Welcome To The Terror-dome...

As unfortunate as last week's tragic events in the Boston area were, there's one inescapable conclusion that shouldn't be ignored.  White America has another opportunity to empathize with Black America experiencing the veil of terror that it lives under as a matter of existence.  9/11 was the first time in recent memory that the nation as a whole began to wrestle the irrationality of hatred that couldn't be understood even though there were many reasons that could be uncovered without much effort.  The fact remained that for most of our White brethren, they simply couldn't come to grips with a notion of being hated for hatred sake. In the weeks and months to come there will be much made of the psychology of enmity that led the two Chechen brothers to act so violently towards people that they didn't know but the reality is that African Americans live under this cloud of sudden terror.

From the long history of lynchings and Klan attacks to every time there's a Charles Byrd dragged to death in Texas or James Craig Anderson being beaten and fatally run over or Marco McMillian being beaten, dragged, and set afire in Mississippi, every Black person lives under the threat of death from unknown persons who may strike out of an unfounded and irrational hatred.  This is the same insanity that White America struggled to understand in the aftermath of 9/11.  Going forward there was a tendency to allow the threat level to diminish in their minds as time caused the impact of the event to fade from memory.  Fast-forward to the Boston 2013 Marathon and the emotional scar was reopened.  Can this be an opening for America to at least dialog about the need to address the cancer that is racist hatred for Black America?  If so, welcome to the terror-dome and let's destroy it while we still can.  We were all Americans for a few weeks after 9/11 so hopefully, since these two "terrorists" who are the very definition of White as in from the Caucasus region that gave us the term Caucasian have been identified as the perpetrators, we can unite to face the truth that the threat from without is great enough to make us remove the madness of imagined threats  from within based on ethnicities...

Black History Month?

An old saying in essence goes, "I'm laughing to keep from crying!" which reminds me of the conflicting sentiments that arise over the notion of a Black History Month. There are supporters who make jokes about the fact that the shortest month of the year is devoted to Black History while opponents get rankled over the fact that there is a month designated to a single ethnic group. Well, this may come as a surprise but I think they're both right!

Black History in the USA is the history of this nation. Without us there would be no nation. The early settlers needed the Natives to help them learn to survive and they were ill-equip to do much more than that. Their next move was to try and enslave these indigenous peoples to perform the herculean task of building an infrastructure for a fledgling nation but that proved to be a "peace pipe" dream. It's awfully hard to beat a man on his home turf playing by his rules.

So, along came option number two. Let's dehumanize and bring in a new group that will make us the home team and we can create our own rules. It was indeed a successful strategy for a couple of hundred years and it illustrates why Black History is American History. From agriculture to the industrial revolution to the advent of modern technology, we have been an irreplaceable part of the story not only as labor but just as importantly as inventors and innovators. Yes, without a Black History Month perhaps all of our contributions would quickly become obscure and forgotten but that's because we, all Americans, don't demand that all ethnicities be given their rightful place in the history books of this nation.

You may have noticed that I denote ethnicity and not race. That's because race as a fictionalized frequently redefined term is the primary underlying factor in the process of keeping people divided. Here's how the American Anthropological Association (AAA) stated it in its recommendation to the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for the 2010 Census:

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) recommended that OMB combine the "race" and "ethnicity" categories into one question to appear as "race/ethnicity" for the 2010 US Census. The Interagency Committee agrees, stating that “"race" and "ethnicity” were not sufficiently defined and “that many respondents conceptualize "race" and "ethnicity" as one in the same underscor[ing] the need to consolidate these terms into one category, using a term that is more meaningful to the American people.”^[4]

The AAA also stated,

"The American Anthropological Association recommends the elimination of the term "race" from OMB Directive 15 during the planning for the 2010 Census. During the past 50 years, "race" has been scientifically proven to not be a real, natural phenomenon. More specific, social categories such as "ethnicity" or "ethnic group" are more salient for scientific purposes and have fewer of the negative, racist connotations for which the concept of race was developed."

"Yet the concept of race has become thoroughly--and perniciously--woven into the cultural and political fabric of the United States. It has become an essential element of both individual identity and government policy. Because so much harm has been based on "racial" distinctions over the years, correctives for such harm must also acknowledge the impact of "racial" consciousness among the U.S. populace, regardless of the fact that "race" has no scientific justification in human biology. Eventually, however, these classifications must be transcended and replaced by more non-racist and accurate ways of representing the diversity of the U.S. population."

The bottom line here is that race is a made-up term that is used to classify people in ways that make it possible to discriminate based on artificial attention to perceptions about physical differences. Biologists have long acknowledged that there is one race of humans with many different surface characteristics but underneath we all possess the same physiology influenced only by our ancestral location origins. These are ethnic differences. Race is a better term for animal types. There are races of birds, monkeys, fishes, etc. because they can have physiologies that are not interchangeable.

So with that backdrop, let's use Black History Month to launch a more ethnic friendly version of history for all people. Otherwise, we may be forced to call attention to the fact that all humans can trace their ancestry beyond Europe, Asia, and the Americas to Africa meaning that ultimately we're all simply displaced Africans...