Everyone Is African by Daniel J. Fairbanks Read Free Book Online

I am writing this paragraph on July 14, la fête nationale , also known as Bastille Day in France. On this same date three decades ago, I was riding on a train through Strasbourg, France, colored fireworks lighting up the night sky. The holiday celebrates the storming of the Bastille, a key event in the fall of the French monarchy and the adoption of the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), one of the world's most influential documents intended to establish basic human rights, similar to those in the US Constitution. Though the purpose of such documents was to extend those rights to all people, many whose ancestry was not classified as “white” were considered to be inherently inferior by commonly held beliefs and often by law and thus were deprived of these rights.
    Today I was on a different train—the number 1 in New York City traveling north from downtown to uptown Manhattan. The ride took about a half hour, and the people I saw coming in and out of the train were diverse, with ancestries from many places. Not only did they appear diverse, many were speaking different languages. I recognized Portuguese and Spanish, languages I speak fluently, and those speaking them had accents typical of Brazil, the Azores, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Peru. I also heard other languages I did not understand, as well as a wide range of accents in English. The people on the train were probably a mix of local residents, tourists, businesspeople, and students. This sort of vibrant human diversity is now commonplace in major cities throughout the world.
    Some celebrate such a mix of human diversity; others deplore it, preferring that so-called races be separated both geographically and reproductively. Even today, some people retain the once-popular belief that the “white” race is superior in intellect, health, and other attributes. Although far more people reject the notion of white supremacy today than in the past, its legacyremains, as evidenced by economic stratification, ongoing segregation, and classification by racial categories. Even among those who reject the supposed superiority of a particular ethnicity over any other, the perception of distinct, genetically determined human races often persists.
    This book is, in part, the outgrowth of conflicting race relations I have observed since my childhood. The sounds and images of the civil rights movement were a part of my youth during the 1960s. On television, I watched snippets of Martin Luther King Jr.'s impassioned speeches. The resonant sound of his voice and the hope it evoked left me appalled that people could be treated as inferior simply because of their ancestry. I was eleven years old when I heard the news that he had been assassinated, and I silently grieved for his family.
    During my high school years in the mid-1970s, I lived in a small town in eastern Arizona, not far from the border with Mexico. While most of my friends spent the summers bagging groceries for minimum wage, I preferred working outdoors on the local cotton farms alongside undocumented immigrants who had walked across the border to find employment. I often heard people refer to them as if they were less than human, using labels such as “wetbacks” or “spics.” I developed friendships with several of them as we walked side by side hoeing weeds in the fields. One man in particular became a close friend. He was obviously well educated and intelligent, and he had abandoned his career as a commercial artist in Mexico City because he could earn more for his family as a migrant farmworker in Arizona. He spoke some English, but most of our conversations consisted of him teaching me Spanish, and I looked forward each day to learning more from him. One morning, he failed to appear, and I later learned that the Border Patrol had taken him away.
    He sparked in me an interest in his culture and language that would