My Greatest Fear

I’ve stretched, bedazzled my toe nails, and am going to attempt to tip toe this razor thin line that is race and identity. As I mentioned in my longer than intended bio, race and racism was a relatively foreign concept to me when I was young. Here in the U.S., especially these days, race is uniquely prescient in the political and cultural arenas. Through the shear breadth of the U.S. economy and its media, this focus on identity through physical expression has spread throughout the western world. I contend that this focus on race, and more broadly identity politics, is a saddening state of affairs and offers no real solutions. I adhere to the definition of racism that describes it as the belief that one particular group’s physical expression inherently places that group at a superior advantage over another with a differing appearance. I fundamentally disagree with anyone that believes that white people are smarter than black people, that Asians are more capable than Hispanics, that Jewish people are superior to Christians, and so on. These concepts are intentionally divisive, attempting to extract from one group to assuage another based entirely on appearance or expression. If in reading these past few sentences, you find yourself uncomfortable or torn…good. We’ve been immersed in this “race first” identity status quo for so long that I often find myself feeling uncomfortable when I express my full opinion on the matter, so you aren’t alone. We’ve begun to miss the forest for the trees.

I don’t want to go down some boring historical or societal fact checking rant on the origins of racism, but I do need to tell my understanding of it. I draw my historical and cultural contexts on race from writers and speakers like Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, and John Michael McWhorter. If you disagree with them on their historical and cultural interpretations, then we are simply going to disagree. If this is the case, I still encourage you to see through what I write here. Regardless of our understanding of the history, my conclusions about where we may end up, I believe, will still ring true. As I understand it, race is a construct. Created as homogenous societies began to evolve their cultures and established more rights for the people within their group. Slavery was and still remains a worldwide institution, practiced for as long as history has been recorded. Humans began by enslaving their from within their own groups first. It’s not hard to imagine that as those groups developed technologies and governing systems over time, and through those evolutions more and more rights were given to the citizenry. Through basic understanding of laws and respect for the members within their communities, the justifications for enslaving/indenturing your neighbor began to fall apart. The practice of slavery, though, didn’t stop. Instead these groups began enslaving other groups rather than themselves. Here is where race gains utility. If I can convince my neighbor that we are smarter, more capable, and just better all around than someone else, it is easy to abuse and subjugate them. Distinctions between us and them are easy to make. The melanin count, facial features, types of hair, and so on become the most obvious markers to make those distinctions. Thus, racism is born. For any modern westerner, this is obvious lazy thinking and antithetical to everything we know about the human condition. What I want to caution you from, is to take modern concepts, which are gained from centuries of trial and error in culture, and apply them backwards on our ancestors. Society two hundred years ago didn’t know any better on race, than it knew that the world was round rather than flat two thousand years ago. We’ve evolved culturally and advanced scientifically over these long millennia to reach the conclusions we have today.

I’m going to say the hard thing, there is “white priveledge”. I don’t particularly prefer the wording of that phrase, largely because I don’t think there is a large cohort of white people that identify as being white. At least not in the sense that it is a major defining characteristic. But there is something there. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act, “white people” made a mistake. The mistake they made was to assume that this revolutionary idea of pluralism, never really conceived of (most certainly not put into practice) throughout the history of the human race, would be universally accepted amongst the populous. That was an unfair assumption. The concept that those that had been discriminated against based on their appearance would just suddenly sing Kumbaya with us was arrogant. Many of the conversations, like “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, that followed were microcosms of that arrogance. The white American population thought that the guilt they felt during those times, prior to the Civil Rights Act, would be absolved by simply accepting everyone and granting them equal rights under the law. Trauma is never solved that easily. I grant and understand, to the degree that I am able, the displeasure that the black and other minority communities must have felt in many parts of the country during those times. As I mentioned earlier, cultures evolve and that evolution takes time. It took America twenty to thirty years to grow into the race neutral concept, but by and large it did. Just visit any public place, you’ll see a myriad of colors and cultures intermingling without a thought to whether or not the product they’re buying, the beer they’re drinking, or the roller coaster they’re riding would ever be restricted from them based on their appearance or expression. We all accept this as normal, or at least in the West we do. I just don’t think that the traumas we often claim ring nearly as true today as they did sixty years ago.

Racism, as it is spoken about today, seems to have many definitions without any kind of clarity. We hear odd phrases around power, implicit biases, and micro aggressions. It, honestly, confuses the hell out of me. I find myself often worrying if any interaction I have with someone hued differently than me, will be seen as some form of patriarchal white oppression. It’s fair to state that my feeling is simply anecdotal, but I can assure you that I’m not alone in this concern. More and more, many say similar things to me. Worse yet, I hear young white men identifying as “white”. This unintended outcome is what concerns me the most about our current race debate. We largely eradicated white nationalism over the last one hundred and fifty years, and though it still exists in the fringes, it for, all intents and purposes, has no bearing on our daily lives. As a society we are beginning to ethnically bind “white people” together in a way that they haven’t been bound for quite some time. This perpetual blame game that white men are the cause and agent to all the world’s woes is idiotic, and doesn’t take into account the possible ramifications that lumping them all together may bring. No different than in any other situation, accusing and assessing someone with guilt over a thing they believe themselves innocent of, only results in equal opposition. Does anyone think that convincing the largest demographic in the United States that they’re flawed and guilty of their forbearers’ sins is a good idea? What could be the outcome? The older of us, that grew up under the concept of color blindness, can easily reject this white ethnic dogma and go about our day. The younger of us, that have grown up under hyper individualism and victimhood mindsets, will have a hard time justifying not believing in “white grievance”. Consider the slippery slope from there.

The prescription that I offer, and to be honest I find it to be almost too obvious, is to consider each other by the economic classes we find ourselves in. Not at all to say that we should find any identity with that class, but rather to better formulate policies that can be applied that help the greatest number of people while not harming or excluding others. I don’t want anyone to be poor any more than I want someone to be sick. Unfortunately, though, we can find ourselves impoverished and we do become ill. I want you to have whatever political leaning you may have. How much larger would the cohort you advocate for be, if rather than separate them by arbitrary designations, you grouped them all together? If we design programs that hasten the graduation from the lower class to the middle, wouldn’t that disproportionally help more of the minority groups we claim to be fighting for? I understand how difficult this proposition is. How difficult it is to set aside our biases and look at problems pragmatically. That is the charge I challenge you with, though.

History has long proven the awfulness of discrimination. The outcomes are never good. The internet does us no service in trying to rectify our poor decision making. It silos us into mini cults, each pointing their bayonets at the other. It has resulted in a near complete fracturing of our society. It has often been said, and is said often today, that we are at a pivotal moment in history. I honestly believe this is to be truer today than it has been in a long time, and if we don’t course correct quickly we will decline and fail the American Project. America has great potential, it is our duty to see that manifested. I’m going to end this with a crude but apt concept. If you can make babies together, then you just might be the same thing. I wish you all a great week!