Paulitics of Moral Celery

I don’t get the sudden influx of race-related news.

So I’m white. You’re black. So-and-so is “yellow” or “brown.” Someone might be feeling green at the moment.

If post-racial means you can’t ever even REFER to race, we have problems… because that’s just trying to ignore something that is real. I have white skin, and I know it. You can joke about it, describe me by it, etc, I don’t care. I have brown hair, too. I guess I could change that, and I can’t change my skin … but both of them are things I was born with, are external, etc.

It seems the really tricky part comes from when you ascribe certain traits because of the color of their skin … based on previous experience or “education.” We don’t just do it with race though. We do it with hair style, clothing styles, how many teeth you have and if they are white or not, the kind of car you drive, the kind of house you live in… basically, anything that becomes common amongst a group of people can be used to “judge” them. And those judgments may or may not be correct.

So when a group of white people start dressing in a certain way and act in a certain way, other people that dress in that way may get “caught up” in the stereotype. This appears to be the same thing with race… certain stereotypes exist because of pockets of similar-races that act the same way – usually bad, in the “bad judging” cases – and sorta “give a bad name” to those that don’t actually fit that stereotype but share a similar trait – their skin color.

I guess it’s kinda the same with Christians, too. Not all Christians want to go have crusades in Arab/Islamic countries, but some people who had similar traits to current Christians did want to, and did it in the past.

So, what’s the solution with this stereotyping that happens in particular with skin color? Hm. I don’t think the solution is to stop referencing skin color (“hey, look at that guy over there!” “which one?” “the white guy with ear-length hair”). I don’t think the solution is to make it insensitive to refer to skin color (“black” or “brown” or “white”). It seems to me that the solution is to stop thinking certain races – and skin colors, usually – are somehow inherently inferior in some way.

For a Christian “Creationist”, that should be pretty basic. They were created a human beings. We don’t know what color Adam was For a Christian “evolutionist” or non-Christian, that may be a bit harder, because how do WE know which one evolved later and thus is actually superior? Hm.

Random musings.

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