UCSD students should be condemned for party

Submitted by: Angelica Stoddard

To my fellow UC students at San Diego: I’m not a science student, but even I can tell you a few simple facts that many of you seem to have missed.

Skin color is not a valid way to figure out who people are.

Color doesn’t tell you their intelligence, what language they speak, how they vote or what their major is.

There is no group of people that owns virtue and no group that owns vice. Ideas about the inherent characteristics of people are debunked science. Like the geocentric universe and the flat Earth, the science of essential race differences is factually inaccurate.

However, unlike having a party where you pretend that the Earth is flat for the fun of it, having a party where you pretend that people are less than you because of their melanin content is not an innocent act. It can’t be.

The reason the concept of race differences caught on was because it was so useful to Europeans and Americans to justify making obscene amounts of money using the bodies of other human beings as their machines and their playthings.

Maybe you want to be whimsical and believe “six impossible things before breakfast.”

OK.

Pick anything else you like and turn it into a theme party. Dress up as alchemists and get drunk while pretending to turn lead into gold.

Play at being stupid about things that have not hurt and killed people.

When you choose to play at being stupid about people, you are choosing to commit a form of violence against them, to turn them into a plaything in your mind, to make them something less than you.

In a world that has known slavery and genocide, in a country where there are still people alive who knew lynching and Jim Crow laws, choosing to enact this dead science in your free time is a choice for which there is no excuse.

I condemn you for it.

All people of conscience and all people of learning ought to condemn you out loud, for you can be certain that in the privacy of their minds, you have proven to them that it is you who are ignorant, it is you who are less than human, it is you who should be despised.

Not because of the color of your skin, but because of what you choose to be.

Stoddard is a third-year history student.