Identity Crisis

When I heard the news report that the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Congressional maps in Louisiana were unconstitutional due to racial bias, my first inclination was to be angry that it meant disenfranchisement for "black" voters. After a bit of pondering, though, I realized that I, believing there is no such thing as race, had no reason to be angry. Legislative maps that gerrymander to carve out "black" districts are based on the supposition that there is such a thing as a "black" voter.

I am old enough to remember when the term for people of African descent changed from "negro" to "black." It was in the early to mid 1960s, when politicians, journalists and various know-it-alls from the former colonies of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa referred to their indigenous subjects as "blacks." They didn’t need to refer to themselves as "whites" because they didn’t need to. They were the people who mattered, and the native people, the "blacks," didn’t matter, except as low-wage workers.

Then, as the Civil rights movement matured, more militant groups took up the mantle of "black" in a kind of reverse psychology, proudly expressing themselves as the embodiment of the most extreme skin tone – black. Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) comes to mind as the leader of this linguistic change. He started using the term Black Power to promote advancement of African Americans in business, government and society in general. This was a fundamental departure from the assimilationist approach of Martin Luther King. 

No one is black. Some people with third degree burns that char the skin might have the appearance of blackness until healing takes place, but even that doesn’t make them "black." It isn’t who they are. No one is their skin color. People whose ancestry is from the continent of Africa, parts of Asia and indigenous Australia have a wide variety of skin colors that range from dark brown to not brown at all. In the United States of America they are all called "black" for reasons of convenience, stupidity and social custom. We define people here by skin color, by ethnic background, by education, by intelligence, by income and wealth, and by social position. And by any characteristic we can come up with.

The easiest and laziest classification is by race. That doesn’t mean race exists, just that it is what we use. It is so embedded that hardly anyone questions whether such a thing as race is a meaningful and useful narrative. Except, of course, scientists. Geneticists concluded long ago that the sorting out of humans into races is arbitrary, not based on evidence, and is therefore inherently, duh, racist. To believe that race exists is to be a racist.

A perfect case in point is former president Barack Obama. When he was running for president in 2008 he avoided the question for a long time, then bluntly declared himself to be ""black." It was a political decision. He thought, correctly, that declaring himself black would attract enough voters who also thought of themselves as black to vote for him. His mother was "white." He could just as easily have declared himself "white," since in America you have to be something or other. He of course doesn’t look either black or white, so like all who identify with skin color, choosing one or the other is choosing something that doesn’t exist.

I, of Irish and Scot descent, would qualify as "white" by the usual mistaken identity. But just as no one is "black," no one is "white." Caucasian skin color is not white, but more of a "burlywood," "rosy brown," "tan," or "peru," and, like "black" skin, manifests in a wide variety of hues. Certainly not constituting a "race."

We also call other "people of color" brown and yellow. It all is so silly. I always bristled at the term “people of color.” First, because it defines people as “of” something, and then because the thing they are "of" is color. They are "of" their skin color. No matter that they exist in complete biological organisms. Skin color is all that matters as who they are.

Where this matters most is that by identifying other people by "race" means you also have to identify yourself by race. Identity, whether true or false, inevitably leads to the natural human tendency to find a way of feeling superior to those who identify differently. If through accident of history one identity becomes the one that dominates, other identities necessarily becomes the dominated. "Whites" dominate "blacks," "browns," and "yellows." And n’er the twain shall meet.

It is 2026. Racism, dominance and "othering" are the rule of the day. In what may be the saddest irony in human history, the "Jewish" state of "Israel," born as a gift in the wake of the worst "racist" mass murder campaign known to man, has devolved into a genocide state, and with full U.S. sponsorship. Politicians who vote repeatedly to fund Israel’s genocide couldn’t care less about Jews or the "Jewish state." They care about being reelected. By and large, they will vote for anything if it keeps them in office. Conforming with AIPAC keeps them in office.

So don’t be fooled by the hand-wringing among knee-jerk "leftists," "progressives," "liberals" and "Democrats." These are identities, not mutually exclusive, but conformist to the false ideology of "race." The sooner we give up on this bogus ideology, the sooner we can start healing our species of the division and hatred that plagues the entire planet. Gerrymandering by any political party is intended to keep incumbents in power, no matter the "race." Those who are divided among gerrymandered districts find themselves disenfranchised, and their skin can be "black," "white," "brown," "yellow" and any other color. One solution to this criminality is to amend the U.S. Constitution, making the gerrymandering of elections illegal.

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Here's a song. John Lennon. The Beatles. Bob Marley. Leadbelly. Koerner, Ray and Glover. Louis Armstrong. Gil Scott-Heron. Sam Cooke. Another from Sam Cooke. Another from Gil Scott-Heron. And another. Bob Dylan. Elton John. Bob Dylan.

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60 Minutes aired a segment titled "When the volunteer helping after a hurricane is a white nationalist," in which they reported on how "white" nationalists (Nazis of one stripe or another) are showing up after natural disasters to "help," more about polishing their images than lending meaningful assistance. 

I don't look at these people so much as ideologues as psychologically troubled. I was reminded of my years of substitute teaching. Every so often there would be a boy who didn't just misbehave, but was insolent and sometimes threatening. It could be in grades as low as seventh - 12 year-olds, but most often it was boys in 11th and 12th grade. They didn't mind being suspended from school, and that was often their goal. After troubled school lives they went on to troubled lives. Their personalities were like the "white" supremacists in the 60 Minutes segment.

Racism and Nazi-like identities fit their personalities, and in today's world of the Internet and easy communication they can easily find each other and organize into violent groups. They also are perfect recruits for ICE and other violence-prone law enforcement agencies. Belief in "white" supremacy - a belief in the dominance of something that doesn't exist - is a variation on what Marxists call false consciousness. I would place it on the low end of Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Another way of wasting your life.