From time immemorial, there has been one race: the human race.  Divisions of this one race have occurred due to geographic ancestry and current location, behaviors, activities, and interests, and through all manner of other shared groupings.  We humans seem prone to a tribalism that has been encoded into the human race's psyche.  We can see this tribalism in all forms of nationalism, statism, fraternal organizations, religions, family units, and even your local hometown football team.   

The loyalty and bonding of tribalism are what keeps individuals committed to the tribe and are what allows the members to collaborate for a shared purpose.  Even if individual relationships within the tribe break down, the overarching tribal considerations remain.  The tribe's identifying features and goals remain intact.   

Unique in this mix of tribal affiliations are nations whose political philosophies, cultural and social systems, language, etc. are sufficiently incongruent to create a mosaic rather than a monochromatic picture of the world.  Attributed to former president Theodore Roosevelt, the notion of where one's "tribal" loyalty lies was at the time used as a pejorative, targeting the immigrants to America who preferred their identity and loyalty as hyphenated Americans.

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans[.]

Subsequently, Reverend Martin Luther King expressed his hope for an overarching American tribe, devoid of racial disparity that reflected the notion that there is but one human race when he uttered his wishes for the future of America.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Currently, this dream that we Americans once embraced as our ambitious goal seems to have been destroyed, and worse, by those who claim to carry the dreamer's banner.  There are those who now promote a skin color, or race-based tribal division in America, again, akin to the hyphenated tangle of President Roosevelt's admonishment. 

We can reside in or visit widely divergent parts of our country and find the same individual outcomes regardless of our now segregated tribal affiliations, in this example the color of an individual's skin.  The notion that the experiences differ between some who inhabit, for example, areas of Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Chicago, Illinois based simply on their skin color is not true.  You can find the same individual good and bad outcomes for the human condition in either location, skin color being irrelevant to the outcome.   Individual behavior and not skin color is the determining factor.  The social conditions for the American racially segregated tribal affiliations are a demonstrable lie.

So smitten with their efforts to separate our American tribe, those focused on race-based tribalism will work to destroy any vestige of our collaborative, shared purposes as Americans.

Take the National Football League.  Look in any football locker room, and there you will find people of all colors and races, and even both sexes, assembled as a team working toward a common goal.  Look into the stands and again see the melting pot of races, sexes, sexual orientations, all dressed in their hometown team's uniform and brought together for a shared event.  The game is televised throughout our country and around the world, with individuals, families, groups, and entire eating and drinking establishments celebrating this example of bringing us all together as one — momentarily suspending the vagaries of life and enjoying the NFL entertainment event as just people together.  Isn't this Reverend King's vision?

The real tragedy, then, is to spoil this example, this celebration of what many would argue is the ideal American tribal experience.  The NFL has arguably contributed to the exact opposite of what it alleges to promote.

The recent social upheaval, destruction of businesses, harm, and even death caused by the racial segregationists who claim the mantle of the social harmony dream is fully on display.  No better story can be told than the observations recently made by former NBA superstar Charles Barkley.

I truly believe in my heart most white people and black people are awesome people, but we're so stupid following our politicians, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, and their only job is, "hey, let us make these people not like each other. We don't live in their neighborhoods, we all got money, let's make the whites and blacks not like each other, let's make rich people and poor people not like each other, let's scramble the middle class." I truly believe that in my heart.

There is but one race here in America: the human race.  Anyone who tries to segregate this race to satisfy his ambitions is the true racist among us.

Image: Andy Witchger via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

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