Under the skin, we are all brothers and sisters

A recent article by National Geographic brought bad news for those who hold to a racial superiority of Caucasians: we all started in Africa as dark-skinned hominids whose skin did the evolutionary thing of protecting us by turning dark. In Ethiopia’s Awash River deposits and in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, paleoanthropologists say we developed from other life forms and spread across the face of the planet, adapting as we went. Those who migrated to lesser equatorial places did not need skin protection to darken it against the sun’s hostile ultra-violet rays. So, under the skin, we are all brothers and sisters.

Catholics now know that there is no doctrinal objection to Darwin’s theory of evolution of humans from apes since we have been freed from the requirement of reading Genesis literally instead of symbolically, as its author intended us to read it. He wrote a parable, not a scientific history, using a familiar teaching method for adults, much as did Aesop, from fourth century B.C. Greece. He wanted to affirm that the God of the Hebrews created the world, contrary to the rival versions of the world’s genesis from competing neighbors of Israel at the time. He had no interest in detailing how God did this. So when scientists give solid evidence that the process took far longer than six days, we say fine.

Our Protestant fundamentalist friends have not been similarly freed. They feel governed by the text of the page since they accepted Martin Luther’s doomed dictum about private interpretation: interpret a biblical text any way you like. But as soon as you accept this premise, you know someone else can interpret your same passage exactly opposite your way. So the stalemate is solved by rote literalism, binding everyone to read every syllable of Scripture as historical narrative, logically even Jesus’ parables.

Science documents how primitive humans migrated throughout Africa, up into Asia and Europe, across the seas to Australia, and finally making it over the Bering straits land bridge into North and then South America. Our bodies experienced many adaptations as we greeted different physical conditions, growing smaller jaws as we discovered the advantage of roasted versus raw meat. Or else narrower noses since we did not have to exhale as much body heat once we left our African birthplace. Or else the obsolescence of our appendix once we did not have to digest whatever it used to help digest.

Yes, we are brothers and sisters under the skin, whatever its evolution-determined color. But racial relations are so poor these days that ancient history like this has little effect on the consciences of even intelligent people who see themselves as sophisticated. Sermons from pulpits about how our grandparents arrived in America unwelcome and suspected of dark, papist superstitions do not seem to produce lasting results to convince us of the psychic harm of racism and similar discrimination. Point out that 9 million Africans perished in the slave galleys during a 150 years of slave trading, unable to make it to American shores, and little light dawns.

Yet God does not accept our stubborn refusal to acknowledge our kinship. It is God who empowers the targets of racism to rise above the systemic and perpetual abuse and to excel. It is God who speaks to the heart, convincing worshippers that, as ancient Isaiah said, our prayers are repugnant as long as we malign a brother or sister and then try to camouflage the odor with pious Sunday incense.

Here is one of the ways. Sports celebrate human strength and performance on the field of play. Our sports heroes in different sports are disproportionally black in that 12.5 percent of U.S. population is African in origin, but far higher than that in professional and college sports. Thus, bigoted sports fans are faced head-on with the contradiction of having to begrudge black players credit at boosting one’s team to championships.

The same applies in movies and music and in countless other fields. How does a racist claim to enjoy the excellence of black performers when he or she condescends to blacks? The same applies to Latino and Latina. It also applies to both genders. We need to ask why we feel so threatened by different people. It’s a kind of tribalism reaching back to our earliest days on earth. Our white tribe has to defend itself against those others who, because they are different, somehow imperil us. When put that way, it seems rather barbaric. So we dress up it in rationalizations like they will lessen our real estate value or else take jobs from our tribe or make us sing in church. People who think this way show they have had too few life experiences with these “different” people, thereby identifying themselves as narrow-minded and parochial.

Millions of years ago, God engineered our kinship, so I doubt that he will allow it to be denied.