part of problem is.....IMO.....lot of people still see colour....instead of just a human being...
The problem with that is, seeing colour is part and parcel of being human. Everybody's a little bit racist. There's an evolutionary advantage to being so. Of course, it's not actually race, or colour, really, as there really is only one race,
homo sapiens sapiens. Race isn't a biological thing, it's a society thing. Societies divide people into groups of varying historical, linguistic, ethnic ,religious or other backgrounds, including the most obvious visual queues like skin color and round or slanted eyes. These categories are not static, of course, as they change over time as societies grow and diversify and alter their social, political and historical make-ups.
But by and large, it's mostly a case of insider versus outsider, us versus them. It happens in societies of people, and of monkeys and apes. The five major continental populations - those of Africans, East Asians, Caucasians, Native Americans and Australasians - have been evolving largely independently since modern humans dispersed from Africa some 50,000 years ago. And within those five populations, smaller subsets of cultures and ethnic groups evolved. They evolved out of necessity. Human social behavior has been shaped by evolution just as the body has been. Humans being a highly social species, social behavior is critical to a society's survival and hence a prime target of natural selection.
For instance, the first human settlements appear only 15,000 years ago. For the previous 185,000 years we existed as small, mobile bands of hunters and gatherers. All of these small groups were each the same kind of people, same colors, same ethnicity, same beliefs, same everything. People from outside the group, those other groups, were viewed with fear, trepidation and distrust, and the more different they were the more they were distrusted. Groups of similar peoples, of the same cultural ethnicity, were an advantage to survival. (which is why multiculturalism is just nuts, at least at this point in human evolution).
Was the long 185,000 year delay in settling down because our ancestors couldn't figure out the advantage of putting a roof over their heads or couldn't figure out how to plant corn? It seems more likely that a change in social behavior was required to live in large, settled groups that made it harder for lions, tigers and bears to pick off the weakest of the pack, and that it took that long to evolve.
Even though we've had the first settlements for 15,000 years, for most of those years they were still settlements of more or less the same people within. It's only been in the last couple of thousand years or so when humans overcame geography in such a manner as colonization could take place where multiple "races" have even tried to co-exist (with, of course, the more advanced "invaders" dominating and often enslaving the natives). Even the ancient Egyptians had clear concepts of light skin and dark skin, and they didn't like each other, despite being virtually the same people.
We'll eventually learn to get along as different races, but it's gonna take a lot longer than the blink of an eye that we've been trying to this point. And it certainly won't happen by next week. Or in our lifetimes.
Headline should have been: Officer shoots man in car. Investigation underway. OR
Officer shoots man while in struggle.....Investigation underway.
That's not gonna happen in a society where racism and prejudice has been such an integral part of society as a whole.
The press IMO is not helping this issue out at all...
That much is certain.
