Why do we do this?

We humans are great at creating handy ways of dividing things. This practice most certainly started at the beginning. For instance, we have more than a dozen names for apples of different colors, yet as we know, they are all still apples and not grapes. Our current dog Lily is a Jack Russell Terrier. She is white with a few brown freckles on her ears and a brown spot around one eye. Before she came along our prior dog, Tucker was also a Jack Russell Terrier. He was a mixture of three coat colors, white, brown, and black. Both Lily and Tucker are great examples of typical Jack Russell personality. They are energetic, playful, mischievous, protective, devoted and loving of their human family. Although different in markings and color we can easily see that both are canines and not birds or frogs. This sort of dividing is all more or less based on and justified by science. Then of course you have other sorts of human invented divisions based more on opinion than science. You can divide up highways based oh which ones provide the most scenic drives or other factors such as amounts of traffic, distance from point A to point B and a million other unique ways to think about highways and their differences. Many of those ways rely on practical factors and some differences are opinion or choice. In more ways than we can count we humans have tried to carve our world, and our lives into as many little pieces as we can. Sometimes that has been useful, sometimes it has not. Sometimes it is even harmful. This practice is ancient and has evolved along with us humans. We humans have gone so far with this dividing of everything into categories that we have even done it to ourselves. We are Americans or we are Mexicans, Republicans or Democrats, gay or straight, Christian or Jew, rural or urban, law abiding or criminal, rich or poor, black or white and probably dozens of other ways we have figured out how to make everyone else seem different than we are. Perhaps to make ourselves feel superior to all others. In the beginning this categorizing of humans, by other humans probably served a useful purpose. Safety and survivability depended in part on belonging to a group and in working as a group they received help in food gathering, shelter building, and safety from other human groups that were competing for resources. Groups grew into tribes and tribes into nations. Obviously, this story is much more detailed and complicated that what I’ve summarized here. I was only attempting to lay a bit of groundwork for what I really wanted to talk about. You might have already figured out the direction this piece is heading but for those that have not I invite you to look at the illustration above. It is a scale of brown from darkest to lightest and bracketed on the left by a strip of white and on the right by a strip of black. Here in America, we talk about black people and white people. Look at that color swath again…. Do you actually know anyone who is white or black? I don’t and I’m 100 percent certain you don’t either. We are all BROWN, no exceptions that I know of. Let me say it again. We are all brown human beings. Granted, we come in a wide range of brown. So why not do away with those divisive terms and just say we are humans. Calling us black or white is just another way to keep the human tribe broken into pieces that some of us love to hate. It isn’t helpful. Most of the ways humans have been divided into categories serve no valuable purpose today other than giving us a convenient way to hate without a guilty conscious. That my friends is sad and it makes life so much harder for all of us brown humans. As long as the topic is “why do we do that” there is just one more thing I’d like to know. Why do we continue to use the term “African American”? Most of the people I know who are referred to in that way are not African. They did not come from there. The majority have had ancestors in America for generations. What is wrong with simply calling them Americans. My ancestors came from England, Scottland, Holland and Germany yet I am regularly referred to as an American. Not British American, not German American, just American. Can’t we just stop with all of these devisive descriptions that have no practical or useful value. They only continue to keep us all separated and give us reasons to fear and hate others.