Janet Aird

BIO
I didn’t realize how opinionated I was until I began writing essayas, or how much fun they were to write. After 10 years of writing articles, profiles and short stories, they’re still my favorite form. “The Human Race” (below) was one of the first essays I wrote and one of the first that was published.

CONTACT THE WRITER
Email Janet Aird

CREDITS
My work has appeared in these publications:

Accent on Living
Bangtale International
California ReLeaf
California Wild
Chicago Tribune
Fine Homebuilding
Grounds Maintenance Magazine
High Plains Literary Review
History Magazine
Los Angeles Times
Mother Earth News
Pasadena Star News
Pasadena Weekly
San Diego Magazine
Tree Care Industry
Turf Magazine

READ THE WORK

The Human Race

“Are you an Indian?” a little blonde girl once asked my three-year-old, half-Chinese daughter.

“No,” my daughter answered. “Are you?”

It isn’t easy for children, learning to classify people by the shade of their skin, the shape of their eyes and nose, the texture of their hair. In elementary school playgrounds across the country, entire United Nations of them play together, oblivious of each other's race.   

By high school though, most of the strays have been herded into their respective racial folds. There, they are surrounded by people who look much like they do, and they begin to believe that people who look different, are different. Identifying with their race lets them belong to an infinitely extended family and provides a convenient source of assumptions about common culture and behavior.

It is difficult to transcend the conspiracies that exist to ensure the survival of these groups. Many people believe they have a vested interest in keeping their group intact and they will fight to preserve it. Significantly, these guardians of the gates come in all shades, and they use the same tactics.

In the struggle to preserve their race’s ‘purity’, that is, to keep outsiders at a distance, every race has slurs to dehumanize the others. They have more slurs to prevent their members from defecting. I realized this the day a Chinese acquaintance called my daughter 'whitewash' because he decided she was behaving too ‘white’.  

The problem, as most of us know by now, is that people who look the same are not necessarily the same, and people who look different are not necessarily different. People cannot be contained in neat groups the way, say, all balls of the same color can be. Racial groups are like mercury. They merge, break off, and merge again with a touch.

It’s time to accept the fact that it’s way too late to go for monopoly in any gene pool. Long before redheads wearing plaid were buried in prehistoric China, long before early man crossed the Bering Strait from Asia into North America, or even the Mediterranean from Africa into Europe and Asia, our ancestors traded, invaded, migrated and procreated unchecked. Apples have been tossed in with oranges for far too long for us to deny that we are all part of the same human salad.

Just take a look at my daughter.

Originally published in the Chicago Tribune