Editor:
As long as we insist on dividing humans into arbitrary races we will have racism.
If someone would suggest to group all black dogs into one race and all brown and white ones into another one, we would just laugh. But we do just that with people.
Dark-skinned people live in tropical regions. In spite of having similar skin color, they are very diverse. There are the various people of Africa: Pygmies, Bushmen, Bantus and many more. There are very dark people in the Asian tropics and there are the Australian Aborigines.
To lump them all together as “Black” is just ridiculous.
All people, with the exception of albinos, have the pigment melanin in their skin.
In the deeper part of our skin, melanin-producing cells inject melanin into the outer skin cells. Once inside these cells, melanin is destroyed. The darkness of our skin is determined by the ratio between production and destruction of melanin in our skin cells. You are darker if the melanin stays longer in those cells.
Dark people have a slower melanin turnover than paler persons.
You see, even our skin is not that different, and we are all “colored” people.
When the ancestors of the northern people left Africa, their dark skin was impractical because the sun was much less intense and not enough radiation could penetrate to stimulate vitamin D production.
Thus, people with a high melanin turnover had better survival chances in the dark North. However they still have the same melanin producing cells under their skin. They are just a lighter shade of brown than their tropical brethren.
We are all “colored” people!
Why can we not stop to blow minor differences between us out of proportion and start to accept that we are all just humans?
Wolf Krebs
Sweet Home