One Race ... One World

By Cassandra Franklin-Barbajosa

When Jolanda Williams looks in a mirror, the image she sees is a warm peach complexion framed in dark silky hair, high cheekbones beneath almond eyes, and full lips that slip into an easy, radiant smile. She has a face that could belong almost anywhere in the world, Mexico, India, or Indonesia. Yet Williams, the daughter of a white German mother and a black American father, has spent the better part of her 35 years coming to terms with where she fits in.

“In America, it is all about your physical characteristics,” says Williams, a resident of Brooklyn, New York, who, for as long as she can remember, has identified herself on paper as African-American. “If I were to put “white” on a job application and walk into an interview, whoever was interviewing me would assume they had the wrong person. It is unrealistic for me to think I can actually walk through the world identifying as white, considering the way I look.”

By Sharon Sebastian  

Black is good, white is bad. Black is bad, white is good. Which is it? Most Americans know that neither generalization is true. Individual character determines quality, not money in the bank, the neighborhood where you live, or the color of your skin.

Yet, increased racial tensions have caught Americans off guard. Headlines increasingly report people of all colors, in and out of the government, are today fueling racial discord. Issues of race emerged in the 2008 presidential primaries just when the race card was close to being pronounced DOA. Racial agitators seized the opportunity and resurfaced too once again provide it with life-support.

White House Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd suggested "...white people have held their jobs too long and should turn them over..." Is Lloyd's proposed redistribution of wealth ideology - socialism, racism or both? The President of the United States embroiled himself in a law enforcement fracas and interjected race. Americans asked when rapper Kanye West took the microphone from Taylor Swift at the VMA Awards, was it rudeness, racism or was Kanye having a fubu moment gone awry? People have difficulty distinguishing between racism, poor judgment, or just bad behavior when tensions rise.

By Janice S. Ellis

Color in all of its richness seems to be welcomed in many, if not every, aspect of our lives except when it comes to other human beings—of color, that is. When it comes to people, suddenly different colors and shades provoke closed mindedness rather than openness, fear rather than friendliness, oppression rather than freedom, and the baseness within us rather than the beautiful. Many down through the ages have fought and paid the ultimate sacrifice to change the ugliness, the discrimination, the injustice, the persecution perpetrated upon fellow human beings because of differences in color.

Our schizophrenic relationship with the notion of color is an age-old one. We love it in things. We loathe it in human beings. History is replete with examples of our worse behavior toward other human beings who do not look like us, dress like us, talk like us, worship like us, live like us. Today, little has changed when we look in some urban and rural areas in this country and many other places around the world.