To the Editor,
Ah, racism. Where does it all come from? Why is it so hard to stamp out?
At one time, I had the insightful idea that maybe racism was in our DNA. Bread in the bone, one might say.
It turned out I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Some dude from an Ivy League school had expressed the same idea, but the letters in front of his name carry far more weight than anything I would say! Possibly brilliant minds think alike or fools seldom differ.
But look here: Racism has taken a ludicrous form. I mean, spitting on a Chinese-Canadian because the coronavirus came from China. What could be more ridiculous than that?
In this day and age, when genetic strides, especially DNA, has shown that no matter what colour of skin, we are essentially the same people. Even Neanderthals, though long extinct, still lurk within most or all of us.
Of course, there are those who will tell you that darker-skinned people are the results of biblical “original sin.” Who believes this nonsense? Obviously more people than we originally thought.
But, ti doesn’t stop with dark-skinned people. Anti-Semitism is running out of control! Synagogues and gravestones defaced. Holocaust deniers running loose. And as Mark Levin, a liberal Jew himself since the onset of the internet. The Protocols of Zion, exposed a long time ago as a Russian forgery, are now read and believed by many times more people than in the past.
Levin also points out in contrast there are those radical Jews who want all the Palestinians driven from the West Banks and any other place near the state of Israel. According to I.F. Stone in Underground to Palestine that’s what started the whole thing in the beginning.
However, we are not here to discuss Israeli-Palestinian relations. This is just to point out, it’s not a one-way street.
It doesn’t help matters that many of our so-called “leaders” — Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi of India — use division to shore up their positions. At the moment, COVID-19 has replaced Modi’s concern about making India a “Hindu nation” but this will return, no doubt,m when the pandemic recedes.
Racism. Bred in the bone? This is not an excuse for racism. It’s just that it’s harder to deal with than originally thought.
Dennis Peacock,
Clearwater, B.C.