Loaded Lucky White Dice

I was meeting with three black men yesterday listening to them tell of their experiences from their perspective when one of them said, “I’ve always wondered why the blacks where picked to be slaves, why was that our cross to bear?”  I had never thought of it that way, how many people groups there are in the world and why this particular one was chosen to be the slave one and how that issue must haunt the souls of so many of its citizens.  Why were the black humans the ones chosen?  It is not so much slavery, which is heinous in it self, that haunted this man; it was the categorizing of him as a human as belonging to the race that was chosen to be the slave group.  “I’ve never understood that” he softly said looking off into the heavens.  Not only had my white heart never understood it, it had never even thought it. When I think of my group I think of “pioneers”; which is another example of the privilege of my whiteness.   Will humans ever be of the human race instead of races of colors?  I never think of myself as a “white” man but only a man.  Why must a man think of himself as a color first and then as a man?  That is a cross I have never borne.