2007-03-22|Jean marks anti-racism day by urging continued fight to end discrimination
To the editor
I greatly admire the Governor General's fight against racism. However, when Mme Michaël Jean celebrates "Haitian slaves waged in 1904 to establish the first black republic in the world", she is building a wall. Identifying the "blacks" to be the majority makes other races less important, i.e., a reverse discrimination.
The fundamental question is: "What is race anyway?" If you measure the skin colour of human beings, the colour shading forms a continuous shade of brown. There are no clear lines separating among white, black, yellow, red, and green to categorise and label people into stereotypical visible majority or minority. There may be DNA sequences to suggest that some genes are dominant in certain groups, but science has proven that there are greater differences between individuals than between groups.
The bottom line is: "If you cannot define race, then it is meaningless." The original purpose of race is to artificially divide people for political reasons. Therefore, the solution to achieve the objective of ending discrimination is not to have better race relations but to develop a society where every citizen belongs only to the human race. Canada has an opportunity to pioneer such a paradigm shift. The goal will be eventually achieved in the 23rd century, as seen in Star Trek. :-)
