Rev. Stephen A. Tillett, Capital Gazette, Annapolis MD - [My book, "Stop Falling for the Okeydoke: How the Lie of 'Race' Continues to Undermine Our Country,"] is based on the premise, backed by scientific research, that the differences that have confounded us and kept people separated from potential allies of like interests and concerns is literally only "skin deep" — 1/64th of an inch deep, to be precise.
At the genetic level we are 99.9 percent the same. Yet we have allowed the lie that we are different "races" to divide us for centuries. So why is this? Who profits from this division?
Well it's not the "average folks" who have been carrying the water for this lie for generations. As Sen. Jay Billington Bulworth says in the 1998 movie "Bulworth": "Rich people have always stayed on top by dividing white people from colored people. But white people got more in common with colored people than they do with rich people."
In his speech at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. discussed the way entrenched business interests in the South — the "Southern aristorcracy" — engineered segregation and promoted the lie of "white supremacy" to keep Negroes and poor working-class whites separated:
"If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow … And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow."
Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Buying into the lie of some sort of "racial" difference between fellow members of the human race has led us to our current place of disconnection from our cousins — the other members of the human family.
The question is: When will we decide that we are tired of the Okeydoke — foolishness, a con, a scam —and stop falling for it?
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