Maybe I'm disheartened with the human race. Yes, the human race. All of us clumped together. We are all guilty of the situation we find ourselves in today, where there is discrimination based on the vain differences of the color of skin, an irrational fear of alterity, and the instinctual and immediate assumption of a monstrous "other" the moment we are confronted with even the most miniscule of differences.
Sure, we "dance around" the subject of race. We still can't even concretely define it. It exists, certainly, but as something negative, something in opposition: we are always not-someone else; we never really are anything, because we fail to pinpoint what those differences really are and what it is that distinguishes one group from another. So, of course, we dance around the subject of race. What else can we do with a bottomless pit of an idea like that but fall down it?
The irony here is that we have already fallen down that abyss of an idea; the problem lies in the fact that we fail to realize it or understand what that "falling" means. We have no solid ground to compare it to because the culture we have been born into never taught us what it is we're supposed to be so afraid of, or so celebratory of.
I suppose I'm frustrated. The last class was very good, from my perspective. We asked a lot of very good questions concerning "race," ended up discussing personal experiences and ideas instead and still, people call this a "dance." What else can we do with such an ambiguous notion other than discuss our own experiences and bat around our questions? In order to concretize race into something definitive that we each can understand, we have to talk about our personal experiences with what we think it is, about our qualms with it, about our fears and about our frustrations, perplexities, and agreements.
I have the sneaky suspicion that we will never know what "race" really is, because I suspect that it is whatever we want it to be, or believe it to be in any given moment. We pass those abstract ideas on and the cycle continues. Perhaps race really is merely an illusion, but an illusion believed in so zealously by all of us that it has grown a personality and substance that has chained all of us. Maybe instead of griping over dancing around the subject of race, we should ask ourselves why we dance and whether that dance is really around the subject. Maybe it is subject, because, like race itself, the dance is just an illusory construct and all of us are prisoners in our own delusion.
