Soooooo ridiculous! Reading the Cosmic Race was an experience this morning. So many lines made me crinnnnge. Even in the very first chapter: it ends with saying that the Christians made American Indians advance from “cannibals” to “a relative degree of civilization.” Yeeeeshhh. I was thinking what the hell am I about to read here?

Reading this chapter reminded me of when you sometimes get in a conversation with an elderly person who uses pretty offensive language sometimes, and doesn’t really realize there’s anything wrong with it, and they don’t see any issue in the things they are saying. There is a ton of racism in this text, but it doesn’t come across as malicious. It’s like he’s this sad man with really bad ideas, but he’s very confident about all of it.
Into the chapter, when he starts getting into the specifics of a cosmic race- how it would come about, what implications it would have, how exactly it would function… Kinda made me feel like I was reading somebody’s dream journal. Vasconcelos idea’s are pretty wacky. He seems like a very imaginative fellow, with not a lot of room for logic in his thoughts.
Overall though, the idea of this piece is that the cosmic race will someday occur and there will be peace on earth. Right now though, today, the world is seeing the highest number of refugee’s than there ever has been. There is a ton of racial mixing that is on-going. And hey, there is no peace. Actually, there’s more conflicts, racial and ethnic and otherwise than ever before. It seems like even though there is mixing happening, the state of the world is just getting worse. This idea that someday there will be one super-race, where we are all the same and no problems exist, is a myth.

[These are just initial thoughts. I’m sort of embarrassed in case I am interpreting it all wrong. That’s what class is for though, right!? See you all soon. ]