I’ve referred to this before, but not only are the answers to our society’s problems in shades of grey rather than black or white, so are our races & the way we view them.

Our society doesn’t have a clue as to how bigoted we really are until we actually stop & think about the people who we call “Black”. For the record, I prefer the terms Black & White for those races because I don’t use euphemisms, except that I’ve somehow gotten trapped into using the word “issue” at times when I mean “problem”, at least when I trying to sell a “problem” on somebody as an “issue”, but I prefer to call the so-called African-Americans “Black” & the Caucasian European-Americans “White”. So sue me or call me archaic in that respect; I can live with that, but let’s call it what it is.  After all, aren’t Egyptians & the various Muslim-based Saharan tribes of North Africa & the whites in South Africa actually African-American if they come here to live, even though these people don’t have black or dark brown skin?  Calling someone who’s Black an African-American isn’t being completely truthful, and to step away from the word “Black” by Blacks means that they’ve accepted that the word “Black” is a negative connotation that they don’t want to be a part of, and that’s truly lamentable, as we White people are the root cause of that.

We call Maya Rudolph & President Obama “Black”, but they are neither — they are mixed-race, being 50/50 White & Black, and since the term “mixed race” implies “impurity” as to race & because they have an ounce of Black blood (the ancient “one-drop” rule), our society automatically calls them Black, which is a negative in the eyes of White society if they have any color other than White in their ethnicity.

But the fact is, they’re as White as they are Black if they’re 50/50 White & Black. So think about this — if they aren’t called “White” because they aren’t 100% White, why should they be called “Black” if they’re not 100% Black?

As far as changing society’s ills & our preoccupation for what color you are, it won’t change socially until there is a desire for change in the masses, and it probably won’t change in our lifetimes and probably not in our grandkids’ lifetimes either. Blacks have been free for appx 150 years and it’s been a slow climb to get where they are now (which isn’t nearly where they should be by now & not entirely their fault by any means), and a lot of their brothers & sisters haven’t made the climb very well, if at all. They have freedom, but they don’t have true acceptance or universal social equality here or abroad, and they have a lot of problems within their own society that might not be cured anytime in the next 50 years — it took the White Italian immigrants about 100 years to rise out of the slums and be accepted as mainstream Americans & move to the suburbs, and there are still times that they have trouble gaining acceptance among the more pearly-white Americans of Northern European backgrounds.