“You don’t come into this world African or European or Asian, rather this world comes into you.  As literally hundreds of scientists have argued, you are not born with race in the same way you are born with fingers, eyes and hair.  Fingers, eyes and hair are natural creations, whereas race is a social fabrication.  We define race as a symbolic category, based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to the specific social and historical contexts, that is mis-recognized as  a natural category… A symbolic category belongs to the realm of ideas, meaning- making and language.  It is something actively created and recreated by human beings rather than pre-given, needing only to be labeled.”

~Matthew Desmond & Mustafa Emirbaya in What is Racial Domination?

Race is something that has come into us, spoiling our lives before we have even tasted the possibility of their goodness.  It sours us on life for who wants to live a life that is difficult?  Race makes you attempt to prove yourself before you have even figured out who she and he is.  We take on race and its defenses because we have not yet discovered the ways in which we are defined.  It puts race in our hands, pushes us from behind, calls us a name and then we fight.  It gives us something to stand on while quietly removing our individual foundations.

Race climbs onto us, becoming a world on our shoulder– “the Negro problem”, “the Indian problem”, “the immigration problem”, “the white man’s  burden.”  We carry the problem and it is in this world that we have created, which makes each of us a problem and none of us the solution.  Our racial identity mis- identifies and mis-labels us; still we will not take the word off because we are too afraid, too tired of searching within ourselves for meaning.  We don’t want to look at ourselves; we don’t want to discover ourselves.  We have turned to race for that and it has stolen our treasures.

Race bends our back, making us unable to look up to ourselves.  We don’t respect ourselves.  We find no dignity, hope or beauty in our face.  We have rendered our bodies useless in the work of newness and creation because of their color.  As with generations past, they will hold the positions of race because we are too afraid to put the word down.

Our racial identity can cause us to be killed and posits others as the enemy; still we hold onto it.  So afraid that we will not find something in ourselves worth loving and celebrating, we look to society. This morning, I hope to live in a world where race is not passed out to children as an identity but is identified as a weapon, that they are told that if you take it, you will lose yourself.