Writer’s Workshop: A Dozen Lines On Peace, Love, and Understanding

Writer's Workshop 1 Minute

There’s something I’ve meant to talk about for some time now, and while it might (no, will) ruffle some feathers, I’m going to go there.

I read somewhere (might have been Ancestry or 23andMe, maybe Wikipedia) that every blue-eyed person in the world is a descendant of an African man who, through genetic mutation, was born with blue eyes.

The fact that nearly everyone who has blue eyes (me included) can trace their roots back to a Northern European country should make you wonder how that happened.

Sarah Hoyt wrote a very interesting article about the whole subject of race and what she calls “reading racial tea leaves.”

I found it interesting because I had been thinking along the same lines recently.

When you come right down to it, race as we’ve used it all these years is really meaningless; it’s an invention of people who consider it relevant, no matter how irrelevant it is (yes, I’m talking about anthropologists and sociologists).

There has been so much mixing and blending and swirling between people of different races and ethnicities that race and ethnicity don’t matter anymore.

I think we need to stop treating them like they do.

The only thing we can say for certain is that we’re all human beings, capable of giving and receiving love, needing to love and be loved (so sue me if I sound too ’70’s).

I’m not saying not to address past wrongs: I’m saying that reconciliation doesn’t happen until we recognize the common bond that we share, our humanity.

As Sarah says in the above article, we have more in common than not, and to pretend otherwise is “arrant [sic] nonsense.”

Let’s make it happen.

Published by John Holton

Internet disc jockey, lover of old TV (especially the commercials), inveterate wise guy.

Published

17 thoughts on “Writer’s Workshop: A Dozen Lines On Peace, Love, and Understanding”

  1. Pingback: The 4th Quarter Week That Was – The Sound of One Hand Typing

  6. Excellent. When I was teaching, I heard my colleagues talking about how they would reprimand students if they empathized with a different race. Universalism, they said, was dead. Doing that minimized and marginalized the experiences of these people of which no one else can relate. Or appreciate their uniqueness. I would argue both with professors who taught that when I was a grad student and with them later when I taught. I argued that it was our shared humanity, the very things we had in common, that made us appreciate the uniqueness of others, that they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They threw ME out instead.

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