Making changes to rid us of racism

Re: “How I deal with discrimination,” Ben Pires, June 18.

It is true we are all related; 99.5 per cent of our DNA is the same across all human beings. Physiologically we are all the same. But racism is not due to physical similarity or dis-similarity; thickness of our skin is nothing to do with racism.

The role of physiology in racism is rather insignificant; racism is all due to what happens above our shoulders — in the dark chamber of our brains. The neural activity across 100 billion neural cells that dictates our social and personal behaviour is fundamentally based on two key factors — our inherited genetic make up and the environment in which we are raised and grow up.

We cannot change the genetic make up or colour of skin or eyes, but we can certainly change the environmental influences through education provided the change starts at elementary school and continues through post-secondary education.

These educational initiatives must also be supported by changes to the existing legal and regulatory mechanisms to moderate the impact of entrenched social beliefs of race superiority.

This will help our younger generation and millennials to flourish in a future that is free of hatred, violence and conflict.

It will take time, but it must start now — start with education and support it with changes to existing social, institutional, legal and regulatory systems to address existing discriminatory practices.

Jeet Rana Victoria