So, I have been away. Not a good sentence to start a blog with, it tells you this is going to be boring and I will make excuses and such. Also I might tell you what is going on in my life, which is not what I started this blog for. I started this to talk about my thoughts on various things and that is very different from what I am actually doing. The topic of racism is still at the surface so I think I will write on that.
I thought I had blogged on racism before in my old MySpace blog but after tracing the blog back several years I found that I had not. The main thought of that imaginary blog post was that we evolved for racism. Back in the day when we still lived in caves, huts made of animal skin or what ever. We knew everyone around us and we all looked pretty much alike and there was not a lot of mixing with those other people across the river with the strange customs and odd clothes and those unnatural brownish eyes and what not. Those weird people may even have been enemies so it was safe for primitive ignorant man to stay with his own inbred group and breed a myriad or special genetic diseases only present in Finns (or insert there what ever small group of people). It was a survival trait to be suspicious of anyone who seemed different because they were probably out to get you.
With that sort of a legacy, no wonder we still get uncomfortable when we have to share an elevator or a bus bench with a person that is a different color or nationality. This is a completely inappropriate reaction today. Now we are hampered by our genetics. We have come a long way from those club carrying grunting simpletons that acquired this trait that helped them survive and turn into us. Still we have a long way to go and this trait is in our way.
I don't think there is a simple quick fix. We cannot go and have the racist gene eradicated from our kids to give them an edge in the global community. We cannot just tell ourselves that our feelings are wrong and stop it is not that easy. Still I think we must strive to be better than animals. The difference between animals and humans is that they are at the complete mercy of their genetics and do not even realize it. Humans can realize that they have a problem and struggle against their natural tendencies and better ourselves. Man is where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
I have many friends of different colors, nationalities, cultures and native languages but I still struggle against my tendency to feel uncomfortable with a person who does not look like me. I accept this is a condition that I will never be rid of but I have been struggling against this since my teens, since I was old enough to realize I had a problem. I will keep struggling until I die and am freed from the burden of my outdated genetic tendencies. Best we can do is realize we have a problem and forgive ourselves, but never give into it or believe the lie that natural=good. The second we start equating natural with good we may as well start condoning murder because someone pisses us off, because wanting to kill someone who angers you is perfectly natural.
Hi girl,
ReplyDeleteI think wanting to kill someone, truly to end their life is pretty extreme.
So lets slow down a little bit and think about racism. There are two schools of thought. One is unification of races and the other is purism.
Asian eyes tilt upwards on the distal ends. White eyes are more rounded. How we got these traits goes back to the beginning so lets just take these as givens.
As a white girl I can certainly appreaciate the tilt of those lovely eyes. And as everyone wants what they don't have,....
So if these two cultures interbreed over time we would get a blending of features. http://smtexas.net/faculty/adame/Multiple%20Gene%20Effects.pdf
Even though the features would unite us as people all blending into one phenotype so we could recognize each other as one tribe and have nothing to fear from co members of the tribe, what would we loose? The uniqueness of the true Asian eye features, the roundness of the true Caucasian eye, both which evolved due to geographic seperation in part.
So arguments exist for both sides of the debate.
But as we become more global with increased communications we will recognize more humans as friends and more intermingling of tribes. In ancient China seperate tribes developed feasts in their religion which would bring the different tribes together and allow them to coexist, for who can war with a fellow you have broken bread with? That tells me that we have always been striving to abandon our seperateness and become ultimately a global society without racism...