The human genome has been sequenced and the scientific consensus is that there is no such thing as "race" based on biology or genetics.
The solution, partially and initially, is a public health campaign to raise general awareness of that fact. The public health campaign would challenge the use of "race," i.e., white (melanin deficient) people and black (melanin enhanced) people, as descriptors for and categories of the human family with certain common and essential characteristics. The public health campaign would be based on the science that reveals this is not true.
This addresses perceptions at the individual level and interactions at the social level. We also have to deal with policies and their implementation at the institutional level. But as long as the perception that melanin is a meter for placement of a person's humanity on the family tree, e.g., those who are melanin deficient can lay claim to being supra-human, the epitome and universal standard of what it means to be human, based on the absence of melanin and those who are melanin enhanced will be considered subhuman, not fully human with diminished mental and moral capacity, based on the presence of melanin, who are complicit in a mass delusion and suffering from a manufactured illusion.
This scheme was crafted as part of the enlightenment view based on the mechanical universe paradigm. In colonial America, we see its institutionalization with Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, it affirmation with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, its re-authorization with post-reconstruction in 1876 and its modernization with the Bakke Supreme Court decision, roughly 100 years later, in 1978.
It appears that there is a roughly 100 year cycle where the choices of one generation are abandoned by their great-great grandchildren approximately four generations later. What persists through the generations is a fundamental paradigm that shapes the world view of the society. On the one hand, many of the movements and efforts toward acknowledging the humanity of people who are melanin enhanced, and particularly people of Afrikan descent, are taken out of a charitable attitude. The negatively impacted party, melanin enhanced or marginalized as the case may be, are given or granted certain rights or privileges based on the assumption and fact that the giver has the power to also take away the rights and privileges. In effect, their actions are charity. We see this when the rights or privileges are rescinded. In fact, the distinction between civil rights and civil liberties reflect this distinction.
Were the humanity of Afrikan people, in particular, and melanin enhanced or marginalized people, in general, were accepted, acknowledged and respected, any denial or infringement of their rights and privileges would be viewed as a matter of justice not charity. The same clarion call for liberty and justice that the euro-descendants of today's, and yesterday's, racist have sounded in the preservation of the discrimination would be asserted on behalf of people who are melanin enhanced if they believed they were equally human. But the ideas and actions that have maintained the degradation of people of Afrikan descent, have been based on the belief that people who are melanin enhanced are in some way less worthy than people who are melanin deficient.
According to a quoted variously ascribed to different people including Pope John XXIII, "What is owed in justice should never be given in charity."
That's the analysis and policy prescription for a solution.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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