in their own distant ancestry. The American genealogy industry is thriving, measuring racial purity with an exactitude of which Nazi’s could only dream. In a country originally defined partly by its opposition to inherited nobility, people are so invested in tracing their family trees that they surrender their DNA to private for-profit testing companies as thoughtlessly as they give up their social security numbers for department store charge cards."

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