(ThyBlackMan.com) This weekend, still pregnant with freshly minted 2012 resolutions, we commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visionary spirit and legacy. In keeping with that legacy, along with resolving to tackle global issues of world peace and economic justice with Gandhian-principled elegance, what better overture to Dr. King’s dream of racial equality than to become a completely post-racial, bi-racial society where cultures and races blend and meld into one another seamlessly.
According to CNN, interracial couples and marriages are at an all-time high; however, they still represent a minority of newly married couples. The Pew Research Center calculates that one out of seven new marriages in the U.S. is either interracial or interethnic, reflecting that the significance of racial and ethnic distinctions is diminishing amongst younger adults. The multi-racial Occupy movements reveal that green, represented by cold hard cash, 
or the lack of it, is the color on the minds of young Americans protesting the ever-increasing class and economic divide.
This lack of racial bias amongst younger Americans was recognized as a national strength in facing down economic and social challenges by the panelists—who included Tavis Smiley, Dr. Cornel West, Suze Orman, and Michael Moore—at yesterday’s Remaking America from Poverty to Prosperity tour at The George Washington Lisner Auditorium. The burgeoning numbers of interracial unions is a positive indicator which can still be improved upon. This MLK Day weekend, let’s declare a mulatto nation uprising by encouraging inter-racial and inter-cultural unions!
As woman of African, Irish, Mexican and Native American descent, married to a husband of Senegalese and Portuguese descent, I am very much a proponent of the premise that intermarriage contributes to inter-cultural understanding and diminishes racial prejudices and tensions. Romantically, it’s also spicy and thrilling to find love in the less familiar by defeating implicit, hardwired biases against those who are different.
A society where it is difficult to discriminate racially against your fellow woman or man due to familial ties, racial ambiguity, and increased racial inter-connectedness, is what I believe Dr. King projected in his “I have a Dream Speech,” in which he conjured up images of “little black boys and girls….holding hands with little white boys and girls.” By coalescing along more substantive lines than race, we can more effectively challenge systems that we perceive are unfair, demand more from our leaders, and be less easily divided by the elites and corporate interests.
After all, “race” is literally a science fiction. The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Human Genome Program has found that “race” does not exist and that it is a fallacy not based in science. My notion that racial classification is a faulty measure was inspired years ago by my former father-in-law Martine Rothblatt, who penned the book The Apartheid of Sex: Manifesto of the Freedom of Gender, challenging legal distinctions between the sexes.
Martine, formally Martin—a transgendered author, lawyer, pharmaceutical entrepreneur—transformed from a man to a human without boundaries, not only challenging preconceived notions about differences between men and women, but also alleged differences between “races.” Through Martine’s own inter-racial marriages and scholarship, she promotes the notion that inter-racial unions create stronger and more diverse, adaptive gene pools.
With racial classifications having no scientific merit, I would challenge their utility as a method of state-sponsored data collection and categorization of people. I’m suspicious of government and corporate interest in keeping people divided. The reinforcement of state-sanctioned, non-existent racial differences only serves to segregate as opposed to unify.
While further entrenching racism through highlighting superficial differences, racial classifications are a distraction from the real issues of the economy, joblessness, lack of health insurance, and injustice. Those are the substantive issues around which we should coalesce as communities—not race.
For instance, politicians from President Barak Obama to Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul have acknowledged the existence of troubling discrimination in the criminal justice system based upon race alone. The Washington Post and ProPublica recently reported that whites were favored over the past decade in presidential pardons over similarly situated minority applicants.
Noted disparities based upon race still persist in the provision of adequate health care and in equal access to quality education. However, as the Occupy protesters highlight, those disparities are also class-based, impacting a broad swath of America’s population, ergo the 99%. To truly live up to Dr. King’s expectations, the issues of income inequality highlighted by a global band of young protesters should be tackled as cohesive communities unified, and not as racial, cultural affinity groups.
So how do we combat against racial discrimination and inequality? We do so by ignoring race, down-playing our differences, and by becoming the mulatto nation that Dr. King conceived. By ridding ourselves of artificial, man-made racial classifications, we take away racism’s greatest vehicle for advancement and entrenchment, our own belief in the reality of “race.”
We will only be able to rid our society of this toxic racial caste system, that degrades us all, by ceasing to legitimize “race” as a way of distinguishing ourselves. Therefore, this MLK day weekend, in the spirit of Dr. King, swerve out of your own lane to embrace, date, and love someone different than you. And the next time you have to check the racial box, perhaps opt out by indicating your affiliation with the human race, because at the end of the day, that’s the only race that really matters.
Staff Writer; Joy Freeman-Coulbary
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