This would not be necessary if we didn't still have a problem. But we still have a lot of bigotry in the world and I fear that in our attempts to lift us out of that quagmire we are only lengthening the process.
To be more specific I must first explain where I am coming from. There are many visions of the future and the ones that show the world where all are equal have certain things in common. The key thing is that race, nationality, religion, or anything that we currently cling to that divides us is no longer a factor. That is not to say those things can't be important to a person, but no part of society cares. Race is gone and those attributes are no more than part of a person's physical description. But how do we get there?
Getting there requires a concerted effort to educate everyone. As we can see with the current pandemic and who people are listening to, it is hard to educate people for something that is that critical. So I wonder how long true equality will take. And here we can address Critical Race Theory which, contrary to what some politicians are claiming in their scare tactics, is only taught in law schools as an examination of racism in our centuries old legal system in the United States. Using it they are digging out the embedded racism in our system. First find it and then we can change it. That is an excellent next step. I recently re-read the US Constitution and made an amazing discovery. For all the claims of embedded racism, there is little written into that document that preserves racism. It does indeed acknowledge slavery, but neither race nor gender are ever specified leaving the core of the document free from that taint. It is a structural foundation for a system of government that can be free from bigotry. Some of the racism seen in it today were not things included and when you look at our history (I am not a lawyer and have not bee taught accurate Critical Race Theory) you can see where racism has been hung on the Constitution by the laws and legal decisions made since it was written. So we have a foundation with a lot of clutter on top. We need to clean that up. I recently heard someone talk about needing a new vocabulary and a more accurate label for Critical Race Theory would be Identifying Codified Bigotry.
So educating people is a challenge. It has to be something in the moment that all political parties can agree on and that is truly rare. The polio vaccine was one. But as they try to finally eradicate it from the world, that same educational challenge rears its head and prevents the final pockets from getting the vaccine. Fear of the unknown and fear of change are powerful things.
So what we are looking at is a real challenge. How do we end bigotry without creating reverse bigotry? The end goal should be a color blind society that recognizes every individual has a different story and embraces that story. But to get there we have to recognize that in those stories bigotry plays a vital role. So we can eliminate bigotry, we have to make it fade away slowly. We can't wave a magic wand and have it vanish because that would wipe out the role bigotry has played in so many people's lives.
So we are caught in a hard situation. To end bigotry (and racism is by far the hardest to stamp out) we have to build an equal society but we have to educate on bigotry to show those who have not been the victim of it what the victims have gone through in order to stamp it out. But I think we need to reframe it in some way. I don't have that answer.
And one part of this that does bother me is in our history we have many people who have tried imperfectly to work toward this goal. Because the were imperfect by our modern standards, even though they were way ahead in their thinking in their time, we judge them by today's standards. If a person owned slaves in America they are automatically bad. It does not matter that they inherited them. It does not matter that they desired to see slaves freed. We judge them based on modern assumptions and write off their key part in getting where we are today. Those historical figures who did own slaves have been remembered and honored because they had a bigger vision of the future. They were in the same position we are in. They desired to end slavery, but were deep in an entrenched system. We desire to end bigotry but are in an entrenched system. The system must be broken. Their actions led to the breaking of the system of slavery. Our actions today need to lead to the breaking of bigotry. All types.
And to be clear, racism is when you treat someone of a different race differently. It is when you don't want your kids marrying someone of a different race. We must end all differences. Each person should be seen as the sum of their past. Their personal past and their ancestry. Watching these genealogy programs can be eye opening. Sure they pick big stars, but when you forget that the person is famous and just look at them as a person, so many come with mixed ancestry. A few have DNA results that show a very homogenized ancestry. Though some forget that even different countries in Europe have deep bigoted divides. In the UK it is hard to say whether they are more bigoted to someone with Scottish ancestry or Indian ancestry. And we see that in the US in the bigotry toward the Irish and Catholics.
And I am deeply troubled by the divide between African American activists and Native American activists. They should be working together, but many times they are at odds. We need to unify the groups working to end bigotry and realize that they all have the same goal, even though they don't have the same history.
One area that might be key to this is understanding the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange. One is theft, one is sharing. Sharing is not bad. Sharing teaches understanding and equality. A white American becoming a Japanese Tea Ceremony master is not cultural appropriation. Is that fine level of distinction that we need to be careful of as we strive to fix what is broken. Cultural exchange is not broken, but it gets lumped in with cultural appropriation. So we need to end all bigotry. But in the process we don't want to destroy other things. We need all groups that are seeking equality to join together and put aside their differences - to find the common history and work for a common future.
The reality of race in today's world is that it was a construct of those seeking to divide and now it is hard to bring us back together. And so many are unaware the dividing us by culture, national origin, language or anything else is just as bigoted. Race is just one aspect. One piece. We need to work on pulling all the pieces together into one effort. We have a difficult issue today of a huge divide in politics in the United States. It is so huge that it counts as bigotry.
One side of that political divide has taken one of the Revolutionary War liberal battle cries and turned it into a reactionary one. I prefer one of the other battle cries - United or Die. We must unite all those working to end all forms of bigotry. We need merge the messages together while maintaining the individual stories. And that is what the ideal future will look like as well. United while maintaining our individual stories. And I think Genealogy, seen by some as a test of racial purity, can become instead the archive of our individual histories. We can keep the stories of the past and the bigotry that different groups have faced as a lesson to the future to not do that again. And we can use it to uncover lost pieces of history and expand our personal histories. We can do all these things to face modern bigotry and continue to erode it.
In 1964 it would have been impossible to contemplate an African American President. Today that is history and we have an African American woman as Vice President. Yet many communities still face the same troubles they did half a century ago. So in some areas our society has greatly advanced. We need to see those advances and build on them and carry those down to every community. No one should ever feel that bigotry. And if we truly want the word "all" to mean every single person, we can't let their political beliefs, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, religion, national origin, or any other aspect of their person to be held against them. The only people who need to be ostracized are those who want to continue to promote bigotry. They are the problem and that message needs to be silenced.
I am hoping to see improvements in this situation in my life. I'm halfway through it so if we make as many changes as we have in the first half of my life, that could be amazing. But we can't ignore it. We have to work at it and we have to join together. Division only works to help bigotry endure.
