Blog: Biological Determinism as a present issue?

Blog: Biological Determinism as a present issue?

While having a look at many texts and successful films about the life of black people—let me give just some examples like Twelve Years a Slave, Django Unchained—that deal with the history of discriminating colored people, with their suffering facing the injustice and especially with slavery in the earlier centuries, the first question that comes to my mind is: In the context of these works, can we really talk about the past or is isn’t still a present issue? 

We are reading scientific texts from the past, for example about the biological determinism and horrible opinions from those bygone days that should not come to our minds nowadays, but is that really the case? 

I might be wrong, but whereas scientific beliefs like the biological determinism are—or should be— totally outdated by now, I think that also discarded theories like that have influence on how people think about each other nowadays while looking at outer appearance and this thinking about each other affects the way we treat each other. As unfortunately many news terribly visualize us how this way of treating each other looks like in our everyday life, one can say that the society holds on to the idea of biological determinism since some people obviously still seem to believe in the opinion of making a statement about one’s mental capabilities accounted for by a different skin color. 

But what does different skin color mean? Who decides about the term different and isn’t difference always a question of perspective? But why do people always use the term different when talking about black people or the ones who aren’t white but never when talking about whites? If a white person talks about a person with different skin color, this person might logically not be white, but it has to be the same term used when a black person talks about a white person, since he definitely has a different skin color than him, so the question that might come up from this discussion is which color is the standard and where starts the difference from that? It brings the chicken-egg-question to my mind, which leads to the answer that no one will ever know it and no one should waste their time with it. 

Modern scientist found out that the gene pool within a group is even more diverse than between members of different groups and by different groups, one can mean such thing as a „race“. So if the genetic difference within the „race“ is more diverse than between the „races“ this group of people can’t be put together because of it’s genes. This fact, after my understandings, proves that the so called „race“ is not a scientifically proven but not more than a by society cultivated thing, since people try to make life easier by categorizing things, which in the case of „race“ might be our outer appearance.