U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is Correct!

Last month, which marked African-American Cultural Heritage month, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called America a "nation of cowards" for its collective timidity to openly discuss race relations issues. He is correct!

The nation is long-overdue for such discussion, provided that its goal is the arrival at historic and scientific truth, and not political indoctrinations into political correctness. Some very important questions on this topic must first be raised.

Firstly, what is race? Is it merely a figment of our collective social imagination, or does it have scientific and historic reality to it? We should begin by dispelling the myth that skin-color alone defines it: Besides the many different peoples of Africa, the Dravids of South India, the peoples of Papua New Guinea, and the Maori of Australia and New Zealand also have dark-colored skins. But there is to date no evidence proving a common origin for these various peoples. Such factors as differences in hair and skin textures, prevalence of differing blood-types between racial groups, and differences of bone structure may also figure in, to delineate races, one from another.

Most people today are of varied racial heritage, very few are pure, without any historic contribution to their genetic configuration from other distinct groups. DNA testings could easily corroborate this claim.

Some say race is the result of environmental pressures exerted on people over eons of time, but this claim has yet to be proven. If this claim is true, for example, why are not the peoples of South America living within the same latitudes as the central third of Africa also of the same race or skin-color? The scientific evidence suggests that any one individual's race would remain indefinitely constant down through many successive generations, despite one generation moving to a different environment and then the descendants remaining there forever. The distribution of both light-skinned and dark-skinned peoples would appear to span a wide diversity of physical climates.

What about the use of racial labels? These are often, regrettably, of inaccurate application. For example, the term "African-American" ignores the fact that Africa is a continent, not a race, and it therefore includes many divergent peoples, including Arabs and Berbers of North Africa and Dutch Afrikaans whites of South Africa, as well as the darker-skinned denizens of the African continent elsewhere. Also, the word "Hispanic" cannot denote a race. It merely denotes a language, spoken by persons of considerable variety of skin color.

In short, it is extremely difficult to clearly delineate, for government legal purposes, one racial group from another. The best socio-political solution to the dilemma is to adhere to the U.S. Constitution 14th amendment, and deny the claims of any creditor race or debtor race existing in the United States. Under the law, race should not matter.

There are a few embarrassing proverbial "elephants in the living room" on the topic of race. Why do African-Americans dominate the sports scene, while East Asians and Jews almost uniformly excel head-and-shoulders above everybody else in academia? But given that physical and intellectual supremacies can be used for wicked and evil as well as for virtuous purposes, we need not give the topic more than superficial pause for reflection.

-Lawrence K. Marsh