Recently I had the misfortune of being with friends who were talking about
race. These two friends were Ceylonese, and it amused me how they were so
quick to differentiate and distance themselves from Indians.
Among others, they claimed that Ceylonese were in many ways a more superior
race than Indians. Regular Ceylonese Hitlers they are if you ask me.
I do not intend to debate on which race is more superior. As a matter of
fact, I really do not care if I am considered ‘inferior’ because of my
race.
Whether one chooses to believe that we are all the product of Adam and Eve,
or that we are all the product of evolution, the fact remains that we all
came from the same source. And that makes us all human beings. In the
bigger scheme of things, does it really matter what race we are? In the
final analysis, it is not our race, skin colour or religion that defines
who or what we are, but whether we have been good or bad human beings. At
least, that is what I choose to believe.
And that is why I choose to be a human being. A good one. (I try)
Sheila, pertinent stuff but let me go off tangent. The one-race position is an on-going tool that counteracts racism to its logical conclusion - a ‘common humanity’ - but holocaust survivor, Rabbi Leon Radzik, whose entire family was murdered by Nazis, begs to differ. He suggested that there exists a genuine divide amongst homo-sapiens because he had witnessed ‘monsters in human form’ who proclaimed superiority.
ReplyDeleteCorollary – Radzik’s position appears to draw parallel to the Rajapakse regime at the end days of the LTTE.
ReplyDeleteI would say that people who kill for what I term as "superficial" diferrences such as race, religion, skin colour, sexual preferences etc suffer from some form of mental disability that exacerbates the differences, rather than the similarities, between one human being from another. Unfortunately there is no known cure for this disease.
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