Jim Wallace,
Roswell, GA
The notion of separate races is being kept alive by our newspapers, opinion writers, authors of books and on and on as they continue to refer to the myth of multiple races in their writing. This only serves to confirm the beliefs of white supremacists, who in turn continue to wreak havoc on our black and brown brothers and sisters. The government continues to support the myth of multiple races by asking for race on census forms, for example. But there is now a debate about asking for ethnicity in addition to so-called race. Often I now see “race/ethnicity,” but I don’t understand what distinction is being made other than that race is dictated by the color of one’s skin. Why not eye color, hair color, etc.?
I was born i a small town in Oregon in 1940. I was raised in a racist culture. It was originally written into the Oregon Constitution that Black people could not live in Oregon. It was only by the grace of my spending time in the military and a career at IBM, both diverse work places, that I gradually came to understand that the notion of separate races was a canard. It was on the 1980 census that I began answering the race question by writing in “Human.”
I readily admit that facing the reality that there is only one race will not solve the racist blight that infects our country, but it is a step we have to take on the road to our struggle to form “a more perfect union.”
Over the years, every time I find an opinion writer using the term race in writing about multiple races I write to the columnist asking why he or she did so. I rarely get a response. One writer I have repeatedly written to is the “New York Times” columnist David Brooks. He has never responded, however in a recent column in which he gave out his annual “Sidney Awards” her wrote this:
“It’s rare that an essay jolts my convictions on some major topic. But that happened with one by Subrena E. Smith and David Livingstone Smith, called ‘The Trouble With Race and Its Many Shades of Deceit,’ in New Lines magazine. The Smiths are, as they put it, a so-called mixed-race couple. She has brown skin; his is beige. They support the aims of diversity, equity and inclusion programs but argue that there is a fatal contradiction in many antiracism programs. ‘Although the purpose of anti-racist training is to vanquish racism, most of these initiatives are simultaneously committed to upholding and celebrating race,’ they write. ‘In the real world, can we have race without racism coming along for the ride? Trying to extinguish racism while shoring up race is like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it.’
“I’ve heard this argument — that we should seek to get rid of the whole concept of race — before and dismissed it. I did so because too many people I know have formed their identity around racial solidarity; it’s a source of meaning and strength in their lives. The Smiths argue that this is a mistake because race is a myth: ‘The scientific study of human variation shows that race is not meaningfully understood as a biological grouping, and there are no such things as racial essences. There is now near consensus among scholars that race is an ideological construction rather than a biological fact. Race was fashioned for nothing that was good. History has shown us how groups of people ‘racialize’ other groups of people to justify their exploitation, oppression and annihilation.’”
So I was saddened that in your book you kept alive the notion of separate races, even though there were several instances where the connection between race and white supremacy was clearly articulated. Facing the reality that we are all one race is one step along the road to reaching Martin Luther King’s dream.
