A Challenge to Attorney General Eric Holder

    Attorney General Eric Holder recently made some very necessary comments: “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be a nation of cowards.”

   Continuing, Holder said “that we Americans simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with given our nation’s history. This is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

       Eric Holder is right. So, in the interest of a very frank conversation, here is my initial challenge to the Attorney General: Who said Eric Holder is black? Use the net to pull up a photo of the Attorney General and he is barely tan in skin color. His moustache is black but his face is not. In this country, we teach one another that seeing is not believing. We call Holder black even though he is not and we compound our everyday stupidities when confronted with individuals from, for example, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. Many South Asians are much darker in skin color than the Attorney General but, in the United States, they are not black. So, if you are tan, you are black; but if you are actually black or close to it, you are “nonwhite” but not black. Think of Governor Jindal in Louisiana: He is darker than Holder but not black.

      To move to the other side of the color spectrum, Chinese, Japanese or Korean Americans are much lighter than many so called whites but they are nonwhite even though they are lighter than many whites. It’s moronic but we affirm this demonstrable insanity each and every day.

    Mr. Attorney General: A courageous discussion of race would begin by noting an undeniable fact: Millions of our most recent immigrants thankfully explode our way of thinking about race and skin color. Like Governor Jindal, “Asian” and Latinos offer us a wonderful opportunity to challenge the poisonous manner in which we have learned to define ourselves by what allegedly divides us, the color of our skins.

     So, why is Eric Holder black? He is black because, using the hideous one-drop rule, the very worst representatives of U.S. culture –the slave traders and owners- divided the entire world into three color categories: White, black and nonwhite. This vocabulary of racial placement is now centuries old but we continue to use and affirm it without challenging its most fundamental consequence: It makes white people the role model for more than 6.6 billion human beings. As Albert Murray told us more than forty years ago the word “nonwhite” houses all the fundamental assumptions of white supremacy and segregation.

      The Attorney General rightfully complains that “outside the workplace the situation is even bleaker in that there is no significant interaction between us.” But, if white is the designer original and the other colors are at best “knockoffs”, why would whites not segregate themselves from blacks and nonwhites? And why would they voluntarily have a frank discussion about the color codes that threaten to unravel the basis for white supremacy. In the early part of twentieth century Sicilians were labeled “dark whites”. That put them into the “proper” color category and they have remained there even though many Sicilians are darker than Eric Holder.

      Mr. Attorney General: If you really want to challenge our racial order, begin by asking the nation to understand the origin and evolution of the white, black, nonwhite division of everyone on earth. Let’s have a frank discussion of how pernicious these words actually are. For example, why is President Obama’s father black? He was a man from Kenya but as soon as he crosses into the United States the color of his skin supersedes the importance of his ethnic origin. Race trumps ethnicity and Mr. Obama can never melt into the pot because, as the Attorney General rightfully suggests, that pot never included the ingredients black and nonwhite. On the contrary, from 1924 to 1965, Congress gave roughly 65% of all legal immigration slots to only three nations: England, Germany and Ireland. We needed to whiten up the nation before the negatives overwhelmed us with so called “mixed race” mongrels.

   Mr. Attorney General: Start with the colors of our skins. It is so obviously ugly, demeaning and stupid to call Chinese, South Asians, and Latinos nonwhite that it could open the door to an even deeper analysis of our problems.

       In a biological sense, there is one race, the human race; it is the only one that actually exists and it long past time for us to recognize that, like skin colors, race is a social construct, invented yet again by the very worst representatives of U.S. and European cultures.

      Mr. Holder, if you really want to avoid cowardice, let’s start with the poison created by the slave trader color scheme, and then have a national debate, not about race relations, but about the legitimacy of the concept of races. It is the foundation stone of the poison you so admirably wish to eliminate yet even though there is a general consensus that race is a social construct, we do not seek the revolution that can occur. In essence, since the concept of race was devised by the very worst Americans, it can be eliminated by the very best Americans.

     If social reality is a human construction –and it is- then we can move into the future on the basis of a corrected past. Recognize the concept of races for a fiction and then create identities that define us by what unites us rather than by what divides us. For example, from my perspective everyone on earth is a fusion and fusions believe that instead of being self-segregating barriers to interaction, body type differences are delightful and diverse manifestations of the underlying and indissoluble unity of 6.6 billion people.

      Fusion is a core identity that happily allows room for other forms of self and group expression. Fusions think of differences in nationality, religion, ethnicity or geography as potential sources of interest rather than as a reason to discriminate or self-segregate.

  Mr. Holder: The new words are less important than the power that all human beings have. We alone make social reality and if you really want to have a frank discussion about skin and race, the way to begin is to challenge the ghastly inheritance that divides Americans and everyone else on earth into whites, blacks and nonwhites.