Uncollected

A few days ago, someone asked me what Black people thought of Juneteenth having become a federal holiday. I simply shrugged; after all, I'm just some random person, not a public-opinion pollster. But it reminded me of something common in the way people in the United States tend to think of large demographic groups.

Black people in the United States are a community in the sense that we all have in common some visibly significant descent from the various ethnic groups that comprise the long-standing populations of sub-Saharan Africa. And that's about it. This is different from being a hive-mind, or some other form of group consciousness. And the other racial groupings in the United States, for all that they are arbitrary, and therefore changeable, operate in the same way.

The habit of inter-group competition for (or, more accurately, conflict over) the available pool of resources has created a mentality of seeing what would otherwise be disparate and diverse groups of people as teams; and in that sense, united. But what can pass for a common skin tone is not the same as common experience; and therefore does not translate into common world view or common interests. This should not be a surprise, given that it's understood that a common nationality doesn't translate into those things, but still, there seems to be an expectation that visible appearance is significantly more than skin deep.