The charge of racism is bandied about so often, in my view, that is has diminished in value to nothing but a pejorative. It is wielded like a sword against anyone who disagrees with another person's position, isn't following the enforced rules of how and why a person is SUPPOSED to think or act, or simply just to label someone with whom you don't like. In other words, it's used for everything but to describe what it actually is. So let's take this time in this piece of the article to define and describe RACISM and delineate it from the other 2 words in our trifecta, PREJUDICE and BIGOTRY.
A little background first, if you please. According to Darwinian Theory and Mendelian Genetics, there are only 3 core RACES of human: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Respectively, Caucasoid people are from what would be referred to as modern day Europe, specifically the northern portion. They are referred to in our vernacular as White. Negroid people are from Africa, specifically central to southern Africa. They are referred to as Black. Mongoloid people, referred to as Asian (or previously Oriental), hail from the western portion of Asia. When I said this in the previous article, I got scads of email from people telling me (and I'm not kidding here) that my description of these 3 races was, indeed, RACIST. That is, of course, ridiculous at it's core. In the majority of emails, the author would refer to a separate group of people and say "What about _______?" The blank was their example, such as Egyptians, Indians, Latinos, and even Jews. I was very often taken aback by their unwillingness to engage in intellectual curiosity which would have allowed them to understand my explanation rather than IMMEDIATELY buck away from it.
For example, if you look at the fusion points geographically for the 3 racial groups, what do you see? Even the most slight observation would reveal exactly what you see every single day you walk the streets of America today. When an African-American marries a blonde haired, blue eyed Swede, the result is an amalgam of the 2 races which produces children with lighter hair, reduced melanin-content skin, bone structure that is a blending of the two, etc. What happens when a Chinese immigrant marries a White immigrant from England? Obviously, the resultant child will a combination of the 2 genetic backgrounds. You don't have to have a PhD to understand this, just eyes. What do you find in southern Europe and northern Africa (the geographical fusion point between Caucasoids and and Negroids? Dark, straight haired people of modest complection. What happens to people as you move west from Africa and east from, say, China? Or east from Europe toward China? I think you get the picture.
Extending that thought, because of what I'll refer to as "modern" migration (starting with the exploration of Europeans and slave trading) and the ease of travel in the modern day via mass immigration and the jet age, ultimate genetic make-up of the human condition is blending in an ever increasing fashion while the ultimate origins of the 3 races can still be identified. So RACE is something that can easily be defined.
So why then is it still such an issue? Frankly put, it's the difference in "us" versus "them" and it is the expression of this difference that requires us to examine and then re-examine how we act as human beings. To be sure, it is not simply by race that this difference is expressed. As I enumerated in the now lost article, it was also seen quite readily in America during it's infancy as a nation when immigrants from all 4 corners of the Earth found their way to our shores. The same thing happened between Irish immigrants and Italian immigrants, along with the original Chinese immigrants and every other group that came here. When people from all of these groups came to America, the cloistered in groups of themselves. How many major American cities have sections that are, even today, referred to as Chinatown or Little Italy? Anyone who's visited south Florida has heard of Little Havana, an enclave of Cuban immigrants that came here fleeing the Castro regime. Was that necessarily a bad thing? Of course not. It was merely an expected human response to new circumstances. People tended to migrate, voluntarily and of their own volition, toward people that the shared a common language, culture, and history with. Over time, that sort of ethnic self-isolation has diminished drastically, but at the time it was the working definition of the "us versus them" mentality I referred to a moment ago. Cultures meshed. Languages melded. We became what is referred to as a Great Melting Pot. But we still have ALOT of melting to do.
Let's circle back to the subject of this piece, which is RACISM. RACISM is a malignant off-shoot of the "us versus them" expression. It goes FAR past the natural human PREJUDICE I described in the last piece. The aforementioned cloistering was an expression of PREJUDICE. People PREFERRED to live amongst people that were like them. It wasn't wholly negative, although one could easily make the argument that is was unproductive and hurtful to a harmonious society. But it wasn't hateful. RACISM is a totally negative connotation that anyone not of YOUR RACE is inherently bad, immoral, sinful, and (most importantly) LESS IMPORTANT than YOUR RACE. RACISM requires that the racist believe this with every fiber of their being. It, more than anything was the driver of American slavery. Slavery, while present in all 4 corners of the globe, has come to be defined by the American only version in modern culture. Whites owning Blacks. But the scourge that was and still is this practice REQUIRES the slave owner to believe totally that the slave is LESS THAN THEM. It's not about the color of anyone's skin. It's not about anyone's place of origin. It's not about one religion versus another. All of those things come into play, but the over-arching factor involved in believing that one human being can OWN another rests rather uncomfortably with the idea that someone is less of a human being than you. While I'll let the slavery discussion rest for another article, suffice to say that it has hung over this nation like a noxious smog for several hundred years and still drives race relations in America today, but not for the reasons you might expect.
I made the argument in the previous version of this article that we DO NOT HAVE A RACE PROBLEM in this country today. We have a TRUTH PROBLEM. That statement, more than any other part of that article drew the wrath of most of the people who emailed me. They failed to see the point I was making in that, as a new country, we had to stare intently at our demons to resolve the conflict between our stated principles that "all men are created equal" and believing that one man can own another because they were a different race. That, dear friends, is RACISM at it's core. When slavery was abolished in 1865, that idea was eradicated from the American condition. I know, I know. I can hear the sighs coming from the readers of this current piece the same well I felt it from the last one. Slavery was racism. Believing that you could say or do ANYTHING you wanted to another person because they were a different race than you was officially outlawed. Does that mean it went away immediately? Of course not.
When Black churches were burned, that was RACISM. When separate fountains, eating counters, schools, and neighborhoods were established for Whites only, that was RACISM. When people were beaten, drug behind vehicles, and jailed without cause, that was RACISM. Compare all of that to what is referred to as RACISM today. It's almost laughable, but in a very sad and somber way. Does actual RACISM exist today, you bet your ass it does. There are purely evil, died in the wool, card carrying racists in America today. Of that, there is no doubt. But there are also people who believe other fallacies and foibles as well. RACISM, on the other hand, has so lost it's meaning in our modern society that it is attached to almost meaningless acts and even minor inconveniences. Would any thinking person equalize the treatment of Emmett Till to the teenage shopper in the previous piece? I think not.
Cries of RACISM are so prevalent today that they are almost ubiquitous. In short, if everything is RACISM, then nothing is RACISM. If everything that you don't like about ANY member of another race is considered RACISM, how can you explain to your children and grandchildren the absolute horror that Blacks in the country had to endure in the earlier part of our history?
So what do we do to begin to fix this problem? First, as always, begin with the truth. White people need to quit lying to themselves and to Black people about what they really think and what's really going on. Black people need to quit lying to themselves and to White folks about what they really think and what's really going on. If we start there, we can walk the rest of the path together, side by side.
In the next piece of this article, I'm going to break down BIGOTRY to it's core and see if I can't help some folks see that, while the current problems seem insurmountable, we are more than capable of seeing the light of day in short order on our road to solution.
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