The Race Question

When is it time to break out of old paradigms? especially when they have proven to hurt and divide large groups of people and pin us against one another? I grew up in a single-parent home with little to nothing, but in some ways, the essential ways, we had it all. We had safety, shelter, food, and the love of a Mother who taught us to not think poorly but to thank God for all his blessings. So when others saw how happy the little warfare family seemed, they sought to rob us of it by lumping us into a group called Welfare Recipients, along with other names too hurtful to mention to those who have also borne names given by those ignorant among us. I grew up being placed in groups like fat, stupid, encourage, and the like; it stings like arrows, remembering how these words often came from those I sought encouragement from.

I find it offensive to be forced to lump myself into a Race Group on questionnaires at medical offices, hospitals, and any other organization. I vote we stop answering the Race question by refusing to respond to it and letting them know we are offended by the question.

Answering the Race question only gets us to question our Race and "those people" around us; we suddenly realize we are distinctly different than other groups of people, and it may linger for part of our day. What has been lingering in me for years is my questioning of myself as to why. Why do I allow them to continue, throughout my life, to place me in a corner with a group of people so different from me, often away from the people I know and love? There is no Race except in the minds of small people. I am a 2nd-generation native of North America, and my family has been here since the late 1800s. Having done my Genetic Testing, I found that my family bloodline is primarily from Italy(never a question), and to a lesser extent, Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East; so how the HELL am I considered White?

Labeling is a big part of Our Social Conditioning.

Sometimes a Label is helpful, but when it ceases to serve the greater good and becomes irrelevant, it should be abandoned.

According to Wikipedia (Warning Label: it's on Wikipedia), get my point? "A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society. The term was first used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations. By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits."

I asked Google, "What's the difference between Race and Ethnicity?" An ethnic group or ethnicity is a population group whose members identify with each other based on common nationality or shared cultural traditions. The term race refers to the concept of dividing people into populations or groups based on various sets of physical characteristics (which usually result from genetic ancestry)."

So if Wikipedia is correct, then I look nothing like the British, Irish, French, or other groups of people lumped into a group called "White"; I, in fact, look closer to the Latino than White. Time to stop the silly labeling so fat cats from pedigree birth lines can distinguish themselves into even smaller groups above the "average man"! Don't be Average, say no when you are asked what your Race is; let them choose and expose their own racism.

A New Perspective

Pull up a moment and view the world from a different perspective. It can be disconcerting and throw us off balance. Face it, we prefer right-side-up, if only we truly knew where "up" is in every situation. My perspective on life is like this picture; it can be unsettling and uncomfortable more often than not. At those times, my brain has to work considerably harder to interpret which way is up in a given situation, challenging my view. It is at those times that I must trust my gut to make wise choices. I usually begin by reading and chasing rabbits down trails, which leads to a better understanding of my surroundings and how to interpret the data.

Feeding the Gut - Going Down The Rabbit Hole
In my research for this article, I read an article by Marcia Reynolds, Psy.D., published in March 2017 in  Psychology Today. The article is on trusting your gut and is named, "Should You Trust Your Gut? How to determine if your instincts are right."

In her article, she quotes William James, who is revered as the father of American psychology. She quotes from one of his books, in which he wrote: “True beliefs are those that prove useful to the believer”. In response, Dr. Reynolds writes in her article,"Few things are absolutely true forever. Science keeps discovering phenomena that debunk what we thought we knew."

Continuing my quest to learn to listen better to my gut, her article leads me further down the hole to Emanuel Swedenborg.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Emanuel Swedenborg was "a Swedish scientist, Christian mystic, philosopher, and theologian who wrote many books and articles on interpreting the Scriptures as the immediate word of God." he lived from 1688 to 1772. Swedenborg "had become fascinated by mathematics and the natural sciences, and to study them he visited England, Holland, France, and Germany, meeting some of the representatives of the new sciences there and learning practical mechanical skills. Swedenborg’s inventive and mechanical genius flowered at this time, and his speculations ranged from a method of finding terrestrial longitude by the Moon to new methods of constructing docks and even to tentative suggestions for the submarine and the airplane."
Taking A New Perspective

According to a paper by Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge, UK, "Swedenborg’s Lunars", Emanuel Swedenborg devoted major efforts to the establishment of a reliable method for the determination of longitude at sea" and that, "mature cosmology sought a rational and enlightened model of the universe.", "he devoted several years to publishing reports and treatises on various scientific and philosophical problems—e.g., cosmology, corpuscular philosophy, mathematics, and human sensory perceptions."

The Gut, Our Second Brain
I read the following articles on the Gut and learned how we are influenced from down under. The Society for Neuroscience published an article in May of 2018 in Science Daily named: "Second brain' neurons keep colon moving", they write, "Brain in the gut coordinates the activity of millions of neurons to propel waste through the digestive system. ... The enteric nervous system is known as the "second brain" or the brain in the gut because it can operate independently of the brain and spinal cord, the central nervous system".
Another article I read on the subject was written in 2010 in Scientific American, by Adam Hadhazy, named: "Think Twice: How the Gut's 'Second Brain' Influences Mood and Well-Being". He writes: "The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system".