My university is currently hosting several panel discussions on the subject of race relations. As a result, I've suddenly become terribly race conscious; as someone who never even noticed before, suddenly words like "diversity" and "ethnicity" are getting awfully old. It seems to me that if people really want to make a world free of differences then we should stop having these dialogues and just get on with our lives without identifying ourselves by a certain pigment in our skin... but that's just me (and I got called a racist yesterday for having that opinion, somehow). Anyway, here are my thoughts on race:
Racial segregation is the final step before complete globalization. I am currently reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, about why Eurasia has achieved such cultural dominance in the world. The questions that much of the book is based upon is "Why did Pizarro come to South America and conquer the Inca? Why didn't Atahuallpa (the Incan emperor) come to Spain and conquer Europe?" This book addresses the historical events that continue to shape the world. Over time, humans have spread out across the world, evolving into separate "races" if that is what we must call them. Over time there arose different tribes, and those tribes became civilizations, and they developed differently. Now, we are reuniting those tribes, bringing them back to the common origins from whence they started, but they are all different, they are all separately evolved. So each tribe has its own things, and the tribe that has the most is the tribe that dominates. Environmental factors influence who gets what; so do amazing individuals working within societies. I think that globalization as we know it today, the intermingling of all world cultures, began with Marco Polo. I am probably wrong, but this is my theory. There were always cultures clashing, coming together, evolving, but never before the 13th century did someone so dramatically begin to bring these separate tribes together. The subsequent centuries saw the size of the world shrink; distances between separate tribes became shorter with new traveling technologies and new trading networks. At times this was beneficial, and at times it was devastating. The Black Death, killing anywhere from 33% to 50% of the people from China to Egypt to Iceland, flowed along trade routes. Gunpowder, paper, Christianity, Islam, silk... all these things also flowed along those trade routes. From China all the way to Northern Africa and Northern Europe, one world culture began to emerge. Natural boundaries-- vast oceans and deserts-- were soon crossed, but the cultures that lived beyond had not felt the effects of globalization. Thus they were devastated by diseases and new technologies. None of the natives of the New World had immunity to smallpox. They had never seen a horse. They didn't know the Inquisition. The natives of southern and central Africa couldn't imagine that the invaders would defeat them and make them slaves en masse. Thus, peoples were conquered, and moved around the world by these powerful trade winds. Eventually, we come to what we have today: there is no more slavery. There is supposed to be freedom for all. Yet still we live with segregation. People still stick to their own tribe, still suffer from the effects of globalization. People in Jerusalem can't forget that their neighbor thinks about God a little differently than they do, so they kill the neighbors. People in Cincinnati see the police pulling over more blacks than whites, so they riot. People can't escape.
Globalization has happened amazingly fast when one considers how much time the tribes were separate. The evolution of history does not follow the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Human thought does not change quickly, but the fact that tribes could become so separate proves that it does indeed change. Therefore, there is hope for desegregation, and things like busing are helpful, but it will not happen naturally except very slowly. If we wanted to speed it up, we would have to step in, Big Brother-style, and plan out communities according to race, forcing people to intermingle and not allowing them to move. My guess is that it would take at least three generations to complete desegregation in this manner.