re: The childish reasoning behind race identification

Your meaning is clear enough, even if the details are a little rough.

Instead of the Christmas present wrapping paper analogy, I prefer the old adage, “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”

It’s silly to think that we don’t all view the world through our own discriminating lens. Our visual cortex actually functions that way, looking for recognizable patterns that can be either useful or harmful to us.

Other people pose a special challenge, with lots of opportunity and also lots of potential problems or outright harm. If they are different than ourselves, the caution is understandable.

We have done a pretty good job in our society of teaching ourselves to be patient and accepting of people who are different than ourselves. We should be proud of our achievements.

Nevertheless, whether it be skin color, or language, or clothing styles, or hair styles, or whatever, we will always have preconceived notions which must be muted while we patiently look a little deeper, and see what’s in the book before judging it totally by it’s cover.