The world is multicultural in proportion to the homogeneous balance of the cultures and peoples that compose it. To strive to deny the existence of races while upholding the abstract notion of humanity proceeds from the same absurd reasoning that affirms that white and black are two different variations or perceptions of the same colour.
Race is a given of Nature, the effect of a biological process, the result of phylogenesis, or, if one refers to the definition that geneticists give it, a subdivision of the species that differs from the others by the frequency of numerous genes. Today one estimates that the process of diversification that separates the great Europoid race from the great Negroid race dates back to around 120,000 years ago, whereas the split of the great Europoid race from the great Mongoloid race to around 60,000 years. ‘Humanity (as an abstract definition) is an invention of the European mind… Humanity as a biological unity does not exist’, cautions the Austrian ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. With the apparent exception of certain so-called primitive races (Ainus, Veddas, Negrillos, Khoisanids, Negritos), this process of diversification has not yet ended. An evolution at the level of cerebralisation can still cause the races of the present day to arrive at ‘a more perfect stage than that of Homo sapiens’, declares the German-American biologist Ernst Mayr.
One will note in passing that there are no examples of the peaceful cultural integration of one people into the culture of another. The multiracial project leads directly to the ‘soft genocide’ of which the biologist Erlung Kohl speaks. It is the expression of a ‘society that despises races insofar as it destroys them’. In short, the destruction of racial and cultural homogeneities or, if one prefers, the ‘newyorkisation’ or the ‘lebanonisation’ of the world, documents the greatest crime ever committed against all the peoples of the earth. The standardising mould of the melting pot is not even comparable to the pot where coffee and milk are mixed: ‘The expression “mixture of races” is besides entirely inadequate. One does not mix races as one mixes coffee and milk, or as one mixes liquids. In café au lait, coffee and milk continue to exist; in café-aulaitisation…both the coffee and the milk disappear!’ The multiracial society of human rights corresponds to a society in which man has lost his most elementary right: that of remaining different — at the same time that he has acquired the freedom…to no longer be what he is. At the horizon of this grey, uniform world emerges the wandering crowd of all those whom one has cut off from their people and their identity, in search of themselves, never finding themselves, as this poignant poem of Alev Tekinay well illustrates:
Between Things
Every day I pack and unpack my bag.
In the morning, when I awake, I plan my return,
But before noon, I accustom myself a little more to Germany.
I change and yet remain the same—
And do not know any longer who I am.
As if to support this threat, the internationally reputed anthropologist Ilse Schwidetzky already offered a warning in 1950 which today assumes a tragic dimension: ‘…each group possesses its own biological structures and, in this way, is differentiated from all the others. That is the reason why nothing is more important for the life of peoples than to know what groups of migrants they are capable of integrating into their reproductive biological sphere.’
The eradication of racial differences only anticipates that of cultural differences. In fact, inasmuch as ‘a race is not characterised simply by its physical traits but rather by what they express, by a determined style of behaviour and sensibility…by a way of being and living and by an existential configuration’, it clearly follows that every attack carried out on the biological substrate will necessarily have repercussions on the cultural paradigm. External disintegration is juxtaposed to internal fragmentation: one ‘of the most harmful effects of crossings between truly heterogenous races, not to mention bastardisation or physical alteration, is a wrenching and an internal contradiction, the rupture of unity within the human being.’
Seen in this light, the demand to blend and mix eternally really is a cruelty; so much of a people’s identity is obliterated. And yet, this discussion is so difficult to have with folks.