The Dowsing Rod of Race
What do a dowser in rural America and a conference on “remigration” in Porto have in common?
At first glance, not much. One spends his weekends walking fields with a metal rod searching for underground water. The other gathers politicians, activists and ideologues to discuss race, identity and the future of Europe.
The connection, I came to think, lies in a particular way of knowing.
A dowser feels the rod twitch. The sensation is real. The thing it purports to detect is not. Yet the conviction remains, reinforced by repetition, tradition, identity and the deeply human tendency to trust what feels true over what evidence demonstrates.
That observation became the starting point for an essay examining the recent Remigration Summit in Porto, the persistence of racial pseudoscience long after genetics and anthropology abandoned it, and Toni Morrison’s enduring insight that racism functions as a distraction, a way of keeping societies occupied with questions that can never be answered because they were never real questions to begin with.
The piece also explores the peculiar irony of holding a conference devoted to ethnic purity on the Iberian Peninsula, one of the most historically mixed and migratory regions on Earth.
Published this week in CounterPunch:
