Free Gas for Your Think Tank — Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement

No skin color is a reason for shame nor a badge of honor. Skin color’s just a physical characteristic like the shape of a hand.

Physical differences (like skin color) obviously exist, but the concept of different races is a man-created concoction. Unfortunately, common sense concepts about race seldom match the centuries of dogmatic, traditional thinking about it.

Skin color is merely a descriptive, physical characteristic of people. It’s not an identifier that defines who they are. Skin color isn’t divisive, but the concept of categorizing people and defining their value by skin color is.

If race was a reality instead of a myth, a person with a white and a black parent would be considered just as white as black. Instead of admitting the truth, historically a baby from a white and black parent was called black so that it could be legally human trafficked.

Most of us have been trained to see people as members of different races instead of as fellow members of the human race. Racial identity based on color was invented in the 1600s as an attempt to make one group inferior in order to justify slavery. Color-based racial-identity was intentionally set up to create the destructive illusion of intrinsic superiority and inferiority.

The history of how skin color was made into a false hierarchy of of human value should be taught to all so we never do that again. To heal America’s racial wounds, when we see fellow citizens, lets identify them as Americans, not by their skin color.

People notice eye color, but they don’t define people by it. Let’s treat skin color the same way.

Separating people into color-based categories released much hatred and cruelty in history. Continuing those categories is dangerous. Skin color’s a human characteristic, but it was wrong when humans began to use it to divide people into a hierarchy of categories.

When neighborhoods can be easily identified by skin color, there’s either intentional or systemic differentiation going on. If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves looking down on skin color that for centuries was used to label people as inferior.

I like my blue eyes, but I don’t want to be labeled by them; same with my skin. I’m an individual, part the human race. Fellow humans: The color of your skin doesn’t make you any more different than me than the color of your eyes does.

If racism was defined as “differentiation between people because of skin color” would you consider yourself free from racism? In a one color world, would some people have found other reasons than color to split the human race into races?

I've never been abused
Suspected or accused
Because of my blue eyes.
I wish things were the same
For my fellow humans
With darker skin.
Don't you?

For more non-traditional think about race, check out my book: Off the RACE Track--From Color-Blind to Color-Kind. Thank you.