Black?

by Twisted Satire (Anonymous Submission)

The more you call attention to racism, the more power you give it. The more you scold your friends for telling racist jokes, the more offensive they become. The more you try to connect unnaturally with someone of another race, the more you alienate them and yourself. (Don't try to make friends with someone of another race just so you can prove to yourself that you are "Unbigoted") People who hang out with many different races may just be in denial of their own racist notions. The sooner we accept that we all have racist ideas, regardless of where they come from, the sooner we can get to work on fixing them.

Aside from normal human distrust of the unknown, people first started judging other based on race about 500 years ago. Before that time, people's background was interpreted based on their values, language, and cultural upbringing in general. You can't look at two people from North Africa and two people from South Africa and say they are the same just because they are both "Black." They would be completely different people, looks, experience, and customs included.

A prime example of this is when Europeans first came to the Americas. The Native Americans, being locked in several inter-confederacy struggles of their own, and did not think of the whites as a group and their slaves, the blacks, as another. They merely thought of blacks as dark-skinned members of the strange groups of men who came bearing guns, germs, and steel. Even when these Europeans began to invade the Native lands, they did not think to Unify as a people to repel the invaders, they did not think of themselves as "Native Americans," but as "Iriquois" or "Pueblo" or "Aztec." They merely saw the coming of the Europeans as a way to trade and gain an advantage over their rival tribes.

The point of all this is, Racism didn't exist, it was invented around the 16th century, 500 years ago. If Racism has been ingrained in our culture for that long, imagine how long it will take to rid oursleves of our subconcious (or so we like to think) prejudices? It's going to be a lot of work, and we'd better start now. You can help, as I said, by taking away the power of race. All men are created equal, and drawing attention to Race will only worsen the problem. We must cast off our shackles that label us as "Black" or "White" or "Latino" or "Asian," and embrace the beauty that is mankind, no matter what colour it is.