Race is Overrated; Ethnicity Underrated

How tired, annoying, redundant and senseless is the relentless drivel about Race. "Race" is a shallow, incoherent, arbitrary, subjective, unscientific, irrational and really useless concept! If I were allowed to banish one word from our language it would be "race." For starters: what race am I? I have nothing to do with the region of the Caucuses so please don't call me Caucasian! I am referred to as "white": I am not by any means white, I am a bashful, sandy pinkish-beige-salmon-coral-peach-camel-taupe. To stereotype me as "white" is itself a racist construction. A person's "race" tells you absolutely nothing about the person. Barack Obama is, for us, a black; in Haiti he would immediately be identified as "blanc" or white. It is less intelligent than identifying people as skinny or short or nice...entirely subjective and largely useless. "Ethnicity" on the other hand is a rich, profound, nuanced, complex reality that combines history, place, religion, culture, blood and practices to help illuminate a persons actual identity and relationship to others around. If I meet a person I need to immediately know their sex; secondly, I want to know their ethnicity and personal identity. The "race" thing is useless. The real conflict and tension is always between ethnic groups. Yesterday I spoke with a middle-aged Chinese (no not Asian or Oriental or Yellow!) who told me her grandmother died during the Japanese occupation and said she could not marry a Japanese man. Interesting, I thought: I was born a few years after the Pearl Harbor invasion but I have experience over my 73 years almost no prejudice against Japanese or even Asians (I use that reluctantly.) In my lifetime we have seen genocide in Rwanda involving Tutis and Hutus; violence between Shiites and Sunni, structured and persistent animosity between Israelis (White? Semites?) and Arabs (Whites? Semites?), massacre in Yugoslavia involving Moslems (Whites? Semites? Browns) and Serbs and Croats (whites?). The wars never involve race (since there is no such thing!) as such. Okay: a few centuries of European hegemony over the other continents did leave a residual resentment against "white dominance." That is fair enough. But it is long overdue for us to move on with our lives. I recently spoke with an highly educated, elegant Spaniard who was aware and proud of his Visigoth and Moorish roots. What do we make of Hispanics: most are some combination of European, African and American. We know from the new testing that most of us combine surprising combinations of blood lines. There is one race: the human race. We are a fascinating, marvelous tapestry of histories and cultures and our coloration, insignificant as it is, is a scale of browns from darker to lighter. Let's lighten up about Race!