Did you know there is no such thing a white race, a black race, an asian race, etc? There is really one race – the human race. Within the race we have various skin pigments resulting in different hues. This is no different than pigments making up different hair color or eye color. I hope you would feel silly if you started calling people with a different hair color a different race than you. So why do we so readily accept the culture’s norms of calling people different races based on skin hues? There’s a lot of discussion to be had there, but for now I’m satisfied if I kicked a little dirt over the dividing lines we call races.

What’s more, I believe the differing skin pigmentations are slowly going away. For many millennia the human race was scattered over the continents with almost no ability to travel from continent to continent. Given many millennia of genetic purity (pure to that continent with no mixing with the DNA of other continents), the people of that continent evolved into a standardized and optimal skin hue for that continent. You may have to stop and think about that…Given the DNA that was present on that continent with no contact with peoples from other continents and given the massive amount of time for that people group to evolve, we ended up with people looking very different on each continent. The Asians developed their look based on their DNA and the environmental conditions on their continent, the same happened in Africa, and the same happened in Europe and all other continents. The separation is what caused different hues to develop.

But now, we are seeing a remelding of the DNA because we have connected our globe with modern travel methods. We are able to move from continent to continent. People relocate, marry folks from other nations and with different hues. When we do that, we usually end up not with black or white babies, but with….brown babies.

I believe in original parents (Adam and Eve), and I believe they were a brown color. From them the various hues we have today formed. And now that we have a more united world with intermingling and intermarrying becoming more and more common, we are having more and more brown hued people. Eventually there will be no black and white, just shades of brown. Which, again, is probably the way it was in the beginning. As a man of a whiter hue, I can say this is wonderful! I’m happy to see the world becoming more unified into one hue so we can quit focusing on unimportant things like skin pigment and calling that a race. When we are all brown we will know we are one race…I hope.

Incidentally brown people tend to be healthier. They have a bigger gene pool to pull from. Hitler thought the master race would be the white race. Actually the bigger the gene pool, the more masterful the “race”; so ultimately Hitler would have created a sickly little race by thinning and thinning the gene pool.

If you’re struggling to overcome racism or even just difference with others, remind yourself of this thought about 1 race. Additionally, see if you can view the world through their eyes. See if you can understand what makes them tick. See if you can articulate their position in a way that’s acceptable to them, proving you understand, even while you reject. This can be a scary exercise. It might cause you to modify your perspective. Or it might threaten your confidence. What if there’s some merit to the other position?

Someone once told me that, metaphorically speaking, it’s easier to shoot a person with a long-range rifle than to shoot them up close with a pistol, when you can look in their eyes and feel their breath. The more human they become to you, the harder it is to pull the trigger.

And getting into someone else’s shoes can be distasteful because some of their viewpoints are so abhorrent to us that we don’t want to give them the time of day. Why would we want to see the world through their eyes? We despise their worldview to the core of our being. Why should we even try to be sympathetic?

The reason is simple, and in the end, it’s worth it. Not only will you sharpen your own viewpoint, but you’ll be able to respond to (and effectively rebut) the positions of those you oppose. And in the process, I might also learn something about the humanity of the person I differ with. How can that be bad?