We Are All Minorities, and the Faster We Realize This, The Better

If a minority group is one which comprises less than 50% of the a population, then everyone is both in the majority and in the minority at any given time depending upon how that person is defined. The sooner that the majority of us realize this, the sooner we can enter a much better world. 

Minority status, even with respect to only one classifying trait, is relative. For example, if you know someone is a dark-skinned human being, you cannot tell, based on that information alone, if he/she is a minority or not. On planet Earth, he/she is a minority (depending upon how you classify the skin-tone of East Asians, Middle Easterners, and North Africans). In Atlanta, Georgia, he/she is not a minority. In Africa, again, not a minority. 

Our status as a minority also depends upon which and how many traits we use to define ourselves. For example, I'm white. In America, that makes me a member of the majority. However, if I choose another trait of mine such as my eye color (blue), then I become a member of a pretty small minority. Moreover, no matter who you are, eventually you will find yourself in a minority of the human population in any given area if you count enough of your classifying traits. For example, a white person with brown eyes is still in the majority in the United States. But what about a brown-eyed white person who is obsessed with belly-dancing? Minority. What about a brown-eyed white person who can dunk a basketball? Minority. On the other hand, you can make yourself a member of a majority any time you want as well. A person of East Asian descent is of a small minority in most of America, but what if she classifies herself as a woman instead? Now she is in a world-wide majority. A black man may be lactose intolerant. Majority. Do you have a beating heart? Majority. 

So why does all this matter? All of the divisions I have mentioned above are completely arbitrary. If you care about the fact that people are black or white or Asian, that is a completely arbitrary thing to care about. Moreover, the only reason you do care about it is because racists in the past cared about it, and you have inherited a society riddled with the disastrous results of making such classifications. Every single person on Earth would be very alone if he or she only associated with people EXACTLY like him or her, and it's very likely that each of us has more in common with many people of a different skin color than we do with people who share our skin color. Choosing to empathize and identify with some people and not others is a primitive instinct born from the infancy of our species, and it needs to be scrapped. Now.  

This doesn't mean that people should deny their identities. I am arguing for a re-imagining of identity. Nobody puts me in a class of left-handed people, and I don't feel at all badly about that despite the fact that there are never adequate scissors for me so I had to become a right-handed cutter. Why? Because I don't tie my identity up in which hand I write and cut with. You choose your identity, and if you have chosen to make the color of your skin a crucial part of who you are, you are making that choice because a racist made it for you generations ago. If people had been enslaved or denied equal rights based on which hand they used to write with, then we'd all be obsessed over left-handedness. You can choose to identify yourself in ways that bond you to other conscious creatures on the planet, or you can choose to identify yourself in ways that separate you from many of those fellow creatures. It's up to you. 

Now I know that some liberals are going to go nuts and call me a "color-blind racist." I know that what I am arguing for would end the academic careers of critical race theorists and feminists, and I'm fine with that because the following is indisputable. If today everyone on Earth begins to think of himself/herself as a member of the class of  conscious creatures first and foremost with little to no regard for any of his/her other inherent traits, tomorrow will see the beginning of an unprecedented age of peace and happiness (and vegetarianism). We know what will happen if we keep doing it the other way.