Ah, today.

I will cast my thoughts on the Afrimerican mind.

First things first: What the heck is an "Afrimerican"?

a-fri-me-ri-can * a word coined by American citizen Janell L. Clark to describe her heritage online; used to describe American descendants of African peoples [slave and free] in the United States during said country's colonization.

IOW, it's one word without _hyphens_, yet it's not a crayon color.

= = =

Allow me to explain. I hate racism. Hate it. It's stupid, irrational, biologically unsound, and one cause of most of this planet's wars.

1. Stupid: Hating someone over skin color, voice accents, or who they bow to as God is tantamount to...being stupid.

2. Irrational: Relates to #1. Now I can elaborate. It's rational to have a vehement preference for a flavor of ice cream. For example, I hate butter pecan ice cream. It tastes disgusting to me. But it isn't rational for me to hate "white" people.

For I can avoid the ice cream. I can refuse to eat the ice cream. I can choose to eat another flavor of ice cream. The reasons being: A. that the ice cream directly offended me by tasting yucky, and B. All butter pecan ice cream from all brands taste the same.

That cannot be said of "white" people, as no two human beings on the earth are alike; that is, while I may have met a "white" guy named George Washington who thinks slavery should be reinstated, his "white" wife Martha thinks Afrimericans should receive slavery reparations.

In short, I may meet, see, or hear five "whites" I don't like at all; but I can't condemn the enitre populace in this country. I couldn't do that even if I only met five "whites" I liked out of the entire population. To revert to the ice cream analogy, unlike butter pecan, "white" people don't all taste the same.

3. Biologically Unsound: Most animals aren't picky about choosing their mates. Basically, as long as the mate is healthy, a dog won't care what breed it is. (though I'm sure ideas of chihuahuas and Saint Bernards getting together are absurd at best.) A dog is a Canis familiaris is a hound is a silly, yapping, barking, howling, panting four-legged creature with a wagging tail and visible, dull claws.

By the same token, a human is a Homo sapiens is an absurd, near-hairless bipedal creature who is essentially a mortal god on the planet yet is its own natural predator because it already knows how to conquer every other lifeform on Earth except a few stray pathogenic microbes. I answer to the latter, because the former has no discernable higher thought functions, despite PETA's protests--and thus cannot blog, or even think to do so. And I am female.

Now, considering that for my own self-preservation I can't choose a husband that would kill me, treat me worse than his dog, et cetera; as a human I do have to be picky. Also, I must be picky for the larger survival of my society; that is, the societies of humans believe--with little exception--that humans should mate in lifelong, monogamous pairs. (and in order to physically breed more humans, the pairs MUST be heterosexual in nature, but that's a whole new beast.)

With those two factors in mind, I have a broad field of, say 2 billion human males on this planet to choose from. However, it's not feasible to travel from my current habitat[America], so I must choose from the relatively narrow field of about 100 million men; still a sizable grouping of males. Out of the latter pool of prospectives, I have to find a husband who I would prefer to spend the rest of my life with on Earth--if I desire to mate. The odds are in my favor of marrying a suitable spouse as of now, and would be greatly reduced if my kids could only be a thoroughbred/purebreed. (as would be a mass of dogs if they adhered to our mating stipulations--mainly the monogamy. dogs would cease to exist if irish setters only mated with irish setters, pit bulls with pit bulls, et cetera....)

4. One Cause of All Save 14 Minutes of Human Time: That would be war. Humanity has only had fourteen total, composite minutes of peace, and part of the reason is that one group of humans thinks itself superior to other groups of humans; or alternately, several groups of humans think a single group of humans is inferior to them--or even another species. As a result: persecution, slavery, lynchings, crucifixions, gassings, rape, torture, and assorted bits of genocide have occurred. Racism in some form created monsters who would stop at nothing to ensure their domination over the human race.

After all, there is really only one "master race". Homo sapiens. Yet if we keep this up, this division between us, this world will really go to the dogs, the cats, the pigs, and all the other animals that PETA wants to save. And as much as I actually like animals, I don't want PETA's worldview to be the only worldview. IOW, I don't want MGM's "Peace on Earth" cartoon to ever actually come to pass.

==

September 11. When I first saw the footage, I thought it was a series of screenshots from a video game created by company staffed with a group of people inhabiting a nation of humans who--bereft of their military--trained their hard work ethic and creative energies to, among other pursuits, concocting odd flavors of ice cream. (the Japanese, namely the crew at Square Soft)

But no. This was neither the fictitious dream of a Square programmer nor the mad imaginings of a movie director from my country. Rather, this real-life carnage was the brainchild of a mild-mannered man with a hairy back from Kuwait. What a waste of a good idea and 3,000 human lives. But this one man did not care about other Kuwaitis, or indeed, about any humans--not even himself. All he cared about was the fact that he hated anyone who wasn't exactly like him. And as no two humans are exactly alike, he was really mad.

However, Khalid's stupidity notwithstanding, this atrocity isn't the grossest act of racism in my mind. No. The nastiest version emanates from my own grouping. We, the Afrimericans--who have known slavery, genocide, degradation, apartheid; who has had all manner of evil visited upon them--or rather, their ancestors and grandparents--in this country; we are willing to turn a bleary, cataract-encrusted eye to it happening to other peoples. All because the perpetrator isn't "white".

No. This is wrong. If a "white" guy had done all the evils of Mugabe, Hussein, Castro, the yokels of the Taliban, et al; the NAACP, CBC, CORE. Rainbow/PUSH and the rest would demand his head. I would as well. But for me, the above listed maniacs(meaning the dictators, not the civil rights groups) don't get a free pass because of their nice tans. How can I put this another way? If Dr. Martin Luther King and Gandhi behaved like Adolf Hitler and Willie Lynch, and vice versa; I would despise the former pair and praise the latter.

Do we understand? It's shameful to be "a respecter of persons" when the God that created us all could care less about the melanin content in our skin. To him, as to his acolyte Dr. King, it's character content that counts.

Now, when I listed my reasons for hating racism, I didn't even mention God, Christ, or the Spirit. When I weigh their commands in, racism is even more repugnant, for even less reasons.

In the case of despots, it's either Sic Semper Tyrannis or Lex Tyrannis.

Yes, it would be easier if the face of evil was always Skeletor, Mumm-ra, or Talpa(Arago). These cartoon characters are all disgusting monsters, and they epitomize what we loathe in real people. But the fact is, some of the monsters look like Treize, others like Zechs, yet more like Roadblock and Hotwing, and Storm; some similar to the Maganac Corps. And we have to call an evildoer an evildoer and destroy said evildoer--even if the person calling for the evildoer's end does look more like He-Man than Bishop Tracker.

==

The Iraqis are free. Whatever happens, I know these people are happy. They are thankful beyond measure. Many of them think Allah planned all this. The son of Billy Graham may, after dispersing food and other basics to the people, assert that it was the Trinity that worked this miracle. And judging from the many reports I have read, the Iraqis love a good, heated debate. And they haven't had an honest one in over 30 years. Get the assault weapons out of their reach, and let the good times roll.

We endured slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, the KKK, cross burnings, and all the trappings that came withal. With the Iraqis being human as well, I see no reason that could hold them back from reaping the fruits of freedom, so long denied them by one of "their own".

That, dear hearts, is being no respecter of persons. The only way to be.

["white": again, I hate using colors to describe people--too simplistic--but in this case the alternative that can help me avoid the Hyphen Blitzkrieg from the many nations and cultures in Europe eludes me. The millions of tiny city-states there are as ubiquitous as spam on Yahoo Mail, and the hyphens would appear with the alarming frequency of pop-ups.]