Searching Hard in Pursuit of Nothing

Recently one of my favorite actors, Morgan Freeman, said Black History Month is “ridiculous”.
His reasoning was that the idea of black people in the US having a single month where their history is discussed is demeaning and that all black history is significant and forms a part of a larger and comprehensive history worthy of discussion year round. At least this ‘interpretation of what he meant’ is what I gathered from all of the news accounts I found to read. I applaud his intellect and his courage.

He also said this:
“The more you talk about race, the more it is an issue that doesn’t resolve.”

This quote lit up my interior and put a smile on my face. The reason it did so is that I have promulgated this theory as my own for some time now and I will tell you that I have had people tell me I am insensitive, and they came close to branding me a social ignoramus.

The conventional and liberally popular theory is that race must be talked about in order to ‘sort it out’ and create a positive line of communication for change. And in what now may seem a complete reversal in tone I see this point as well and it has been productive, in a manner, over the passage of time.

I also believe we could have gone faster if everyone understood that race is merely a concept.

I have told the people willing to discuss this opinion with me that it is my idea race is a mental construct only and therefore not actually real. It is a concept, with no foothold in reality. The idea that a human with different color skin is somehow different from those with another color skin, has no intellectual or scientific merit, and therefore renders the point moot; thus creating a default position of equality in humanness; which by additional rational extension creates a conceptual position, not a reality position, that skin color differences separate us in any meaningful way.

I am saying that we have quite literally invented the idea that race matters. We have willfully manufactured its artificial reality. This is a daring statement, however I believe it to be true. It is all just a concept you see. A pure human invention. The reality of skin color differences can be dismissed in this way. Yes it requires some intellectual exercise, but I believe the idea to be accurate. When the reality of race can be intellectually dismissed then the idea of racial difference is left wearing only its ‘conceptual’ clothes. And then you see, we can just quit talking about it and we have simultaneously created a higher and more positive ground to work from.

How did we change a concept into an ugly reality? It is achieved through fear. Fear of things different. Fear of cultures different and ideas not our own; ideas held by people with incoherent languages and cultures that might shock us. All of this leads to trying to capture our fears; and often the literal capturing of humans and their enslavement such as occurred between the US and the inhabitants of Africa. Greed certainly played a role as well.

I think Mr. Freeman is voicing a clarion signal. He was born in 1937 in the deep south of Memphis, Tennessee. Do you think he has not seen racial intolerance? Yet today he says:
“The more you talk about race, the more it is an issue that doesn’t resolve.”

In candor I say the following with some pride; Mr. Freeman said what I have known for a while. Then again, perhaps he has also known this for a long time as well. Race is a concept. When we reach a point that Mr. Freeman suggests, where it is no longer necessary to discuss the idea, we have come to a refined understanding of what skin color is and more profoundly, what it is not.

Can we all just be silent for a while? Jesse Jackson are you listening? Race is a concept, not a reality. The more you promote differences rather than our essential human sameness, the more you promote race as a reality, then deeper is dug the hole from which we all strain to catch a glimpse of a more dignified and worthy racial and spiritual peace.

This is a difficult mental wrestling match, this idea that race is a concept. To state that it is a concept immediately dismisses the real visual observation that skin colors differ and offers you up to the free-wheeling ‘non-thinking’ race liberals as a bigot.

My wife and I, who are considered white, adopted an infant ‘child of color’ 23 years ago. He is a recent graduate of the University of Texas and we are immensely proud of him. If he carries any racial divide scars they are invisible to me.

During his childhood the only discussion about his ancestry or skin color was limited to allowing him the truth of his adoption and his origin, but never any more than the starkness of truth alone. This might sound like an uncaring parental attitude. Perhaps we should have hovered over him, asking daily if he was treated differently because of his skin color. We took a different approach. We treated race as concept, unworthy of daily discussion or concern. It was treated as a concept devoid of any reality that could craft a real difference between us.

I asked our son recently, “How much prejudice have you experienced in your life”? (The first time he had ever been asked this by his mother or father) He said, “What do you mean? Why would anyone care or bother me about that?” He has lived his first 23 years without the idea that there was any issue for him to deal with; a sort of ‘blind and conceptual’ approach if you will. Ours was a mute response to the world’s raging discussions over color.

I offer this as some small proof that if you can understand my point of race being a concept, then you can learn to see people of a different color through a uniquely filtered and spiritual lens. And I affirm to you that unless you understand race is a concept not a reality, you will continue to be confused and noisy about it. When we all understand this, then we can grow quiet, and peaceful.

If you have been patient and read all the way to this point and I have simply confused you, then I will offer you a simpler borrowed styling from the late John Lennon.

'Imagine there are no races, it's easy if you try.'

And Morgan Freeman, a 69 year old man; a child of the segregationist south agrees with me.

Thank you Mr. Freeman, you made my day.