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.