Where I work, we have three classes of employee: Military, government civilians and defense contractors. I’ve been all three of those–sometimes two at once–so it really doesn’t matter who I associate with. To others, it matters a great deal. A few weeks ago, we had a organization-wide meeting called a Commander’s Call. That weird shyte was on display.
Of course, BSP noticed the government civilians sat in one section of the room. The military did in another and the contractors did in a third section. I said “there’s only two places you see this kind of segregation: Here and at church.” Two persons heard me say that; one laughed and the other one pretended he didn’t. I said “it’s okay to laugh at that, I know its funny.”
And even if it wasn’t funny, it’s still true. At one of those meetings, to be a super-douche, I plopped myself in one area of the room completely occupied by another group. Of course, the group I “belonged” to gave me a hard time afterwards.
Let’s face it, church is one place that’s heavily segregated. You’d think God would like us all to get along Rodney King-style, minus the terrific whooping he received. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it is. People go to church with other people they have stuff in common with. They also go to be with their friends, who typically look, act and work like them. The only non-segregated church I’ve been to is the one on military bases. I think that’s mostly because they have to be integrated.
I now consider myself multi-racial. Why? Because a lot of people in my line were race-mixing a long time ago, before I was created. In fact, I believe one genealogy website claims we (this means everyone) share a common ancestor who lived 65,000 years ago. Therefore it makes no sense to me to think differently of someone because of their race. Plus now, we have global range. People can like and meet people on other continents, get together and have multi-racial kids. It doesn’t even matter to me. As a matter of fact, I think it’s kind of cool.
Unfortunately, like my government civilian-military-contractor example, it matters quite a bit to some others. Sometimes it’s brought up where we can’t just ignore it. Like in politics, the last refuge of the uber-douche. We’re not even getting into that today. Politics is just a horrific mess.
Liked your insight a lot!
It’s like at my High School, people automatically segregate based on race/common interests. And normally people didn’t venture to another environment. Even happens at my University. You rarely see a mixed group of people studying together. I’ve even heard Black people talking about sitting away from white people on purpose and same goes for white and black when it came to Chinese and Japanese students.
I think it’s interesting how people can intentionally stop themselves off from learning about different people and cultures. I also think its interesting how group dynamics work; where a person gets criticism from their own group for being willing to venture outside that group. You know, like certain people dating outside their race…