Racism is a symptom of being human (and other misanthropic observations).

Creation of Eve by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel (Wikimedia Commons)

Just an idea, and right or wrong, it will change few minds, but I'll share it anyway:

I think the response we're seeing to excessive police force is due more to frustration at years and layers of inequity within and between communities than to White police officers oppressing Black men.

Have you ever been suddenly moved to tears over a cross word or bump on the head? It wasn't so much the word that hurt, or the bump, it was all the other little things that had been accumulating for hours or days or weeks that until that moment had been contained.

I can't personally speak to the Black community experience, but I can from friends who have that experience, and it should come as no surprise that there's as much subjugation within and among Black communities as White, Latino, Asian, or any other.

That isn't the message that self-appointed liberators want you to hear, especially those who profit off the message, but it's nonetheless true. And I have to give TV talking heads a lot of credit for very recently (within the last week) addressing it, even though it's been like watching deer slowly poke their noses out to see if any hunters are around.

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1962 British political cartoon with President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev arm-wrestling. This would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the era that my father enlisted in the Army rather than be drafted. One of many sources >

Here's the thing: Focusing on race is an easy way to avoid solving a far deeper, ancient problem. Color is an excuse for hate, and a convenient rallying point for resistance.

If we were all one color, it would be no different, we'd just find other reasons to distrust and subjugate each other.

That's the deeper, ancient problem, and that's the one no one is talking about.

Racism is a symptom of being human.

But racism, like all imposed inequities, is made possible by an imbalance of power, just as the wealthy oppress the poor, the high-born the low, the educated the non, the stronger the weaker, the beautiful the ordinary, the healthy the infirm, etc.

That's what has to be fixed, and efforts to do so are dismissed as conspiratorial, socialist, intrusive, presumptuous, archaic, mythical, nonsensical, old-fashioned, irrelevant, etc.

Business folks like to say "you won't get different results if you keep doing the same thing," and that's equally true here. We'll continue as we always have, until we're blasted into atoms by an asteroid, or engulfed by the sun, or freeze in an ever-expanding cosmos, or Jesus comes again, or __________

(supply your own apocalyptic or hopeful ending).

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Some will disagree because they can't see any further than color. Some because it's expedient and linked to political or financial success. And some because our capacity to hate is so deep, there's no place else one can hope to make a difference, and pretending this makes a bigger difference than it does is better than making no difference at all.

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Although I'm not a racist, you might call me a humanist, which is to say, a misanthrope.

A little linguistic joke.

Very little.

But funny, you gotta give me that.

I'll give you an A for effort.

You're too generous.

To a fault.

[2014-12-03]

c0