Racism is like a royal order that is based on Divine Right. Its hierarchy descends in relation to the throne (which, for the present is occupied by the so-called "white" race), as does its chain of command, and God help anyone who dares dispute the authority of those at the top (the anointed themselves, and their henchman of any other colour) or steps out of the given line. And that is what this essay is about: Where we perceive ourselves in the hierarchy of racism, and why we accept that hierarchy. We are all touched by it, and it influences everything we say and do: Our attitudes, formed or warped by forces that we cannot identify; the lies we tell one another and ourselves; the way we accept old wives' tales and the mumbo-jumbo of demagogues as Holy Writ; the fact that we cannot or will not wake up to new realities -- the same way a person in a fire will sleep heavily and soundly, breathing in the toxic fumes that will ultimately kill him.

Most of all, what I mean to examine here is this: When something, such as the hierarchy of racism, is so obviously and patently destructive to the welfare of us all -- think of those 30 million men, women and children who perished on the altar of Hitler's (and Europe's) racism -- WHY DO WE PERPETUATE IT? Why do we allow this vile thing to lie stinking and oozing its poison in every nook and cranny of our lives?

What is more defective or humbug than the idea of race? It is a sham, a social construct, a complete fallacy. Yet and still, it defines every step of our life-long walk through everyday American life. It trips us here, it pushes us on there, it turns us around here, it propels us up one more blind alley there. An obscene labyrinth, it entices and repels, encourages and confuses, soothes and terrifies. And like any really effective labyrinth, we can't get free of the damned thing! We walk, creep, crawl, run, stumble, prance, sashay, strut, shamble, and finally -- lurch right back to Square One! And there is no Ariadne whose precious thread might save us!

Each time, we're just a little bloodier, just a bit more bruised.

There is only one way to eliminate racism, that is by eliminating the false notion of "race" and its attendant hierarchy.

It's interesting that the cockamamie nonsense of "passing for white" never really caught on in the Latin-American Catholic countries, just as Hitler's euthanasia programme and anti-Jew crusade never actually got off the ground in Catholic Italy (as opposed to the more secularised France). I have no intention of defending Catholicism per se (my church certainly has her own extremely nasty past to deal with), but I am nevertheless convinced that the Protestant ideal is basically exclusive in its view of people, not inclusive. And the particular form of Protestantism that has had the firmest grip on the American nation since its inception is Puritanism.

Puritanism is its own punishment. It is its own purgatory, its own hell. It has always espoused the idea that a person can attain "purity" for him- or herself through Christ alone, thereby nullifying sin. In other words, one can become "clean" in God's sight by accepting Christ as one's "personal saviour", and thereby be made free of guilt, shame and temptation. A Christian is, according to the Puritan definition, "clean", "undefiled" -- in other words, "pure". (Keep in mind the word "pure" here, as it is central to this analysis.)

Puritanism came to the North American continent with the little sect that landed at Plymouth Rock, and with it, all its bigotry and exclusivity. One of the most basic tenets of Puritan salvation was the idea that purity of the heart and mind is the criterion for becoming a true child of God. And if "purity" was an issue of faith, then most assuredly -- considering that non-Christian, subdued men and women plundered from Africa were being sold as a commodity on a very lively and profitable market -- it had to become an issue of commerce and public morality as well. But how could God, Mammon and the State be served at the same time? The answer to unloosing this Gordian knot was to seize on the concept of "race", a piece of nonsense manufactured in Europe in the late 1600s to justify the rampage of killing and plundering that Europe had already begun, using her gunpowder, her horses and her ships, all over the world in the 1500s, its ultimate frenzy reaching the highest pitch in Hitler's orgies of mass murder four-hundred years later.

To be "pure" was the same as being "pure of heart and mind". To be "pure" was to be a child of God. But didn't that encompass as well the idea of racial "purity"? The half-caste, the half-breed, the mulatto, the créole, was not their "racial impurity" a sign of their inferiority as well? Were they not -- being "impure" -- loathesome in the eyes of God?

But on the other hand, what is "race"? Any scientist worth his salt can tell you that about 150,000 years ago a tiny, relatively homogeneous group -- some 10,000 people or so -- wandered from Somalia and Ethiopia into Mesopotamia, and from there, dispersed into smaller groups. Some went north, some west, some east, some south again; while some remained where they were. And in their new surroundings, these groups lived, developed and multiplied, each in their own way. Certain physical distinctions became greater among them: fairer skin, for example, or darker; lighter eyes and hair; eyes with fatty tissue around them, causing their bearers to look "slant-eyed"; curlier or lanker hair; longer limbs, or shorter limbs, allowing for greater endurance in the performance of different tasks. For example, a short-limbed, heavily muscled man is more likely to be able to endure monotonous physical tasks and move heavy things with speed and precision -- as, for example, a rice-farmer or a fisherman might have to do -- whereas a longer-limbed, round-eyed man might have to be able to see farther and survive longer standing on his feet, hour after hour, keeping watch over his herds. This is probably why Japanese sumo-wrestlers and Masai herders don't resemble each other terribly much. Nevertheless, they are so intimately related genetically that a son of one and a daughter of the other can together produce superbly beautiful and gifted children.

At the bottom of the ladder of the "race" hierarchy arbitrarily created by "white" men, we find the sub-Saharan "black" man. Because he has never developed a written language or managed to perform significant feats of engineering, he is considered by his other human kinsmen to be less gifted, more primitive. But what is, for example, Louis Armstrong's music if not poetry and engineering on a grand scale, that -- however ethereal -- is nevertheless divinely inspired? As an accomplishment, how does it compare, in terms of mankind's enlightenment, progress and pleasure, with the morbid perversions that caused Hitler to murder and violate an entire world? Hitler, certainly, was at the "top" of the imaginary race-ladder, or thought himself to be. But having identified in his ideas and actions the Mark of the Beast, why do we continue to gauge things, if only unconsciously, on a scale of values that he would have had no objection to?

I point out these generalities -- and generalities is all they are! -- for one reason only, and it is this: We are ONE family, all of us. The distinctions that have surfaced among us over the past 150,000 years are superficial, and in no way static. And today, as the descendants of all of these smaller families have begun once again marrying and interbreeding with one another on a grander scale, we are once again coalescing -- in a sense -- back into the original family from which we are all descended. Despite what the racists would have us believe, this development is irreversible and inevitable. We were all "multiracial" from the beginning, and that's where we are once more headed.

"Whiteness", for example, is in bad trouble. Its foundations are beginning to quake. In the census of 2000, "white" people all over America squirmed in discomfort as the news came in that for the first time, "non-whites" are in the majority in, say, California. But things are changing all over the world, and face it, the world -- whether or not folks in DuBuque or St. Paul find it a displeasing idea -- is irrevocably "non-white".

And while we're on the subject, let's just think about the asinine word "non-white". It implies that "white" is the standard by which all else is defined, measured and categorised. Because everything else is defined in relation to it, everything else is therefore substandard, a negation of the best, a second or third alternative. Could there be any better reason for asserting that we are all "multiracial" -- in other words, defining ourselves in terms of a positive, not a negative concept? All of us so-called "non-whites", must be SOMETHING after all; how then can we be "NON-" anything, much less "NON-white"?

As for what "black" is taken to mean, a journalist called Richard Lim, a man of -- as far as I know -- oriental background (orientals being still another of our offshoot families, just like all the other so-called "races") wrote the following about the editor and renowned writer, Anatole Broyard:

"When I met Broyard at his office canteen, I did not know then that the 68-year-old man had himself erased his past brutally when he was in his 20s, and reinvented himself.

Neither did his son and daughter, nor his friends and colleagues. His erasure of the past was so total that he could live the life of a lie without being caught out by even those nearest to him for almost five decades.

It was a lifelong secret which he refused to unburden to his two children even when he was dying of prostate cancer in 1990.

Broyard was a black man [sic, my italics] who had passed himself off as a white, a fact which was revealed in 1996 by the eminent black scholar and writer Henry Louis Gates Junior in an article in the New Yorker magazine."

Let's face it: Aside from a handful of doddering old colonels, formerly of the British or French or American armies, sitting around in their clubs drinking their favourite poison, nobody of any public distinction actively pursues today the idea that black people are some kind of inferior humanity. Yes, Africa is a mess, and it's certainly not only because of colonialism that the entire continent is in disarray. Its development, because of certain cultural handicaps and inadequacies, has simply not kept pace with the rest of the world. But on the other hand, has China's? Has India's? Pakistan's? And what about Afghanistan where our bombs and missiles are, sadly, detonating by day and by night?

We have come to a complete and utter standstill, and I truly believe that race-thinking is the bogeyman behind this hatred and stupidity. Here in Europe, after the 11th of September, Arabs are being insulted in the streets -- and I mean housewives in shawls out doing their shopping for their families, for Christ's sake, people running businesses that are important to the whole community, children on their way from or to schools -- many of them are catching all kinds of abuse. People are looking at them, and deciding that they are of the wrong family, and treating them uncivily and rudely. This is disgusting!

Once, before any of this "race" meanness ever began, there was a great king called Saladin, who was the ruler of Istanbul and all of the Arab Empire. He accepted all of us -- Muslims, Orthodox, Catholics and Jews -- allowed us to work and live in his realm, and called us all "The People of the Book" (the Bible, the Koran, the Torah). He was a man who loved God, and as far as he was concerned, no matter how we worshiped, or in what way, as long as we too loved God and lived by "the Book", we were worth his protection and his succour.

Then came the Crusaders, killing everything in their path, including Christians. Just lately, the Pope has apologised for this unfortunate turn of events (I believe he was in the Ukraine). The French, English and German knights who had pledged their faith to Christ slaughtered not only the Jews and Muslims who were their purported enemies, but the Orthodox and the Catholics in Istanbul and Jerusalem as if they were cockroaches. Most of them, you see, were the wrong colour, and their religion be damned!

This is my point: racism is the foulest stain in the annals of mankind's history. The bastards that killed 6,000 people on 11 September may have been Arabs, but does that make the Arab people our enemies? I refuse to accept that because in my mind, it does not compute. And I look back on a bygone age, wishing that I might have been able to live under a great ruler like Saladin, and knowing that my lord the Christ would have approved.

We are multiracial, all of us. And we have to get over our favouritism of one group or the other, and look at who we really are. Why should I, for example, call myself "African American" when more than half my ancestors were not Africans? But then we come back to the ladder of racial hierarchy. According to this scheme of things, African blood is a taint, a stain that "all the perfumes of Arabia cannot wash clean". I don't agree. I am a mixed-race woman and damned proud of it. My African blood is as precious to me as the blood of the Cherokees, Seminoles, Irish and French that runs so exuberantly in my veins. I am the ultimate American, the "purest" of our kind.