Layering the Colors--Cropping the Edges

Genetics informs us that we are not as hardwired as we once believed.  The mapping of the brain is profoundly affected by diverse environmental factors; nurture trumps nature in this malleable landscape.  Despite social pundits and clinicians who stubbornly cling to behavioristic determinism, science calls us out of the darkness in the true sense of education, self-actualization.
The binary relationship between being and becoming widely manifests itself in that socialization of hyphenated ethnic-Americans wherein we are all called on to shed our history and embrace collective identity in the U.S.A.  This collective identity, however,  is illusion and nowhere is it better revealed that in our electoral, medical, and judicial processes. The poor, the disenfranchised, the underserved are meted out far different playing cards in these arenas.  Inadequate protection and representation both are endemic to programs designed to band-aid the frayed edges of our social fabric. Correspondingly, collective destiny is illusory, as some Americans writhe in pain, squat in squalor, and assuage their emotional confusion with body/mind-numbing substances while others gloat in glory of  predictable wins, minimized losses.
Our system tells us that we are one; the pluralistic nation attempts to bind together each stripe of difference under the red-white-& blue. Some minorities, mistrusting this authoritative stance, may choose to isolate. Those who embrace many-into-one aspire to "normalcy", homogenization.  Either choice entails commitment to layering the colors of self into an acceptable foreground against the national background. The community's pillar and the community activist, the patriot and the pundit alike must crop the edges of their individual rhetoric lest they be labeled outlier, outlaw, other. We can cite, for example,  many instances of fear-based propaganda aimed at slandering President Obama.
If we were able to release our fear of the other and reconcile the outlaw as a transformational, intellectual force, couldn't we redirect the attention paid to photoshopping our national image into an economic driver grounded in our perceived and possible differences?  Being would then be celebrated rather than secreted or negated. The neural and social pathways would open to becoming one human race populating part of one planet Earth--far more than the boundaries of our borders and flag might suggest.