Abandon race

In every corner of this world, it is a wonder to me that so few people have realized that distinct, pure races do not, will not, cannot, and never have existed.  EVERYONE is multiracial.  Trace your family— those who call yourselves “white” or “black” or “Arab” because that is the only identity you have ever been taught— maybe your mother was born on some spit of land that some group of people once called Prussia and then called Germany, and your father’s father was called “African American”, though his closest kin include slave masters, and their parents were from France and Norway and Spain, and people from a African tribe whose name has since been forgotten, but some of them worked on plantations in places known as the West Indies, and then the Deep South, and your father’s mother was called “Native American,” and her parents were a mix of backgrounds known as “Scots-Irish” and “Nez Perce,” also known as the “Nimíipuu,” (depending on whom you ask).  What does the US government call you?  Black.  What does your standardized test call you?  Black.  What does your college application call you?  Black.  You are a human being, a citizen of the world, and you have been reduced to one syllable, often used derisively.  Maybe sometimes you are called “multiracial” or “biracial,” but that doesn’t mean much either.  My mother was born to a man of Irish and Welsh descent, and to a woman born of Greek and Finnish descent.  My father hardly knows the names of the countries of his great great great grandfathers and mothers, but one of them was probably Ireland, judging from the red hue of his hair and the spots on his pale skin.  What does the US government call me?  White.  What does the hypothetical human being whose ancestry was described above call me?  White.  Look at me with my freckle-less bronzed olive complexion and golden brown hair, and then my full-blood sister, with her fair pale skin, smattering of freckles, and white-blonde hair.  What does the US government call us both?  White.  Sometimes “Caucasian,” after a mountain range neither of us have ever even seen pictures of.  Cut us open.  Cut all of us open— my mother, my father, my ancestors, your ancestors, the ancestors of humanity— we will all bleed.  When we are dead, we will all rot, and in our rotting we will all grow to resemble universal dirt.  Death is the ultimate equalizer, revealing our true natures that were never RACIAL, but molecular.  Organic material.  Mostly carbon.  Rich, poor, tall, small, narrow-eyed, wide-nostrilled, “black,” “white,” “yellow,” “brown,” “biracial,” “Israeli,” “Pole,” Catholic, Buddhist, Protestant, Sikh, we will all become roughly the same sized pile of dirt, nutrients sucked into the womb of the earth, feeding and fertilizing new cycles of life.  Race is more than body and skin, you say?  Race is identity, culture, religion, a way of life, yes.  All ways of life have the same goal— survival and perpetuation.  What is the worth of the rules, the grammar, and the ritual that tyrannize daily activity?  The diet, the cycles of sleeping and waking, the positions of copulation and birthing, the verbal utterances all equal different viewpoints of the same planet, seen through the same eyes that only wear different lenses.  What is man but the product of time and chance?  Think back to your ancestors, this time FAR back.  Who are your greatest grandparents?  The cell, and before that, the organelle!  Your ultimate people, clan and tribe is the free-floating particle of life in the earth’s primordial sea.  And before that, who is to say?  We are not colored, we are not white— we have held onto these badges in our ignorance, in our desperation for some shard of identity and belonging in our lives.  We are the voids!  We are the gentle roar of the universe, forever united, we are oneness!  Let us be proud of our human patchwork of identity, of our arbitrary traditions, of our food and dances, but let us not forget our oneness with all living things, with our human species, and our entire family of living creatures that roam across or root themselves into the earth!  There is and never has been a “race problem,” and “interracial marriage” is impossible.  We are not different brands of products produced on distinct assembly lines!  All life is subject to change as it is based on a constantly mutating alphabet of genetic combinations.  Even specific strains of bacteria genetically engineered for given duties abandon their people— how many “race traitors” and “Oreos” and “interracial” strains of bacteria proliferate as mutations accumulate?  Now for humans, we must add in culture.  How many pure Christians are there? Christianity and all its traditions are merely the present collection of numerous ancient schools of thought.  Convergence, divergence, and resurgence are essential to life.  Let us not sell ourselves short.  Let us allow ourselves to broaden our gaze, and not for the sake of political correctness or economic expedience but for the sake of doing our amazing existence some justice!  We are not different breeds of beast.  We are not a set of commandments.  We are so much more and less than that.  We are not of  the rainbow-- we are NOT refracted and distilled!  We are the naked beams of  sun.  She, in her life-giving radiance is, after all, the reason for the differences in our skin hues— the lighter we are, the less melanin we have, so we can absorb vitamin D more easily.  We are that simple— the rays that have witnessed life for a geological millisecond— the cycle of rising and dying embers— one flicker in the universal portrait.