Dear Editor,

The idea of race is still an insistent force that decides how we view people with different shaped eyes, nose, hair, or skin colour.

The concept of race is a powerful energy that determines how one views others of a different race as highlighted during the novel coronavirus pandemic when harsh treatment was directed toward the Asian community because some people blamed China for the pandemic.

Also, this same ‘fictional disease’ of superiority may have triggered a Caucasian 18-year-old in Buffalo, New York, where he was reported to have said, “Sorry,” when his weapon mistakenly faced someone who externally resembled him. Hmm..

But racism is just another fictional version of human prejudice in which the phantoms that we create become and replace the reality no matter how much the actual truth may differ.

Therefore, a race of people may either become falsely inspired or discouraged by the accidental shade of skin or shape of physique. If the world could be compared to a garden, it would be delusional to divide and extol the virtues and colour of a specific rose above another for which the differences are meant to coexist and to inspire collective enrichment.

Race and racism are undeniable; however, many try to discount its existence or to rationalise its unimportance. Yet it can easily become a reverse enchantment that seeks approval by virtue of the same external differences and not for who we intrinsically are — human beings and brothers of different casts and mien.

It would be an indictment to the connective importance of man to make barriers of colour when science is making bridges, or to be imprisoned within walls of varying shades when the reality sets us free.

Homer Sylvester

Mount Vernon, New York

h2sylvester@gmail.com