Rethinking race

I am not white. Yes, you read that correctly, and no, I don’t say so in order to announce my membership in a racial minority.

Although many race-conscious people – including college admissions officers – would label me as white, and although I concede that the hue of my skin is closer to looking white than it is to looking black, brown or any other commonly cited color that crudely denotes race and/or ethnicity, I stand by my assertion.

Why? First of all, and most obviously, I have seen white things before and have found that my skin tone bears little resemblance to any of them.

Second, in the sense that the term white is used to denote the Caucasian race, I have no way of knowing that all of my ancestors were Caucasian anyway, and I have no desire to find out.

I have been told that my more recent ancestors probably came from the British Isles – apparently Lowery is a Scottish surname. I have been told that my maternal grandfather may have had ancestors who were inhabitants of pre-Columbian America.
I cannot express how little those things matter to me.

Third, having been exposed to the convincing body of evidence that suggests our species originated in East Africa, I am fairly certain that my earliest ancestors (and those of everyone else) had fairly dark skin and that racial and ethnic classifications have merely been constructed based on superficial, ill-defined characteristics allegedly shared by certain groups of people who began to develop in slightly different ways after the migration outward from that region some 50,000 years ago.

While that is all well and good, an important fact remains. Even if someone could prove to me definitively that race and/or ethnicity do exist and that any given person can be classified as belonging to one or another of them, my own race and that of anyone else would be irrelevant to me.

I say this not in order to boast of my moral superiority or any such hubris as that; I don’t need the sanction of the public on my morality. Instead, I say it as a matter of fact because I simply don’t and wouldn’t take race into account when evaluating the character of anyone.

Taking someone’s race or ethnicity into account when attempting to determine their intellectual ability, trustworthiness, fairness or any other quality strikes me as wholly absurd because, even if certain groups could be proven to possess certain qualities in greater or lesser measure on average, knowing that would tell me nothing about the particular individual in any case.

Disturbingly, over 40 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, examples of people practicing racism, that is to say, considering race to be a relevant factor in evaluating people, continue to abound.

Given these thoughts, I must note my disagreement with the conventional wisdom that holds the current climate in this country is becoming “post-racial,” that we have a “post-racial” president and that race may finally be ceasing to be an issue in our political and social affairs.

The fact that some 95 percent of so-called “blacks” voted for the so-called “black” presidential candidate last year and that many non-white voters, according to a Gallup pole taken about one month prior to Obama’s election, were more likely to vote for him because of his race, is deeply troubling because it evinces a lack of willingness to evaluate then-Sen. Obama on the basis of the content of his character instead of the color of his skin.

Where have I heard that notion before?

Also disconcerting are developments such as the president’s nomination to the Supreme Court of a woman who has repeatedly asserted her superior ability to adjudicate cases based on her “Latina” heritage.

Until people begin to change their thinking about these and a wide range of similar decisions and practices, rational observers will have to conclude that, sadly, racism remains alive and well in our country.