Remember that 2008 NEW YORKER cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Muslim terrorists? It rekindled the national debate about satire, racism, and fear, and the fire has not gone out. The excellent cartoon illustrated the lengths some minds are willing to go to justify— rather than transcend— the racism inherent in their human natures.
That's right, inherent; racism is innate in our human natures. We don't necessarily or consciously hate "others" by an act of will, we do it quite naturally. Find out what's up with that below the orange "Sekrit Muslin" [sic] thing.
Like our mammalian ancestors, all humans beings are bellicose, with fiery tempers, and mega pugnacious as a rule. Originally it served a useful evolutionary purpose when it came to survival; the aggressive and highly motivated monkey of that day did not hesitate to take his sundry array of weapons to his inferior neighbors' skulls and exterminate them. (They were sleepin' with the gibbons, for God's sake.) The species that most often won these battles progressively improved, and therefore quickly multiplied to wax fat on the land.
Soon they fanned out over the Mesopotamian peninsula. And with a mere seventy generations of evolution at work, one particular pair spawned a singularly remarkable pair of twins, male and female. They had nearly perfect opposable thumbs; they walked upright. Their brains were smaller than ours, but their improved intelligence propelled them into the leadership of their tribe, and their family grew to become the nucleus of the mid-mammals.
And eventually the mid-mammals begat the Primates. After almost nine hundred generations of development, covering about twenty-one thousand years from the origin of the dawn mammals, the Primates suddenly gave birth to a pair of remarkable creatures; the first true human beings.*
These first human beings were not Caucasians. They were not black; they were not yellow; they were not red, orange, green, or blue. They were BROWN. Their melanin most nearly resembles the present today Eskimo; they had hardly more hair on their bodies than the average person of today. They were our racial aborigines, and the progenitors of the entire human race.
But about 500,000 years ago, among the human tribes of the northwestern highlands of India, there was a new and strange occurrence. A human man and woman living in the northeastern part of this inhabited highland region began to produce a family of unusually intelligent children. And thesechildren became the ancestors of the six colored races of our world.
These nineteen children were not only more intelligent than their fellow tribesmen, but their skin had a unique tendency to turn various colors upon exposure to sunlight. Of the nineteen children, five were red, two were orange, four were yellow, two were green, four were blue, and two indigo. Their skin colors became even more pronounced as they grew older; and when they mated with their fellow tribesmen, all of their offspring tended toward the skin color of the variously colored parent.
For almost a hundred thousand years these peoples spread out around the foothills and mingled together, notwithstanding the peculiar, but natural antipathy, which manifested early between the emerging races. Those were ages of intense struggles between the various developing races, and, surprise, their eventual and gradual dispersion to the four corners of the globe did very little to alter their deep-seated animosity towards each other. They just naturally didn't like each other. And they still don't.
The original evolutionary plan of race amalgamation on an evolving world of time and space entails a gradual blending of all six colored races into a single race, that is destined to become up-stepped by an infusion of higher life plasm, in the ongoing evolutionary plan of creature perfection. Such an age is generally inaugurated by the arrival of the planetary "Adams and Eves," who are supermaterial beings; not evolutionary human beings. Unfortunately, before this racial blending project could really become functional on our world, the normal plan of racial amalgamation went into the toilet as a consequence of yet another, even more insane catastrophuque, we'll refer to as the "Lucifer Rebellion."
Let's digress a bit.
Although Lucifer was a real celestial being, by no means was he some inevitable source of "evil duality" equivalent to God's absolute cosmic goodness; he was the celestial equivalent of a local "chief executive," in charge of an inhabited segment of creation know as a "system," and encompassing approximately ten thousand worlds. In other words, he was a lower level celestial universe administrator who got a bee in his brain about just who was really in charge of the universe; as he understood it, that is.
Lucifer initiated a system-wide rebellion based on his personal notion that there really was no "God," and that eternal life was simply inherent in the universe; that all the beings above him had merely created a fiction of a God in a far-away paradise to maintain control of the universe for themselves. Harumph.
The Rebellion, shorter: Lucifer was allowed to promulgate the rebellion, but it had been immediately quarantined to prevent its spread outside his system. Nevertheless, in younger evolutionary worlds like ours, great confusion was sown in the minds of the inhabitants about the true nature of the universe, (which as you may have noticed, the confusion continues to this day). Thus when Adam and Eve arrived, they faced a growing multitude of intractable problems; not the least of which was the aforementioned hostility of the races towards each other.
But our backward planet stumbles on, more than a full "dispensation" behind the "average planetary schedule." (By the end of the Adamic dispensation on a normal planet the races are practically blended, so that it is literally true that "God has made of one blood all the nations," and that his Son "has made of one color all peoples." The skin color of such an amalgamated race is somewhat of an olive shade of the violet hue.)
On more normal worlds— worlds that have not experienced a default or rebellion of their celestial administration— the eventual brotherhood of man is always the goal of human society. World-wide peace— the cessation of race conflict and national animosity— is the eventual fruit of the long struggle of racial amalgamation and uplift.
Unfortunately, that path is no longer an option for us. To overcome the systemic racism of our peoples, we must discover new ways of transcending our natural animosity towards others. In that regard, there is one giant clue which, sad to say, most of us are content to ignore. The Son of God himself introduced it while he was here as one of us, when he said: "Love one another."
That's still the best advice anyone can ever follow.
* All historical statements in this article are derived from The Urantia Book, first edition 1955.