RACISM - DNA has a voice.
We live in an incredibly polarized world. Division is literally everywhere you look. I can’t help but believe that there is a solution and that beneath all this tension, this never ending hatred, the race bating, and the noise, brothers who descended from the same forefather are waiting to be reconciled.
We all come from different walks of life. Not one of us had the opportunity to choose what skin we were born into or what social status we were raised with. You and I inherited. That’s right. We inherited by virtue of our DNA and the foreknowledge of God the bodies and the families that we were born into.
On this subject, I’d like to share with you my own ethnic heritage. The son of British Guyanese immigrant on my paternal side and a Creole French – a people of rich biracial heritage on my maternal side. That rich heritage finds its roots in Germany, France, Honduras, Mexico, and here on USA soil – the Native Americans. Prior to my paternal families arrival in Guyana, South America, we had a presence for however long in Scotland, UK, and according to DNA hailed from modern day Nigeria. DNA has a voice.
As interesting as I believe my own families heritage to be, one thing is true: I didn’t get to choose any of it! It was bestowed upon me at conception. I can neither boast nor should I self loathe over it. It’s the long story of the ages for my bloodline that I have the opportunity to continue living out the next chapters of. The same is true of every living human being on the face of the earth. Of every nation, tribe, tongue, and skin tone in existence.
Here is where responsibility comes into play. Most of us, if we’re honest, inherited good AND evil traits. Some families are phenomenally gifted in business and/or inherited wealth, whereas others are bogged down with multigenerational poverty whereby no one has ever escaped lack and just getting by. Some families have the multigenerational blessings of having served the Lord, whereas others families no one knows the Lord at all. But no matter what good or bad trait or legacy that one inherits, we all have the personal responsibility for what we do with our own leg of the journey. This is my preface.
RACISM according to oxford is defined as: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
A prejudice, is a PRE-JUDGEMENT. This means before adequate evidence has been presented, before conversations are had, before opportunity to be proven innocent, a judgement of guilt has been cast. Racism is manifested when we judge an entire group or class of people, regardless of the color of their skin, guilty of certain undesirable and negative traits without giving individuals the just standard of “innocent until proven guilty”. Now, I would like to add and intentionally address the fact that racism, systemic racism, and empowered racism all manifest in their own individual categories from my own observation. Racism is on an individual person to person basis, whereas systemic racism manifests when entire systems marginalize a specific ethnic group of people. This was exemplified in Nazi Germanies intentional targeting and eventual attempted extermination of the Turkish Ashkenazi Jews, the United States targeting of the Native American people, and most commonly spoken of, the United States targeting of Negro Americans through Jim Crow laws and beyond. Empowered racism is when the majority people group of a region, state, or nation are able to control and oppress entire dynamics of the lives of a people group just by sheer virtue of the principle of power in numbers. Minority groups that have racist sentiments towards the majority thus never have the same effect as the empowered majority. Neither is excused or justified, but the effects will never be the same.
Can we all be targeted by racism? Let’s go there. Whether you’re a Caucasian like my wife, a Latino like my ancestors, negro-American like my paternal heritage (I’ll explain briefly at the end why I used the term negro), Polynesian, Asian, or any of the many beautiful people groups that walk the earth, you can be targeted by racial prejudice. The list of prejudices that exists is endless. So the idea that ONLY minorities are targeted by racism is #debunked. There are PLENTY of minorities that have unfair hate filled prejudiced and racists views and beliefs about Caucasians (as a sterotypical generality) and many other groups of people. Many a minority may even use those views to disenfranchise peoples they are prejudiced against when they get a position of empowerment in the workplace or in the government. THE DIFFERENCE here is about empowerment. The majority in this nation, The United States of America, are Caucasian. Thus, the category of EMPOWERED RACISM comes into play. The majority wins mentality plays out when a group of people who carry similar prejudices create dynamics whereby the object and individual representing their prejudice becomes oppressed. The majority, like it or not, then carries a higher responsibility for stewarding justice and equality for those they steward over and amongst. The responsibility that accompanies majority empowerment, is thus to all peoples, not only to members of the majority ethnic group of a community and nation.
I am very proud to be a biracial American. I once despised not being the descendent of just one class and one ethnic group, as our social climate tends to create boxes that we all feel a natural pressure and gravitation towards. I felt as if my not being fully negro-American or fully Caucasian American made me less valuable and like a “fish out of water”. No where to fit. However, the older I get, the more I realize that my “ethnic divergence”, if you will, is actually a gift from God whereby I am able to comprehend the experience and humanity of others better without being obligated to take a side. Thus, I’m more equipped to bridge the gap in a severely divided culture. I’m a little bit of everything or as some of us say in Louisiana, “a pot of gumbo”!
FLASHBACK: Did he really say “Negro”? Yes, yes I did. Decades ago, it was common that black Americans were known as Negros or “Negroid”. If you lack context, you may have assumed that it was a racist term – though many used the term with contempt. Contrary to perhaps your modern understanding, the term Negro was given to black Americans because we were sold as slaves from a place called NEGRO LAND in West Africa. Not from all nations in Africa, specifically Negroland. Thus, African American is watering down the identity of those who belong to families who had been enslaved, effectively watering down their true identity. A more in-depth look at this subject is to come in future article, but for now just a free spoiler! Many of you have never heard this before, but it’s a fact of history that can be found on maps, like the 1736 map below, that predate our modern maps that have removed the heritage site of most negro-Americans forefathers. Yes, you heard that correct. Saying one is a Negro, is just like saying one is a Frenchman hailing from France or an Englishman hailing from England. It identifies the place of origin. Thus, the Negro is one descended from a people who had a settled, civilized, and established nation in West Africa called Negroland prior to the diabolical and inhumane African slave trade.
Negroland Map circa 1736
Did you learn something new? Racism is real and it’s deeply effecting peoples lives, even if it’s not yours. No matter what the case, you and I have a choice to see people for who they are, something that can not be discovered purely by the color of their skin. May we all fight to do away with the ignorance and oppression produced by racial prejudice and see our world as it is versus what we believed or even wanted it to be. The first step in combating racism, is acknowledging its existence.
