Growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the 1960’s and 70’s might not have been so bad. Neither would being born to a dysfunctional family, or biracial. But when you put all of these things together, the effects can be devastating. Nurturing is important under any circumstances, and when it is lacking, people will usually seek solace elsewhere. When even that elsewhere is unavailable, a person might be inclined to turn more deeply into him or her self. This is what I did throughout most of my growing-up years.

Children want to feel part of a group -- that they are like everyone else. In my early environment, it was easy to buy into the idea that being black was somehow better, and that I didn’t quite measure up. Practically everyone around me was black, and so, it seemed that they must be right. Later when I moved out into the larger world, I began to get a truer picture. I realized that every group, especially the disadvantaged, wants to feel that they are somehow better. Modes of expressing this feeling may vary -- sometimes subtle, sometimes not. Even with this realization dawned on me, the old ingrained attitudes were hard to shake, and probably still affect me to this day.

The prevalent view about race is wrong in my estimation. The one-drop rule is crap, and the idea of a pure white race is nonsense. These ideas are consistent with white-supremacist philosophy. The irony is that most blacks seem to buy into it as well. This brainwashing by the dominant society is much like the brainwashing I experienced by black society as a child. Realization of this intensified my mistrust, causing me to believe no one and reject all advice. I felt I had to find my own way.

My exploits in early adulthood were not always honorable, but they led me down paths I might otherwise have missed. I questioned not only concepts of race, but of morals and of good and evil. I experimented with various drugs. One substance in particular was so potentially dangerous, I am lucky to have survived. I came away, however, with a great many new ideas and visualizations about existence, humanity, and our place in the universe. I gained the incentive to study the sciences and humanities in an attempt to better understand and interpret these experiences. Somewhere along the way I got the idea that all this would make a good story. An autobiography seemed somehow inappropriate. In order to embrace creation, history, and destiny the way I wanted would require something different -- a literary vehicle that could encompass past, present, and future -- a timeless five dimensional sort of a concept if you will. My book ‘The Pharaoh’s Son’ was the result.

My spirituality has grown of a need to establish a spiritual foundation upon which I could feel secure -- a need to believe in something firm and universal -- something that does not change with the whims of humanity. With such a worldview, it matters less how people choose to label me. The time will come when today’s labels will be curiosities for study by future scholars.

In examining the long evolution of humanity, we can find oscillating phases of isolation and miscegenation among groups. At times, people in different parts of the world become isolated by changing geographic, climatic, economic, technologic, and social conditions. At other times, including the present, similar factors working in reverse bring groups together and encourage miscegenation. The isolation phases have led to more or less distinct groups, sometimes referred to as the ‘great races of humanity’. Anthropologists have labeled them australoids, caucasoids, negroids, mongoloids, etc. The miscegenation phases have led to less distinct groups such as those found in Polynesia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the hodgepodge of North and South America. In the United States, miscegenation has not yet advanced to the point of an established widespread culture. The process is painful, but then maybe that’s always been the case.

If one accepts the anthropologist’s notion of race, we can say that many Mediterranean people of Portugal, Spain, and Italy are some mixture of Caucasoid and Negroid. We know that a considerable Negroid strain could be found among the Moors of northern Africa and the Middle East. We also know that the Moors occupied parts of Europe until at least the fourteenth century AD. The surname Moor, along with its various forms: Moreau, Moretti, Morel, Morris, Morrison, etc. can be attributed to an ancestor who was a Moor. The English name Blackmoore comes from the term ‘black as a Moor’. These claims are further supported by the fact that the family seals will usually bear the likeness of a black person of Negroid type. It is interesting that in Germany, the names Schwartz, Schwartzkopf, Schwartzenegger, and the like will be represented by similar seals.

According to the scientists, not all blacks are Negroid. The Ethiopians of east Africa have complexions raging from light brown to very dark, and yet, they are classified as Caucasoids. This is largely due to the similarity of their skeletal structure to Caucasians.

The relationship between the Ethiopic region of Africa and the Middle East appears to go at least as far back as the time of Genesis, that is, if name associations have any meaning. The term ‘Hamite’ refers to the children of the biblical Ham, and ‘Kushite’ refers to the children of the biblical Kush. Kush was the son of Ham who was the son of Noah. The land of Kush is what we now know as the Sudan, adjacent to modern-day Ethiopia. The biblical Punt was an empire comprised roughly of the lands of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, the eastern Sudan, and Yemen across the Red Sea. In ancient times there was a district in Punt called Amu, so the terms ‘Kush’ and ‘Amu’ seem to originate in Punt. Now what is interesting is that in modern-day Afghanistan we can find the Kush Hindu Mountains, and in these mountains flows the Amu River. The Amu River is a tributary to the Indus River, which in turn is probably the Pishon River mentioned in the Genesis creation story as flowing through the land of Havilah. The name associations may all be coincidence, but people do tend to name new places after fond old people, places, and things. Some translations of the Bible mention lapis lazuli, a highly prized stone in ancient times, as coming from Havilah. The Amu River area is one of the three places in the world where lapis lazuli naturally occurs.

Jews have fairly well assimilated toward the Caucasoid persuasion, but this was not always the case. European travelers in the nineteenth century remarked that the mulattoes of the United States were not much different from their own Jews back home. One can only wonder how much Hitler contributed to the reduction of the numbers I speak of here.

The assimilation process of the Jews can be traced to much earlier times. The early Hebrews, represented by the patriarchs of the Old Testament, assimilated with the Old Canaanites (in modern-day Syria) and absorbed much religious belief from them. The Old Canaanites were Hamites originating from Ethiopia. The oldest known form of Hebraism can be found among a tribe, called the Qemant, in the Gondor region of Ethiopia. Is it any wonder that Ethiopia is mentioned in the Bible from the time of Genesis? Moses established a Hebrew identity that was mostly religious in nature -- a compromise between Canaanite and Mesopotamian beliefs. King David of Jerusalem established a Jewish ethnic identity. Before the time of Moses, the Hebrews were a mixed and sometimes confused lot, as we of the hodgepodge of North and South America are today. The point I’m trying to make here is that our best hope of establishing a new ethnic identity, if that is the goal, may be to first establish a version of spirituality and religion that makes sense to us as an evolving people and addresses our needs, just as the early Hebrews/Jews did in the past.

We are taught to believe that Caucasians are white while Negroes are black. Then we are forced to grapple with the scientist’s notion that Ethiopians are black Caucasians, and western society’s notion of white Negroes amongst the transplanted African populations. The classic Ethiopian might just be Caucasian as the scientists say, but would have a hard time convincing Bob Williams in Centerville, USA of that fact. Adam Clayton Powell might just have been Negro as most Americans accept, but would have been ridiculed or dismissed by the Yoruban social elite.

A dark-skinned acquaintance of mine was feeling feisty one day and remarked on something I said or did (I don’t really remember) by saying, “That must be all those white genes of yours coming out.” I smiled and told him, “Thank you! I take that as a compliment.” Now my acquaintance, who is usually highly opinionated, didn’t quite know how to respond, paused, then changed the subject. I was letting him know that it didn’t matter to me whether he accepted me into his fold or not. Feeling a sense of belonging to some fold is important though. To achieve the highest level of spirituality and fulfillment requires it.

If this is all becoming a bit tedious and confusing, it is only to show how hopeless our efforts for racial definition can become, and why I have given up on trying to label myself. Focusing instead on the higher ideals of spirituality is a way to transcend the trivial concerns of race that plague us. Spirit, consciousness, and soul are devoid of color as we know it.

For those of you interested in my book ‘The Pharaoh’s Son’, you can order it through any bookstore, or on my website www.astabora.com, now under construction. It is also available on Amazon.com.

You can also read Chapter One of The Pharoah's Son right now: "In The Beginning"

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