Sleeping Serpent

Recently in class, we listened to a quote by John Jay Chapman...

"There was never any moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. Owing to the cotton gin it was more than half awake. Thereafter, it was on everyone's mind though not always on his tongue."

Are today's "sleeping serpents" race, immigration, our national deficit, ineffective educational "reform", Jim Crow "Justice", disintegration of family...topics on everyone's mind, but seldom on our tongue?

Unfortunately, racial categories and classifications have been constructed over the past centuries to help "prove" differences, hierarchies, dominance, superiority...Anglo-Saxon Rights, Manifest Destiny, The Master Race...

Ridiculously ironic, when we consider that all "races" are an accumulation of  human interaction over the centuries.

Paul Hoffman writes...

"Our society is obsessed with race and confused by it...we treat race as a polar phenomenon; you are either this or that."

The racial categories created by Johann Blumenbach "scientists", the United States Government Census Bureau,  our stereotyped lens of others, etc. ignores the overwhelming evidence of science that we are genetically the same. 

Hoffman notes that .012  of 1%  is what "separates" us genetically!

Will we ever be able to deconstruct our "differences of melanin" and emphasize our similarities...face our problems head on?

My hope is with my children's and student's generation!