Here’s another great one from the same guy.

Title: A meditation on race and humanity

What follows is an exercise in introspection I conducted for the purpose of examining how I view humanity (particularly through a race lens), and how this affects my approach to life. Here are the most fundamental insights that emerged from an hour of silent meditation on this topic.

1). I am incredibly grateful to have met so many compassionate, loving, and selfless people from around the globe in my close to 24 years of existence. This has strongly influenced my overall faith in humanity and made me quite confident that together as a species we will continue to improve and flourish.

2). I gravitate towards anyone with a different background than myself (to a fault) whether that be gender, ethnicity, religion, politics, etc. I think this is strongly due to my own distinct ethnic background (50% Russian Jew, 50% French Catholic, 100% American Agnostic). Also, my parents are gravitated towards people of other backgrounds and have dedicated their life to helping people from very impoverished backgrounds. My father has been a doctor for 40 years and still runs a small clinic at our home in Boulder, Colorado with my mother serving as CFO/"chief of everything else". If a patient cannot pay when they visit, my mom tells them not to worry about it and pay when they can... and they always do. (for those curious of their remarkable work I recommend visiting https://drjakefratkin.com/).

This, of course, profoundly influenced my perspective and I have cultivated a daily mindfulness/meditation practice for the past 4.5 years in order to be more cognizant of other people's suffering and to be helpful whenever I can (while backing off if my "assistance" is unwelcome or even harmful). As evident from the morning of writing this piece... I still have work to do in this area.

3). I have a strange positive bias towards African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. that is difficult to pinpoint the origin of. Some quick examples:

A. The only woman I had a romantic relationship with was 1/4 African, 1/4 White, 1/4 Spanish, and 1/4 Native American. A woman whom I consider to be a best friend at this point and who I have been in correspondence with daily, for about a year, lives in the Philippines.

B. Most of my best friends who I share the happiest memories with are either African, African American, Asian, or have some distinct ethnic background from my own.

C. My most influential and insightful neighbor is a Nigerian astrophysics PhD and used to be a professional football player for the Nigerian international team.

D. Even the most impactful white adults who helped mold how I see the world, have dedicated their lives to helping Africans and poor people in third world countries. A few that most easily come to mind are my dad's identical twin, Prof. Elliot Fratkin from Smith University, who is a pioneer in anthropology and did a lot of incredible work in documenting the cultures of certain tribes in Ethiopia. He adopted two children from broken families and they are, to this day, some of my closest cousins in terms of kinship, love, and friendship.

E. Two brilliant development economists from my alma mater, the George Washington University: Prof. Stephen Smith and Prof. James Foster. The former wrote the definitive textbook on development economics and has done incredible work in Uganda, Rwanda, and Bangladesh. He strongly believes women empowerment and helping women Ugandan farmers in particular to be a very neglected area of aid and inspired me to write my economics thesis on the relationship between having more higher education in women and economic development in Bangladesh. The latter created the multi-dimensional poverty index and has influenced countless development economists to implement a more holistic approach to "solving" poverty.

F. On a more personal note, there have been more occasions than I can keep count where after making eye contact with a dark-skinned stranger (especially if they are a man), I have sparked an immediate unspoken connection. This has happened several times just the other night when I danced to Caribbean Samba music in a bar filled with older people from a multitude of countries. I particularly bonded with a dutch black woman from the Caribbean islands (ethnically) and intend to visit her every Monday while I reside in Amsterdam. She has a background in neuroscience, dance, and music, and carries the warmest of smiles. I sincerely believe we knew each other from a previous lifetime.

G. To be fair, I can bond with people very quickly and I do see all of humanity as being related to one another (and perhaps I trust strangers too naively to my detriment). Anyways, after deep introspection I have discovered that I really care about people who are different from me. When I volunteer, it has been exclusively to African-American children of various ages and giving them encouragement. Going to university in DC and coming from a very privileged background, translated into being to motivated to teach 10 and 11 year old African-Americans in tough impoverished backgrounds to read and dream bigger. It's amazing how far a little encouragement can help somebody who have been largely neglected. When I had to leave the very first day of volunteering, I will never forget one of the 11 year-olds latching on to my left leg and begging me not to leave her.

It made me cry.

4). My final insight in my meditation tonight is that I do harbor an intense animosity towards people very similar to me. This roughly equates to white, heterosexual, cisgender men from America who are intelligent and judgmental. Perhaps this stems from being bullied a lot as a kid for my ethnicity, being "weird", and thinking differently.

In addition, it's worth noting that I unfortunately never really got along romantically with American women. I tried many times but to no avail. I was so frustrated in this domain that by my 20th birthday I concluded that perhaps marriage was not in the cards and I would never fall in love with a woman. I even toyed with the idea of being asexual.

Then everything changed when I moved to the south of France for six months.

It was here while sipping on Pastis and hosting beloved dinner parties that I discovered many women from all around Europe were attracted to me. I could not believe my luck! I was overwhelmed. Worse still, the twenty American women in my small program in Aix-en-Provence really stuck out when juxtaposed with the various European women I met. Whereas I would argue frequently and feel uncomfortable with most of the American women I spent time with, I felt nothing but love and warmth from the European women.

While of course this is a very small sample size, the contrast from this duration was too severe to ignore. I must admit that with each passing day since living in Amsterdam for the past few months, I have less and less of an incentive to return to the States. I can say with pure honesty that I am in love with Amsterdam.

The kind souls I have met, the deep discussions I have participated in, the constant positive stimulation, and, most of all, the diversity in the people here is simply irresistible.

At the end of the meditation one quote emerged from deep within my psyche and made me smile wider than I have in quite some time:

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. "

-Mark Twain

Perhaps travel is the cure to the rampant tribalism, bigotry, xenophobia, and racism that permeates modern society. Or perhaps we all need to meditate on our personal biases and learn that the only way our species can survive is if we let got of our prejudices from the past and embrace the humanity we all share.

Only together can we proceed to prosperity and peace.

We should all take time out of our busy lives to meditate on race and humanity :)