this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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This seems pretty well thought out.
I'm a little confused by: "A belief that race is an immutable genetic concept". If I was born in Spain and my whole family has lived there for centuries, am I not Spanish / a Spaniard?
I'd agree that saying things like "all Spaniards are terrible at math" is racist, but I don't see how one's race is mutable in this fashion.
They may be talking about ethnicity vs race? Google says in basic terms, race describes physical traits, and ethnicity refers to cultural identification. Race may also be identified as something you inherit, whereas ethnicity is something you learn.
So ethnicity is certainly mutable
Spanish would be a good description of your ethnic background in that situation, but there are quite a number of ethnic identities within Spain as well - the Basque, Galicians and Catalans, just to name a few. "Spanish" isn't a racial monolith. There would be plenty of people whose ethnic background looks quite different to yours but who are no less Spanish.
What I mean in that statement is that Nazis believe that "race" - as in "Germanic", "Hispanic", "Black" (they tend to lump all sub-Saharan Africans together), "Middle Eastern" - is a useful way of classifying people, and that substantial differences in things like intelligence and physiology between humans are primarily the result of these categorisations.
But none of that is mutable, is it?
Your DNA isn't going to change, but those ethnic groups are transient things rather than an inherent feature of reality. An ethnic group is ultimately a relative thing. Some "African-American" people might be genetically closer to the African people from whom their ancestors came than the other ethnic groups living in America, but they're not simply "African" - they are a separate diaspora. Those ethnic groups change their makeups over time.
It's not like, say, elements. 1,000 years from now, the average genetic makeup of any given ethnic group will be observably different from how it is today, but a Hydrogen atom will still be defined in exactly the same way as now. Nazis believe that races are a concrete, reified structure that doesn't shift over time - it is a "pure" and "natural" state that becomes degraded and diluted by what they term miscegenation, rather than a fuzzy construct that changes over time.
Let's say you were born in Spain and your whole family has lived there for centuries, but your family are black - say, some of your ancestors arrived from North Africa long ago. I would still call you Spanish, but a Nazi would call you African (or more likely some kind of slur). They care about the colour of your skin more than your actual background. Likewise, no matter how many generations your family has lived in a country or how well they pass, Nazis assert that if any of your ancestors was a Jew, you are also a Jew, and that as a Jew, you are inherently inferior to non-Jews and consequently a racial contaminant.
Just adding to this, following this same supposedly biological argument that advocates for a natural and morally correct path for the furthering of genetic lineages, Nazis persecuted homosexuality, bisexuality and trans people as a national policy, shutting down sexology research institutes, literally burning years of scientific advancements, and revoking official acknowledgements the Weimar Republic granted transgender people. It's often forgotten, but the inherent homophobia, biphobia and transphobia of neonazis and adjacent movements is not a recent development at all: https://www.advocate.com/news/holocaust-lgbtq-victims-german-parliament