"What problems are solved by raising entire generations of Americans to hate the color of their skin?
I’ve often been told I have no right to write about race.
I’ve also been told that I pompously “think I have a right” to write about race just because I married a Mexican.
And you know what? Often I find myself second guessing nine-tenths of what I say because, undoubtedly I’ll say something that someone somewhere will scream about how I have no right to say for one simple fact:
I’m white.
Even as I sit here writing this, I’ve stopped and started at least a dozen times, thinking about the right way to put all this to mitigate the inevitable backlash.
But you know what? That’s actually the entire point."
I feel an accusation that I'm a racist coming in the near future, because I don't see all Caucasians as racists and bigots in general, or that we have some monopoly on racism and bigotry in general in this country. But we'll wait and see.
Just to give some of my own views about race in America, as it's called:
It was African-American freedom fighter Rosa Parks who had the courage and was right to stand up for her own rights not as an African-American, but simply as an American citizen in refusing to give up her bus seat to a Caucasian-American, who said 'that the only race is the human race.
Dr. Martin Luther King and his I Have a Dream speech: "I have a dream that one day my children will grow up and not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." I'm paraphrasing, but that is very close. The only thing I would add to that dream is that all children in America grow up and see that dream as the new reality or the new normal. In a society like that no one is judging people by race, but by character.
When I say I don't see race, I mean I don't judge people by race. Anyone can see the racial differences between Europeans, African-Asians, North Americans and everyone else. That is not the question. The question is do we judge people by the race and ethnicity that we see, or by the individual and their character and how they present themselves in life as an individual. And not just that, but I also don't identify by race and certainly not by color.
Not all African-Americans have black skin. Not all Caucasians have white skin and if you look at the color of white in reality like a white t-shirt, no one has that complexion anyway. Asians whether their ancestors come from Central Asia, South Asia, or the Far-East, obviously don't have yellow skin.
So if we're going to have a conversation about race in America are we going to talk about race, or is this about color? Two different things. And to say that some people have white blood, some people have black blood and some people have brown blood. the only blood I've ever seen is red. So that's not a way to talk about race either. Barack Obama doesn't have black or white blood, but only red blood. He's not black or white, but brown. He's got Irish and American-Indian ancestry on his mother's side and Kenyan blood on his father's side. He's both an African and European-American, as well as an American-Indian. He celebrates St. Patrick's Day, because he's Irish on his mother's side.
So are we talking about race, or color, or both? And when it comes to mix-race people, well they might not have one color in their complexion, but a combination of colors. Depending on the person.
When it comes to apologizing about being Caucasian or anything else, why should anyone do that? Should everyone speak out against bigots in their racial and ethnic communities when they make ignorant statements about other ethnicities and races? Of course they should if they know what that person said is bigoted. But this idea that anyone should apologize for being how they were born regardless of how they were born, their complexion, how their hair looks and how their face is shaped, etc, of course not.
Why should individuals apologize for how they were born? It is one thing to denounce your own bigotry and say you were wrong about that and are now sorry for it. But it's another to apologize for how you were born. Which is something that none of us can obviously control. We aren't born bigots. That is something that people have to learn and then accept.
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