The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) welcomes social scientists to the business of acknowledging the 800 pound gorilla in the room. In studies conducted at the University of Massachusetts it has been confirmed that mutual trust between different races of human beings can spread just as quickly as mutual suspicion, to which The Department replies; “Well, no shit, Einstein.”
The studies are incomplete, perhaps rushed into publication by the most blatantly obvious confirmation of their findings, the election of Barack Obama, a black man, to the office of President of the United States, a nation that spent ninety years enslaving blacks and another hundred years oppressing them. DOPOTO respectfully suggests these scientists could have saved a lot of of time and money by simply investing in cab fare to the immediate vicinity of our headquarters here in Brooklyn, New York to take a good look around, maybe talk to somebody. In Brooklyn they would have found people of every ethnicity and deriving from every nation on the planet getting along just fine, thank you very much. And, being the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious, obvious being the operative word here, we cannot refrain from pointing out to these scientists that they really have to get out of the lab more.
Barring that, if they want to continue to fritter away their careers and expensive educations on confirming what everybody else already knows, perhaps they could conduct a series of experiments and studies testing the theory of gravity, maybe have some volunteer students step off balconies of gradually increasing height to see if they can rise into thin air rather than plummet to the ground. Charts and graphs could be used as teaching tools to measure how far and fast they fall to the pavement. A table of probabilities could be created as to the likelihood of any of these volunteers surviving the experiments unscathed, and at which heights the falls become fatal (Nobody said serious science was risk-free!). Everybody already knows the outcome of such scientific work, but at least it will give social scientists something to do and thin the herd of the feeble-minded. To say nothing of the brisk business they will provide local emergency room personnel and medical examiners.
As far as the people of different races getting along if given half a chance? Well, for one thing, there are no different “races” of human beings, only slight variations under the umbrella of the human race; skin color, facial characteristics, hair types, physical size and other trivial differences. Which prevent none of us from interbreeding or giving blood and donating vital organs to one another. So, their “scientific” studies start right off the bat with an erroneous assumption. Ask Tiger Woods, who’s pretty much the product of almost every sort of human being getting along very well indeed. Or President-elect Obama, who’s black father and white mother found some pretty common ground.
Race is not a scientific term, but one invented by laymen with an axe to grind. Those humans among us who are of a mind to start wars or dominate others for their own enrichment have used the term race very efficiently to spread hatred and mistrust among the peoples of this world. The terms nigger, spic, dago, kike, towel head, honky, redskin, yellow devil, pollack, guinea and a thousand more insults were created to engender ignorance and fear. And many ethnic groups have had ample opportunities to fear and mistrust other ethnic groups who enslaved, oppressed, robbed and murdered them in great numbers. The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious need not go into great detail on this point since there is no one alive outside of a social laboratory who needs this pointed out to them.
DOPOTO suggests that America itself is a social laboratory, combining all peoples of the world under the umbrella of one nation, sort of a cage match where we either kill each another or learn to get along. In America, the same kinds of people who for centuries in Europe and elsewhere met only on the field of battle with the sole aim of annihilating one another now found themselves sitting amiably together on the board of the PTA figuring out how to best educate all our children, without even batting an eye or asking themselves how this came to be. They met their former enemies and found out they were really okay, pretty much like themselves, wanting only to be safe and warm and to provide for their families as best they can.
Humans being the obstinate beings that we are, the shame is that it took 232 years to pick as our leader a black man, not because he is black or in spite of the fact that he is black, but simply because the majority of us felt he was the best man for the job. Something as simple as that turned out to be one of the more complex tasks we as human beings have performed. DOPOTO recognizes humanity’s penchant for making the simple and obvious extremely convoluted, but also celebrates the fact that eventually we get it, even if it takes centuries. We don’t have these thick skulls by accident. And besides, without this human trait, there would be no reason to operate The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious, would there? And we at DOPOTO would be out of a job, and that just wouldn’t do.