Would fellow Americans who champion a racially segregated, politically separate Tibetan region of China, tolerate for one minute a racially segregated, politically separate "Whites Only" or "Blacks Only" Georgia or Alabama? No? Then please don't wish this kind of reactionary apartheid state of affairs on China. America is hardly the only multiethnic and multicultural nation in the world, nor should it be.

Many Americans who are admirers of Martin Luther King erroneously compare the Dalai Lama to King, Nelson Mandela, or even the great Mahatma Gandhi. This flatters the Dalai Lama and insults King, Mandela and Gandhi. Gandhi, King, and Mandela were integrationists, not segregationists. Gandhi opposed Hindu-Indian and Muslim-Indian segregation and did his utmost to preserve Indian national unity. King opposed African-American and European-American segregation, and dreamed of a day when black and white children would walk beside each other hand in hand. Mandela opposed black, Cape-Colored, and white Afrikaner segregation.

Pro-unity Chinese oppose Han-Chinese and Tibetan-Chinese racial segregation. The racial integration of Tibetan and Han is hardly a pie-in-the-sky proposition. It has already happened. It keeps happening year after year, even as the Dalai Lama struggles to keep Tibetans and Hans racially segregated. One need only look at China's astonishingly complete integration of her Mongolian, Manchurian and Han subcultures to see how thorough racial assimilation can be. No modern Chinese, including those of us who matter of factly assume we are "Han" knows for sure whether we have Manchurian Mongolian, Uyghur or Tibetan blood in us. Nor should it matter.

Whatever feet of clay Gandhi, King, and Mandela might have had in real life, these three icons were or are genuine integrationists. In this respect, the Dalai Lama has hardly anything in common with any of them. The Dalai Lama is, if anything, closer to militant separatist oriented religious/political figures such as the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan, or the Jewish Defense League's Rabbi Meir Kahane. The omnipresent Al Sharpton is the epitome of this kind of opportunistic agent provocateur. He is what African-American libertarians refer to as an "ethnic grievance pimp." The omnipresent Dalai Lama, always in the right place for a photo-op, is a Tibetan Al Sharpton. He merely affects a "kinder, gentler" persona and boasts slicker PR. After all, he has Hollywood's glitterati doing his image-making for him, gratis.

World opinion meanwhile, suffers from selective amnesia. It has conveniently forgotten "His Holiness" was the plotter and instigator of a violent armed revolution in 1959. It has blanked out the fact that this politician forfeited any claim he might have had to being a pacifist decades ago.

The way to move beyond race hatred, and festering grievances about "who done who wrong" is actually quite simple. Hardly easy, but simple. The solution is: first integration, then intermarriage. The solution is exactly what neo-Nazi skinheads and Ku-kluxers fear and dread: the "mongrelization of the races," the "dilution" of "racial purity." The solution is what racial bigots' refer to perjoratively as "miscegenation." Intermarriage makes it more difficult, albeit not impossible, for anyone of mixed parentage to hate one side of his family for wronging the other.

This process has an important prerequisite – racial integration. In order for it to take place people must not be deliberately segregated from each other. It requires that people of goodwill of all backgrounds refuse to tolerate the establishment of artificial barriers to individuals mixing with each other economically, socially and ultimately, genetically.

Interestingly enough, this is also what militant Tibetan and Uyghur separatists fear – the "dilution" of their racial distinctiveness. The term they apply to this dreaded phenomenon is "cultural genocide." Their identities are so invested in their biologically-inherited racial characteristics as "Tibetans," "Uyghurs," or in the case of neo-Nazis as "white Aryans," that they cannot see their common identity as members of the human race. As the talented African-American singer Pearl Bailey put it "there is only one race, the human race." It is worth noting in this connection that recent DNA evidence has confirmed that Chinese, as well as other Asians, are all of African descent.

The chief obstacle to this benevolent process of "creeping integration" is ambitious political "leaders" whose power is built on racially-defined constituencies. These "leaders" ability to lead their followers around by the nose is threatened by any dilution of "ethnic purity" and any blurring of racial lines. This means they have a vested interest in keeping apart individual human beings who otherwise would have traded, formed friendships and intermarried.

Sad to say, the Dalai Lama ranks not among the Gandhis, the Kings or the Mandelas of the world, but among those charismatic "leaders" who abuse their stature and authority to keep these racial lines sharply drawn by fanning the flames of primitive ethnic resentment. The Dalai Lama indisputably does it with tremendous flair and finesse, so he doesn't come across like a Louis Farrakhan, in other words, as a raving lunatic, but make no mistake, he does it. This misuse of his personal charisma arguably makes him worse, not better than his peers.

Given the state of the world today it is clearly unrealistic to expect existing sovereign nations to completely lower their guard against once hostile foreign nations. I am not urging that existing nation states adopt naively Pollyannaish foreign policies. But is it too much to demand that anyone with humanitarian pretensions at least refrain from aggravating internal racial tensions within currently existing nations? For China as well as for America?

Meanwhile, individuals of goodwill the world over can gradually increase the porousness of international political boundaries via free trade. Stable, mutually beneficial trade relations increase human to human contact across existing national boundaries, and contributes to the eventual diminution of irrational xenophobia.

Genuine spiritual leaders of global stature do not speak only for their tribe. They are not nearly so petty and narrow-minded. They have hearts which encompass the world. They speak for all of humanity. Whom does the Dalai Lama speak for? Does he speak for global racial integration and the universal brotherhood of man, or only for his narrow tribal constituency? The question is rhetorical, and the answer should be obvious.