There is but one race - the human race

It's been a while - but I'm not giving the bloging up. In september we had general elections here in Sweden. And ended up with a new political party in our parliament. A party that got in there because of their populistic ideas about immigrants and people of other cultures and ethnicity. I find this a huge failure and feel ashamed of my own country. We will all have to live with the consequences and we all need to take responsibility for making it right. The question is how to do that?

Reed Joseph Conrad The heart of darkness or almost anything by Sven Lindqvist, what specifically comes to mind is Utrota varenda jävel (Exterminate All the Brutes), which starts like this:

You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What we lack is the courage to recognize what we know and draw the conclusions.

 

For me - when it comes right down to it - the heart of the matter is that we are all human and that is all that really matters. Or in the words of Edward James Olmos, at the UN headquarters in 2009 in his capacity as one of the leads of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica:

I still find it incredible that we still use the term race as a cultural determinant. To this day—you should have never invited me here because I detest what we’ve done to ourselves out of a need to make ourselves different from one another—we’ve made the word race a way of expressing culture.
There’s no such thing and all you high school students bless your heart for being here. You are a hundred champions right now that are going to go out understanding this. The adults in the room will never understand it. Even though they’ll nod their heads and say you’re right they’ll never be able to stop using the word race as a cultural determinant.
I just heard one of the most prolific statements done by one of the great humanitarians. He’s really trying to organize and bring us all together and he used the word race as if there is a Latino race, an Asian race, Indigenous race, Caucasian race or a Latino race.
There is no such thing as a Latino race, there never has been, there never has been. There never will be. There is only one race and that is what the show brought out. That is the human race period.
Now the pressure comes, why did we start to use the word race as a cultural determinant? The truth is that over six hundred years ago the Caucasian race decided to use it as a cultural determinant so it would be easier for them to kill another culture. That was the total understanding, to kill one culture from another culture. You couldn’t kill your own race so you had to make them the “other” and you to this day—I’ve spent thirty-seven years of my adult life trying to get this word out and now I am done and well prepared as the admiral of the Battlestar Galactica to say it to all of you—there is but one race. That is it.
So say we all

So say we all!