Chris Wallace said:
That makes bigotry by far the biggest hypocracy of all, especially in America. America was founded by slave owners who violently stole the land from its native people while demanding the freedom to govern themselves, & rallied around a document stating that "All men are created equal". A document, mind you, whose author not only owned slaves, but determined from his own experience of having ONLY ENCOUNTERED SLAVES, that blacks were intellectually inferior. Then centuries later, the descendants of said slaves are told by the descendants of the murdering, thieving slavemasters that this is their rightful land & we need to go back where we came from. Then the governing body, having denied us jobs, education & opportunities for centuries, points the finger at all of us when some of us turn to crime. Then they invite the refugees of othe rcultures to come to this wonderful land of opportunity only to revert back to their territorial nature & subject the newcomers to further intolerance. It's sickening.
This is a difficult issue, because while it's true that nobody alive today was in any way involved with or responsible for slavery in America, a large number of the people alive today who had ancestors living here either benefited or suffered because of the decisions of the guilty parties.
The only way I can see things changing enough to deal with this issue as well as countless others at the same time is to overthrow the government, institute a wise and kind dictator (i.e., me), and subject the entire country to an age of radical sociological reconstruction. Taking people's money and redistributing it evenly (which is not the same as reparations, since this would be focused on the future, not the past) has failed before, and I'm not saying it would ever work, but if entire generations of people were socialized in such a way that they would understand the reasons why we should be civil to each other and how cooperation is the only way to keep people safe, there could be less inequality, moneywise. That could only happen if there was a way to force everyone above the age of 5 to follow the new government's instructions to the letter and raise young children a certain way, which is impossible, I know. The other major component is to make more basic human needs accessable to all people. Several countries in Europe have socialized medicine; I'd sure like a piece of that action, and millions of people need it. If the government were to not only restructure the criminal justice system so that the citizenry was protected but provide basic resources like medical care, food and housing (until those who need it get jobs, which the new government would help them find), then there would be no excuse for need-based crime, and greed
might be
less of a motivating factor if the quality of life was higher across the board. Again, this is all theoretical.
Skin color and place of birth don't mean anything in and of themselves. People take sides and argue viciously over any perceivable difference, and people's appearances, language, accents, etc. are just the easiest excuses for taking sides against. If people could be effectively taught to live in a utilitarian lifestyle (that is, acting in such a way to achieve maximum pleasure and minimum displeasure, for the greatest amount of people,
in the long term) right from birth, they could be shown how to sublimate (find a constructive use for) their baser instincts and leave the fighting and hostility where it belongs: in video games, board games and team sports. If we could start over with a clean slate, socio-economically, and keep on task, with a huge amount of supervision and intervention (that's why it's a dictatorship, benevolent though it may be), life might be better for everyone.
As it is in reality, the one thing I do think might help (slowly, long-term) is for people to go ahead and stop pretending there is such a thing as "races" within the human species. There just aren't any such thing in real life. The first time a person from a group with a distinct set of similar physical characteristics (which basically defines what a "race" is supposed to be) had a child with someone from another such group, that determined once and for all that there are no races. If it is possible for a human being to be born with a "mixed racial identity," then there simply are no more races, at all. A race is either a discrete, separate category, or it's not a race, and we all know it isn't discrete. I learned in a class on psychology of interpersonal relationships and a class on general social psychology that there is computer technology that can take the imaged of several faces and "average" them into one face, and it turns out the more faces used, the more attractive the average face gets. I've heard various people say that people of "mixed race" are often the most attractive people. I bet it's the same dynamic with both of those scenarios. We're all people, and we are, as a species in general, genetically programmed to consider certain kinds of features on people more attractive than others. This would seem to indicate that we "should" interbreed with people of different features, since the more "mixing" there is, the more attractive you are, and the more attractive you are, the more Charles Darwin wants you to have babies and pass your genes on. That's the biological explanation why we should stop all this "race" nonsense.
The intellectual/conceptual reason, which is only my own estimation as far as I know and not based on anything I've read or heard, is that removing the language of "race" takes power away from the people who believe in it. Things only exist if there are words to describe them, or else it's just individuals perceiving phenomena separately, and what is "real" for society has to be acknowledged by a decent proportion of people who have the ability to perceive it, or else it's a UFO or Elvis sighting and is only valid to people who
want to see it. If all people who could be considered by the majority to
not racist stopped using inaccurate words such as "white," "black," "race," "mixed," etc. in our everyday speech and writing, then that just leaves racists using terms that don't mean anything. If you could condition the majority of the population to stop acknowledging the very idea of race and force them to use accurate names of colors to describe people's skin tones (which
is important, but
only for describing suspects to the police-- "He was 5' 8" and
tan, like
Crayola crayon tan, and he stole my car!"-- and blind dates to your friends-- "He's a dreamy shade of burnt sienna, you'll just love him!"), then what does that make racists? It makes them seem crazy, and I don't just mean KKK types, I mean just crazy for thinking that a brown-skinned man is "black" ("Awesome, I didn't know
Darth Maul was in town!"), that a person who looks me could be called "white" ("Um... you might want to give your glasses a really good cleaning, or have those cataracts removed... that guy is
burlywood, not white"), and that a human being can be judged just by looking at their skin tone in the first place. Okay, I know we wouldn't actually be using the names of each individual color and each walk around with a wallpaper sample-fan, but you get the idea, right? I know this is completely improbably, but I don't think it's impossible. If it didn't result in confusion, long explanations and stupid arguments, I would never use any inaccurate words to describe anybody. I'm a literal-minded guy, and that's why "race" means nothing to me. I get my first impressions of strangers I see in the subway and so forth based on their body language, facial expression, and sometimes what they're wearing to some degree. "Race" is crazy talk, pure and simple, and I really wish people would stop talking about it like it was real, since that just gives power to the bastards who exploit people's belief in it.
Also, nobody should be taking "pride" in anything they didn't earn. Skin color and place of origin are
not chosen by the individual (well, unless you have a full-body tattoo), and are not even acheivements. I'm not
proud to be an American, I'm
glad to be an American, or at least I
was a few years ago.
Nothing anybody's ancestors did can be attributed to us right now. If someone earned a *****-load of money, they can feel proud about that (if they're so inclined), but being born into a wealthy family is nothing to be proud of
or ashamed of. Nothing that happened without our direct involvement is our fault or honor, and nobody should ever be blamed or praised for what they didn't do. I'm not saying people today shouldn't be cleaning up our ancestor's messes, but I am saying that no innocent parties should stand accused and many people's priorities need a complete reworking.
