The Common Good

March 7, 2021

Is your skin color the most important part of your identity?

If you are a white nationalist on the far right of the political spectrum, or a progressive in the far left wing of the Democratic party, then the answer to that question is probably yes. For many conservatives and liberals, race is the determining factor in who they consider themselves to be. And the two main competing camps in this nation’s racial drama are white Americans and black Americans.

A recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Jorge Ramos, a Latino journalist and pro-immigration activist, blamed Donald Trump and anti-immigration white people for the racial tensions in this country.

But in yesterday’s Times a Korean-born American named Jay Caspian Kang wrote a more nuanced essay specifically acknowledging Asian/black conflicts and exploring the complexities of racial tribalism in this country. At one point he referred to racial politics as “a zero sum game in which everyone loses.”

In response to his essay, a reader identified as Charlotte from Atlanta wrote in an online comment:

The current orthodoxy on race in the U.S. pushes all of us to identify with, and be identified by others with, our race above all other identities. The races are then sorted into groups of oppressors (white people) and the hapless oppressed (everyone else). If you are an oppressor, you are supposed to commit your entire life to “the work,” i.e. expiating the collective guilt that you bear as a member of your race, regardless of your personal actions, choices, and beliefs. The oppressed, meanwhile, are treated as morally childlike victims – incapable of perpetrating racism themselves, not responsible for their own decisions or choices, and incapable of being successful or self sufficient without the intervention of others.

When an oppressed group contradicts this narrative (e.g. by academic or economic success, voting Republican, opposing affirmative action, etc), instead of taking a hard look at the narrative, we just move that group into the oppressor category. It’s happening to Asians and segments of the Latino community already.

Asking people to sacrifice for the common good is far more successful than asking them to sacrifice for someone else. By pushing a politics of polarization, we’ve destroyed that sense of common good and created precisely the zero sum game the author describes.

And what is the “common good” to which Charlotte refers? Public health, the economy, climate change, education, public safety, and housing are issues that affect people regardless of skin color. In my view, problems such as income inequality are less about race and more about class.

That’s not to deny that race, culture, and gender are significant factors in how people treat each other. Those factors are true not only in the U.S., but also in Africa, China, India, Japan, Vietnam, Europe, and everywhere else I’ve ever visited. So the attempts by progressives to blame racial prejudice on white institutions in the U.S. and Europe are simplistic at best. Racial and cultural frictions are an international problem, a challenge for the only race that really matters: the human race.

What we need here in the U.S. and around the world is not the left wing and right wing emphasis on racial identity, but a larger vision of our shared humanity. A common good based upon a more evolved consciousness of who we really are – interconnected souls – rather than the shallow, ego-based identification with our various racial, political, and religious tribes.

One reason I’m not too attached to my skin color, nationality, or gender is that I see those variables as being temporary. Because I believe in reincarnation, I thinks it’s likely that in future lifetimes I could well be, say, an Indonesian woman or a Nigerian man. And for all I know I may already have been an African American woman or a Mexican Indian man. These identities are fluid and temporary, from my Buddhist and metaphysical perspective, so labeling each other according to racial classifications is short sighted and ignorant.

Our true identity is not based upon the color of our skin, but rather is about the content of our character. We are not our race.