Racism…is stupid

Where’s my cape? Captain Obvious to the rescue!

“True racism exists only when one group holds a disproportionate share of wealth and power over another group then uses those resources to marginalize, exploit, exclude and subordinate the weaker group.” – Dr. Claud Anderson, Powernomics

I have never understood racism. The practice always seemed like so much work compared to just not doing it. The concept of one group of people hating another group of people because their skin color is different is something I’ve been grappling with for most of my life. I still don’t understand it. In the United States of America, Race is the most prominent, in your face, intangible concept that everyone no matter the ethnicity is affected by. People divide themselves into subgroups of pro-racist and anti-racist advocates who spout confusing and sometimes contradictory messages. Some sections of the News media are determined to brand one group of people as morally and intellectually defective and the other group as some sort of superior savior class. Cue Ben Shapiro and his cherry-picked statistics about why all blacks are criminals. Think tanks are assembled to spin historical events such as slavery, lynchings, the KKK, the civil rights movement & police brutality. Society’s racist stereotypes argue that Blacks & Hispanics are supposedly criminals, Asians supposedly carry weird diseases, Native Americans are supposed to be drug addicts, and Whites don’t season their chicken. I’m just like…why? Why do we treat each other like this? This is all so dumb! As someone who chooses his friends & associates based on their vibe, regardless of their skin color, I just don’t get it. If I don’t like someone, it’s because they’ve done me wrong after meeting them, not because society has brainwashed me to think that they are inferior before I have even said a word to them.

As much as racists hate me because I was born black, I don’t hate them. I view them as weird zoo animals to be observed from far away. I watch some of their intellectuals on YouTube with the intention of trying to understand why they embrace this idea. I still don’t understand their incentive structure. What do they get out of this? Is there a secret economy that deposits money into their bank account every time they do and say mean things to people? Maybe a raffle that gives out free vacations to the Bahamas? “Yea, I hate your people, but I love your beaches.” So dumb…and pointless. I think that’s why Jesus Christ said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Racists deserve our pity for being so backward, not our anger. That goes for being homophobic as well. It’s all nonsense.

Nevertheless, the power that racists wield politically and economically cannot be denied. The trustless economy is the solution to racism’s real-world economic effects. Smart contracts allow anyone who meets its minimum requirements to participate in the token economy without fear of discrimination. Ethereum uses a programming language called Solidity that is used to construct Smart Contracts. The main types of Smart Contracts are ERC20, which allows the creation & transfer of tokens from one user to another. ERC721 allows Non-Fungible Tokens to be minted and auctioned off. Currently, the use case for NFTs are image JPEGs, but they have a wider use case as literally anything else. An NFT could be an apartment building, for example. The transfer of money between parties can be programmed to be extremely detailed. The tenants could call the mint function on the ERC721 contract to create a new apartment instance. The ERC721 Smart Contract could then emit an event that automatically compensates all investors associated with the property. The downside of ERC721 Smart Contracts is how expensive gas fees quickly get, which is why ERC1155 contracts were created to solve that issue. The best way to understand ERC1155 is to compare it to a video game. The coins are the ERC20 tokens and the weapon types are the ERC721 NFTs combined into one contract. ERC1155 contracts allow multiple token types and NFTs to be transferred and minted on the same contract. The trustless economy doesn’t care about the color of your skin. Smart contracts circumvent any laws or procedures put in place to limit the economic growth of any group of people. Smart Contracts are not a solution for racism’s cultural nonsense, but they could at least provide constructs that dull racism’s ability to marginalize, exploit & exclude groups of people economically.

This is a sensitive topic, but I hope to have handled it with as much care as possible. I don’t believe in sacred cows, and I’m not an activist trying to guilt-trip anyone. I also hope that I didn’t come off as trying to convince anyone that they should stop being racists. If you are a racist, I’m sure you have thought long and hard about why you would hate an entire race of people until the day you die, and there is nothing I can do or say to change your mind *shrugs. That’s not my job anyway. Go see a therapist or something. My intention isn’t to wield this topic as some sort of spiked mace meant to bludgeon anyone into submission, but if there is a societal issue that I think technology can solve, I will have an honest discussion about it. You’re all grown-ups, you can handle it.

Join us next time as Captain Obvious makes more observations such as, “Water Is Wet” and “The sky is blue.”

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