Biologically, there is no such thing as race. There are variations in colour of skin and eyes, face shape and body characteristics. However, racial categorisations are psychological and social constructs. They have no fundamental significance other than in specialised areas of medicine and athletics. For the purposes of everyday life and politics, race should be made totally irrelevant.

For the vast majority of human history, people lived in very small groups of family and closely related people, in which it was a necessity for survival to discriminate in favour of people just like us. Over time, we have found ourselves belonging to larger and larger tribes, including nations and, increasingly an emerging global tribe. During the agricultural era, cities formed, people travelled for trade and warriors established large multi-ethnic empires. Different groups of people began to mix. This process accelerated during the age of imperialism and even faster during our modern era of globalisation and mass migration. Our cities today are racially mixed and people’s identities are fast evolving and adapting.

If we fast forward a few hundred years into the future, the world will be fully globalised and race will be increasingly irrelevant, a visual difference of no significance. This isn’t naive or unrealistic. It has already happened and is continuing to happen. For example, the white English are a very mixed bunch racially. Some have very dark hair, dark eyes and olive skin. Some have blonde hair and blue eyes. Some have pale white skin, green eyes and ginger hair. Others have mousy brown hair, brown eyes and medium toned skin. This racial variety never crosses anyone’s mind for a moment. Everyone is just English or British. Our genetics include the original ancient Britons, Celts, Irish, Scots and then all the subsequent invaders and travellers including the Angles and Saxons, the Norman French, the Dutch, Vikings and a sprinkling of others from all over. This process of integration of different races into a common nation continues to this day as millions of new people have come to join us.

We must be compassionate in our response to the strains encountered during this fast transition from an ethnocentric, racist world to a global, post-racial world. Different individuals, groups and countries are at different stages of this transition. In some it is going smoothly and in others the transition has arrested or reversed. For the foreseeable future, there will be systematic differences between these artificial categories we call race. They will differ in power, wealth, crime, health, education, culture, values, behaviour and much else. We must recognise that this is an artefact of where we have come from. Our task is to empower everyone to manifest their own destiny now and not be a prisoner of historical legacy

http://www.amazon.com/New-Magna-Carta-Psychiatrists-Prescription/dp/1506191673