Thank God We’re All People of Color

A January 16, 2012, editorial in our local Daily News-Record cited Pat Buchanan’s recent book, “Suicide of a Superpower,” as questioning whether “the demographic change of the United States from a predominantly white, culturally European country to one in which whites are a minority, and multiculturalism rules, is a good idea.”

I find our paper’s unapologetic inclusion of “white” in this summary of Buchanan’s views to be disturbing, especially in light of this appearing on Martin Luther King Day. Buchanan appears to believe that our survival as a "superpower" is dependent on our remaining largely members of a superior (?) Aryan race and culture. The example of Nazi Germany should have taught us the hard lesson of where that kind of thinking can lead.

Or Buchanan may believe nations should preserve their own distinct cultures and color, and that we should regard each as “separate but equal.” Growing up in the segregated south, I know all about what that really means--that some people are to be regarded as more equal than others.

Do we really want to be a democracy that would exclude non-western Nobel laureates like Leymah Gbowee, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Archbishop Tutu, or the Dalai Lama just because of their skin color and/or ethnic background? Or that would not have welcomed "wise men from the east" or a brown skinned Palestinian Jew like Jesus?

Personally, I’m glad that God made us all shades of color--from tan and pinkish to dark brown and ebony--and that inside, we are really all the same.

And we "Caucasians" can be especially grateful that we’re not actually “white,” God forbid, as in the color-of-this-page white, or kitchen appliance white. To be bleached of all skin color would be ghastly indeed.