I agree that it is silly to expect individuals and societies to transcend race. Race is as fundamental as sex. You can no more change your race than you can change your sex.
Most of the time, most people are going to prefer their own kind. The more races and religions in a society, the more divided and weak it is. The more homogenous a white or asian country, the stronger.
Blacks, with few exceptions, will always feel like outsiders in first world countries, just as gentiles will always feel second-class in a Jewish state, and whites will feel weird in a black state and non-Japanese will feel like strangers in a Japanese state.
Gregg Howard writes for the New York Times:
Simpson’s story is that of a black man who came of age during the civil rights era and spent his entire adult life trying to “transcend race” — to claim that strange accolade bestowed on blacks spanning from Pelé to Prince to Nelson Mandela to Muhammad Ali. Which is to say, it’s the story of a halfback trying, and failing, to outrun his own blackness.
This country was built on the backs of black slaves whose lives and labor were stolen by their white masters. That theft created a caste system in which both groups of people could occupy the same spaces yet have completely different experiences: a white America and a black America. This was true in 1619, in 1865 and in 1947, when Simpson was born; it holds true today.
Yet there are a few blacks — the most singular and spectacular among us — who have unique and priceless gifts to offer. Racial transcendence happens when white America takes these gifts for itself, in exchange for acceptance within white culture. It is the mechanism through which whites acknowledge the humanity of black superhumans and which allows these few to move, supposedly, beyond blackness, their talents granting them safe passage through white spaces, mouths and memories. Every black person, successful or not, has to overcome a steep handicap; the idea of racial transcendence is anchored in the fallacy that the handicap is blackness itself, rather than a society that terrorizes and undermines blacks at every turn.
Racial transcendence is a lie, but it’s one that Simpson believed in deeply. In the first installment of “O. J.: Made in America,” a sociologist and activist named Dr. Harry Edwards describes his efforts to recruit Simpson into a collective of black athletes working for civil rights in the late 1960s — people like Muhammad Ali, Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Jim Brown and the Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their fists in a black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics.
Simpson refused. After just one season at the University of Southern California, it was obvious that he was a priceless talent. It wasn’t just that he was stronger and faster than everyone else was; Simpson ran almost daintily, tiptoeing through seams visible only to him, leaving defenders diving at air. He had emerged from nowhere, fully formed, already one of the best college running backs of all time and already more famous than most of the athletes in Edwards’s collective.
“His response,” Edwards remembers in the documentary, “was, ‘I’m not black, I’m O. J.’ ” In 1968, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Simpson believed he could escape race in America.
