urgent re-evaluation needed - >> mind the _

Back when I posted on Persepolis I already had been thinking if I should post on aryan description as the terminology for the Iranian people and point to the nowadays obsolete understanding of the usage of Aryan to mean “all Indo-Europeans” by most scholars. In central Europe and especially in Germany there is still a continuing reference to the terms as used in the early 20th century or even worse as in the sense the Nazis modified it for their own unsustainable interpretations.

Now that I had to listen to some Critical Whiteness talks which struggled a lot withe general terms around Ethnicity and ‘race’, but had no problems to refer to scholars which used ‘aryan’ as a possible description – even if just to neglect them – I am really disturbed how much the terminology is still around in exactly this very old-fashioned, fascistic and racist way – as otherwise it could not be used in terms of such a discussion.

This non-re-evaluated usage points exactly towards the high – more or less unconscious – coding of certain terms and that even a recoding, which opens new fields of access is strictly overlooked in even an academic surrounding. It dismisses heavily all the possibilities and options would be allowed in just in thinking of the word in its proper meaning. May be it is just an indicator to really carefully look at the own mindsets (never excluding myself), how ever critically one claims oneself … or may it is because most of the scholars – att least in this discussion – were german or european .. also this is an indicator for a mindset … (more to follow)

… Whiteness, of course, is a delusion — as the insane Captain Ahab of Moby Dick demonstrates. Scientists today agree that there is no such thing as “race,” at least when analyzed in terms of genetics or behavioral variation. Every human population is a mongrel population, full of people descended from various places and with widely differing physical qualities. Racial purity is the most absurd delusion, since intermarriage and miscegenation have been far more the norm than the exception throughout human ethnic history. “Race,” then, is what academics like to call a “socially constructed” reality. Race is a reality in the sense that people experience it as real and base much of their behavior on it. Race, however, is only real because certain social institutions and practices make it real. Race is real in the same way that a building or a religion or a political ideology is real, as each is the result of human effort, not a prescription from nature or God. Thus the concept of race can have little or no foundation, yet it can still be the force that makes or breaks someone’s life, or the life of a people or a nation. …
(excerpted from: Who Invented White People?