Recently a piece of news caught my eye and for a reason when the Interior secretary Ryan Zinke was quoted by several for his repeated comments against workplace diversity, something which he denies.
In any case, this made me realize and now write about my own experience from not so far back when two men who I have known for a long time said to me that they believe similar people should live together as a nation and repeated that line to make sure I heard and understood it.
To give all this a little more meaning, these two are educated white male Christians while the last I checked yours truly still remains a brown Muslim. The comment was out of the blue and out of context with anything relevant we were discussing at that time, and it caught me by surprise.
Even though I realize that the comment was meant for me being different, at that time I just ignored it.
Now I guess it implied that similar looking people should live together as a nation, or it could have been the same religion, or both, I cannot be certain as I never sought clarification. The immigration status could not have been a factor as one of the two is an immigrant just like me.
With the current wave of nationalism let us assume for a moment that similar people should live together as a nation then here are just a few interesting situations I can think of, and I am sure there are many more where the boundaries based on race, color, and religion get blurred.
There are a lot of white Muslims with light eyes. Do they belong with the Muslims or with the whites?
Would the darker shades of Christians live with their color or with white Christians?
What about the Atheists?
How about the native Americans, the original residents, would they stay or look for a different universe?
Who gets to decide all of this?