On race


I wander through each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear

London, William Blake

Paco Malo sent me a link to a WSJ article by Shelby Steele, and it struck me that I have written over 200 posts on this blog, and so far as I can recall, I have never mentioned race.

Steele speaks of a world where race is paramount; I just don’t see things that way. I don’t think of myself as a white man any more than I think of myself as a left-handed man, or a brown-eyed man. All are the case, but all are accidental, and none looms large in my thoughts.

I feel no sense of shame for white racism. Whatever white racists may have done, their sins are their own. I am all too aware that human history overflows with atrocity. I could cry for the crimes of the human race, but that is the only race I claim as mine.

The contemporary obsession with race as the lens through which to see society strikes me as ironic. Every action comes at a cost, especially that of accepting the fundamental premise of racism, that race is terribly important. Now those are some mind-forged manacles…

To end racism it will be necessary to let go of race. To let go of tribalism, and the worship of blood lineage. My allegiance is to ideals, not blood. We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Posted on October 28th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: General

One Response to “On race”

  1. Paco Malo, on November 1st, 2005 at 11:44 am Said:

    Bruce Springsteen once wrote, “I was born into this life payin’, for the sins of somebody else past.”

    When I plug this in, as context filter, to the sins committed by my great, great grandfather in kicking the Reconstruction goverment out of South Carolina, I had a paradigm to work with — to understand the dynamics of murder in the name of princlple, and it’s last effects on the minds of those down the line.

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