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Racism: A Virulent but Curable Social Disease

Article  in  Theory in Action · July 2014

DOI: 10.3798/tia.1937-0237.14019

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Timothy McGettigan Earl Smith

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 Theory in Action, Vol. 7, No. 3, July (© 2014)
DOI:10.3798/tia.1937-0237.14019

Racism: A Virulent but Curable Social Disease

Angela J. Hattery, Timothy McGettigan, and Earl Smith1

In this paper, we argue that race is a destructive biological illusion

that is better understood as a form of Durkheimian deviance than as a
meaningful form of biological differentiation. Without question, there
are significant differences among human social groups, however,
those differences are sociological rather than biological in nature. We
will analyze the tennis careers of Venus and Serena Williams to
repudiate new and old eugenicist misanthropy and instead illustrate
that positive and negative human attributes are determined by
sociological success factors rather than biological attributes. Further,
we will emphasize that the deleterious consequences of socio-racial
differentiation are aggravated by the Thomas Theorem (“If men
define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences”).
We will conclude by drawing upon Jane Elliot’s work to illustrate that
racism is rooted in malevolent social constructions, and, as such,
racism is a curable, or “deconstructable,” social disease. [Article
copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute.
E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website:
http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2014 by The Transformative
Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS: Racism, Athletic Performance, Darwin, Williams Sisters,

Tennis, Thomas Theorem, Jane Elliot.

Potential doesn’t win a gold medal; doing it is the only thing that counts.
Daniel F. Chambliss, Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers
(1989)

INTRODUCTION

As in the old Hans Christian Andersen tale about the gullible emperor
(Andersen and Tudor, 1945), people the world over have been duped
through the power of suggestion (Thomas, 1928) into believing that

1
Note: Authors contributed equally. Names are listed in alphabetical order. Address
correspondence to: Earl Smith; e-mail: smithearl8@gmail.com.

1937-0229 ©2014 Transformative Studies Institute

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