By Zack Wright
Monday, August 08, 2016
Racism is not a problem in the United States Marine
Corps. There is no distinction between black or white Marines — or any color in
between. Drill instructors, NCOs, and commanding officers alike teach their men
that there are no races in the Marines — to the Corps, whether you are light
green or dark green is irrelevant. We are all green, and that is all that
matters. For many decades, Marines of all different shades have fought, bled,
and died beside each other. Promotion is based on performance scores, not on
race. Discipline is based on individual action, not on race. Marines identify as
Marines, not as a race.
If more Americans discarded the divisive labels that are
thrust upon us every day by government policy, progressive ideology, and
popular culture, we would have a much more united, less factionalized, less
racist society.
One of the first things I remember being taught in life
is that skin color does not matter. Discrimination, segregation, and hatred are
wrong. Separate is not equal. I took this nugget of truth to heart and I have
tried to live my life in a manner that confirms that ideal. Race is an
artificial human social construction, a construction which has been a powerful
force in conquest, enslavement, segregation, apartheid, murder, and genocide.
Race is a negative force; it is a way for people to justify division and
separation between groups of people.
Just over 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt, in
a famous speech, called for discarding the hyphen that many Americans carried
as part of their identity. He argued that maintaining the hyphen in the American
identity, would lead to the eventual destruction of America. “The one
absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all
possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all,” Roosevelt said, “would be
to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
Last year, then–Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal echoed
this sentiment when he said of his parents, “They weren’t coming [to America]
to raise ‘Indian-Americans.’ They were coming to raise Americans.” Jindal
proclaimed that he was tired of hyphenated Americans, a practice which only
divides us.
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. called for the end of
racism in America. He dreamed that we would “one day live in a nation” where
Americans “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of
their character.”
Unfortunately, our nation has changed from the United
States I knew in my youth to the country that we live in today. While I concede
that my perspective has changed from that of a child to that of an adult, I believe
that our country — while never having fully succeeded in discarding racism in
the past — has regressed in the last decade. It’s true that the evil,
government-sanctioned horror that was chattel slavery and Jim Crow are long
gone. Public schools have been integrated for more than four decades. In theory
all U.S. citizens are equal under the law. In 2008, we elected a black
president.
Yet despite these signs of progress, today we are mired
in a backward-trending divisive ideology of self-segregation, fruitless
categorization, and tribalism. I watched in profound sadness and disappointment
in the winter of 2014 when, in the midst of the terrible self-destructive riots
in Ferguson, Mo., President Obama, the man with the perhaps greatest
opportunity to lead our country into reconciliation and unity since
Reconstruction, instead further divided our country. The president was uniquely
positioned to do more than simply make a profound statement; he could have led
us toward a post-race society — but he squandered his chance. I was listening,
waiting to be led to a new America, and he left me disappointed and Ferguson
burning.
The end state of the progressive ideology that celebrates
and reinforces race as an important distinction in employment, crime, education,
and politics is a society that is further split into warring factions. It is
rolling back the spirit of E Pluribus
Unum. Instead of uniting the country as one, it seeks to divide us based on
the color of our skin. Our young people are assaulted by a racial ideology that
tears us apart. Divisive jokes, slurs, nicknames, and categorization confront
our youth every day. Rap songs, social media, and popular culture all reinforce
that divide instead of minimizing it. But instead of finding ways to move past these
troubles, progressive ideology seeks to normalize racial slurs rather than
eliminate them.
I have experienced racism in my life. Things have been
assumed about me because of my appearance. I have been called slurs. I have
gotten in fights. I, too, have been categorized against my will. I am one of
the millions of Americans who does not fit into the convoluted categories and
divisions that government policy and racial ideology try to force us into. I
refuse to be categorized based on my skin color or ancestry by anyone — but
especially by the government.
In order to exercise your constitutional right to buy a
firearm in the United States you must fill out the ATF 1140 form from which a
background check is conducted. Buyers are required by our government to
categorize themselves by answering two questions: Question 10A on ethnicity
requires you to check “Hispanic or Latino” or “Not Hispanic or Latino”;
Question 10B requires a buyer to define himself by choosing at least one of:
American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native
Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or White.
Archaic classification systems are non-scientific,
flawed, divisive, and pointless. How should a person answer whose parents and
ancestors were Arabs born in Egypt? What about white people born in New
Zealand? Are they not Pacific Islanders? Is it not insane that Lebanese,
Pashtun, Bengali, Tamil, Turks, Cambodians, Indonesians, and, of course,
Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans Americans are all classified by our government
as “Asian”?
One of the most insulting incarnations of racism today is
the idea of race-based voting. Whenever politicians and media predict the
outcome of the “Black vote” or the “Latino vote,” I cringe. How is it not
racist for someone to assume — or even expect — an individual to vote based on
the color of his or her skin? What is more racist than to ascribe a person’s
political views to her physical appearance? Should not a person vote his
conscience? Should not experience, philosophy, religion, economic status,
residency, education, occupation, and morality have far more to do with an
individual’s political perspective than his or her pigmentation? Expecting
someone to think, behave, or vote a certain way based on skin color is as
racist as segregation. And yet many who dare dissent from the politics they are
expected to hold based on skin color are often called traitors or Uncle Toms.
I am a conservative American who hates racism. I am in
fact actively anti-racist: I want to live my life in a way so that my tiny
corner of the universe is positively improved by practicing anti-racism. What
is the end state of divisive racial ideology? It is unending division. For
progressives, is there ever a point where Asian Americans, African Americans, European
Americans, Hispanic Americans (another socially constructed category —
arbitrarily divided from Native Americans) can just be Americans? Not that I’m
aware of. Progressive ideology seems to want to divide us — permanently.
Alternatively, the admittedly far-off and idealistic goal
for American society from a conservative perspective is color blindness. If
race shouldn’t matter in how we judge individuals, let’s treat it like it
doesn’t matter. Let’s remove race as a criterion for consideration. Conservatives
should work toward a society where nothing is influenced or decided based on
the color of a person’s skin. A truly uniting policy would be to move beyond
these feudal bonds of socially constructed imprisonment. Let us cast off any
stereotypes, assumptions, benefits, grievances, or impairments based on the
amount of pigment in a person’s hide.
Encouragingly, there is a precedent for this idea in
American history — when disparate groups of English, Dutch, German, Swedish,
Welsh, and Scottish colonists became, simply, American. Later, the Poles and
Italians became Americans. The Irish — once thought to be too different to ever
truly assimilate into our culture — became Americans. During the First World
War many Americans of Germans descent made tangible changes in their customs
and culture to become, simply, Americans.
I am not advocating that you forget your heritage or
ancestry. As free men and women, by all means celebrate your ancestry and
heritage as you please, but remember that we are an American Nation, and that
“American” is our nationality — something far more important and unifying than
the artificial and destructive concept of race.
So let me join with President Roosevelt and Governor
Jindal in calling for an end to hyphenated Americans. Let us drop our tribal
divisions and embrace our shared heritage and nationality. Let us unite as
Americans. Let us remember that separate is not equal. I hope that, as
Americans, we will move toward a color-blind, post-race, and post-racist
society. That is the only way to end racism.
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