There have been what seem like a metric tonne of posts, polls, and blogs lately dealing with race, sexual orientation, and other similar issues. Throughout these related missives, I've spotted what I consider to be a common thread that exacerbates the problems that people cite in the form of racism, discrimination, etc.
Let us first start by examining the human race. At our heart, we are xenophobic, at best. From childhood, we react negatively and strongly to that which is alien, foreign, different. In our younger years, we react in cruel and sometimes violent fashions on the playgrounds. As we grow older, we're more restrained overall, but if we have not overcome our xenophobic nature and learned to suppress or overcome it, we can indeed be more dangerous than in our formative years. This is compounded in groups, as witnessed by occasions when mob mentality takes over.
The mistake people are making, in short, is in publicly defining themselves by major traits. People are willingly (indeed, deliberately) defining themselves as black, gay, transgender, female, etc.
The problem is not so much in that these people have the traits. There is no denying the presence of these traits. The problem is the lack of exercising common sense on a number of fronts.
On one front, defining yourself by one (or a few) major traits that happen to be minority traits is rather akin to painting a large target on your back, complete with a sign saying, "Harrass me." It's not necessarily that the traits themselves are bad. Most traits, in and of themselves, are neutral; it's how people perceive traits that sways their reactions. As a xenophobic reaction, most people tend to automatically fall back on innate fear and aggression. Even if they have tempered their attitudes and outlook over time and with some effort, people may react in a hostile fashion before they check themselves. The very existence of a trait cannot be helped in most cases. However, drawing attention to a differentiating trait is provocative, and elicits undesirable responses.
On entirely another front, people do themselves a disservice, even when socially isolated, by defining themselves in the majority by a single facet of their composition. People are inherently the sum of their experiences, and also the sum of their traits. To define yourself in the majority by only one or a few of your many traits is to deny much of who and what you really are--which generally proves to be far, far more important than whatever traits you may define yourself as.
Case in point... I suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It's a huge part of my life. But I'm not "the OCD guy". I'm just me, sans labels, barring perhaps the nickname with which I style myself.
People defining themselves in terms of being "a transexual", "a black", or "a female" as their primary distinguishing quality both negate the majority of their complimentary traits, and further emphasise their differences from other people in society. And they do this on the basis of a grossly exaggerated emphasis on one particular trait that they single out to present as their public face to the world.
This self-imposed definition and its societal fallout is not something I feel is beneficial to equality or unity. We cannot move forward to a common perception and a common set of responses in any sincere fashion while people are constantly sowing what amounts to discord by intentionally drawing attention to their differences. As a species and a culture, we are too xenophobic for the goal and the orthogonal action to be reconcilable. At best, it's counterproductive; at worst, it's intentional sabotage. There's a difference between simply having a difference, and actually flaunting that difference. There's nothing to be proud of. People simply are a certain colour. Or they are gay. What-have-you. If one wishes to actually be equal in the eyes of their peers, they need to actually act the part. When was the last time you heard someone conspicuously announcing that they're straight? Or white? And I do mean just announcing it out of the blue. You don't hear it--or I haven't, at any rate. Yet, I have heard people spontaneously announce that they're gay, as if that's some matter for special consideration. In other situations, I've heard blacks speaking and flaunting "gangsta" ebonics so fluently and arduously that it just about drives me to tears. I weep for the enhanced illiteracy of the generations of non-blacks that have grown up thinking that this is normal and acceptable. But I digress... The bottom line is, you either want equality, which means nobody should care about your differences, in which case please do keep the differences to their normal levels instead of exaggerating them...or you're out to make a statement, which only serves to increase discrimination and divisiveness.
Further, the self-definition by one trait is something that I feel is unhealthy to one's self. It could be a case of buying into one's own propoganda, in the case of extreme activists--in which case, it starts down the road to further self-delusion than already exists in the form of thinking they're actually furthering their cause, when they are, in fact, undermining it. People that buy into their own propoganda tend to start viewing the world through very poorly made spectacles of their own design--sometimes to the point of being unbalanced. It could also be the case that people focus so much on one or two traits that they happen to hold, that they lose themselves, as one loses the forest for the trees. One can become so absorbed in one's own distorted view of one's self that it becomes hard to acknowledge the host of other qualities they hold. This becomes problematic when you combine the internal resultant loss of self-worth in not seeing all of one's positive qualities, with the societally influenced subtraction of self-worth due to negative reaction caused by what is essentially divisive behaviour. Combined, the two-pronged stimulus seems highly likely to result in lowered self-esteem of those taking both hits.
That lowered self-esteem leads to anything from a perpetuation of emphasising of differences, which becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, all the way down the spectrum to suicidal thoughts, in exreme cases.
The best thing people can do for themselves is take an honest and complete self-assessment. Consider all of your traits. Consider whether it means more to you to "prove" you can be gay and good, black and good, etc., or whether it means more in the end that you can live in far less discordant harmony with the rest of society by embracing all the rest of the traits that really matter--such as being decent, honest, sincere, loyal, caring, empathetic, respectful, loving, etc.
If we ever want to get anywhere near being blind to our differences in this society, we have to get people to stop drawing attention to those differences. We have to make those differences irrelevant. We can't do that while people keep pointing to those differences, be it due to an agenda on their part, or due to some (sometimes honest, sometimes fabricated, sometimes perceived) persecution complex related to those differences. As a xenophobic species, we aren't wired to automatically tune out the differences between us. Being "colour blind", for example, is a myth. People, on the whole, aren't tuned to think in those terms; it takes a lot of effort and self-discipline to overcome what is an inherent fear and dislike of anything different. The few that achieve such a state have done so with effort, and I'm betting that even those few that exhibit such discipline in some areas are lacking that same discipline when it comes to other differences. The best path forward, then, is to stop inciting the xenophobic side of our nature into reaction.
Stop exacerbating the problem, and the problem may actually start diminishing. You cannot expect a wound to heal if it is constantly being scratched. Further compounding the problem is the fact that many (if not most) people are so conditioned by society through various inputs to conform, that intentional non-conformity is often taken as an attack upon either the person, society, or both. That isn't just scratching the wound, that's scratching the wound and then pouring rubbing alcohol on it.
In any event, definition of one's self by select and trivial criterion which should be irrelevant is damaging both to society, and to the individuals partaking of the practise.
