PERSPECTIVES: Black History Month Belongs to the Whole Family of Mankind

By James C. Johnston Jr.

There is only one race of mankind on this planet today. It is the Human Race otherwise known as Homo Sapiens. We may look slightly different from one another because of developmental regionalism over many tens of thousands of years. Our ancestors ventured out of our common homelands in Africa to populated the whole world. Essentially all members of the human race have their origins in Africa, and Africa is our universal homeland. We are all Africans.

This is no longer a theory. This is a scientific fact which is written in our D. N. A. All human beings have common ancestors, and we are related by blood and history. The human race is one super-sized family of mankind consisting of almost nine billion brothers, and sisters, cousins, and persons of every degree of relationship. The mere pigmentation of a person’s skin has nothing to do with the intellect, genius, ability, strength, or any individual quality an individual person may have. All human beings have equal capabilities according to their individual gifts. Some of us may be more gifted in certain areas as individuals, but this has nothing to do with anything so superfluous as the pigmentation of our skin. It is true that we can inherit different family traits, but all human beings are still essentially related. “Black History Month” is a celebration for all of us.

There is no such thing as racial superiority, because we are all of the same race while sharing a planet of finite resources. Collectively we have the intellectual resources to solve the problems of all mankind, the basic problems of our human family. We unfortunately also are inhibited by residual backward racial prejudice, narrow-minded-nationalism, regionalism, and the inherited parochial bigotry of our collective culturally uninformed past.

In the Twentieth Century we began to understand after the horrible cataclysm of World War I that we had better learn how not to be so efficient at auto-destruction of the human race. This war began as European Nations, who worked very hard to be armed to the teeth with the most dynamic weaponry of mass-destruction ever seen, decided to fight it out for national supremacy as the logical conclusion to an “arms race to end all arms races” up to that time in history. Aircraft of all sorts, heavier-than-air and Lighter-than-air, battled in the sky. Millions of men exterminated each other on the ground while rushing out of trenches, and raking machinegun fire, sending out clouds of poison gas, and bombarding each other with howitzer shells. Nothing had ever been seen like it before. They were not thinking about the possibilities of killing their own brothers in this fratricidal war.

Billions of dollars were spent on super Dreadnaught battleships, and submarines threatened starvation for whole nations merely as military strategy. Nations ran-up debts never seen before in the history of the world. Tens of millions of men died. They were brothers. Tens of millions of innocent civilians died. They too were brothers and sisters. This was a stupid war. There was absolutely nothing rational about it. It was a great exercise in national pride and a seeking for revenge of wrongs done between national states before the births of most of the soldiers who died in the idiotic battles of this futile contest of national wills. It is sobering to think that the people responsible for this idiotic mass-killing and slaughter of 1914-1918 could easily fit into my dining room, but their collective and irrational hatred subsumed the whole planet and condemned us to repeat the whole stupid exercise two decades later with a new cast of horrible actors.

I believe it was Great Britain’s Foreign Minister, Earl Grey, who said, “There is no glory in war. There is only death in war.” I think that his lordship was on to something there.

In the wake of World War I, Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the League of Nations became a reality, but the Conservative Republicans killed our membership in what might have been a very effective deterrent to war in the U. S. Senate, and the United States never became a member even though we had offices in Geneva, Switzerland to keep an eye on things there and monitor the League.

A Second World War against racist German Nazism, Italian Totalitarianism, and Japanese Imperialism followed inflicting a horrible cost of life and resources. As Winston Churchill call it, “The last best hope of mankind,” the United Nations was formed, and indeed for a while provided a sort of fountain of hope for a while. This war was natural result of what happens when individual insecurity translates itself into an insatiable need to justify itself as a force of overwhelming superiority. This is the great danger of national narcissism.

Politically, the world of the late 1940’s throughout the Post-War Period was divided into two camps: those nations who supported Communism, as an idealistic future of a kind-of-dialectical-materialism-based on a convoluted view of supposed economic equality, and those nations who supported capitalism as represented by Japan, the United States, and the West. There was a “Third World” of un-aligned nations and former colonies struggling to find their own identity. It was an ugly time characterized by latent rage just below the veneer of international civility. Again, we forgot that we are all brothers seeking to survive on this little planet which were shared so fitfully.

It is essential for the survival of the greater-human-race, that he world is really made up of people of one race, one human family, and we really ought to love one another. With the coming of each new generation, I see a greater hope of that happening. I talk to a lot of young people. They are coming of age with more understanding than we old-timers, and will soon be pushing us old and bigoted fossils out of the way. Maybe they can save the world by seeing that all of mankind is of one blood, one family of mankind, a family that began life all together in Africa so very long ago. It is my fondest hope that they do a much better job of loving one another than we did , and that they too recognize the fact the “Black History Month” belongs to all of us.