There is but one race, the human race. Divisions of this one race have occurred due to geographic ancestry, behaviors, activities and interests, and through all manner of other shared groupings.
We humans seem prone to segregation that has been encoded into the human race’s psyche. We can see this segregation in all forms of nationalism, statism, fraternal organizations, religions, family units and even local hometown football teams.
The loyalty and bonding of the group are what keep individuals committed to the group and are what allows the members to collaborate for a shared purpose. Even if individual relationships within the group break down, the overarching group considerations remain.
Unique in this mix of group affiliations are nations whose political philosophies, cultural and social systems, and language are sufficiently incongruent to create a mosaic rather than a monochromatic picture of the world. Attributed to former president Theodore Roosevelt, the notion of where one’s group loyalty lies was at the time used as a pejorative, targeting the immigrants to America who preferred their identity and loyalty as hyphenated Americans:
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans.
Subsequently, the Rev. Martin Luther King expressed his hope for an overarching American group, devoid of racial disparity that reflected the notion that there is but one human race when he uttered his wishes for the future of America:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Recently, this dream that we Americans once embraced as our ambitious goal seems to have been destroyed by those who promote a skin color, or race-based, group division in America, akin to the hyphenated tangle of Roosevelt’s admonishment. College dorms, high school and college graduation ceremonies, and football pre-game songs are specifically designed to segregate and not bring us together under the dreamer’s banner.
We can reside in or visit widely divergent parts of our country and find the same individual outcomes regardless of our segregated group affiliations. The notion that the experiences differ between some who inhabit, for example, Pine Bluff, Ark., Boone County, W.Va., and Chicago, Ill., based simply on their skin color is not true. You can find the same individual good and bad outcomes for the human condition in these locations, skin color being irrelevant.
Individual behavior is the determining factor. The racially segregated group affiliations are in part an apparent construct for those with money or power, i.e., a political agenda. The leaders of these causes typically live quite comfortably, “segregated” from the very groups they claim to represent.
No better story can be told than the observation recently made by former NBA superstar Charles Barkley:
I truly believe in my heart most white people and Black people are awesome people, but we’re so stupid following our politicians, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, and their only job is, hey, let us make these people not like each other. We don’t live in their neighborhoods, we all got money, let’s make the whites and Blacks not like each other, let’s make rich people and poor people not like each other, let’s scramble the middle class.
There is but one race here in America, the human race. Anyone who tries to segregate this race to satisfy their ambitions is the true racist among us.
Robert T. Smith is a Pittsburgh resident.
