Letters to the Editor of the Rockville Centre Herald May 5, 2011

Stop identifying Americans

by race

To the Editor:

Once again, the government is identifying people by the color of their skin. The U.S. Census Bureau has provided figures for the “racial and ethnic profile of RVC,” along with the rest of the nation.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told us not to judge people by the color of their skin. But so long as we identify people by the color of their skin, we will continue to do that either subconsciously or, for the racists, consciously. Race both unites and separates.

I object. First, I am not white. I am mostly motley pink. President Barack Obama is not black. He is a creamy chocolate. For the folks who identify him as half white and half black, he obviously isn’t striped, and we’ve seen him in shorts, so that eliminates the other option. It gets absurd. A hundred years ago people commonly spoke of the Teutonic race, the Anglo-Saxon race, the Italian race and others. If that’s true, most of us are the product of interracial marriages. It gets more absurd.

In science there is no such thing as race. Science speaks of species. There is only one human species: us. The genetic difference between us and chimpanzees is less than 1.2 percent. The difference between any two human beings on the face of the earth is probably less than 1/10th of a percent. (For those of you who don’t believe in evolution, no sweat. Your offspring won’t evolve.)

Race is the product of the human imagination. Lots of things are the product of the human imagination. Some of them are very good: for example, justice. Some are silly: ghosts, the aliens from Roswell. Believe in them if you want. They do no harm. But some of them are terrible. The most terrible of all is race. More horrors have been perpetuated in the name of race than any other idea. Slavery and the Holocaust are just two. (Most Americans still think that Hitler persecuted the Jews because of their religion. In fact, it was race. The Nazis were all about race.)

As long as our government perpetuates the myth that human beings are divided into racial groups, it will perpetuate the myth of race. That is inherently dangerous. It is time for our government to stop separating Americans. It’s time to start uniting them.

Ed Thorp

Rockville Centre

Legislature is

rushing