Formatting my 2000 book Impressing the Whites in order to make it easily available on createspace.com and Amazon, I was surprised by some lines in the document (yes, authors write many books, and sometimes forget much of what they’ve written in their earlier books), such as this paragraph:
… as the number of wars and the unhappiness caused by bigotry are increasingly unnecessary in an age in which we are moving closer to a world wherein a man or a woman can say: I am not only a man, I am also partly a woman, and partly an American, and one-third an Asian, and one-sixth an Indian, one-hundredth a Jew, and one-fiftieth an anarchist (and so on — this is just an arbitrary list), because all these tendencies and elements are blended in me …
[end of quote]
I realize the risk of quoting any random lines from Impressing the Whites: it is likely to give a distorted impression of a book that is far more complex than its provocative title.
But, in view of the Paris attacks, and the tendency of human beings to see only their pain, not the suffering of others who look different from them (no matter how different we look, the difference between the DNA of one human being and another is a maximum of 0.1%), I think this is worth reflecting on.
Interestingly, I wrote this long before I read that it’s been established, through linguistic and genetic research, that all human beings originate from Africa: whether we are white, black or “yellow,” our ancestors are the same group of human beings living in Africa between 150-200,000 years back. Which, even more profoundly, confirms my statement in Impressing the Whites, which is one of my most-read and most-discussed books: that we all contain the other.