Racism

Disclaimer: I personally try my very best to harbor no racist attitude.


Despite our efforts to combat it over the last hundred years or so, racism is still present in a great many places, some more obvious than others. Although we have made tremendous progress in reducing its effect, somehow I doubt that it will be possible to ever completely wipe it out.


Consider that people do have a tendency to regard certain groups of people as closer than others. When the closer group of people is citizens of the same nation, that is called patriotism and is widely considered a noble emotion. When the closer group of people is one's family, it is called family love and is generally considered to be a intrinsic component of human nature. However when the closer group of people is those who share the same skin color, then it is called racism and is widely condemned.


There seems to be a bit of dissonance here.


So I think that there are only two ways to make race unimportant - the first is to achieve a utopia where every one of us regard every human being as equally deserving of our love and help regardless of whether they are our brother or a stranger from a distant land. This is rather unlikely.


The second is to make race a non-factor in our emotions. One difficulty in doing this is that a person's race is often tied to his or her culture, which in turn ties to things such as religion and language which tend to have strong emotional ties. Unless these differences can be weakened as well, a tendency to prefer one's own race would be difficult to wipe out.