The Rev. Kandarian-Morris of the Durango Unitarian Universalist Fellowship revisited the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s with an eloquent and timely sermon the day before Martin Luther King Jr. day. It was appropriate since racism is still with us in America.

Her sermon title, “The Continuous Struggle,” came from King who said, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” The title sums up the issue we all face. The great irony of American racism is that anthropologists and biologists have long known that race is dead; every human being on Earth belongs to the same genus, species and subspecies, now identified as Homo sapiens sapiens, the double smart ones.

The perceived differences among humans, like skin-color variations, are superficial when compared to our mental and emotional capacities. There have been no significant differences among bipedal creatures since the Neanderthals perished about 27,000 years ago. Today, we are all one subspecies. Human “races” do not exist; only one human race exists, it is probably best that we delete “races” from our vocabulary. If the term, “races” disappears, there is little left for racism to cling to.

Rev. Katie, who visited the location of the killings and more recently watched the movie, “Selma,” discussed the events of March 1965 when four young African-American girls were murdered in their church, a horrible bombing in Selma, Alabama, that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” While conditions have improved for African-Americans and other minorities in the U.S., we have all witnessed a reoccurrence of racism in our nation in recent years. We must accept all humans as a single subspecies and treat them as one if we are to overcome racism.

Don Gordon

Durango