Apparently Trent Lott’s sin wasn’t in what he believed- about this country being better off in 1948 if a segregationist Dixiecrat (Strom Thurmond) had won the presidency. His sin was in actually saying it. For many in the Congress as well as throughout this nation, it is okay to have hate thoughts, and to have a system of beliefs that denigrate and debase some people. Apparently, it’s even okay to do this shielded by a heretical interpretation of the Word, an apostasy from Christianity- a twisted understanding of God’s Love. It is just not politically correct in polite company to blurt out ones passion for prejudice, intolerance and bigotry in an opened forum- leaving the people who share your beliefs with the extreme discomfort of having to feign indignation, paste mock surprised expressions on their faces or espouse beliefs that are contrary to their actions and common discourse. It certainly would have been different and even politically correct had Trent Lott made his now infamous blurt before some closed reactionary group of likeminded bigots whose charter was an ode to self-aggrandizement through the affirmation of a neurotic mythology that made a self-fulfilling prophesy out of every absurd scrap of nonsense that they chose to endorse about their own assumed God selected superiority. <\/p>\n
Mr. Lott was stripped of his leadership power position among the Republicans in the Senate for the crime of elucidation. If you stop and consider what has just happened, Mr. Lott’s transgression is no small one. Not so much because he gave offense to a broad section of Americans whose history is marred by outrageous acts of horror and intolerance, but rather because he put at risk the continued existence of the underlying lie to which the undeserving have glutted on unearned advantage. The damage that Trent Lott did to the delusions of his bigoted buddies and to the cause of intolerance may be irreparable. Let’s hope so!<\/p>\n
Just in case Mr. Lott’s apologetic catharsis is the beginning of a cascade reaction that will be the harbinger of a new human reconciliation and understanding, here’s an essential bit of information that is unknown to most people. The faint of heart may want to avert their eyes at this point. This may well be analogous to debunking both the Santa Clause myth as well as the tooth fairy to a child. The fact is that: RACE IS NOT REFLECTED IN A HUMAN’S GENES. There is no such thing as ‘race’ among humans. About this there is wide agreement among anthropologists and human geneticists. The notion of race exists as a social and cultural construct, but from a biogenetic standpoint there simply is no marker that distinguishes one socio-cultural group from another. Remarkably darker people differ as much from each other genetically as they do from lighter people. And that makes perfect sense since they are all the same race. What makes this fact even harder to believe is that we have been so inculcated and indoctrinated to the contrary that we had to elevate visual variations of no actual significance (skin shade, facial features) up to the false domain of human racial delimiters. Even for those so-called enlightened liberal types who measure their tolerance by such utterances as, ‘They are just like us’, miss the point by a genetic mile. Of course the reasoning having ‘them’ just like ‘us’ leaves those who are members of the ‘us’ some comfortable wiggle room to be appropriately uncomfortable about ‘them’ dating our children, or ‘us’ going out with \u2018them’ to a restaurant or on a cruise. It is simply not true that ‘they are just like us’: THEY ARE US! Until and unless this fact becomes held as a truth and as a buffer against the rote lies that have contaminated our discourse there will be those of us who will cleave to unfair and unearned advantage. As long as we are opaque to the truth we will never know the pure light of true grace and redemption, and our lives will continue to be shallow and our place will continue to be purgatory.<\/p>\n
If we are to change the content of our thoughts and beliefs as acts of purification and renewal, then we should also change the syntax of our words and our language. Here are some rehabilitating recommendations:<\/p>\n
1. The word ‘Negro’ has connotations of black and death. It is not a nice word and should not be used to describe other humans. It is a word that has been a justifier of race designation and a fortifier of the notion of otherness. It should be filed in the same trashcan with the ultimate abomination word, nigger. <\/p>\n
2. It is just absurd to describe humans as black and white. This is so for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that people aren’t black or white. Beyond that which is apparent though the notion of black and white denotes things that are antithetical and antonymic: day and night, good and bad, holy and evil. We must stop cleaving from each other through the use of toxic language that nurtures a lie.<\/p>\n
3. If color or human shade designations are to be used- in descriptions for example, then we can assign people identifiers such as light, light brown, medium brown or dark brown or even very dark. Similarly noses and lips may be described as they appear: full, thin, flat, wide… <\/p>\n
4. The term ‘interracial’ is applicable in describing schnauzers, Dobermans, and German Shepherds. It has no application to humans, is totally inappropriate, and therefore should be scrapped.<\/p>\n
5. With all due and heart felt respect to the NAACP, we ought to phase out and ultimately retire the term ‘Colored People’. The term is another myth handle and propagator of the ‘us and them’ mentality. Are the people who are not colored, ‘uncolored people’?<\/p>\n
6. We must all come together on affirmative action as a moral imperative, an act of true contrition for those who are us whom we have so unfairly and cruelly disadvantaged by an adherence to a self-serving and heinous philosophy that espouses: It’s okay to do anything to anyone no matter how egregious or hurtful as long as we can rationalized it and get away with it.<\/p>\n
For those who will accept the truth about who we humans are- with our cultural and social diversity enwrapped by our now proven genetic equivalence and our individual flaws and strengths, we can celebrate our multifaceted existence, knowing that ultimately we really do come together as one. For those who would fan the flames of old myths and lies there is only anguish and anger. To promote bigotry and hatred is profane. To ignore the truth is inane. To believe that somehow this will change is insane.<\/p>\n
In the end Trent’s biggest affront was for being indelicate in his assertion of an allegiance to a system of beliefs that at its very core stems from the enslavement of human beings and the subliminal desire and longing for the continuance of that enslavement. So having opened the casket to the light we see that the evil within is still alive, breathing. Once and for all, and perhaps thanks to Mr. Lott, we should be able at last to thrust a stake into its rotten heart and kill it dead.<\/p>\n
Dr. Loucas is an Internist who heads the Department of Evaluative Medicine and Risk Assessment at the West Palm Beach Veterans Medical Center. He originally hails from Brooklyn, New York and is a graduate of the New York University School of Medicine. He is 58 years old, has three adult, beautiful caf\u00e9 latt\u00e9 children and one life mate and wife- the very noir Patricia Loucas- entrepreneuse and owner of Unique Concierge Services: www.unique-concierge.com <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Copyright (c) 2003 David M. Loucas, MD. All rights reserved.<\/font><\/small><\/small> <\/small><\/font><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Outing Race: An Essay by David M. Loucas, MD February\/March 2003<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tae-articles-and-commentary","tag-the-abolitionist-examiner"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2001\/08\/Articles-and-Commentary.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p89tuq-2S","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2672,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions\/2672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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