I thought we were all Americans

See, I must be a fool. In 1963, I heard Martin Luther King, Junior say;

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Well, I thought the civil rights movement was about making Americans ONE PEOPLE, and I bought into it. I thought it was about everyone being equal totally disregarding the level of melanin pigment in their skin color. I married a woman who was of Black, Asian, European and Indian extraction – because I believed (and still believe) that skin color and heritage didn’t make the person who they are.

Now, here we are 44 years after Reverend King’s speech about his dream, and we’re still consumed by this skin pigment thing – an accident of nature, something has nothing to do with anything.

Today, the Washington Post runs a sceeching headline that people with less melanin in their pigmentation are outnumbered by people with more melanin in the DC Metro area;

Fueled by an explosion of jobs attracting immigrants to the nation’s suburbs, the percentage of minorities has dramatically increased in six local counties — including Prince William, where the share of minorities grew from 35 percent in 2000 to 48 percent in 2006, according to census estimates to be released today.

In addition, Manassas Park was one of eight jurisdictions nationwide that shifted to majority-minority status in 2006, bringing the total number of counties in which minorities outnumber whites to 303 — nearly one in 10 of the nation’s 3,141 counties.

[…]

Locally, Charles County in Maryland and the Virginia counties of Prince William, Loudoun and Stafford, as well as the city of Manassas, remain majority-white, but the proportion of minorities increased at some of the fastest rates in the nation.

In 2000, minorities accounted for 33 percent of Charles’s population. By 2006, they were 45 percent. Similarly, Stafford’s share of minorities grew from 20 percent to 29 percent, and Loudoun’s share increased from 20 percent to 32 percent.

So what? Can anyone explain to me what this has to do with the price of tea in China? Why should it matter that there are more people of color in this area? Apparently they’re all working – that should be the good news. Shouldn’t it?

Yesterday I wrote in the post below this one about Barack Obama declaring, to a group who calls itself “The Race” that Black Americans and Brown Americans are engaged in “One Struggle”. Against who? For what?

I’ll bet you money if Rush Limbaugh was addressing a group of melanin-deficient people who called themselves “The Race” and declared that we were all engaged in One Struggle, that would make the evening news and probably start a war between melanin-deficient people and melanin-loaded people. Over what?

Guess what? We’re all engaged in One Struggle – the terrorists who are trying to kill us are colorblind. They want to kill us all because they lump us all into One Culture, even though we ourselves don’t. And we do have a shared culture – a culture of peace, ingenuity and prosperity.

If the people trying to eradicate us, along with that culture of peace, ingenuity and prosperity, recognize that, why can’t we?  

Category: Society