When I consider diversity, I think of Earth’s biosphere. And how incredibly diverse it is with an estimated 8.7 million species of plants and animals alive today.
When I further consider diversity, I think of the system of classifications which we humans use to catalogue the rich fields of life enjoyed here on Earth.
The plant and animal kingdoms are classified using seven basic divisors: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.
Today’s humans are classified as the species, Homo-Sapiens, which happens to be the last surviving species of the Genus Homo, having emerged in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago. The species Homo-Sapiens migrated outward into Europe, Asia, and beyond and thrived, while other species within the Genus Homo, most notably Neanderthalensis which, while continuing to live on, were finally lost to history in their entirety about 40,000 years ago.
Today, on Planet Earth, only one species of the Genus Homo exists. That species is Homo Sapiens. I do not say this to belabor what is an obvious fact. I do, however, say it with full intent to reiterate it, simply because it is a truth vital to the making of my point.
That point being that Homo-Sapiens, as of now, are the current end of the line of the genus Homo. There are no further classifications. No further divisors. There is only the species and not again to belabor the point, but rather to drive it home, only the one species within the entire Genus. And we are it, Homo Sapiens.
If there is no further classification, no further divisor of the particular and specific animals known as Homo Sapiens, then one may ask what might be the point of this writing exercise of mine?
And it is the following, and in a word, “Race.”
The word “race.” When I consider diversity within the biological kingdom of life, I do not consider what I believe to be inherently false, misleading, and self-perpetuating terminology based on the concept of the simple single syllable term “race.” And as a sidenote, I would posit that never in the history of humanity – the species Homo Sapien – has a single syllable caused so much trouble as has that of the term “race,” with the exception of the single syllable term, “God,” yet I shall leave that for another discussion.
Race is not a classification of diversity within the plant and animal kingdom. It simply is not. There is no debate here. Yet Homo Sapiens, the very species which came up with the afore-mentioned system of classification of the diversity of plant and animal life within our shared biosphere – which, by the way, was a masterful exercise in logic and critical thought – also, in what can only be seen as the very antithesis to that logic and critical thinking, decided to foist upon themselves the idea of a further level of classification of their own species. And they named it “race.”
For no other species which exist today or have existed in the past is this further level of classification applied. This label of “race.” And with the term, and that it be expressed in language have such necessary, though highly unfortunate, conjugations of the term arisen. Those include “racist,” and “racial,” among others and phrase related ideas like “race-biased,” and its ilk.
My position is simple. I do not acknowledge the term “race” except in an awareness that it exists and with an understanding it exists as a tool of language designed solely to divide Homo Sapiens from themselves.
Is that a bold statement? I don’t know. I certainly do not pronounce it with the intent to so be. What I do know is it is what I believe to not only be a simple product of the most rudimentary critical thought process, but also a knowledge inherent within the soul or the spirit if you will, of the species Homo-Sapiens, of which I am one, and as such, consider myself well qualified to opine on the matter.
I’d like to now offer for thought the idea that the term “race,” and the innocuous varying characteristics within the species of which give it rise, such as skin tone, facial structure, and other completely random and meaningless yet quite natural variables iterated unique in each and every person who has ever lived are what are used to designate one “race” from another.
Most often of course, the specific terms used to designate the false idea of race, and as such to further perpetuate the error, are what I refer to as “color codes,” since the use of the terms “black,” and “white,” and “brown,” and “yellow,” and “red,” are just that. Codes applied to primary colors and their variants within the spectrum that we Homo Sapiens are able to see. Codes which say for instance that you, “brown” person, are different from you, “black” person, and you, “white” person, etc.
Before delving deeper into this, allow me to offer a quick study. Twenty-seven years ago, my youngest daughter was born. My elder daughter was four at the time. For her first two and half years I was not in her life as her mother and her were unknown to me. Once I married her mother, I raised her as my own and along with her younger sister, who was born a year after the marriage. Neither of these two girls ever heard me use color codes to differentiate one human being from another.
I was adamant that those adults who interacted with my kids, not use those terms either. My wife was very good about it as she knew what this meant to me and was of a similar mind. Of course, most adults who were in our lives, while not in philosophical support of my wishes, for the most part abided choosing to chalk them up as just another of my many hippie’esqe quirks. And who can blame them? I had in fact spent twenty years, long-haired and barefoot, following the Grateful Dead around the country, but I digress.
So for the most part, these girls, up until they entered more prolonged public interactions with other kids and adults – via school, friends, sleepovers, and other events, and at which point they could no longer be shielded from such avarice of thought and idea – never heard one human being differentiated from a fellow human being through the use of a color code.
I should mention we had no broadcast television, and the internet was modem based and accessed only by myself for work. The only television programming we had was via VHS tapes. And 90% of those were Star Trek along with kids’ films and cartoons which were deemed by my wife and I to be of educational value.
One weekend morning I was watching a kids’ movie with my youngest daughter. She was about five years old at the time. I wasn’t paying much attention to the film and was reading a book as we sat together on the couch. She was quite absorbed by the film and quiet, and then she said to me, “Daddy, I like that girl’s hair.”
I put my book down and looked at the TV screen. There was a scene in which the three little girls who were the protagonists in the film were sitting together side by side. What I saw, having been raised in a society which uses color codes and me not “knowing any different” until I was of an age to begin formulating a different thought line than my peers, saw what unfortunately may be indelibly written in my psyche – but more on that later – were the three girls; a black girl between two white girls.
Of course I didn’t say this to my daughter, and simply asker her, “Which girl?”
And my daughter answered, “The girl in the middle.”
My daughter saw three girls. And that’s all she saw. One, the girl on the left, two, the girl in the middle, and three, the girl on the right.
If I would have asked her what differences she saw in the girls, she would have commented on their dresses, their hair – long, short, curly – the personalities they portrayed in the film, and very likely if pressed, or on her own, she might have said one girl has darker skin than the other two. But in her saying that it would be no different than her commenting – which she had over time – on the difference between the color of my skin and her mother’s. I worked outside, and in the summers became very tan. Her mother stayed out of the sun as she burned easily and thus our skin tones come August would be remarkably different. But no more different than is a young person to an old person, a short person to a tall person, a blue-eyed person to one with green eyes, etc.
It’s simply a difference between people – of the species Homo Sapiens – of whom all are unique in a myriad of ways, in the same way as each bird which has ever lived has had a feather pattern entirely unique not only to other species of bird, but to those within its own – or any of a number of examples across all species within the plant and animal kingdoms.
And what is my ultimate point with all this? It is to posit the idea that we, homo sapiens, would be much better served by the intelligence granted to us by evolutionary processes and/or by God if one is so inclined, if we nixed the idea of “race” as a divisor among the collective of humanity. And in doing so, we nix, as well its ancillaries. Most notably the use of color codes.
To be perfectly clear, I am saying we ought to stop and desist using such terms as black, brown, white, etc. to describe fellow human beings. Some may say, this is just another way for one group to ignore the past/current plight of another through recent history.
I say no to that. Absolutely no. For if we really want to acknowledge the plights, the suffering of one group of humans by the hands of another, then why not acknowledge all of them and constantly be cognizant of all of them. Including that first group of homo-sapiens who trekked out of Africa 300,000 years ago. Why did they do that anyway? Why did they leave? Africa is a large continent and surely there was enough room for the small number of humans who existed then. Maybe some left, simply because they were driven by the desire to explore, to see what was beyond the savannah, across the river, over the mountains, etc. And maybe some were driven out for reasons we can’t know but can easily theorize upon, based on our own experiences as members of the same species.
And that first group left, maybe they met up with another who had left their home for similar reasons. They joined forces and multiplied and then they discovered a beautiful valley, and they all settled. The valley was divided by a river. They explore both sides. There were those who said the east side was best to settle upon and those who said, no, it was the west side that was better. There were arguments. They could not agree, so there was a fight. People were injured or even killed and those who chose the west side lived apart from those who chose the east side. And maybe they lived that way for a long while nursing grudges of the battle that began it all. The west siders raising their children on the premise that the east siders could not be trusted and vice versa. And then one day new settlers came in from the point of access the first group, before dividing, had come. That being the east, the east siders told the new people that there was great settling on the west side and that the west siders were evil and together, the east siders and the newcomers could attack and defeat them. So, they did just that, but some west siders escaped and traveled farther north to get away. They made it all the way to France and painted animals in caves and lived lives away from the evil west siders and their new-comer pals who had so horribly attacked them. And stories grew and grew over those thousands of years until it became simply a known fact that anyone coming from that way – that way being the only way the east-siders could come if they ever were to come – must be evil and must be vanquished and/or absorbed as slaves, etc.
And you have to figure this accelerated version of things happened much more slowly but did so in multiple locations across multiple migratory paths out of Africa. And in many cases some groups were vilified for thousands of years by others and those which were more powerful ruled through what they saw as a necessary subjugation, and can you imagine how many groups with names and unique identities came and went, were persecuted and were persecutors, over the last 300,000 years?
Can you imagine how those groups, identifying each other by who knows what fallacy of thought – akin to our own of this day – who would be completely confused by a divisor as that such as we use today? A color code?
The point is all of these divisors are arbitrary. All of them. And yet, they are so ingrained into our histories and cultures that they seem inescapable. And that is why I, even with my belief and conviction of thought associated with it, still saw the little girl in the middle on the TV screen in the movie as a “black girl.” I will probably always see people by their color codes or whatever other arbitrary, and completely irrational, divisor we homo sapiens place upon each other.
And if that is so, why write any of this? It is because this is not about me and what I see. This is about what that little five-year-old didn’t see. She did not see the product of ignorance, of habit, of a complete lack of critical thought which leads to the perpetuation of division and all the anger and resentment – and what that inevitably leads to – which accompanies it.
My elevator speech version of this is very simple. I can get it across between only two or three floors. It goes like this, “We adults, we’re wrecked, man. But the children aren’t. So, let’s make sure they stay that way. Unwrecked.”
Almost exclusively, do adults perpetuate the same crimes upon their young, foist the same weights, which were committed against them, saddled upon them. And nobody does this consciously. Humans do what we do because we have not thought of another way to do it. Often, we don’t consider anything to be wrong specifically – other than having some negative notion tied to a fatalistic viewpoint – but I would suggest that somewhere down inside, we absolutely know something is way off kilter, which can be changed, and as we are an optimistic bunch, that there must be another way.
Here’s another way.
Diversity:
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
All Stop.