Concept of Race

* Re “Is Concept of Race a Relic?” April 15: Sixty years ago, in “The Fate of Man in the Modern World,” the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev curtly dismissed the concept of race as a merely “zoological category”--having no relevance in human history or society. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “anywhere in history, to find a real race in the accepted zoologic-naturalist sense of the world.” Human is a race; African, Asian or European are not. It’s good to see that modern science has at last begun to catch up with this ancient, basically religious insight: People are different from the other animals, but our essential difference is not more real in some people than it is in others.

Now I wonder how long it will take contemporary social thought to catch up with both science and religion on this point. For, as Berdyaev also noted, racial categorization (or for that matter, sexual categorization) is “absolute determinism, fatalism.” We cannot believe in essential differences between African and European, men and women, gay and straight, Greek and Jew, and also believe in the reality of personal freedom and dignity.

If we are merely hapless victims of our genes or of the separate petri dishes in which we were “cultured,” then we are always eternally predestined to damnation or to glory by a purely random fate. We are all “victims,” and there is nowhere we can turn for redress--since neither law nor faith, neither science nor religion, can change the color of our skins or the shape of our pelvises, our childhood memories or our unbidden adult desires.

J. L. JONSSON

Long Beach

* Robert Lee Hotz’s article is certainly a big step toward eliminating one of the major myths that contribute to the perpetuation of racism.

As a cultural diversity consultant of African American ancestry, I have long held the view that “race” was an absurdity, from personal experience and from my own research, particularly the pioneering work of anthropologist Ashley Montagu.

Montagu and other anthropologists established these same views on race back in the 1940s. Thus, the fact, as the article states, that race has no basis in human reality, is, indeed, an empirical human reality, varied only by cultural and genetic variables.

It is only the manner and means by which the historical legacy of racism has been impressed upon the lives of all Americans that allow the concept of race to continue.

ANTHONY GIVHAN

Long Beach

* The simple, irrefutable fact that people of all races can mate and reproduce with one another seems to indicate, even to a scientifically challenged individual such as myself, that we all originate from the same source; be it Adam and Eve, or the 3-million-year-old hominid dubbed “Lucy” by anthropologists (and for whom there must have been a corresponding Desi).

EARL EAGER ALBERT

Temple City