The Truth About How Race Is Used To Divide Us in the United States
We hear the word race in the news daily. Whether that’s in regards to potential legislation, conflicts, or additional protests that have cropped up. And, in nearly every case that the word “race” is mentioned it’s in conjunction with division. The question is, what exactly qualifies race, and why is that causing so much division in the United States? We’re going to take a deep dive into our nation’s racial divide and see how exactly we can put a stop to it.
What Qualifications Determine Race
As we dive into the topic of race, the waters can get murky as to what exactly race is. Generally, race is defined as a group of people based on similar, shared, social and physical qualities which have caused them to be classified into categories created by society.
In other words, race is an idea created by society in order to separate individuals out. That means that race really isn’t something that can be quantified and is something that is founded in people’s minds within our society. With no clear cut qualifications for what substantiates race, we’re really throwing a word around without truly understanding or realizing the ramifications of that categorization.
How Race Divides Us As American Citizens
Unfortunately, the United States has a history of racial divide, and years of the nation’s division over racial differences has led to underlying bias and views on races. The US was one of the later Western nations to abolish slavery, making a division between whites and blacks a still very recent change. And, even after the abolition of slavery, there were still ongoing laws of segregation well into the 1900s.
It’s not just slavery that has led to racial divides, either. The United States has always welcomed immigrants from other countries and has been considered a land of opportunity. However, that has also led to feelings from American citizens that the “foreigners” are taking away jobs from them. This resentment has grown a racial divide between whites, Asians, and Latinos, leading to an even greater division in our nation.
Another place where we see racial divides is between native Americans and Western immigrants. Native Americans have been prosecuted ever since Westerners first stepped foot in the United States, leading to a long history of racism.
How Race Is Used to Divide People
As our nation struggles with a deep history of racial tension and conflict, it’s no surprise that race has become a divisive word. When we hear the word race, we automatically categorize people into groups of “us” and “them”. This mentality leads to separation, division, and further racism.
In addition to this, the more we focus on race and make it something that we point out in official documents and paperwork, the more we highlight differences based on ethnicity and origin rather than seeking to unify people. In essence, our infrastructure is setting us up for failure by encouraging us to think of people as “the others.”
Why Race Shouldn’t Be Included In Official Documents
Luckily, there is a solution. Changing the divide over race in the United States starts by changing the way that we think about race. We need to eliminate the idea that race is something to separate us and make us different from one another, and instead need to begin simply accepting that we are all humans.
How do we do that? We must start at the top. Part of the struggle is that our nation’s leaders, our government, and authority figures, are using the term “race” freely in public legislation and documentation. The more we see the people who represent us and who we look up to using these terms, the more acceptable we make them in our minds.
To eliminate this mentality, we need to remove the word race from our documentation. We need to begin eliminating the concept of race entirely from our official documents so that we can simply begin to look at those around us as humans instead of as “others.”
Do you believe in changing the way we view race as a country? Join Lasherry America and the LAST HEIR Society in creating a more unified nation by continuing the conversation on race and how it affects us as Americans.
Should we remove race from all official documentations?