Courtney Tolbert,
Washington, DC
I believe that our acceptance of racial classifications as an informative, science-based tool for perceiving and understanding each other is at the crux of our ever-evolving discord. It is a tool relevant only as a means to extract value away from individuals for purposes of exploitation and a device to coddle those with underdeveloped psychological maturity or self knowledge/acceptance. “Race” coddles the insecure and attempts to control those who are considered “the other”. As long as we continue to use this way of thinking as a tool within our cultural development, we will never be able to get beyond it’s fallacies and will always revisit issues we tell ourselves have been “put to rest”. Those who are emboldened only by a false sense of inherit superiority will never, truly feel whole and will continue to act out, angrily, and with the same violence they inflict upon themselves internally, to those identified as the ‘other’ externally.
