Makes total sense. As a white person it really just frustrates me and makes me ashamed. What the hell is wrong with my kind? What the hell?????? We can't get over this? We REALLY cannot get past this? Seriously, what the hell??? We can't just watch with fascination how population and demographic shifts move through the country and the world? We can't just find that illuminating and fascinating and educational? We can't just look at the evolution of our basic human species? We can't just simply step back and marvel at ourselves as an evolving life-form? One of my dad's favorite guideline-type phrases was "rise above it." Why can't we all do that? Why can't we all just get over ourselves and rise above this? Find and embrace our higher selves and our higher purpose?
Sometimes I find it utterly fascinating and absorbing to study the faces of Latinos in my part of the country. You gaze at them and you can see traces of tribal ancestry, Spanish, indigenous people who came from everywhere before Cortez ever got here, those who look as though they came over from Mongolia and China via a frozen Bering Sea. I look at some African American faces and see the magnificent and mind-boggling Dogon masks I studied in art school, and traces of history and migrations and intermarriage and interbreeding. I study sculptures of some of the pharaohs of Egypt, especially the face of Akhenaten. And those sculptures on Easter Island. MAN! What you can learn by just doing that! I see history. I see art. I see sculpture. I see human sculpture. I see bone structure underneath whatever-the-hell skin color it is, and it's just freakin' fascinating! There's a whole history to be mined in a single set of cheek bones, for example! How we remake and redesign and rebuild our very skeletal structures by where we go, what we eat, what we do, how we live, how and with whom we mate. We are our own physical architects. I find joy and wonder and inspiration in that.
We have, right there in front of us, the theater of history, playing out in the faces and bodies of the peoples and tribes around us. It's the story of us. Of mankind, womankind, humankind. And every face on the planet, regardless of its color or construction, is a page in that very VERY big history book. Why can't we appreciate that? Why can't we embrace it? Instead of puddling up in the little wells of difference like they must be something negative.
So discouraging. Sometimes we whites seem interested only in flushing ourselves down a tube of shit, rather than looking around to see and appreciate and develop the history and the art and the utterly impossible magic of the human species that plays out all around us. We really are a rainbow. As varied as the birds, or the beasts, or the bugs, or the flowers, or the very geography over which we walk. And we whites, in particular, too often would just rather flush ourselves down that tube of judgmental fearful closed-minded constipated shit.
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