“Race. A competition
between runners, horses, vehicles, boats, etc., to see which is the
fastest in covering a set course.
— “Sasha Won the Race”
Much as I’ve tried to
avoid the subject because it’s one of the few things that bore me to
tears, I think it’s time to confront something that has become an
annoying yet vital part of the national discourse since Obama ran to
become “the first black president.” So I went to “race, definition”
in my search engine, and what showed up was the above. Hurray for
Sasha!
Then I went to my personal
dictionary, a grade-school gift from my parents. It says “race., n.
a rapid course, as of an animal or river; contest of speed.” Then,
eventually, “descent or lineage.” Finally.
So while I’m mentally back
in grade school, I can tell you without looking what I learned back
then, that stayed with me: There are four races of men (now called
humankind). They are Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid/Asian, Pacific
Islander. The last one seems to have evolved to include Australian
aborigine, but it has little to do with any discussion today.
Today’s discussion has
come because during Holy Week I was startled by a Globe story about
the Rev. William Rich of the Trinity Church, who noted that Jesus
was a “person of color.” What?
I’m not going to search
for a definition of “people of color,” because the phrase is
meaningless. Almost everyone I know has some color; mine is sort of
olive green that turns reddish brown in the summer; I think it comes
from my dad’s Slavic-Croatian descent, which is Caucasian no matter
how “tan” I get. Mother was freckled “white,” being half-German,
half-Irish — both Caucasian.
I traced her background
through the
National Geographic genetic program from the time our female
ancestors left East Africa along with much of humanity in general,
carrying Negroid physical traits that had made survival in Africa
easier. They made their way through the area that is now Israel, up
into the Caucasus, on to Germany, where the cold winters apparently
encouraged the evolution of Caucasian traits like paler skin, often
blue eyes, or green eyes like my mother’s. My dad’s maternal lineage
ended up in Slavic Croatia. His eyes were brown.
Some humans stopped and
stayed in the Middle East, where Jesus was born. They didn’t become
blondes, but they acquired other “Caucasian traits like skin color
that ranges greatly from pale, reddish-white, olive, through to dark
brown tones.”
| |
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National
Geographic Genographic Project |
Yes, now I’m
double-checking my own retained knowledge with Wikipedia. “Conceived
as one of the great races, alongside Mongoloid and Negroid,
(Caucasian) was taken to consist of a number of “subraces.” The
Caucasoid peoples were usually divided in three groups on linguistic
grounds, termed Aryan (Indo-European), Semitic (Semitic languages),
and Hamitic (Hamitic languages i.e. Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian).”
So, there’s Jesus:
Caucasian, speaking Aramaic, one of the Semitic languages. Probably
had more skin color than my mother, but it was clearly absurd to
hear Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a racist
because he doesn’t play well with Palestinians who share the
Israeli/Semitic background with Israelis. They are all Caucasian,
like me.
Same silliness occurs when
some Croatian/Irish/German and other Americans are called “racist”
when we object to illegal immigration. When as an exchange student I
lived with a Mexican family, it never occurred to me to consider it
anything but Caucasian like me. Dr. John Silber, when he was running
for governor, was disparaged by some opponents for arguing that
Hispanic is a language, not a race. He was right. Most Latin
Americans are descendants of European settlers, primarily brown-eyed
Spanish and Portugese Caucasians.
I did have some Mexican
friends with distinctly Mayan or Aztec features, which means they
may have carried some genes from the Mongoloid race group that
crossed the Bering Strait or perhaps arrived by boat from Asia;
genetic studies show that our “native American” population has Asian
genes. But I haven’t gotten the impression that anyone is dividing
illegal Hispanic immigrants into descendants of the Spanish or the
Asians; that’s not what is meant when we are called “racist” for
objecting to illegal immigration.
It’s generally understood
that Indo-European, which most readers here speak as a first
language, is a characteristic of Caucasians; it includes Romance
languages like Spanish and Germanic languages, which include
English, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian and Celtic. It’s also the United
States’ language, so earlier immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the
Pacific Islands now speak Indo-European. That’s the point of a
melting pot. Now we have to continue encouraging all legal
immigrants to speak English, so we can all communicate easily, and
be Americans.
As for race, it doesn’t
matter. Most of the worst battles throughout human history have
taken place between humans who were genetically close: the Semitic
people, including today’s, the habitants of the Greek Peloponnese,
Caesar’s conquests, British internal wars, WWI and II in Europe, the
invasion of China by Japan, the two sides of various civil wars,
including ours.
The savagery taking place
in Africa today is among various members of the Negroid race. After
the Caucasian armies left, Southeast Asians killed other Southeast
Asians. Caucasians are presently slaughtering each other in Syria.
Narrow tribal, religious and/or political differences — not race —
have almost always been the determinants of hatred and slaughter.
White settlers did conquer
native Americans, not because they were another race but because
they were occupying the territory the newcomers wanted. Slavery here
began with black Africans selling other black Africans to white
traders; American slavery ended a century and a half ago and we
should have finally gotten over it when our country elected a
mixed-race President, which is even more transcendental than a
“black president.”
Yet trouble-makers often
look for an easy way to argue “us” vs. “them” for political power
advantage. These racists, regardless of color, are all “them” to me;
I am sick of it. They should keep Jesus out of their silly attempts
to arbitrarily divide the human race that God created, in Africa,
when we were all the same.
Barbara Anderson of
Marblehead is president of Citizens for Limited Taxation and a Salem
News columnist.
