Dick,

The only sure way to end racism is to abolish race. the same way that the only sure way to end crime is to make everything legal."

Funny :) Does this mean if we abolish religion, we can make people holy? :)

I think I go with McGrath on this one. Race is a concept created by anthropologists. Caucasion, Negroid, Mongoloid etc. and I would assume that it has a useful scientific application. "Racism" however is a different thing altogether.

"Racism" may have more to do with cultural bias than race itself.

One great healer is music. It can bring people together. (Unless it's some musicians on a gig fighting about what chords to use or who is keeping time. :)) One of the reasons I got into folk music to begin with is it's social healing power...by this I mean bringing people together from different cultures. Of course there is a tendency in some folks with certain musical interests to exclude others. Even so, in my experience when musicians from different cultures get together, or people who share songs from different places congregate, the walls generally come down. Music is pretty much something that everyone can understand to some degree regardless of where it comes from. Even when we make arbitrary names up for it such as "traditional" or "folk" or "commercial" or "pop" etc.

I think if we dig deep enough in all of us, there might be elements of "racism" that we haven't learned to come to terms with. They might even be on an unconscious level. But regardless, there's something about the power of music that transcends this in my humble opinion. It highlights the fact that we're all human and are basically social animals (otherwise we would have been extinct long ago.)

This is one of the reasons that I think folk music is so important.

Frank Hamilton