Is Racial Identification In Itself ..."Racism" ?

Yesterday, when I received my email news from NPR, I noted an interesting article on the NPR Blog titled "Biracial or Black: Choosing an Identity". It struck me that choosing an identity, in itself is a form of promoting racism. In a society where racial profiling seems to be the norm (at least if you intend to fly, or get stopped by a cop) there is an over shadowing prevalence of racism.

When I became a firefighter, I took tests for several different cities. On every one of those applications was a space marked "Race". Caucasian, Afro-American, Hispanic, Asian, Etc., and then..."Other". When I finally got a job with the City of Berkeley, I was given a personnel form to fill out. There on the form was the section marked "Race". I filled in the form with the response of "Human" in the space. I thought sure someone would come back to tell me that was an inappropriate response, but no one ever did. Then I thought, perhaps,... just perhaps, this liberal city that I'd grown up in really didn't care that I had responded that way. Maybe they saw the truth in the statement that I'd made. I suspect in reality they just missed it, but one can hope.

Then came the era of "Affirmative Action", and with it a sweeping surge to hire "minorities", and make up for all the racial inequality that had plagued this country up to then. It put the shoe on the other foot for a change. With affirmative action, however, there came a form of discrimination that fed the fires of racism, rather than quench them. Reverse discrimination suits were filed, and in some cases won. Granted it opened a dialog that had remained unspoken for far too long, but sometimes that dialog became the rhetoric of hatred and abuse that disparaged all of us, no matter what ethnic origin we were from.

I guess what I'm really trying to point out is that with all the things that face the human race on our planet today, selectively separating each other by "race" serves no purpose. Other than identifying our looks, it's divisive and encourages racism by promoting thinking in those terms. We are in a world where with each generation the color of people becomes more neutralized. I'm sort of an olive beige color, you're brown, black, white.... So what? Other than strictly for identification purposes, our colors and cultures are different; but, our race is "Human".

If we can learn to recognize that fact alone,.... what do you think our relationships to each other might be? Could we learn to treat all people as we would have them treat us? Would respect for all people of the world have a mutual baseline? We might not like or agree with all peoples. We surely would find reasons to oppose or reject certain ideas and cultures, and no doubt we would even find reasons to fight, but,.... we could come to realize that the bottom line here, is that we are all of the "Human Race", and we are all on this planet together.

A young man, I recently met face to face, created a word that sums up the perfect idea for ending racism. That word is "ERACISM"...."e-ra-cism"... "The removal from existence of the belief that one race is superior to another". It makes perfect sense. If we promote eracism, we can help change our future. It couldn't hurt. If you agree, type that word into your computer. You'll find a variety of clothing promoting that idea. I don't mean to sell T-shirts, but I do mean to help sell an idea. The more people that promote that idea, the sooner it might come to be accepted.