As a human being, you must have asked yourself these two questions at one time or another in your life: “Who am I?” and “Where do I come from?” Modern science has revealed that our first ancestors - “Adam” and “Eve” - lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and some of their descendants walked out of Africa about 50,000 years ago. Our brave ancestors, with their adventurous spirit and resourceful minds, travelled far and wide, and eventually spread to the every continent on the planet except Antarctica and took over the world. All humans existing today belong to the same species - Homo sapiens (Latin name for ‘wise man” or “knowing man”), and are connected to “Adam” and “Eve” by an invisible thread (DNA) throughout time and space. We are ONE on the same planet, and under the same sun, moon, and stars.

As modern Africans, our ancestors had dark skins that protected them against strong ultraviolet light in Africa. As they migrated north, their skin color, along with other physical features, started to change in order to adapt to varying light intensities in the North, resulting in a range of other skin tones among human  populations, such as red (e.g. Native Americans), yellow (e.g. East Asians), white (e.g. Europeans) and brown (e.g. South Asians). Skin color says nothing about a person except that it is an adaptation of his/her ancestors to the light intensity in the place they had lived.  Modern science also revealed that all human “races” share 99.8 – 99.9% of their genetic materials. So biologically speaking, we are ONE HUMAN RACE.   

Chinese has been an oppressed “race” in several eras of human history, and has experienced racial discrimination and persecution firsthand, and therefore should be more racially tolerant and unbiased. I don’t expect that Chinese are racism-free, however, I do expect that my highly educated, liberal, and open-minded friends are “color-blind” and racism-free. But among my circle of friends, I often heard of racial slurs towards certain races – such as a Chinese version of N-word. Among most of Chinese, there is also a taboo against marrying their children to certain races. I felt very uncomfortable whenever I was engaged in such conversation and always had an impulse to voice my opinion about “races”, especially from a biological point of view. However, I am by nature not confrontational and argumentative, so most of time I just kept silent. I admit that I am a real coward and tend to bury my head in sand like an ostrich whenever I deal with racial issues.